Okies by Gerald Haslam (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Okies. By Gerald Haslam. (New West Publications: Penngrove, California, 1973, reissued 1974, paperback, 113 pages, $2.95.) Gerald Haslam’s Okies captures the reader immediately. Scenes and characterization suggest a vision that is sympathetic and affirmative, realistic and unafraid. The conclusion, for this reader, is that Haslam’s short stories are both powerful and delightful. That’s an unusual combination. Usually, in so many contemporary films for example, the attempted combination is undercut by a betrayal of anyone willing to respond to the humanistic appeal: a willing suspension of disbelief is mocked with cynical violence. Not so with Haslam, who can make the humanistic overture to his readers, drive his stories on through scenes of selfishness and violence, and achieve a tough-minded realism which does not betray the reader. The subject is the second-generation Okie, those who fled the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930’s as children or who were born in California, many of them as another kind of “Okie,” the Chicano, the migrant farm laborer, the job-to-job laborer in the oil patch. Victims of prejudice, though in various stages of becoming middle-class themselves, these people struggle against the fearful elite, against one another, with their own capacities for love and hate. Typically, Haslam begins with an innocent situation which catches the reader, immediately, because of the remarkably concrete and effective style. Internal monologue, for example, is often used very skillfully to establish character and motivation while the plot continues to move along swiftly. Soon, in ways that are always intrinsic to the characters and their situation, the threat of violence or evil arises. The threat will be mythic in character but not in personality. Haslam does not go to books or to other cultures to find a latent power: the threat of evil or violence is always home-grown. No footnotes are needed, though connections with archetypes could be made by those who like to make them. “Rite of Passage” may be an exception. Admittedly, I once “lived” the 310 Western American Literature story myself, so did my son, and so have millions of others; but it seems a bit contrived to me, and I can only hope my reading of the story was not prejudiced by the academic title. “California Christmas” may track a bit too closely the Biblical story of the loaves and the fishes; “Smile” is an effective portrait of a wino whose internal monologue is an abuse of others for what are actually his own failings too, but it is a one-note story; “Sally Let Her Bangs Hang Down” and “Compañeros” hit as hard as any short stories I have read in a long, long time, but both, in the end, seem to hang fire, lacking a resolution strong enough to measure up to the stories them­ selves. Such reservations, however, are a comment on art and not on Haslam. Structure, I think, must be the most difficult of all the difficult things an artist must achieve to create great art. (Witness Hawthorne for example.) And such reservations — even if valid — are outweighed by excellence. This is, in my opinion, a truly fine group of short stories. “The Doll” and “Before Dishonor” are especially strong, and my personal favorites are “Wild Goose” and “Cowboys.” Although it ismost obvious in the latter two stories, Haslam often uses a joke as a powerful, complicated, and successful way of dramatizing the connection between the commonplace and the universal. In “Cowboys” for example, the most sophisticated of the stories in this selection, the reader is set up to expect a Hollywood shootout to be a practical joke in revenge for an earlier practical joke. As in “Wild Goose,” “The Doll,” and others, however, the final joke — without any tricks by Haslam — is real. And the result is that unusual combination mentioned earlier: both delight and power. MAX WESTBROOK, The University of Texas OSCEOLA: The Unconquered Indian. By Wm. and Ellen Hartley. (N.Y.: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973, 293 pp., $8.95.) In 1970, the Indian Claims Commission offered the Seminole Indian tribe $12,347,500 for lands taken by the LI.S. Government during the period known as...