Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History

FORREST G. ROBINSON Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History If we are to have any new thoughts, ifwe are to have an intellectual identity of our own, we must make the effort to distinguish ourselves from those who preceded us, and perhaps pre-eminently from those to whom we once had the greatest indebtedness. Richard Hofstadter1 I suppose . . . that the root ofmy uneasiness with the Western revisionism generally is that the revisionists would like us to believe that they were more or less the first to notice, or at least to emphasize, how violent, how terrible, and how hard winning the West actually was. My own reading, as well as my boyhood among the old-timers, leads me to exactly the opposite conclusion: everyone noticed how hard it was. Larry McMurtry2 E "T doctorow's novel, Welcome to Hard Times, is set in a F ?^f small town on the Western mining frontier. Life in Hard Times is hard. Men and women alike—merchants, miners, prostitutes— are caught up in a precarious struggle for survival. The environment is arid, exposed, and hostile, while the settlers are rootless, disenchanted, and desperately venal. Pervasive frustration and failure are centrally represented in a furiously destructive bad man who descends at regular intervals to lay waste to the town. This rapist and murderer, Doctorow suggests, is the concentrated embodiment of the human perversity everywhere at large in Hard Times. He is the recurrent disaster which the fallen little community brings upon itself. Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 1, Summer 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 02Forrest G. Robinson The narrator of Welcome to Hard Times, a man named Blue, is by far the most fully developed ofthe novel's characters. Doctorow's emphasis on the teller of the tale is his way of underscoring the essential constructedness of the very familiar, ifextreme, Western scene that he sets before us. Blue is strangely bland and matter of fact in describing a sordid , violent, doomed society. To the very end he keeps ledgers, written accounts ofevents as they unfold. The writing seems to provide a measure of control, distance, and hope; and it reinforces Blue's sense of himselfas an embattled innocent. Yet all of this, Doctorow makes clear, is false. The only things under control in the town of Hard Times are the narrator's carefully cultivated illusions. Blue is in fact deeply implicated in the hopeless world he surveys. His optimism is groundless, and his innocence is a sham, a cover for spineless evasions and an imperfectly repressed fascination with the bloodletting. Blue's self-deception, his recoil from the destructive reality ofhis experience into a consoling but utterly fabricated web of words, is the leading element in Doctorow's emefgent assessment of the frontier myth. To the extent that the myth, endlessly reproduced in history and fiction, film and television, involves a triumphal narrative ofEuroAmerican enterprise, endurance, and progress toward the fruition of democratic ideals, it is not—the novel suggests—merely a fabrication, but a flagrant lie. Doctorow's inspiration for Welcome to Hard Times arose out of the drudgery of reading "lousy" Western screenplays for a film company. "From reading all those screenplays and being forced to think about the use ofWestern myth, I developed a kind ofcontrapuntal idea of what the West must really have been like. Finally one day I thought, ? can lie better than these people."'3 It is in Blue that Doctorow gives voice to his understanding of the way in which Western myths are generated and sustained. "Like the West, like my life," Blue reflects, "the color dazzles us, but when it's too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim." Bitter experience notwithstanding , he is also convinced that "a person cannot live without looking for good signs," and goes on to add that "if a good sign is so important you can just as soon make one up and fool yourself that way." Newcomers are especially welcome to Blue, because "anyone new helped bury the past."4 An ingenious literary critic of the proper regional persuasion might, upon first...