FIRST REVIEWS
THE WINNING OF THE WEST
THE KID. By John Seelye. Viking. $4.95.
OLD MORALS, SMALL CONTINENTS, DARKER TIMES. By Philip F.
O'Connor. University of Iowa Press. $5.95.
In
The Kid
John Seelye takes up the matter of the West
with a surity of language and form that are both amazing. This is a
yarn in the best sense, told in an unfaltering dialect as solid as Twain
or Harte. The tale begins in classic Western style - "I didn't see them
ride into town but there was a man who did... ." The intruders are
The Kid, young, blond, blue-eyed, and his huge black companion, Ham,
who is mute and clairvoyant. They carry a fortune in Dakota gold and
a book on the future of sheep herding in Wyoming, which The Kid
reads and recites like scripture. The town is Fort Besterman, Wyoming;
following the cattle-killing winter of
1886-87,
it is filled with out-of-work
cowboys, getting by on credit whiskey. The town's principal citizens
are the Judge, the Captain, Winky, the narrator, and Fiddler Jones, an
ornery cus, a Texan with a fondness for trouble.
In fine Western fashion the collision of The Kid and Fiddler
Jones is understood at the outset. Fiddler wants the gold, so does an
itinerant gambler known as Leland Stanford. There is also no doubt
that some violence has to come of this: that is clear in Seelye's early
compliance with the genre. Seelye brings the story to its moment of
first violence with matinee movie certainty, then turns the whole town
toward a chaos of rationality and plain madness the mere Western
could never contain. He is at work here on the materials of classic
American literature. Suddenly, all of the forced equations of so much
literary criticism - Huck is ..., Jim is ..., Billy Budd is .. ., Claggart
is ..., Captain Vere is ..., Ahab is ... - begin to intersect, as though
the whole critical algebra had been warped into a topological anomaly
in which multiple connections occur. The Judge is the aged Huck Finn,
perhaps; the Captain is something of a starry Vere, marked like Ahab;
Fiddler Jones mixes Claggart and Crane's Scratchy Wilson ; The Kid,
The Kid is the
here comes everybody
of American literature with Huck
and Billy Budd up front.
Seelye is not alluding in all of this, he is revising. While meticulous-
