A taut and powerful novel with such an unnecessarily graphic brutality in its opening paragraph, however, that many readers will be put off by it. The scene is Utah in 1924 and against a rugged ranch country background Mr Savage spins a tale of two brothers, George, slow, clumsy, essentially decent, and Phil, a repressed homosexual. When George marries a widow and brings her back to the ranch, Phil makes life such hell for her that she takes to secret drinking. Then her young son, Peter, who is bright and strange, comes for the summer and sees what is happening. While Phil is plotting a homosexual involvement with the boy, young Peter is plotting a diabolically clever revenge on him that is pretty chilling. Krafft-Ebbing against a regional Western setting, this has strong literary but rather less commercial appeal.fn2
The book earned much critical praise — ‘a powerful tragedy,’ ‘taut and powerful,’ ‘the year’s best novel,’ and, wrote Roger Sale in The Hudson Review, ‘the finest single book I know about the modern west,’ but sold few copies. Emily Salkin of Little, Brown, the force behind the 2001 republication of this neglected novel, remarks that the publisher’s sales records do not go back to 1967 but ‘I can’t imagine it sold more than 1,000 copies in hardcover.’fn3 Though the novel is still occasionally found on ranch bookshelves, it is virtually unknown today to the general reading public, even to specialists in western literature. It is cause for rejoicing that The Power of the Dog has a second chance with today’s readers.
Thomas Savage was born in 1915 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to a remarkably handsome couple, Elizabeth (Yearian) and Benjamin Savage. Elizabeth Yearian was the oldest daughter of a famous Idaho sheep-ranching family, and her mother, imperious and powerful and well connected, was known as ‘the Sheep Queen.’ The ranch itself had been founded a generation earlier when the clan patriarch discovered gold.
When Savage was two years old, his parents divorced. Three years later his mother married a wealthy Montana rancher named Brenner, and from that time he was ranch-raised as Tom Brenner in Beaverhead County in southwest Montana. He was fortunate to be part of two eccentric and sprawling clans — the Yearians and the Brenners — which furnished him a wealth of character studies; fortunate to be part of two rich and notable ranches, the Brenners in cattle, the Yearians in sheep. Family mattered intensely, especially to the Yearians. In his autobiographical novel, the best known of his works, I Heard My Sister Speak My Name (republished by Little, Brown in 2001, under the title The Sheep Queen), he wrote:
We all love each other. My aunt Maude, the middle aunt, once told me, ‘You know, Tom, we’ve always liked each other better than anybody else.’ It is not that we think we are better than anybody else but that we are better company, at least for each other. We like to have fun.fn4
… We picnicked annually, sometimes as many as fifty of us, on the very spot where George Sweringen had discovered gold and we ate what he had eaten: beans and bacon and trout fried over the fire, and dried apple pies. We felt we could reach out and touch him and his wife Lizzie who had often sung hymns. We were proud of them and felt they would be proud of us. They would have liked us better than anybody else.fn5
Beaverhead County was a bronc-stomping Montana now long gone, rough and masculine in ethos, only one or two generations removed from pioneer days. It was a man’s world of cattle, sheep, horses, dogs, guns, fences, and property. The open range still existed in living memory, as did confrontations with Indians. In the 1920s the Brenner ranch house enjoyed electricity (from a Delco generating plant, later replaced by a Wind Charger) and a certain amount of elegance. There were some automobiles in Montana in the ’20s, and young Savage was passionate about the more prestigious equipages (his interest in classic automobiles is embedded in Trust in Chariots, his fourth novel, about the escapades of a man who fled marriage and toured the continent in a Rolls-Royce, linked to Savage’s own purchase in 1952 of the Rolls-Royce that had been on exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair), but in ranch country the railroad continued to be all-important and the horse was still major transportation; men were valued for their abilities with horses. Most ranch diets were home-raised, rustled, or hunted meat, potatoes, beans. Coffee was swallowed black. Both the Yearian and Brenner tables featured delicacies and abundance uncommon in that day.
