A Literary History of the American West

Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream

THE PLACE of Walter Van Tilburg Clark in literary history is difficult to establish. Clark is best known as the author of a cowboy novel in which no hero comes galloping to the rescue, The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), in which three innocent men are lynched; it helped to shatter the long-running stereotype of romantic heroes–from James Fenimore Cooper to Owen Wister–and to launch a new wave of realism in western novels and films.

The place of The Ox-Bow Incident in literary history, however, does not foretell the historical significance of the works of Walter Clark. His next novel, The City of Trembling Leaves (1945), is a stylistic medley in which the mountain sprites are given a literal existence and in which the artist's eye is centered on adolescent dreams and problems, stories of the struggling young artist, and psychological relations between the domestic and the ideal. The Ox-Bow Incident may nominate Walter Clark for a place in literary history, but The City of Trembling Leaves sends the historian back to unanswered questions.

Clark's relation to history itself is also puzzling. He served his writer's apprenticeship during the 1930s, but his early work was not fueled by the literary potential of the American depression. There is an occasional mention of hard times, but during the mid-1930s Clark was working–in poetry for the most part, with an occasional success–to purge himself of the beginner's devotion to ideas, sentimentality, and grand themes. In his mature fiction, almost all of it published during the 1940s, Clark pays no attention to World War II or to the beginnings of the Cold War.

Among those serious novels John Milton has called "Westerns," as distinguished from the popular stereotype he calls "westerns," * the fiction of Clark is consistently judged the best or among the best, and yet it is atypical of the genre it supposedly represents. The difference between Clark and the writers with whom he is classed is a difference in the uses of history. With only a few exceptions, the serious western novel is faithful to a specific place and to a specific historical event or a representative historical experience.

* Ed. note: Throughout this volume, we have followed an opposite practice, using "Western" (n.) to denote a book or movie built on the formulas of the popular stereotype, while "western" (adj.) denotes the general region or direction. The fiction of Walter Clark, by contrast, is not characterized by fidelity to specific or representative history.

A list of excellent western novels which could serve as "fictive chapters" in a history of the American West could be a reasonably accurate indication of the genre itself. For illustrative purposes merely, such a list might begin with the following: A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Big Sky (the mountaineer experience) and The Way West (the wagon train story); Vardis Fisher, The Mothers (the Donner party disaster); Michael Straight, A Very Small Remnant (the Sand Creek Massacre); Benjamin Capps, The Trail to Ogallala (an improvement on the cattle drive story as originally told by Andy Adams in The Log of a Cowboy); Frederick Manfred, Lord Grizzly (the story of Hugh Glass) and Conquering Horse (Indian life in pre-white America); Frank Waters, The People of the Valley (a necessary chapter in the ethnic history of New Mexico); and Harvey Fergusson, Grunt of Kingdom (ranching in New Mexico).

Walter Clark, in sharp contrast to writers who clearly are his fictive kinfolks, insisted on numerous occasions that The Ox-Bow Incident was not based on a specific lynching and that he moved geography about–in The Track of the Cat, for example–to suit the needs of the story birthed in his imagination. This fundamental difference in the uses of specific history does not suggest, of course, that Clark's peers have been lacking in imagination or that Clark was unconcerned with historical accuracy. The difference is fundamental but certainly not exclusive, not invidious. The western novel as a genre–and including Walter Clark–is characterized by historical accuracy; but actual people and events from history are never central to Clark as they are for so many of the best novelists in the American West. Authentic details are included in the stuff of Clark's imagination (note the veiled historical background of Joe Sam in The Track of the Cat, for example); but they are present for verisimilitude, perhaps for a deeper layer of implied meanings, and Clark's central interest is never the general one of the fictivesociologist who creates an imaginative story as a potentially better way of describing the life of a specific place in a former time.

To ask on historical grounds for a more specific analysis of the similarity and differences between Clark and his peers is to discover a possible answer to the question of his place in literary history. Clark's use of western history is important in his art because it is–even in The City of Trembling Leaves–the essential backdrop of his narrative; but his use of history is atypically offstage in that he is concerned with what happened after the glorious adventure, after the climax.

