The Fifth Wind by L. D. Clark (review)

Reviews 297 development as a man of the West is meant to define the moral significance of Lane’s fall from grace and power and the consequences of his overbearing individualism for those who live within his shadow. Zollinger struggles manfully to invest Lane with tragic significance; in the first hundred pages, for example, Lane arrives like a god in a billowing cloud of dust at high noon, receives several gunshot wounds and is bound in bandages like a “mummy” yet able to ride for days, and is called everything from “the stuff of legend” to an “Olympic paragon” and a “new-fallen Miltonic Lucifer, still proud, uncrushed.” In urging us to see “something infinitely larger than life” about Lane, Zollinger pushes too hard, his own ambition forcing him into exaggerated writing and a labyrinthine and eventually unconvincing set of plot machinations, particularly in the last sections of the novel. Before then, however, there is some fine action writing and good brief characterizations, particularly of Victorio and some of the minor figures of town and ranch. The novel is at its best in the political contest, in which the super­ human “man alone” is challenged to defend himself within the legal and moral structures of a Lilliputian world of those who are “happy to band together” in their fear and confusion. Once the story abandons this theme of the mutual dependence of ruler and ruled for the high dramatics of revenge and mother love, the problem of hero worship in a democracy is lost to the rather creaky Coriolanus machinery, which seems transposed to the West more for effect than because of any natural mythic fit. The para­ ble wears before the story ends, and no amount of Shakespearean allusion can keep the tragic apparatus afloat. PAUL SKENAZY University of California, Santa Cruz The Fifth Wind. By L. D. Clark. (Tucson, AZ: Blue Moon Press, 1981. 126 pages, $6.95.) About a year after Alaska Blair unexpectedly returns to his native environs of the Crossed Timbers, a section of country in East Texas along the Trinity River, he causes consternation. The occasion is an arbor revival. Each night in late August when farm work is done, the country people gather, in the words of Eustis Blair, the narrator, “to listen to the special preacher appeal to the brethren and the backsliders and all the lost who were willing to come and hear the word.” When the sermon is over the special preacher, as was the custom, asked was there anyone who wished to testify. 298 Western American Literature Alaska Blair, dressed in spotless white “down to his hatband and his shoes,” signifies that indeed he would. He tells the congregation that for years he has had some inkling, “just a wink of light here and yonder,” that he is to be an instrument of the Lord, that somehow God would use him as the guide who would lead them to the Miracle of the Holy Ghost: “If you come and work and pray with me, you’ll see the Great Day of the Holy Ghost come to pass.” Essentially this action commences the complications of The Fifth Wind by L. D. Clark. From this point on one can predict what will become of Alaska Blair, provided that one keep in mind the thrust of the Christ story, particularly as it is related in “Matthew.” In other words, and to simplify, Wind is a thesis story founded on the Commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:39) L. D. Clark is a Laurentian scholar, has been for years. I don’t wish to make too much of this, Clark’s regard for D. H. Lawrence, but some no doubt will quickly relate Wind to The Man Who Died. Actually Clark’s book is better than Lawrence’s just because one takes umbrage at Man, not because it is an arrogant statement but because it is an insipid, unrealized argument. Clark’s is neither. Clark’s message asserts that God is everywhere in everything; that we are constantly in the presence of God, therefore; that if we will heed our hearts, our senses, we can experience the Miracle of...