The Power of the Dog
Page 26
But it is not bitterness and loss that make Phil the mean-mouthed bully that he is. Bronco Henry’s death does not explain Phil’s almost pathological cultivation of nonsissy appearance — smelly, dirty, rough hands, deliberately ungrammatical talk, superabilities in such manly things as riding and braiding rawhide ropes. The major key to Phil’s complex personality is, perhaps, that in wanting to touch and have Bronco Henry, he was forced to recognize and confront the enormous fact of his own homosexuality. His private obstacle became this thing that he knew about himself, something that in the cowboy world he inhabited was terrible and unspeakably vile. Following the code of the west, he remade himself as a manly, homophobic rancher. No one could mistake rough, stinking Phil for a sissy. In that light, his wounding tongue can be seen as preemptive sarcasm that throws possible critics off balance and into confusion. ‘[H]e had loathed the world, should it loathe him first.’fn15 He grew fangs.
Savage ratchets up the tension tremendously when he has George take an interest in Rose, the doctor’s widow, and finally, secretly marry her. Hell breaks loose when he gives the news to Phil, who resentfully sees the widow as a schemer after the Burbank money. The couple moves into the large master bedroom once used by the Old Gentleman and the Old Lady, but Phil dedicates himself to making the bride’s life a living hell in a thousand little mocking, secret ways, eventually driving her to secret tippling.
Then it is announced that Rose’s sissy son, sixteen-year-old Peter, will spend the summer on the ranch. Phil is appalled and thinks:
Was … George cogitating about the summer when the kid would come slinking in and out of the house, a constant reminder that Georgie boy wasn’t the first one to put the blocks to her? He had a hunch George hated sissies as much as he did, and now there would be one such right there in the house, messing around, listening. Phil hated how they walked and how they talked.fn16
Phil prepares the bunkhouse hands for the sissy’s arrival by describing Peter’s mincing ways, the paper flowers. Peter arrives, and in the ranch house tensions thicken like glue and mealtimes become a horror. The boy can do nothing right. When he surprises Phil naked at his secret water hole, Phil flies into a shouting rage. But the boy is as sharp of eye as Phil, and he sees what Phil is doing to his mother and much more. He has chill and watchful ways, a coldness that has always confounded Rose. In a gauntletlike roundup incident, even Phil recognizes something adamantine and courageous about Peter when the boy walks past the ranch hands in stiff new blue jeans after someone has mocked him with a wolf whistle.
Now, Phil always gave credit where credit was due. The kid had an uncommon kind of guts. Wouldn’t it be just interesting as hell if Phil could wean the boy away from his mama? Wouldn’t it now? Why, the kid would jump at the chance for friendship, a friendship with a man. And the woman — the woman, feeling deserted would depend more and more on the sauce, the old booze.
And then what?fn17
He anticipates that Rose’s drinking will escalate and that George will finally cast her off. And so Phil makes the first overtures, offering to give Peter the rawhide rope he is braiding, offering to teach him to rope and ride, offering friendship, which Peter seems to accept. In all of this turn-around friendship (not unlike Long John Silver’s grinning overtures to Jim Hawkins), he tells Peter about that extraordinary person from the old good days, Bronco Henry:
‘Oh, he taught me things. He taught me that if you’ve got guts, you can do any damned thing, guts and patience. Impatience is a costly commodity, Pete. Taught me to use my eyes, too. Look yonder, there. What do you see?’ Phil shrugged. ‘You see the side of a hill. But Bronc, when he looked there, what do you suppose he saw?’
‘A dog,’ Peter said. ‘A running dog.’
Phil stared, and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘The hell,’ he said, ‘you see it just now?’
‘When I first came here,’ Peter said.fn18
Accompanying the change in attitude there is a sense of rising sensuality, intensified when Phil, who never touches anyone, puts his arm over the boy’s shoulders, an intimacy set off, as if in emotional parentheses, by Phil’s fury at Rose for selling some old hides to the Jewish peddler. Peter listens stone-faced to Phil’s vengeful rant, but he has his own secret plan, deeply chilling, more awful than any of Phil’s sadistic cruelties, for Peter is already in the big leagues.
In reading Savage’s autobiographical novel, I Heard My Sister Speak My Name, we see much of the raw material for the characters in The Power of the Dog. George Burbank is modeled on Savage’s stepfather — stolid, steady, quiet. The Old Gentleman and the Old Lady are fictional illustrations of the elder Brenners. One of the Brenner brothers served as the model for Phil Burbank. The fictional Tom Burton in The Sheep Queen writes about their mother to the woman now proven his sister. He describes his mother’s second marriage to the well-to-do rancher and the sly insults she suffered from the second brother, Ed.