In The Ox-Bow Incident, for example, set in 1885, Bridger's Wells has declined well past its peak when it was a lively stagecoach stop. The railroad has passed it by. Cowboys still wear sidearms, drink whiskey in the saloon with stereotypical gestures and ironic toasts, and they still play cards and get into fist fights; but many are balding, paunchy, past their prime, and they have found no way to translate the macho energy of a fading history into the life they are now leading. Winder is obsessed with hate for the railroad that is ruining his freight business. Smith tries to act like a cowboy tough anxious to lynch rustlers but is, in actuality, the town drunk and a coward. Major Tetley, who lives somewhere between the glory that was Rome and the glory that was the Southern Confederacy, is so blind to the actual world that he causes the suicide of his son and then commits suicide himself. Farnley's Hollywood playacting bit–when he grabs young Greene by the vest and yanks him up close–is typical of the macho male who lives in a time and place after the climax of history. The resulting frustrations become a distorted but powerful drive toward the sublimated and decadent release of lynch law.

The City of Trembling Leaves pushes western history further into the background, but the mountain and desert of Nevada and symbolical touches of history (Bowers' Mansion, for example) participate in the twentiethcentury setting. Tim Hazard, like Buck in The Watchful Gods, is fascinated by heroes from the Tristram legend to the contemporaneous football field; and both must learn that what can be achieved today is intertwined with the past. The Track of the Cat is set in 1900 to represent the close of the frontier, an event discussed and debated by Art and Curt Bridges. "The Wind and the Snow of Winter," Clark's story of the panhandler, is set in 1940. Clark's historical viewpoint, in short, is at least a trifocal lens: a more or less specific historical West, a date after the historical climax chosen for the setting of a given work, and the vantage point of Clark's own personal time in history.

A brief summary of Clark's life helps to explain his preference for a post-historical view of the American West, his effort to tell what happened in the past by writing stories that begin after the historical climax, after the so-called glory days. The biographical outline also helps to explain how he could love the land and value unity, yet write so often of the intellect and the divisive.

Born in Maine in 1909, Clark was raised in a home devoted to art and to scholarship. His father, Walter Ernest Clark, served as Head of the Department of Economics at City College of New York, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor for distinguished service in economics and education. His mother, Euphemia Abrams, graduated from Cornell and undertook advanced study in piano and composition with Edward MacDowell at Columbia. When the family did move West, while Clark was still a child, it was to the University of Nevada, where the father served as President from 1917 to 1937.

After graduating from high school in 1926, Clark attended the University of Nevada, taking B.A. and M.A. degrees in English and philosophy, with special attention to English literature and European and American philosophies and with a creative master's thesis, a 136-page poetic version of the Tristram legend. During 1931–33, Clark was back east as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Vermont. There his studies centered on American literature and Greek philosophy and literature, culminating in a second M.A. thesis, this one a critical study of Robinson Jeffers.

From then on, academic life intermixed with ranch life, a biographical manifestation of the ambiguity which both fueled and undermined his work as an artist. In 1933, he began teaching high school English and coaching basketball and tennis at Cazenovia, New York, a stint broken in 1940 by a year at Indian Springs, in southern Colorado, and concluded in 1946 by a year at Taos, New Mexico. More ranch life in 1949–this time in Washoe Valley, Nevada–was followed by a move to Virginia City and an appointment to the faculty at the University of Nevada. In 1953, he resigned to protest the autocratic rule of the administration. From 1953–54 through 1955–56, he headed the creative writing program at the University of Montana. From 1956–57 through 1961–62, he taught creative writing at San Francisco State, taking a year off in 1960–61 to work at the Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, Connecticut. With Virginia City becoming an approximate base in his life, Clark returned finally to the University of Nevada, where he again taught creative writing. During his last years, he undertook the ill-advised task of editing and perhaps drawing a book of some kind from the voluminous journals of Alfred Doten, an early settler and minor entrepreneur. Clark died in 1971.

The inescapable and ironic conclusion–one argued convincingly by L. L. Lee in his Boise Western Writers Series monograph–is that Walter Clark, who loved mountain and desert, who enjoyed drinking beer with big-bellied men, who saw the intellect as divisive and often destructive, was himself one more victim of the analytical disease that has plagued so many Americans both actual and fictive. Like young Tim Hazard, he was given to compulsive "instead-of" talk, factual recitations and rambling journeys of the imagination as an unwanted avoidance of the unity and balance he craved.

Like the mature Tim Hazard, Clark came to realize that the Henry Adams he admired and attacked but could not dismiss was a problem for embarrassingly personal reasons (compare The City of Trembling Leaves, pages 424–28, and Clark's essay-story, "The Writer and the Professor," Chrysalis, Spring 1962). As Adams's multilensed view of medieval and modern history led toward a fragmentation of the self, so did Clark's multilensed view of the West and the nation lead toward a similar incapacitating intellectualism.

