Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry (review)

Reviews 181 both. In the poem “Spring” he recalls watching new life “swell” above and beside a community irrigation ditch; in “Picking Piñons” he receives “murmur [s]” of a “stable world” from a tree. Many of the pieces in Black Mesa Poems suggest a fine ’ine between dream and reality; in “What’s Real and What’s Not,” Baca regains contact with the elemental landscape during a two-day camping trip with an “ex-vet Nam grunt”: “My singleness glimmers bright, / and my first time from home in months / makes the land glow, the sky bluer, / and the asphalt road / winding to the foothills ignites each nerve into a sacred torch.” “Black Mesa,” th; penultimate poem of the book, ties together many of the collection’s prominent motifs, tracing the congruence between the “north­ ern most U-tip / of Chihuahua desert” and the poet’s mind. Baca’s poetry itself, like the land which inspires it, is life-sustaining, life-vivifying—it makes life seem “real.” Readng Black Mesa Poems is an experience at once stirring and soothing. SCOTT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University Buffalo Girls. By Larry McMurtry. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. 350 pages, $19.95.) “If life just don’t suit you,” Calamity Jane advises in this remarkable new novel by Larry McMurtry, “Maybe it’s best just to cough and fade out.” In something more than s literal sense, that’s precisely the message of this book: that the Wild West died not with a bang but a whimper, and that the end of the trail was more often accompanied by a mournful cosmic recollection of the past than with any celebration of former glories. Centered on the life of Martha (Calamity) Jane Canary, McMurtry assembles a cast whose lives are larger than themselves and whose deeds made the west wild and romantic in the world’simagination, an image stimulated by the pomp and spectacle of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and its inter­ national tour. In add tion to Calamity and Buffalo Bill, McMurtry’s cast includes the lovely frontier madam, Dora DuFran, famous cowboyTeddy Blue Abbot, “Texas Jack” Dmohundro, Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, and others, both real and fictional, who went west when it was still wild and stayed until it rounded itself up, fenced itself in, and then took the show on the road. Much more than in Lonesome Dove or Anything for Billy, McMurtry debunks myth and displays the legends of the west as they more realistically might have been. As usual, he draws his characters with broad strokes, allowing their human absurdity to emerge more clearly than their legendary exploits, but in his caricatures a deeper humanity emerges, one that captures and some­ times shocks with its frank acceptance of the uncommon. They are pictured as 182 Western American Literature people left out of their own time, caught up in their own memories, and inventors of their own destinies. Only occasionally does his spokesperson, Calamity, come forth to abuse their inflated notions of the west with brutal truth. “All this is silly,” she says, “The big adventure’s over. It’s over and that’s that.” Laced with the literary style and sense of irony that always marks McMurtry’sbest work, this newest offering far surpasses his most recent books in quality and poignancy. His acute sense of who these people were and what they were about comes flooding through each page, and in the sections given over to Calamity’s letters to her daughter, her self-portrait and confessions go to the heart of what the American west truly was. If readers have not yet turned to McMurtry or know him only by virtue of his early books or, perhaps, Lonesome Dove, they would be well served to take up this volume. Styled with tenderness and gentle humor, Buffalo Girls ispossibly the best thing McMurtry has published in twenty years. Once finished, it makes me want more, and at the same time, it makes me glad that it is in this form that the “final word” on the legends of the American west ispresented. CLAY REYNOLDS University of North Texas Hardscrub. By Lionel G. Garcia. (Houston...