Ed was a bachelor by profession, a woman-hater. He was brilliant, quick at chess, puzzles and word games. I recall that he knew the meaning of the word ‘baobab.’ He read widely in such top-drawer periodicals as no longer exist — Asia, Century Magazine, World’s Week, Mentor … Country Life he tossed aside as directed at climbers and others who required the crutch of possessions.
He was lean, had a craggy profile under thick black hair he had cut no more than four times a year. He despised towns where hair was cut, where men gathered to engage in silly banter and chewed food in public. His long, sharp nose was an antenna quick to pick up the faintest rumor and send it on to his brain to be amplified … His laughter was an insulting bray; it crowded and pushed the air ahead of it.
He said many true words about other men. I never heard him say a kind one.fn19
Burton goes on to describe the stepuncle’s devotion to his half sister:
The little girl became for Ed his chief instrument of torture; he began to woo her away from my mother. He did a fine job…. Ed talked to the little girl around my mother. That her daughter found Ed so lovable and so responsive to her will must have made my mother doubt her sanity.fn20
When Burton/Savage’s mother played Schumann or Schubert on the piano, Ed would go to his room and counter with boisterous tunes on his banjo. ‘His purpose was to destroy my mother, and that is what he did.’fn21 This malicious act grew, in Savage’s hands, as a black weed in The Power of the Dog to great effect. Although young Savage often wished his stepuncle dead, he was too young to ‘find the clue to his own weakness and destroy him.’ In the end the man destroyed himself. While he was fencing a haystack using poles ‘slick with cow manure wet from the fall rains,’ a splinter jammed into ‘the palm of his naked, horny hand.’fn22 He was dead within days of anthrax, a deadly disease caused by Bacillus anthracis that can be transmitted from animals to humans through insect transmission, milk, and the handling of infected hides and tissue.
Savage’s innate sense of literary drama let him construct a gripping and tense novel from these pieces of his Montana family history. It is one thing to have extraordinary raw material in your literary scrap bag, but quite another to stitch the pieces into a driving and classic story that forever fixes a place and an event in the reader’s imagination. From the childhood memory of an odious man, with virtuoso skill Savage created one of the most compelling and vicious characters in American literature. In a curious way he has realized his childhood wish to see the man dead, for every time a new reader catches his breath at Phil Burbank’s satisfyingly ghastly end, the child that was Thomas Savage re-kills him as surely as the fictional Peter Gordon removed his mother’s nemesis.
fn1 Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times Book Review.
fn2 Publisher’s Weekly, January 2, 1967.
fn3 Emily Salkin, private correspondence, October 10, 2000.
fn4 Thomas Savage, I Heard My Sister Speak My Name, p. 138, Little, Brown, Boston, 1977.
fn5 Ibid., p. 140. Sweringen is the fictional name Savage used for the Yearians.
fn6 Thomas Savage, I, Thomas Savage, am the author of The Power of the Dog, 1967, p. 5, autobiographical essay used by Little, Brown for promotional purposes.
fn7 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
fn8 Thomas Savage, personal correspondence, September 15, 2000.
fn9 Ibid.
fn10 Ibid.
fn11 Interview, Jean W. Ross, Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 1999.
fn12 Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog, p. 67, Little, Brown, Boston, 1967.
fn13 Ibid., p. 273. Psalms, 22:20, The New Scofield Reference Bible, Oxford U. Press, N.Y.
fn14 Will Fellows, Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest, U. Wisconsin Press, 1996, 1998, well illustrates the rigid division of the sexes in conservative, rural America.
fn15 The Power of the Dog, p. 263.
fn16 lbid., p. 126.
fn17 Ibid., p. 226.
fn18 Ibid., pp. 259–260.
fn19 I Heard My Sister Speak My Name, pp. 223–226.
fn20 Ibid., p. 228.
fn21 Ibid.
fn22 Ibid.
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House.
Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books bought by the prestigious literary hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present. In 2012 Vintage Children’s Classics was launched to include the much-loved authors of our youth.
For a full list of the books Vintage publishes, please visit our website www.vintage-books.co.uk
For book details and other information about the classic authors we publish, please visit the Vintage Classics website www.vintage-classics.info
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473523012
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Thomas Savage 1967
Afterword copyright © Annie Proulx 2001
Thomas Savage has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Vintage Classics in 2015
First published in the United States by Little, Brown in 1967
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1967
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784870621
www.vintage-classics.info
Visit www.worldofstories.co.uk for all your favourite children’s classics