Thus the problem of Art Davies in The Ox-Bow Incident–his excessive attention to analysis when his final plea to the lynch mob is that the heart should outrank the head–is a problem Clark knew from the innermost depths of his own self. And Davies is but one of a kind. Art Croft– another of the reading, artistic, or intellectual type Clark liked to name Art–reads and writes on winter range until his partner, in macho frustration, has to start a fight with him for something to do. Croft, like Davies, performs a minimal and obviously ineffectual duty which could be rationalized into an appeasement of the conscience but which–and this is also obvious–will not stop the lynching. In The Track of the Cat, Art Bridges is also a reader, an especially spiritual, priest-like, and gentle one; and he will not stop Curt any more than his counterparts in The Ox-Bow Incident will stop the lynch mob. Tim Hazard and Lawrence Black and young Buck, a typically precocious reader, are three more of a breed Clark portrayed with skill and variety.

At one extreme are those who have seen the agonizing contrasts of history with such honesty that they are not only incapacitated from action but are, in fact, destructive, perhaps suicidal. Lawrence Black is a perfec-tionist, an idealist. He is so contemptuous of commercial art that he scorns praise as a vile corruption and destroys his own paintings. His pointless and unprepared-for stroll into the Nevada desert, if not overtly suicidal, as his wife thinks, is at least an invitation to suicide. Art Bridges has lost the ability to communicate between the ideal world and the actual world. He lives primarily in the beautiful spiritual world symbolized by the exotically decorated blue blanket of his childhood–his image of medieval glories, of original perfection untainted by brutes like Curt–and this means that Curt will run the ranch. Art is a good person who earns the reader's sympathy, but he is a failed hero; and his woolgathering immediately after having seen proof of the black painter's (panther's) ability for killing borders on the suicidal. And, for the critic who is brave enough, there is a discomforting amount of evidence to support the position that young Buck, at the end of The Watchful Gods, walks into the ocean to commit suicide. Buck, in any case, is in a state of shock from having confronted the unbearable combination of the terrible and the beautiful.

Others, most notably Tim Hazard and Hal Bridges, learn to accommodate the traumatic combination of the ideal and the cruel which plagued both Henry Adams and Walter Clark. Art Croft is somewhere between the extremist Lawrence Black and the truly heroic Hal Bridges, and he ends The Ox-Bow Incident with an appropriately ambiguous remark which suggests that he has rationalized his way into believing the lynching can be forgotten, or that he realizes, ironically, he will never be able to forget it. In still other cases, with the young heroes of "The Buck in the Hills" for example, the story ends, and it is difficult to say what has been learned or how the next encounter will be handled.

For the purposes of locating Clark in literary history, however, the pattern is sufficiently clear. The question now becomes one of content. Granted Clark's fascination with the Henry Adams problem, granted Clark's decision to set his stories after the historically climactic experience, what is the content of his western version of the confrontation between the ideal and the actual? To move toward a possible answer, we must again consider Clark's works in the context of relevant themes in the literary history of the American West.

Narratives of the West are commonly concerned with problems in the spread of what European-Americans call civilization. Families in wagon trains are threatened by "savages" and by the "uncivilized" forces of nature. Narratives about ranching, homesteading, and frontier towns feature the dangers of corruption from within the Caucasian community, but the essential effort is still the establishment of a decent civilization in a wild country.

Clearly, this expansion of civilization is the expansion of national civilization, and yet it is equally clear that the national relevance is short-circuited. In hundreds of films and novels, the national effort to settle the West leaves suddenly, once the given task is accomplished, only a regional remainder. Building a railroad from coast to coast is important to mainstream America, but what happens to those who live on land opened by the railroad is then ancillary to the nation as a nation. And stories about what happened after the trail was blazed, after the cattle were delivered to market–Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass or Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, for example–are stories, perhaps excellent ones, of the decline of the "good old days" in the West, not stories of a national decline.

Popular narratives make a special contribution to this curious switch in relevance by ending when the particular task is accomplished or the problem is solved. Wagon train and cattle drive Westerns are typically concerned with getting there, and the stereotypical ending–often aided by purple prose or uplifting music–implies that life for those who made it was happy ever after. The historical brevity of the most famous stages in western settlement–the mountaineer period, the wagon train period, cattle drives, for example–and the trap of nostalgia for high adventure in unspoiled country are probably contributing factors in the strange but widespread belief that America's much-loved stories of the West are nonetheless regional stories isolated from mainstream America.

The vision of Walter Clark, however, is a distinctly national vision. Clark knew his territory and its history–as a good regionalist must, as a good writer must–but his narrative intention was not to recreate the act of going to Oregon, getting the cattle to market, or saving little people from corrupt sheriffs and cattle barons. His vision is neither nostalgic nor anachronistic. He does not retell the story of western settlement as if it represented somehow the future.

