292
ROBERT B. HEILMAN
cliches of conquest that the western theme easily encourages. These
cliches may be recognized without genius. He will need a little
more stature to move beyond the cliches of energy and variety (the
limits of A. B. Guthrie's second, and inferior, book), for these are
less detectable as cliches. He will need still more largeness to move
beyond the cliches of endurance and heroism, for these,
if
the
management of them passes to any degree beyond the mechanical,
may not be spotted as cliches at all. But
if
his material provides
him with large and palpable disasters, or most of all with tragic
errors, he is the more likely to have the "right feeling" out of
which, given adequate craftsmanship, may come adult and
in–
dividual art. For now he is committed to the most inclusive and
probing awareness of the human involvement: not only of the
victory, but of the cost of victory, or of the failure in apparent
victory; of the ambiguities of earning and learning ; of the moral
hazard, the moral doubleness; of the oblique motive or the evil
deed in the very fabric of the pure intent, the struggle, the strenu–
ous search.
If
something of all this is not evident in the "given,"
then indeed the artist must have the largeness to discover it, to
remake the form of the seen by bringing the latent substance out
of its obscurity.
Perhaps in a literary journal one should not take time to
be–
labor the script-writers, as I have called them, for their form of
procuring will doubtless always be with us. But
if
they have been
too successful in taking over this virgin-territory for a profitable
street-corner traffic in the cities, their monopoly is not complete.
There is an occasional marriage of true mind and matter-of a
talented writer with a western theme that he treats, not as an ex–
ploitable property, but with devotion and respect. In
The Big
S ky
A.
B. Guthrie interprets tQe West as milieu, so to speak; he pro–
vides, not a pictorial tour, but a re-creation of a chosen milieu in
all its particularity, neither sentimentalized nor rejected: presented
through a human
figur~
neither stereotyped nor highly individu–
alized, but with a somewhat flattened representativeness that so
interacts with the scene as to aid in giving it a personality and
dramatic vitality. In
Oxbow Incident
Walter Clark is also con–
cerned with milieu, in the sense that what happens is inseparable
from its place and cultural context; and these are well established.
