PAR T ISAN REVIEW
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ly building the kind of Western that will resonate with dime novels
and movies, he subjects its shimmering mythology to the rest of Amer–
ican literature and the extravagances of criticism.
It
is what Charles
Boer has called in another context "a revisionist view" of myth. In
making the Western susceptible to the whole pantheon of American
literary characters, Seelye is reconsidering the assignments of roles and
the arrangement of stories and themes. Fort Bestennan is the place
where all the thematic axioms come true, and in doing so, they are
altered. The courtroom where all these paths cross offers one American
conclusion - the dialectic of mercy and law synthesized by plain sense;
the street outside offers another. Both speak to contemporary predica–
ments as much as to the rough frontier.
This is an ingenious book and an important one. It is also quite
naturally funny. Winky's narration is filled with fine story-telling ex–
aggerations and digressions, which suit him and his dialect and which
play back beautifully into the center of the book's concerns.
Taken at all conventionally, the short story is a tangle of neces–
sity - firm narrator, quick scene, solid characters, unfailing ironies,
epiphany - and the masters of the form brood over everyone, like chess
grandmasters who have plotted out a full range of problems and solu–
tions. I raise all of this because the center of gravity of Philip F. O'Con–
nor's
Old Morals, Small Continents, Darker Times
is at a point of un–
easiness about that form. O'Connor's first subject, an Irish Catholic
boyhood, puts hilll fully in the shadow of
Dubliners,
and he accommodates
himself to what's expected of his material with some skill and occa–
sional brilliance. Still, this is familiar territory; the boy struggles between
a long-suffering mother and a drunken father; in a schoolroom story he
is dreamily trying to piece together his sense of a parish priest as he
watches the exhaust fumes of the priest's suicide seep out under the
rectory's garage door; in two more stories the boy begins to deal with
choice and moral responsibility in a larger world. The best story in this
group is "My Imaginary Father," where the boy's inevitable move
toward his father comes in an acceptance of the father's frustration and
rage. In a brilliantly conceived exchange of secrets, the father explains
his anger, his seemingly irrational hatred of The Loyal Sons and
Daughters of the Golden West, a society of the heirs of California
pioneers, then slides down his son's private hill in a cardboard box–
briefly childish and relieved for a night at least of the weight of his
hatreds. The virus enters the boy, infecting his dreams and altering
his
hill. Only partially aware of it, he has inherited his father's sour righte–
ousness, a mixture of personal failure with a sense of social injustice and
general error.