Clark's nagging concern for the intellectual ideals of democracy and his aesthetic choice of time–setting his stories after the historical climax– combine to shape the content of his literary art. The pot of gold at the end of the American dream was–symbolically, historically, even literally–in the West. The development of the West was to be the development of America. The West was a prime testing ground for American values. Clark's ambition, I am saying, was to tell the people of the East, the West, the nation, what happened. The act of going west was high adventure, but what did it mean after the dramatic journey was over? In 1885, in 1900, in 1940, what role had western settlement played in the American Dream?

The aggressive and materialistic side of the democratic experiment is best represented in The Track of the Cat. For Art and Joe Sam, the black painter is the evil that arises when a people dishonor the land that gives them life and exploit nature's bounty to gratify the lust of their ego and the ambitions of their pocket book. "`Slaughter for the joy of it,'" Art tells Curt, "`is a thing [that] comes back on you, in time.'" Curt, of course, is contemptuous of Art's religious attitude toward the land and of the icon he carves each year for Joe Sam. The cat, Curt proclaims–sounding like the paradigm of aggressive Americans from the purchase of Manhattan through the invasion of the Black Hills to the contemporary certainty that nature can absorb whatever poison we choose to dump into it–is an actual cat killing actual cattle and can be stopped by an actual bullet. We "`raise cattle,'" Curt says "heavily, making each word count," and "`we'll kill whatever kills cattle.'" What is killing the cattle, what is wrong on the land, is Curt and the materialistic version of the American Dream he represents; but he is right about one thing: he will destroy what is doing the killing, that is, himself.

There will always be another Comstock, Curt believes, at least for those who are practical enough to see it and strong enough to go after it. Their present year, 1900, is not the "`end of the world.'" Art grants that there will always be something around to exploit, by the powerful few, but "for everybody? No. That was a kind of dream, too, a big, fat one, and it's over. We've gone from ocean to ocean, Curt, burning and butchering and cutting down and plowing under and digging out, and now we're at the end of it. Virginia City's where the fat dream winked out. Now we turn back. . . . We can start digging into ourselves now; we can plow each other under. . . . Even a good dream, backed up, turns nightmare, and this wasn't a very good one to start with. A belly dream."

Walter Clark's central concern is the American Dream and what its culmination in the West proved it to be. It is the story of three major character types: the idealistic dreamer, caught in the spell of truth and unable to compromise with the actual world; the egotistical dreamer, driven by aggressive will and thus also blind to the actual world; and–a select few– those who respect the religious truth of the natural world and the flawed integrity of the occupants of that world.

Art Davies, Art Bridges, and Lawrence Black are three different versions of the fragmented idealist. Major Tetley and most of his followers, Curt Bridges, Harold Bridges, Sr., and numerous minor characters–including a good number from the short stories–represent the exploiters, those too mean of spirit to believe in the reality of Joe Sam and his black painter. In The City of Trembling Leaves, much of Reno itself–the garish gambling houses, frustrated youth–is a product of the American Dream "backed up," turned "nightmare."

The certain sign of dream turned to nightmare–a pervasive danger for all varieties of heroes, heroines, villains, and the in-between majority–is the act of turning in on one's self. "We can start digging into ourselves now," says Art Bridges in The Track of the Cat; and this is exactly what Art Davies does in The Ox-Bow Incident. In different ways, Lawrence Black, Rachel Wells (who fights the battle of "Rachel vs. Rachel"), and Tim Hazard (who fights the same battle) are variations on a theme important– according to Clark–for Americans generally.

These variations may serve to suggest, also, Clark's place in American literary history. Herman Melville's concept of the Divine Inert, for example, is substantively comparable to Clark's portraits of idealistic dreamers who have seen more truth than they can accommodate and who cannot make the compromises required for practical action. Hal Bridges seems a more affirmative figure than Melville's Bulkington, for Hal is certainly Clark's major portrayal of a hero; but Hal treads his Nevada version of a lee shore, constantly admonishing himself to steer shy of Curt's power and not be drawn into Art's dreaming and yet to respect both extremes. Fundamental differences exist, of course, Melville's white whale suggesting metaphysical meanings while Clark's black painter is probably symbolic of exploitation in western settlement; but Clark is clearly a mainstream writer in his concern for ideals which–though real–seem as dangerous as evil.

