Solitudes by R. G. Vliet (review)

Reviews 337 “to degrade man, to dehumanize and depersonalize him” while also assert­ ing that “Crane’s fictional world of war and adventure left room for man to find individual expression through fine deed and defiant gestures.” The latter statement is indeed true of nearly all the fiction that Crane wrote after his trip to the West, which is to say that the fiction itself clearly illustrates something Mr. Bergon’s study denies: that the West was not just a suitable subject for Stephen Crane’s artistry but an experience that changed his art. ROBERT GLEN DEAMER, Thiel College Solitudes. By R. G. Vliet. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977. 274 pages, $8.95.) The hero of R. G. Vliet’s historical Western, set in southwest Texas in the 1880’s, is a left-handed, red-headed stud. He runs stolen cattle, kills a man, seduces a couple of virgins and a dried-up wife, and survives plenty of natural perils, including cholera and a tornado, in quest of a beautiful woman. In these respects the novel bears a curious relation to formula Westerns. But in most others, Vliet has tried to go far beyond the straightjacket assumptions of that form beloved by, in William Eastlake’s phrase, writers of the purple page. The result is a philosophical Western, as though Camus had been grafted onto Zane Grey, with a touch of Walt Whitman throw n in for good measure. The man the hero Claiborne Sandelin kills is a stranger, and Claiborne kills him in a fit (no physiological explanation of this or subsequent fits is provided — epilepsy?). Not until the end of the novel do we begin to understand why Claiborne killed the man. Indeed the interior search is precisely this, to understand why and to lay the ghost. He killed the man for sociological reasons: the stranger was a “Meskin” and Claiborne hates Mexicans; the stranger was rich and Claiborne is literally a poor white. But the real reason, we are asked to believe, is much deeper; it is nothing less than a recognition of the stranger’s solitude, the fundamental aloneness that Claiborne is existentially sad about, seeing it in himself, in others, seeing it as the only truth beneath the appearance of everything. Claiborne eventually comes to terms with the murder, forgives himself, and under­ stands the consoling paradox that all things are bound together by solitude and the sentence of death: “trees and bugs and birds and critters and weeds, and his own kind, too” (p. 217). Before the hero is freed from nihilism and enabled to love life, he falls in love with the granddaughter of the slain man. Most of the book is taken up with his search for this woman and, conversely, with her search 338 Western American Literature for the murderer. Vliet’s shift in point-of-view, from third-person focus on Claiborne to the woman Soledad, produces some of his best prose and creates a compelling psychological mystery. But what weakens the novel — and this is its only weakness — is the treatment of the sexual attraction between hero and heroine. When Soledad knows for certain that Claiborne is the killer, she plans to shoot him. But a timely fit or seizure by Claiborne keeps her from pulling the trigger, and the next thing we know she is yielding her virginity to the man she presumably hates. Claiborne rides her, and then rides on alone but happy, leaving her alone but unhappy. When she thinks to herself during the Act “How can 1 be doing this? (text itali­ cized, p. 257), the reader wonders the same thing. The best thing about this novel is the weather; the next best thing is the supple, muscular prose. If Vliet had left out the sex, he’d have written a really good metaphysical Western. DON GRAHAM, University of Texas at Austin A Study Guide to Steinbeck’s THE LONG VALLEY. Edited by Tetsumaro Hayashi. (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press, 1976. 140 pages, $9.95.) The editor’s name and the engaging dedication, “To Ryiochi Fujishiro and Gertrude Kane,” should arouse no expectation of cross-cultural insights and subtleties. Hayashi, of Ball State, is...