Six Faces of Mexico ed. by Russell C. Ewing (review)

302 Western American Literature historical novel. I am reminded of Jack Schaefer’s statement, made in anger, that too often we who believe that the development of the West was one of the “great movements of human history” and who would “cherish high standards in regard to other types of writing” are nevertheless “willing to condone, even to welcome, western stories of minimum average compe­ tence.” Precisely because H-F’s books contain much that is excellent, along with much that is of minimal competence, they should be judged as un­ flinchingly as possible. At his worst, H-F can be purely commercial, liable to sensation-seeking, and imprisoned in the old formulas of the Western. At his best, he is capable of dramatic, but controlled, evocations of history, the men of history, and the land in which that history took place. A h n o ld E. N e e d h a m , Chico State College King of Spades. By Frederick Manfred. (New York: Trident Press, 1966. 304 pages, $5.95.) As the fifth and last of its author’s “Buckskin Man Tales,” which to­ gether form the nineteenth-century segment of his currently fourteen-volume “Siouxland” saga, King of Spades bears a number of separate, albeit ulti­ mately interrelated, burdens. What material contribution, for example, does it mate to the total Siouxland story? How effectively does it bridge the chronological gap between the adjacent Tales of the Buckskin Man series? How well does it stand by itself? What advances, if any, does it mark in Frederick Manfred’s skills as a writer? In short, is it “book enough” to carry forward this complex of responsibilities? It would seem to be that, and more. With regard to the questions raised, King of Spades furthers the Siouxland design by introducing into this microcosm the mythic implications of certain Old World preconceptions struggling for survival in the New. As a Buckskin Man Tale, it continues to explore, but at a more grandly “classical” level, the ideological conflicts of the principal characters in the two immediately preceding Tales, in the stated order in which it is intended that they be read, Lord Grizzly and Scarlet Plume; while it “phases out” of the Indian orientation of these earlier works, and into the building West of the white man. As a book alone, King of Spades represents an ambitious and largely successful storytelling attempt to elucidate native materials by means of a major literary analogue, the Oedipus legend, drawn from an alien but at the same time contributory culture. Its author’s craftsmanship has clearly ad­ vanced, revealing a quiet assimilation of wide and sustained reading in a narrative style that, with the passage of years, has grown deceptively “sim­ pler.” Manfred is at his best in this recital, sinewy in movement, granite- Reviews 303 hard when the occasion demands, but always with an eye for the flowers at the side of the trail. In the historical “program” of the Buckskin Man Tales, King of Spades, focussing on “Black Hills justice in 1876,” is the fourth volume, coming after Conquering Horse (1959), “Indian pre-white times in 1800;” Lord Grizzly (1954), “Mountain man times in 1823;” and Scarlet Plume (1964), “Sioux Indian uprising in 1862.” It is followed by Riders of Judgment (1957), ‘Cattleman times in 1892,” which invites re-reading in this new perspective: is Riders climax, or denouement? Memory would indicate the latter; but such an irregularly evolved sequence of books, first read when they appeared, could on a second reading, as “programmed,” provide sur­ prises. And yet there is no “sameness” in the Tales. Each is emphatically dis­ tinct from its fellows in plot, character, and the accessory concerns that it evokes. If there is a single theme linking them, apart from the natural en­ vironment common to all, it is the search for identity, ending in the discovery of the true self. But this is a discovery made with mounting tragedy as the various period settings of the Tales lead toward our own. King of Spades explicitly finds the root of this New World tragedy in the Old: in the Eng­ lish way of life that he has never...