A powerful work ethic dominated western culture, and it took (and still takes) a tough cuss to make a go of ranching. This kind of rural life is more or less extinct in the American 21st century; most people cannot even imagine a society without paved roads, television or radio, cars, hot showers, telephones, airplanes. Nor can many know the combination of hard physical work and quiet wealth that characterized some of the old ranches. This was Thomas Savage’s world for the first twenty-one years of his life. After graduation from Beaverhead County High School (where he claims to have learned little beyond speed typing) and two years at the University of Montana studying writing, he broke horses and herded sheep in Montana and Idaho for a few years, doing the ritual Saturday night go-to-town-and-get-drunk, ‘where you sat on the running boards of cars and got sick.’fn6 The horse-breaking part of that past was visible in his first published article, ‘The Bronc Stomper,’ for Coronet magazine in 1937 under the name of Tom Brenner, unremarkable except for its unusual subject matter. Years later Savage wrote:
In 1936 I began to wonder what I was doing, wandering around, and perhaps to find a direction, I wrote an article about how to break a horse, sent it off to Coronet magazine and was astonished to receive a check for seventy-five dollars. Fifty of it I invested and lost in gold mining stock. The other twenty-five I spent on a red dress for a young cousin of mine who had been invited to a Junior prom. I didn’t sell another thing for seven years.fn7
A certain restlessness was in him now, and the possibility of another kind of life than ranching began to glimmer in the distance. He enrolled as an English major at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
On my 21st birthday I woke up herding sheep in the Bitterroot Valley. I asked myself what in hell am I doing here, and my stepfather, the best of stepfathers, much in love with my mother, sent me off to Colby where I’d heard there was a charming girl who had been in high school in Missoula, Montana. We wrote all that summer, and I went back and we were married the summer of ’39.fn8
After Savage graduated from Colby he took an uncongenial job as a claims adjuster for a Chicago insurance company. Over the years he also worked as a wrangler, ranch hand, plumber’s assistant, welder, and railroad brakeman. He taught English as well, at Suffolk University in Boston, at Brandeis, and more briefly at Franconia College in New Hampshire and Vassar College. Through all of these jobs he was writing steadily.
This marriage with Elizabeth Fitzgerald, later a novelist herself, endured until her death in 1988. They had three children, sons Brassil and Russell, and daughter Elizabeth. In 1952 the Savages bought property on the Maine coast and lived there until the February blizzard of 1978 washed the house off its foundations. ‘It cost us $25,000 to fix that house,’ Savage says ruefully. The next year Savage received a Guggenheim Foundation grant, which helped him write Her Side of It, the story of an alcoholic writer wrestling with demons.
In 1982 the Savages sold the Maine house and moved to Whidby Island in Puget Sound, where they built on property given to Savage by his long-lost sister, immortalized in I Heard My Sister Speak My Name. Today Thomas Savage, who left the island after his wife’s death, makes his home in Virginia Beach near his daughter.
As a young man at Colby, Savage began his writing career with a short story about the importance of the railroad to an isolated ranching community cut off from the outside by a high pass and the intense Montana winters.
I sent it off to Ed Weeks, then editor of The Atlantic. He returned it, remarking that there were no human beings in it, and suggested I make a novel of it…. I wrote the first draft of The Pass at Colby. Dean Mariner allowed me to skip classes so long as I wrote.fn9
The Pass was published by Doubleday in 1944 under the name Thomas Savage, f
or, with the birth of his first child, Tom Brenner sent to Salt Lake City for his birth certificate and began the laborious process of having all his past job and education records changed to show his birth name, Thomas Savage, ‘all difficulty, but eventually accomplished except for having my wife’s Phi Beta Kappa name changed from Brenner to Savage, which they wouldn’t do.’fn10 This family complexity of names and identities, of east coast culture and western mountains, of manual labor and writing, of a lost past and private secrets, characterizes Savage’s life, his novels, and the people in them. The tangle of abandonment, loss, broken families, and difficult emotional situations is in Savage’s work and, to a considerable degree, is related to his own life. With intense human drama swirling about him throughout his childhood, and from the vantage point of outsider in the Brenner house, Savage developed an exquisitely keen eye for nuances of body language, intonation, silence. He has said a number of times that he does little research but relies on his own experience of life, memories, imagination. The 1977 autobiographical novel, I Heard My Sister Speak My Name, fictionalizes the extraordinary and true appearance in Savage’s life, when they were both in their fifties, of an older sister neither he nor anyone else knew existed. His beautiful mother had been dead then for a decade, but the digging out of legal proofs and papers uncovered a long-ago temporary false identity, her secret — that in 1912 she had borne a baby girl and, as in some antique melodrama, left the infant on a doorstep. This novel is particularly useful for a study of Savage’s sources.
