Waltz Across Texas by Max Crawford (review)

Reviews 355 (“Gig”), by contrast, tries to show, by returning to the beginning of his memory, the private Hemingway. We learn about Hemingway’s writing and drinking habits, his high blood pressure, liver ailment, his occasional cruelty towards his wives and children. The author describes his close personal relationship with his father, Hemingway’s gift to him of $5000 of his Nobel prize money, his taking him to Jai Alai games in Havana, and on antelope hunts in Idaho. Gregory’s living relationship with his father was very emotional, and his present memories of him apparently still painful. Since writing this book, the author has moved to Fort Benton, Montana (New York Times, July 27, 1976), and in a recent interview describes Hemingway as a “loveable, vital, sensitive man.” Such emotion, depicted for the most part in clear, sharp prose, makes the book compelling reading. But, lacking new public “facts” about Hemingway and his times, the work may disappoint some scholars and teachers of Hemingway. The book is also perhaps too expensive for its size, and its author and editors have allowed it to be printed with some rather stunning errors. EUGENE WASHINGTON, Utah State University Waltz Across Texas. By Max Crawford. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1975. 393 pages, $8.95.) Max Crawford’s first novel begins and ends with questions. From the beginning we wonder, along with Sugar Campbell the narrator, why Sugar has been asked by an old friend, Son Cunningham, to return to his home­ town in Flavannah in West Texas. Readers may wonder why he doesn’t do the rational thing and either ask for a straight answer or quit. But people in this particular fictional world don’t do things rationally. The novel is filled with violence, death, and a host of grotesque characters whose motivations are either neurotically hidden or misrepresented or lost in an alcoholic haze. Waltz Across Texas is a shimmering field, a crisscross of implications leading toward and then away from the central event, the death of Tee Kitchens, and the nature of this event is a function of the various and fragmented ways in which it is perceived. The main thread of the story is gradually revealed in section I. Tee Kitchens, a West Texas rancher on the verge of financial ruin, has had his life insured for six and a half million dollars. Kitchens is a drunk and a probable psychotic who has (or perhaps has not) already killed two men for any of a number of possible reasons. Son Cunningham, a powerful wheeler-dealer in love with Kitchen’s beautiful wife Adrienne, has hired Sugar Campbell to kill Kitchens; or, according to another view, he has hired 356 Western American Literature Campbell to die in Kitchens’place. By the close of the novel, though, neither of these views seems correct. Tee Kitchens is killed at the end of section II, after more than two hundred pages of speculation, surmise, and suspicion as to who will kill him for what reasons. Cunningham admits the murder to Campbell (p. 224) and then later changes his story several times. In the official police version it becomes “two Mexicans” who did the deed. In section III, Sugar Campbell, now in love with Adrienne himself, tries to prove that Son is the killer. Cunningham, however, is too devious and ruthless for amateur detective work to touch him. What results, then, is a story of crime and reward in which the killergets both the girl and the money. As Cunningham says to Sugar near the close of the novel, “Crime and reward — ole Feodor would have shit a brick” (p. 387). This summary hardly does justice to the layered complexities of the waltz which often seems like an insane puppet show. In the size of its world and the free flowing quality of its movement, Waltz Across Texas is remi­ niscent of Edna Ferber’s Giant; in the gothic quality of the landscape and the bizarre extremes of human behavior, it may remind one more of Tom Horn’s The Shallow Grass. As in that novel, we see the terrible forlornness of most of the characters acting out old rituals in a strange...