Читать книгу The Diamond Hitch - Frank O'Rourke - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION BY

MOLLY GLOSS

I must have been around twelve years old when I fell in love with the books my dad was reading, the cowboy novels of Zane Grey, Max Brand, Luke Short. I had a child’s view of the world then, and the adventure, the clean violence and simple morality of my dad’s white-hatted cowboy heroes suited me just fine. And it would have been a few years later, after I’d reached a more complicated understanding of the world, that I first stumbled on Frank O’Rourke’s novel The Diamond Hitch, not shelved with Max Brand and his cohorts but residing (as I thought of it) on the real shelves with the real books.

I read it two or three times in my teens. I understood, even then, that if it was not quite a book for the Literary Canon it was more authentic in feeling, in landscape, in the depth of its perceptions, more accurate in its details and in the complexity of the lives of its characters than the traditional western fiction I’d grown up loving. It was my first encounter with a writer nudging the mythology of the cowboy away from blood and bravery toward a darker, more complex truth.

When Dewey Jones steps off the train in Holbrook, Arizona, he’s flat broke after a summer following the rodeo circuit. He lands work as a cook and horse breaker for a winter roundup, and this first long part of the novel follows Dewey and the rest of the roundup crew through days and weeks of hard, hot, exhausting, dusty, dangerous work. There is little that might be called “adventure.” There are two Apaches working the roundup, though none of the other men remark on this in any particular way. There is no gunplay—Dewey has a gun in his bedroll but he never brings it out. And when he returns to the rodeo that summer it’s to a nervous, bright, seductive world with its own dangers—his dreams of big wins perennially wrecked by late nights and too much bootleg liquor. There is no straight-up villain, just an overweening rival for the affections of Mary Ashford. And this is not a West frozen in the amber of the 1880s, but the real and changing West of Model T Fords and moving pictures and Prohibition.

When I began to write about the West myself, it was O’Rourke’s novel more than any other that I sometimes consciously and more often unconsciously took as a model. I didn’t have Dewey Jones in mind, for instance, when I wrote The Jump-Off Creek, but Tim Whiteaker is a cowhand who bakes pies for his neighbors and takes off-season work as a cook for a logging crew; in this, and in many other small details of western life and work as I’ve written of it, I know that I owe a debt to The Diamond Hitch. And I also know, in a larger sense, that O’Rourke’s novel is one of the main reasons I have spent my writing life trying to reimagine the cowboy hero—steering clear, as he did, of gunslingers and savages, looking always for stories grounded in the heroism of ordinary lives.

In the traditional western novel, violence is the easy and only answer to every problem, an answer without honest pain or consequence; and it seems to me that the shadow of that violence, the shadow of the cowboy hero, has darkened our American politics, our national identity, our values and beliefs. But I feel strongly that storytelling can not only help us witness ourselves as we are in the world, but also think in fresh ways about ourselves as we might become. In The Diamond Hitch, Frank O’Rourke was working in a smaller, quieter corner of the West, a place where the heroism and the violence were downplayed, half-concealed in the mundane details of a hard life, a life in which the best values of the western myth—the courage, the self-reliance, the toughness—were always mindfully upheld.

And there is one more very particular and very personal reason I hold The Diamond Hitch in high regard.

When my husband died in February of 2000 I was about 20 pages and a few research notes into a new novel, my fourth. But I was not the same writer I’d been before Ed’s death; grief and loss were now the lens through which I viewed the world. And although I had always avoided any conscious use of my own life in my fiction, I now found that I couldn’t go on writing without acknowledging my experience of Ed’s death. The story I had started, the story I had thought I wanted to write, was no longer one I was interested in. Whatever I wrote would have to have a place in it for Ed, and for the new reality of my life.

I read and reread all the notes I’d kept over the years, wisps of ideas for possible novels, but for a long while I wrote nothing; I filled my time with what I now think of as “comfort reading”—seeking out and rereading novels I remembered loving when I was younger. I took Jane Austen for a good long spin, and I reread Black Beauty and The Black Stallion, all of Tolkien and The Once and Future King. I don’t remember what brought O’Rourke’s novel into my mind but I think it must have been a yearning for the simplicity of those cowboy westerns of my youth. I had only the barest memory of the story in The Diamond Hitch by then, but I remembered it as a western without gunplay, several notches above the two-gun novels of Max Brand. The library no longer kept a copy, so I hunted one up from an on-line used-book store and began a slow reread; and I was struck anew by the quiet telling, the honest plotting—a story about real men inhabiting real lives.

The greater part of the novel deals with rodeo, and the roundup, but there’s a last section in which Dewey takes winter work “breaking broncs on a circle job” for several ranchers and farmers. When I came to that part of the story I remembered, among my notes for possible novels, one about a young woman horse-breaker in the 1910s. There had been no place for Ed in that girl bronco-buster’s story, I had thought. But reading—rereading—The Diamond Hitch I realized that if that young woman was breaking horses on a circle ride I’d have the beginnings of a novel not only about her but about all the people on her circle. There would be room for the dark complexity of real death. Room for Ed.

Every writer begins to be a writer by first being a reader. In rereading The Diamond Hitch for this introduction, I am struck yet again by how Story ties everything together. How, as artists, everything we’ve experienced becomes an opportunity to meaningfully integrate our lives with our art. There are a great many reasons to celebrate the reissue of O’Rourke’s novel—to celebrate the quiet reshaping of western myth and the western hero. For me, there’s also this: I know unequivocally, The Hearts of Horses would not have been written if I hadn’t found my way back to The Diamond Hitch—found ways to talk about grief and love in a genre that once had shown me only simple adventure and unambiguous heroism.

—MOLLY GLOSS