Savage’s first novel, The Pass, is shot through with the deepest kind of landscape description which utterly controls the destinies and fortunes of the ranchers and Scandinavian farmers who settle on the prairie adjacent to a formidable pass. The people of the place love it beyond reason, the blue autumnal haze, the grassland stretched out, and they relish testing themselves against spring storms and baking drought. The novel is studded with brilliant portraits that already display Savage’s masterly ability to show the inner lives of characters, especially women, who are treated with a rare depth of understanding. The language and thinking of the ranch people in The Pass is strikingly vivid, even today, and invites comparison with James Galvin’s biography of place, The Meadow, and the brilliant and funny stories of the Chilcotin country by Canadian writer Paul St. Pierre, Breaking Smith’s Quarter Horse and Smith and Other Events.
A sense of great longing and sympathy for the western landscape colors this novel, and it is hard to dismiss the idea that Savage, in the tighter confines of the east, re-created the country he came from for personal as well as literary reasons. But living in such country demands and takes everything. When a character freezes to death on his trapline in The Pass, a young wife says to her husband, ‘The prairie killed him. He loved the prairie and it killed him.’ There are more ways than one that hard country kills, as Savage shows in his western fiction. Some years after The Pass, Savage said in an interview:
I have always believed that the landscape shapes the people. A person will say, for instance, that there is something different about Westerners. And I think the moment you leave Chicago and go West, you find that people are quite different. For one thing, there is an openness about them. I think the difference in Westerners has to do with the fact that they feel it’s impossible to look at the Rocky Mountains — or to look at the horizon, which is equally vast — and consider that there is such a thing as Europe or neighbors or anything else.fn11
The Pass and Lona Hanson and, to some extent, The Power of the Dog may be seen as late novels from the golden age of American landscape fiction, a period that falls roughly in the first half of the last century. In these novels landscape is used not just as decorative background, but to drive the story and control the characters’ lives, as in the work of Willa Cather, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Walter D. Edmonds, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, and nearly all that Hemingway wrote, all resonant with the sense of place, a technique well suited to describing the then strikingly different regions of America, the pioneer ethos, the drive of capitalist democracy on the hunt for resources. By 1948, when Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead appeared, with its characters braced in adversarial and manipulative position to the raw land, that older landscape novel was disappearing.
The title of Savage’s major book, The Power of the Dog, is a multiple-layered reference to a striking landscape feature that Phil Burbank can see but his brother, George, cannot. In fact, Phil uses this distant formation of rock and slope that resembles a running dog as a kind of test — those who cannot see it are lacking in intelligence and perception. For himself it is a proof of his sharp and special sensitivity.
In the outcropping of rocks on the hill that rose up before the ranchhouse, in the tangled growth of sagebrush that scarred the hill’s face like acne he saw the astonishing figure of a running dog. The lean hind legs thrust the powerful shoulders forward; the hot snout was lowered in pursuit of some frightened thing — some idea — that fled across the draws and ridges and shadows of the northern hills. But there was no doubt in Phil’s mind of the end of that pursuit. The dog would have its prey. Phil had only to raise his eyes to the hill to smell the dog’s breath. But vivid as that huge dog was, no one but one other had seen it, George least of all.fn12
In another sense the dog is Phil himself; alternatively he is the dog’s prey. The dog is also a connection with the old, finer days. But most powerfully the title comes from the Book of Common Prayer:
Deliver my soul from the sword;
My [only one] from the power of the dog.fn13
The Burbank ranch is located in southwestern Montana near the cattle-shipping town of Beech, and it has been operated for many years by the parents of Phil and George, ‘the Old Gentleman’ and ‘the Old Lady.’ The elder Burbanks are moneyed easterners who maintained relatively luxurious lives in their years on the ranch but who, when the story opens in 1924, have retired to a suite of rooms in a Salt Lake City hotel, following an undescribed contretemps with Phil. The Burbanks are the most important ranchers in the valley. When the story opens the two sons run the ranch, Phil forty years old, George thirty-eight. The two men share a bedroom as they have since childhood, out of tradition and habit.
