Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle by Katie Lee (review)

Reviews 175 a poet give us more than surrealism or the crypto-personal or the arcane. How refreshing to have a poet look at our whole society and speak without reference to stock politics or sociology. Richard Hugo speaks to us of community, of friends, of those minimal, essential emotional ties that mean survival in a bleak landscape, be it Montana or our national landscape of ego-speak and fragmentation. To Richard Hugo, the experience of poverty, of need, is as valuable as harmful; he sees the experience of need, expressed in the making of human connections, as an emotion one cannot forget, cannot lose touch with, and still be called human. MICHAEL ALLEN, University of Indiana Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle. By Katie Lee. (Flagstaff, Arizona: North­ land Press, 1976. 254 pages, $12.50.) Katie Lee tries to do three things in this book: describe a mode of life she claims is disappearing, establish the provenience of certain Western songs, and narrate a mystery — the meaning, location, and present disposi­ tion of Old Dolores, a town prominent in the lyrics of a song she first heard in Tucson. The peculiarly difficult search for the town is the organizing and unifying principle intended to hold the book together, as the author concentrates her search upon Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, with excursions and side trips “from New York to L.A. and Maine to Miami.” In the course of a BBC television interview, J. R. R. Tolkien observed that nearly all successful narratives possess two elements: a quest and an object. Seldom have I seen a book so rich in promise and so flawed in the realization of it as this quest for the physical location and the psychological values and meaning of Old Dolores. From the title, a reader might conclude that the book is a history of the American cowboy, albeit a bit unorthodox. Indeed! The book is anecdotal, associative, irreverent, profane, in places inaccurate, sometimes hokey, and both ungrammatical and highfalutin. But it is also at times tender, evocative, appealing, and sensitive. As a history of the cowboy, it is trivial; as an account of a sensibility becoming aware of the changes that time and removal bring to the lives of towns and people, it is an accomplishment. Early in the book (p. 8) this startling assertion appears: “ ‘I’m a Rambler, I’m a Gambler’ ... is pure Gaelic in character; Gaelic, stemming from Moorish. . . .” The questions wanting answers are how anything that is pure Gaelic can be said to stem from anything else, Moorish or not, and how this alleged Moorish connection with the Gaelic tradition can be substantiated. Katie Lee visits many old Westerners in her search for information 176 Western American Literature about the song and its town. In what must be sincere attempts to make these people authentic, she too often makes them appear caricatures. The point here is akin to the advice given to writers of fiction: if you want it to be effective, use profanity sparingly so that it will have force. Or again the point is similar to Northrop Frye’s insistence that “To bring anything really to life in literature we can’t be lifelike: we have to be literaturelike. The same is true even of the use of language.” It becomes tedious to read reported speech (and for all I know these conversations may have been faithfully transcribed from a tape recorder, though I doubt it) and to hear the narrator’svoice giving forth trope after trope from chapter 1through 15; “you look as happy as a dead pig in the sunshine”; “you’re about as useless as fur on a snake”; “you don’t wear enough to wad a shotgun”; “rusty as a graveyard hinge”; “smooth as bear grass in a breeze.” Children are “house apes” or “rug rats.” These are all common as they are endearing, but repetition of the formula stultifies. Sometimes the author’s language is high flown: “The frivolous spring wind races through Horse Camp grotto. Sounds . . . punctuate its susurrus passing. . . .” (p. 75) This is the same narrator who tells us, “In the back right pocket of every pair of Buck’s jeans there...