The Old Colts by Glendon Swarthout (review)

Reviews 167 both marry and quit teaching—Summerfield to become a traveling salesman of textbooks, and the narrator to become a technical writer in the “south­ western” city where he went to college. The special relationship between the two characters is one concern of the book, and in the later stories, Summerfield becomes the narrator’s doppelganger, his spiritual shadow. Ferguson is often at his best when developing the relationship between his characters and the rural landscape. It is when both men leave the land­ scape, when they move toward maturity, that their problems begin. It is then that these men become marked by a great, overwhelming desire to be alone, to be severed from the community of mankind, to be in isolation from all forms of human intercourse. There is pain here. Something has gone wrong; in some way these men’s emotional lives are stunted. Ferguson’s art lies in defining this limitation in his characters. In their essential aloneness, they are grandchildren of Sherwood Anderson’scharacters in Winesburg, Ohio—people who become grotesque because they cannot escape the maze of their aloneness. In wandering the face of the West, in never finding a community or human contact which can nourish and sustain them, these men are a type of emotional orphan. That this figure should be a part of the contemporary West should not surprise us; it is to Ferguson’s credit that he has been able to identify him in our midst with such skill. RONALD L. JOHNSON Northern Michigan University The Old Colts. By Glendon Swarthout. (New York: Donald A. Fine, 1985. 239 pages, $15.95.) Did you know that William Barclay “Bat” Masterson (1853-1921) and Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp (1848-1929), famous Dodge City peace officers of the eighteen-seventies, met again in New York in 1916 and went on a spree that included sporting with Follies dollies, shooting it out with gangsters, and almost knocking over a bank? No? Well, neither did anyone else until Glendon Swarthout told all about it in an “Eastern-Western” which he based on a fourpage account of the doings— in Masterson’s own hand—that he says he got from a dying Walter Winchell, who got it from Damon Runyon, who got it from Bat’swidow. Now we learn that Earp forsook comfortable retirement in California to come east and look up Masterson, working then as a sportswriter; that Earp lost all his money (poker games, conniving chorus girls, Bat’s bor­ rowings) ; and that he and Bat, himself deep in debt to bookmakers, returned to old haunts in Kansas to recoup their losses by turning bank robbers. Unfortunately, Masterson’s original manuscript no longer survives, as Swarthout ’s cat “used it for natural purposes,” so what we are left with is this affec­ tionate, gently mocking, sometimes rollicking but sometimes hackneyed retell­ ing, a mix of authentic frontier lore and B-Westem movie clichés. In fact, with 168 Western American Literature its overage heroes involved in gunplay, chases, saucy amorous dalliance and sentimental partings, The Old Colts has the earmarks not so much of a novel as of a film scenario for the likes of Robert Mitchum, who began his career as a gunslinger in old Hopalong Cassidy movies, and Burt Lancaster, who in fact played Wyatt Earp in the 1957 Gunfight at the O. K. Corral. KENNETH W. SCOTT Long Island University Matty’s Heart. By C. J. Hribal. (St. Paul: New Rivers Press, 1985. 101 pages, $6.00.) This volume of short stories is published as part of the Minnesota Voices Project. The casual reader who did not know that the author was a young man might be justifiably confused by the point-of-view ventriloquism repre­ sented by the half-dozen slices of middle-American life: an older woman, the Matty of the title story and of the concluding story “Kitchens,” tells her own account of being held hostage for a time in a local restaurant;Luther, a farmer of similar age whose sons have turned out badly and whose wife is dead, tells his own story, before being portrayed again in “Kitchens” as Matty’s lover; an adolescent girl, a...