And after a moment, “That he couldn’t have been moved, that there was for him no realization of sin.”
“There wasn’t,” I said. “You’d have had to kill him.”
There was no talk in the bar now, and I could hear somebody coming up the stairs.
“And I couldn’t have done that,” Davies said slowly. “And though even that might have been better, it is not altogether a weakness that I couldn’t.”
“Nobody could have done that,” I told him. I was glad he’d come back to that idea. It would be a saver for him.
“No,” he said wearily, and nodded.
“If I didn’t believe that—” he said.
“You couldn’t have stopped him any other way,” I assured him.
“No,” he said.
The door opened, and it was Gil and Canby.
“Hello,” Canby said to both of us, and then to me, “How long have you been awake? I just came up to see if you wanted something to eat.”
“I’ll come down,” I told him and, when he asked, said the shoulder was doing fine.
Gil was drunk, all right, in his steady way.
“Sorry,” he said, “didn’t know you had company,” as if he’d found me with a girl.
“It’s all right,” Davies said, “I was just going.”
“Did he wake you up?” Gil asked, belligerently, looking hard at us, to focus.
“I was awake,” I said. “Where did you go to get that drunk without my hearing you?”
“I took the horses over to Winder’s,” he said, “and he wanted to drink. He felt pretty low about the business.”
“He did?” I said.
“Bill’s not a bad guy, when you get to know him,” Gil maintained; “only pig-headed.
“Anyway,” he said cheerfully, “we won’t have to have another hanging. Tetley took care of himself.”
It caught me wide open, and I made a bad cover.
“Oh, Gerald, you mean?” I said, after too long a wait. “Yeah, I heard,” and tried to signal him off. He didn’t get it.
“No,” he said, “his old man too. After he heard about the kid he locked himself in the library and jumped on a sword. They had to break the door open to get him. Saw him through the window, lying on his face in there on the rug, with that big cavalry sword of his sticking up through his back.”
Canby saw me glance at Davies, and I guess I looked as funny as I felt. Canby turned quick to look at him too.
“Who would have thought the old bastard had that much feeling left in him?” Gil said.
Davies just stood there for a moment, staring at Gil. Then he made a little crying noise in his throat, a sort of whimper, like a pup, and I thought he was going to cave. He didn’t, though. He made that noise again, and then suddenly went out, closing the door behind him. We could hear him on the stairs, whimpering more and more. Once, by the sound, he fell.
“What in hell ails the prophet?” Gil asked.
“Go get him,” I told Canby, and when he stood there trying to see what I meant, “you can’t leave him alone, I tell you.” And then started to go myself. But Canby caught on, and pushed past me, and went out and down the stairs three or four at a time. I went to the window, and saw Davies already out in the street. He was sagging in the knees, but trying to run like he had to get away from something. I saw Canby catch up with him, and Davies try to fight him off, but then give up. They came back together, Davies with his head down and wobbling loose on his neck. Canby was half holding him up.
“What in hell ails him?” Gil asked again, watching over my shoulder.
I heard Canby getting him up the stairs, and went over and closed the door. But we could still hear the shuffle of their feet, and Davies whimpering constantly now, like a woman crazy with grief. We listened while the shuffle and whimper passed the door and went down the hall, and then was shut off by another door closing.
“What’s the matter?” Gil asked, scared.
“He had a notion he was to blame,” I told him.
“For what?”
“The whole business.”
“He was?” Gil said. “That’s a good one.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt sick for the old man.
We both thought about it for a minute.
“Well,” Gil said, “you better eat something. All this time, and losing that blood.”
“I’m not hungry,” I told him. I wasn’t, either.
“You better eat, though,” he said. “I gotta eat too,” he added. “I can’t drink any more till I eat something.”
Going down the stairs he said back up at me, “Smith was all for getting up a lynching party for Tetley, till we heard.”
“Smith’s a great hanger,” I said.
“Ain’t he,” Gil said.
We ate out in the back room, where it was already laid out for us, salt pork, winter rotten potatoes, beans and black coffee. At first it stuck in my throat, but I drank two cups of the coffee, and was hungry again. Canby came in while we were eating, and said Davies would be all right, he’d given him something to make him sleep and sent Sparks up to be with him. There was nobody in the bar, so he stood watching us eat, with his towel in his hand. He said the story was all over town all right, that it took more to pass Smith out than he’d thought. But in one way it was working out good. They were taking up a pot for Martin’s wife. There was more than five hundred dollars in it already.
“Even old Bartlett chipped in,” Canby said, “but he’s not showing his face around much. He sent the money down by Sparks.”
“That reminds me,” Gil said, as if it hadn’t been on his mind, “I put in twenty-five apiece for us.”
