PARTISAN REVIEW
565
"True. The point is this elk here. You gotta stop taking somewhere
so we're stopping the taking with this elk."
And I got to start taking somewhere so I'm starting with this elk.
Not that I meant to kill him, nor would kill him again.
That elk,
sir, that elk there has been cowboyed.
The problems of organized American greed seen against that other
sort of spirited taking, the appealing code of the outlaw, the cunning
that is part of our strength is quite enough - we do not need Asia.
One moral conundrum does not necessarily imply another. The story
of butchering the elk and carrying it illegally out of the forest during a
forest fire is not enthralling and though it is meant to be the central
symbolic action it is literal and drawn out in the telling. Shetzline is
not sure of his powers as a storyteller which are considerable and tends
to overload his narrative with interlocking lives, many of them no doubt
characters interesting to him as foils for his hero or for the sophisticated
town doctor, but who carry on like regular guys in
Field and Stream.
The doctor is a sensitive man like those well-educated gentlemen in
Faulkner who come closest to the author's sensibility and who carry a
sense of history about with them quite naturally. There is a story, in
the wings as it were, of an attractive, serious college boy who has worked
with the forest service during past summers and is now sought by the
FBI fleeing for Canada with a girl, with dope - evading the draft.
If
only Shetzline could have trusted the resonance of this softly told tale.
The epigraph for
He ckletooth
3 is "'Who stole America?' - Lawrence
Ferlinghetti," a question which might have been as facilely handled as
the proposition "We blew it," in
Easy
Rider,
but which Shetzline at his
best really tries to answer.
American individualism in some of its romantic and destructive
aspects is also the concern of Stephen Becker in
When the War is Over,
a charming Civil War novel that is much too modest. Perhaps it is the
remove of history that gives this work its fine scenario but at the same
time imposes a dispassion as though its important moral issues were
quaint blue uniforms displayed in a glass case.
When the War is Over
is an artful novel which incorporates a real story, the execution of a
southern farm boy as a rebel guerrilla weeks after Lee had surrendered
at Appomattox, with the fictionalized account of a skeptical young lieu–
tenant, Marius Catto, who was wounded by the boy, who comes to
protect him and who in a stirring finale commands the firing squad:
"Thomas! Thomas! You'll be in heaven tonight! Remember that! You'll
be in heaven tonight!" The heaven which Catto holds out to the
