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MARCIA CAVELL
the fantasies of an adolescent boy, the myth of the American frontier.
But only on the surface. Behind cowboys and Indians is a novel
about intimate connections. On one level the novel is knit together by
narrative; on another, by variations on a single image which recurs like
an obsessive dream. In the opening pages it is of a model that Ed is
photographing for a faintly pornographic advertisement in which she
is to be seen from behind, nude to her panties. It is the first of many
such recognitions.
The image comes back to him the morning of the departure, when
he screws his wife - from behind - and it is in this passage that the
novel first speaks its title:
It was the heat of another person around me, the moving heat,
that brought the image up. The girl from the studio threw back
her hair and clasped her breast, and in the center of Martha's
heaving and expertly moving back, the gold eye shone, but not with
the practicality of sex ... but the promise of it that promised
other things, another life, deliverance.
And of course it appears as the act of violence which instigates the
action of the novel: Bobby, forced to drop his pants and offer himself
across a log "in an obscene posture no one could help."
That part of the body which can never be an object for its own
eyes is also the point of rape, the access to the soul which men and
women share. Trust is turning one's back to another. And
coitus a tergo
functions in the novel as metaphor for the moment of risk and revela–
tion which translates love into murder and murder into love. When
Ed finally tracks down and ambushes his would-be killer, it will again
be from behind, as the climax of an extraordinary kind of communion:
I had thought so long and hard about him that to this day I still
believe I felt, in the moonlight our minds fuse. . . .
If
Lewis had
not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love,
painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to
him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the
floor of the woods. . . .
Many of Dickey's poems too are about astonishing connections. I
think offhand of "Power and Light," "The Sheep Child," "Celebration"
and the whimsical "Encounter in the Cage Country." In fact, I am per–
haps most grateful to
Deliverance
for sending me back
to
Mr. Dickey's
poetry, not because I like it better than his prose, but because I hadn't
realized how good it also is.
The Bay of Noon
is to me an annoying book. Certainly Miss Haz–
zard has a gift for place. Like her earlier book,
The Evening of the
Holiday,
her new novel is set in Italy, and Naples is by far its most