I squared with him out of my Indian sack.
“She picked a good time for the pot, anyway,” Canby said. “Roundup over and none of you guys taken yet.
“It’s not a bad price at that,” he added, “for a husband that don’t know any better than to buy cattle in the spring without a bill of sale.”
He went back out to the bar, and we could hear him talking to somebody out there.
After a while, when he wasn’t talking any more, we went out, and Gil and Canby had their joke about the “Bitching Hour,” and we had a couple of drinks and a smoke. I didn’t want any more; what I still wanted was sleep. It seemed as if I hadn’t even got started on the sleeping I could do. I’ve noticed it works that way, when there’s something bothering you that you can’t do anything about, you always get sleepy. Besides, there were men beginning to come in who hadn’t been up there with us. They would look at us, and then stay at the other end of the bar and talk to Canby in low voices, now and then sneaking another look at us. Gil was getting sore about it. He still hadn’t had the fight he wanted, and he was drinking like he was just a pipe through the floor. He would stand there, staring at the men, and just waiting for one of them to say something he could start on.
When Rose Mapen came in again, all big smiles and walking like she was at the head of a parade, and the man with the red sideburns right behind her, I was scared. But Gil fooled me. He picked up the bottle and two glasses and said, “Come on, I don’t want to fight that guy now. I’d kill him.”
Up in the room I stretched out on the bed. Gil put the bottle and glasses on the dresser and went over and looked out of the window into the street. It was about sunset, a clear sky again, and everything still. Gil opened the window, and the cool air came in, full of the smell of the meadows. Way off we could hear the meadow larks. Gil poured himself a drink and lit another cigarette. He blew the smoke hard, and it went out the window in a long, quick stream.
“I gave Winder the ten to give Farnley,” he said, like that made up for something.
“That’s good,” I said.
Downstairs we could hear Rose talking and then laughing and all the men laughing after her, the way they had in the afternoon. She was on show all right.
“If I started a fight with that guy, it wou
ld come to shootin’,” Gil said.
“We’ve had enough of that,” I told him.
“I know it,” he said, “but I don’t know how to start a decent fight with that kind of a guy.”
And then, like he was giving it a lot of attention, “He’s a funny guy. I don’t know how you’d start a decent fight with him.”
Tink-tink-a-link went the meadow lark. And then another one, even farther off, teenk-teenk-a-leenk.
Then Gil said, “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” as if he’d let it all go.
“Yeh,” I said.
COMMENTARY
CLIFTON FADIMAN
L. L. LEE
CLIFTON FADIMAN
Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” is your correspondent’s unwavering choice for the year’s finest first novel. It has many of the elements of an old-fashioned horse opera—monosyllabic cowpunchers, cattle rustlers, a Mae Western lady, barroom brawls, shootings, lynchings, a villainous Mexican. But it bears about the same relation to an ordinary Western that “The Maltese Falcon” does to a hack detective story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s sort of what you might call a masterpiece.…
“The Ox-Bow Incident” is not so much a story about a violent happening as a mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice. What lends the book an unusual touch—almost a touch of genius—is the way in which everything that is important in it revolves around the most profound moral issues and is presented only in terms of the tensest melodrama. Each of the characters—there are a score of them and they are realized with almost over-elaborate precision—bears a special relation to the problem of violence, from the sadistic Tetley to Davies, the saint manqué. But none of them figures merely as a spokesman for an idea or even a feeling; each one, you sense, is a whole life of which only a facet is presented in this particular episode.
In addition to being the inventor of a plot whose convolutions you will follow popeyed and goose-pimpled, Mr. Clark is the commander of a completely adult style, all bone and sinew, without a trace of the affectation of over-simplicity. If he has a fault, it is that of understatement, for which he will be freely forgiven.
On the basis of “The Ox-Bow Incident,” I don’t think you can make any predictions about Mr. Clark. The thing is so darned perfect that it seems to deny the possibility of growth on the part of the author.… There’s a kind of cabinet-worker precision about “The Ox-Bow Incident;” everything—characters, plot, style, rhythm, even the title, so cool and complete—falls into place not mechanically but organically, as if the final effect had been calculated shrewdly and patiently, with nothing left to improvisation. Such a book can never be followed up by another of the same kind; it stands by itself. But whether or not Mr. Clark publishes a single line in the future, he’s a writer, here and now.
