Notes to a Bald Buffalo by John R. Milton (review)

Books NOTES TO A BALD BUFFALO BY JOHN R. MILTON (Vermillion: Spirit Mound Press, 1977. 126 pages, $5.95.) John Milton, our John Milton, has for some years now bent his energies toward exploring and describing the American West as it appears in fiction and poetry. As editor of The South Dakota Review Milton has published material simply not available elsewhere, notably some interviews with writers and a symposium on Western writing that must be read by anyone trying to sort out the confusing relation between experience and fiction in the West; in his own critical work Milton has shown himself able to consider Western fiction without needing to put so much weight on "West" that "fiction" wanders, unmoored and unattended; as a poet he has attempted to fine down the sentimental lurch and yaw that so often afflicts Western poetry of vast space and mythic time. And now he has published a novel, Notes to a Bald Buffalo, which tries to puzzle out some connections between Western beginnings and endings, between Western loves and Western deaths. Something of the way Notes to a Bald Buffalo holds itself as fiction can be seen in Milton's recognition that the West is crucially a "landscape of the mind." "The real meaning of the land," Milton writes, "was not in the looking but in the feeling one had for it. It was a land of visions, and the visions came from deep inside each person, not from the things he looked at" (p. 15). Here Milton echoes Wright Morris, who has built fine, rich fiction from seeing that the dry West blooms with fictions: "Where there is little to see, there men see the most." We can know from this that Milton will not concern himself with the usual Western notion that truth in fiction is a result of historical accuracy, a matter of getting the facts straight. Our fictions have become our most important "facts," Milton would say with Morris, and so his novel presses on the dreams, fears, and myths that shape our view of the West. So instead of ritualistic shootouts or ceremonies of manliness or heroic physical adventure—those touchstones of Western fiction—we get a poet and ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW57 his wife traveling across the West by car, a rancher who is now in a mental asylum, an Indian woman living on the reservation. These lives are shown to us in brief, fragmentary, almost disjointed chapters, the whole held together by die fact that it is the poet's interior West that we are witnessing. The book begins with the beginnings of that West in the person of a Swedish farmer who emigrated to America and founded the family line, builds symbolically on what has been heired to the poet by his grandfather and by living in die West, and then ends with the completion of the poet's Western journey and the poet's death in a strange, enigmatic sexual encounter. What is clear in all diis is that Milton's continued concern with the literary West has brought him through to a sophisticated awareness of the relation of literature to life, an awareness lacking in most regional writers, and we could expect compelling fiction from him. But Notes to a Bald Buffalo is not a good novel, and perhaps it is unconvincing as fiction because Milton the novelist has foundered on just those shoals Milton the critic can graph so accurately. That observation is not so much a revenge on criticism as a comment on the difficulty of writing about the West. It seems to me that "subject" has overwhelmed fiction, that the strain of showing significant meaning has somehow distracted Milton from his task as shaper. Something of what I mean can be seen in the first-page description of the Swedish grandfadier. His eyes seemed to be in double focus: one eye looked at his fields and the other looked beyond them. He dreamed of America but did not consider going. In his mouth was evidence of a split disposition. It was a straight mouth ... the right side . . . turned down at the corner and the left side turned up. He perpetually contradicted himself...