Relevant also are Henry Adams and Henry James, primarily for their concern with the theme of a dream turned back in on itself and for the resulting incapacity for action as a topic of special interest. Clark's occasional use of a style suggestive of Hemingway is not an accident; "The Buck in the Hills" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" are directly comparable in content as well as style. Numerous character types recurrent in American literature appear also in Clark's writings: William Faulkner's Quentin Compson and a legion of self-destructive idealists; Sherwood Anderson's portraits of mothers, in Winesburg, Ohio, for example (compare Clark's Mrs. Hazard, for example); and "citified" people, common in American fiction, who confront the latent primal, and learn or do not learn (paralleled in Clark's short stories "The Rapids," "Why Don't You Look Where You're Going?" and "The Portable Phonograph").

Perhaps the major difference between Clark and comparable writers– in general terms–is his emphasis on the primal and the democratic as well as on the intellectual and materialistic aspects of the American Dream. A helpful illustration of Clark's daring variety begins with a puzzling image in The Track of the Cat. All three of the Bridges brothers dream of mountains and valleys which seem, at a single moment, both familiar and unfamiliar, both homelike and exotic. The specific image, "the Andes or the Himalayas," can be read to suggest disorientation, something out of place, a disorder; but the image recurs so often the reader feels a need for more specific analysis. Clark's explanation occurs, curiously, near the end of The City of Trembling Leaves. Lawrence Black has wandered off into the desert courting suicide. Tim Hazard has found him in time, and the two have stopped at a friendly bar inhabited by ordinary people, citizens. Tim, without condescension, entertains the company, and his biggest hit of the evening is one of his own songs, "The Sweet Promised Land of Nevada." The lyrics describe God creating the world, but God forgets to finish Nevada, leaving it a "Sweet Promised Land" with the promise unfulfilled, with primordial mountains and desert a present and grossly tangible reminder that God's power and energy exist.

God's supposed error with Nevada–repeated, according to the song, with the "Himalayas and Andes"–is of course not an error at all. The mountains of Nevada–like other signs of God's hand in other parts of the world–seem exotic to those who are out of touch with the nuclear, the center of their world. We do have here a symbol of disorientation, true, but it is specifically a symbol of disorientation in primal terms; and if we remember the setting–Lawrence Black, the good but destructive idealist who cannot force himself to condescend to the world, has been rescued by Tim Hazard, who is ambitious to compose a great symphony but who is playing a folk ballad for just plain folk and is a smash hit–then we can see something of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's very western version of a very American concern with the dreams of democracy.

MAX WESTBROOK, University of Texas

Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources
Christmas Comes to Hjalsen, Reno. Reno: Reno Publishing Company, 1930.
The City of Trembling Leaves. New York: Random House, 1945.
The Ox-Bow Incident. New York: Random House, 1940.
Ten Women in Gale's House and Shorter Poems. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1932.
The Track of the Cat. New York: Random House, 1949.
The Watchful Gods and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1950.
Secondary Sources
Andersen, Kenneth. "Character Portrayal in The Ox-Bow Incident." Western American Literature 4 (Winter 1970): 287–298. (Discussion of character types as determined by their relation to faded myths and traditions.)
Bates, Barclay W. "Clark's Man for All Seasons: The Achievement of Wholeness in The Ox-Bow Incident." Western American Literature 3 (Spring 1968): 37–49. (Argues that Swanson is "the novel's single whole man.")
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. (Includes a provocative and informative chapter comparing The Ox-Bow Incident to the film.)
Cochran, Robert W. "Nature and the Nature of Man in The Ox-Bow Incident." Western American Literature 5 (Winter 1971): 253–264. (A major essay emphasizing Art Croft's limited but realistic and human morality as contrasted with the fanaticism and destructiveness or ineffectiveness of Art Davies, Major Tetley, and others.)
Lee, L. L. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boise: Boise State College, 1973. (A monograph of exceptional quality, on all counts. Judicious coverage, yet includes a clear analysis of Clark's handling of the American Dream. Selected bibliography.)
Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1980. (Required reading for anyone interested in western American
literature. Includes a revised version of Milton's classic essay on the "western
attitude" of Walter Clark.)
Portz, John. "Idea and Symbol in Walter Van Tilburg Clark." Accent 17 (Spring
1957): 112–128. (Wide ranging and yet specific and convincing study of Clark, with special attention to the unitive, the divisive, and the intuitive.)
Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. New York: Twayne, 1969. (Includes a selected bibliography and references to other bibliographies. Contends that reality for Clark is archetypal.)
Wilner, Herbert. "Walter Van Tilburg Clark." The Western Review 20 (Winter 1956): 103–122. (A superior example of the criticism which argues, basically, that Clark did not succeed as an artist.)

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