On the ranch Phil is responsible for haying, roundups, ranch labor, trailing herds to the railroad, the daily work of a big spread, while George oversees the business affairs and finances, meets with bankers and the governor, and winds the clock on Sunday afternoon. In the rural division of labor, ranch work is man’s work.fn14 Phil spends much time in the bunkhouse with the hands, talking about the good old days when ranch hands were real men and the chief of them was Bronco Henry. Phil prides himself on his ability to get along with the cowboys and thinks there is something about George that makes them uncomfortable.
The brothers are a study in opposites. Phil is slender and good-looking; he is brilliant and enormously capable, a great reader, a taxidermist, skilled at braiding rawhide and horsehair, a solver of chess problems, a smith and metalworker, a collector of arrowheads (even fashioning arrowheads himself with greater skill than any Indian), a banjo player, a fine rider, a builder of hay-stacking beaver-slide derricks, a vivid conversationalist. He is also a high-tempered bully, a harping critic of all around him; he knows unerringly the cruel thing to say, relishes getting people’s goats. He is, in fact, a vicious bitch. He bathes only once a month in summer, not in the bathtub but in a hidden pool, makes it a point never to wear gloves so his hands are nicked and callused and dirty. He gets his hair cut rarely. He believes that people need obstacles in their lives that they may strive and rise above them.
George, on the other hand, is phlegmatic, slow to learn but with a good memory, feels sorry for people and never blames anybody, has little to say. George is stocky (Phil calls him ‘Fatso’ to irritate), steady against Phil’s mercury, kind against Phil’s cruelty. It is easy to see the brothers as personifications of Good and Evil, as Abel and Cain, as Weak and Strong,
as Normal and Peculiar. To some extent all of these balance points fit, but both characters are far more complex.
In a barroom Phil, who himself drinks very sparingly out of fear of what he might reveal in a loose-tongued moment, humiliates and abuses the drunken town doctor, Johnny Gordon, who cannot resist liquor, with tragic results, for the doctor, corroded by humiliation, kills himself a year later. Phil is revolted by weakness and pride, and never misses a chance to lacerate another with his mean-spirited opinions. He humiliates not only the drunken doctor, but a Jewish department store owner who started out as a hide buyer, a boastful fat kid with a bag of marbles, and an elderly Indian; he spews hatred and scorn. So much does he dislike social-climbing Jews that rather than sell his old hides to the peddler, he wastefully burns them. He is particularly vocal and phobic about ‘sissies,’ still a word of choice in the west to describe effeminate boys and men. He is particularly scornful of Peter Gordon, the drunken doctor’s sissy son, who has developed an unfortunate skill in making paper flowers. It is this son who discovers his father’s body and who inherits the doctor’s medical library. Less well known than his ability to fashion crepe-paper roses is the boy’s omnivorous curiosity about medicine and wild plants, whose intricate leaf and root systems he draws in minute detail.
A character mentioned only a very few times and never described is of central importance to the novel — Bronco Henry, the ideal cowboy of Phil’s youth. Again and again there is a fleeting reference to this hero, and gradually it dawns on the reader that Bronco Henry has a tremendous emotional grip on Phil’s bitter and loveless heart. No one and nothing can ever match Bronco Henry. At some time in the past, we come to understand, Phil desired — touched — perhaps loved — Bronco Henry. And something very bad happened. We do not learn of the accident that killed Bronco Henry in front of the twenty-year-old Phil’s eyes until nearly the end of the book. Nor do we learn until then that it was Bronco Henry who first saw the running dog in the landscape.
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