From “Make Way for Mr. Clark—the O’Neill Family Afloat and Ashore,” published in The New Yorker, October 12, 1940
L. L. LEE
The Oxbow Incident is Clark’s best known novel; it is also the one most directly concerned with man as a political animal, that is, man as member of a community. And nature seems almost ignored except as setting, as stage. But stages, certainly, are always symbolic, for they can suggest the attitude of the author of the drama. The stage does so here; nature functions as a symbolic comment upon men’s actions. The novel begins in the sunlight, in the beginning warmth of spring, but the main action takes place at night and in the cold. Nature, and so, Life, in a sense withdraws. The cold and the darkness symbolize the lynchers’ being outside of nature as well as their own inner coldness and darkness. The hanging at dawn, then, is not just a simple reversal, i.e., death occurring just as the day is reborn, but is also a deliberate assault by the lynchers against the continuing processes of nature.
Oxbow is also the most ambiguous of Clark’s treatments of the American scene: not in its protest against injustice, certainly not in its obvious protest against racism. But it is ambiguous in that it is concerned with ambiguities: how does one arrive at justice—and can man arrive at justice anyway?
What is justice to be based upon? Davies answers that it comes from the law, and that the law is based upon the majority will. This is good American doctrine. But every reader will note that Tetley goes through certain forms: he holds a kind of trial, and the decision is based upon the votes of the majority. That majority, though, is not of a group of individuals, but of a “pack” (as young Tetley calls them), men more afraid of being thought physically afraid than they are afraid of committing an injustice. And the action they perform is manifestly unjust, that is, it is wrong. The men are hanged to satisfy Tetley’s lust for power, and the group of “rugged individualists” surrenders to him.
Clark is indeed talking about more than a Western lynch mob; he is talking about the whole American society or, rather, the whole human society. And the horror lies in the irony: it is far easier to understand and forgive the brutal actions of slaves than it is to understand and forgive the brutal actions of men who think themselves free and act as slaves. Here is Clark’s most explicit criticism of the American Dream: the forms of law will not suffice if they are not based upon true individualism. And these Americans are not individuals nor are they concerned with individuals.
From “Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Ambiguous American Dream,” published in College English, February 1965
READING GROUP GUIDE
Many consider The Ox-Bow Incident to be the first serious Western novel in American literature, and Clark’s novel wholly overturns many of the conventions of the typical Western or “cowboy story” (in which conceits like shoot-outs, the triumph of good over evil, and the figure of the cowboy hero tend to loom large). Discuss the ways in which Clark transforms stereotypes about the West.
How do you understand the events leading up to the novel’s culminating moment, the lynching? What are the causes of the lynching as these unfold throughout the work? Is the train of events Clark delineates anywhere reversible?
Discuss the frontier society described by Clark. What impressions do you glean of the way life was lived on the frontier? What seem to be some of the distinguishing features of frontier life.? Are there aspects of life on the frontier that came as a surprise to you?
The mob, and ideas about mob violence, figure centrally in the novel. What, for Clark, is the mob?
Discuss the importance of the physical environment for Clark: landscape, weather, the way land is experienced. How does Clark put the physical elements to work in his book? How important are these to his story and to the novel’s overall effect?
Clifton Fadiman called The Ox-Bow Incident “a mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice.” Discuss what seem to you to be the causes of violence and transgression in Clark’s treatment of these themes.
While his novel takes place in the West, Clark’s ultimate subject, according to Wallace Stegner and others, is nothing less than civilization itself. In what ways, allegorical or otherwise, does The Ox-Bow Incident say things about civilization writ large, in your view?
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
&nb
sp; •
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
MASS MARKET TITLES AVAILABLE FROM THE MODERN LIBRARY
The Arabian Nights
Translated, with a Preface and Notes, by Sir Richard F. Burton
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
0-8129-7214-7
The Ox-Bow Incident
WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK
Introduction by Wallace Stegner
0-8129-7258-9
The Lost World
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Introduction by Michael Crichton
0-8129-7213-9
The Wings of the Dove
HENRY JAMES
Introduction by Amy Bloom Preface by the author
0-8129-7211-2
Swann’s Way
MARCEL PROUST
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
Revised by D. J. Enright
Introduction by Richard Howard
0-8129-7209-0
The Mysterious Island
JULES VERNE
Translated by Jordan Stump
Introduction by Caleb Carr
0-8129-7212-0
Available at bookstores everywhere
www.modernlibrary.com
MODERN LIBRARY IS ONLINE AT www.modernlibrary.com
MODERN LIBRARY ONLINE IS YOUR GUIDE
TO CLASSIC LITERATURE ON THE WEB
THE MODERN LIBRARY E-NEWSLETTER
Our free e-mail newsletter is sent to subscribers, and features sample chapters, interviews with and essays by our authors, upcoming books, special promotions, announcements, and news.
To subscribe to the Modern Library e-newsletter, send a blank e-mail to: [email protected] or visit www.modernlibrary.com
The Ox-Bow Incident Page 26
