Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien (review)

Despite being a student of queer literature with an interest in writers of the American West, I had not encountered the work of Thomas Savage (1915–2003) until reading this new biography. O. Alan Weltzien acknowledges the critical neglect of Savage’s oeuvre and achievement of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980). While most of the thirteen novels published over forty-four years (1944–1988) received glowing reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, sales remained low and sporadic at best. Though at times numerous, Savage’s recognitions were far fewer than those given to other American West writers such as Montana contemporary A.B. Guthrie, Jr., author of The Big Sky.

The biographer’s declared goal is “an act of recovery” (12) that seeks “to reverse his sad tale of obscurity” (6) by assembling biographical and critical research to argue that Savage is purposely overlooked for two major reasons. First, he contends that Savage’s novels subvert white American western narratives of Manifest Destiny and self-congratulation. Second, he asserts that Savage’s identity as a gay writer, and his novels’ corresponding disruption of heteronormativity, “makes us squirm and revise common understandings about life in the rural West” (6-7), work many readers and scholars have opted not to pursue. Weltzien makes a compelling case for Savage’s long-overdue inclusion in American West literature.

Moving chronologically, the six chapters include a timeline of the novels and a copious list of individuals who inspired the fictional characters. The first two chapters, covering about twenty years each, provide useful context by addressing Savage’s rural Montana childhood and the emergence of his writing talent. Chapters 3-5 each discuss five to twelve “high tide” (121) and “zenith” (151) years and focus on writing process, public reception, and identity struggles. Fulfilling the (Anglowestern) narrative arc, the final chapter traces Savage’s last twenty-one years and his slide from “limelight [to] obscurity” (177). The personal and literary impacts of Savage’s relocations from Montana to New England and then to San Francisco are fascinating, and this well-researched book will inspire confidence for many readers, even as it raises significant questions for others.

While inviting and conversational overall, it sometimes jars the reader with jumps in register. For example, Weltzien informally describes “weird Uncle Bill Brenner, clearly the odd duck at the ranch,” before switching registers on the same page to rhapsodize academically how Savage “subliminally recognized an analogy between his hidden orchestra and his hidden queer self ” (46). These jumps might make visible the multiple, conflicting identities that we all, Savage included, inhabit. Yet, the jumps often occur around gender or sexuality, as in the very informal “blow job” (142) or the repeated line, “Savage doth protest too much” (132, 138), that echoes Hamlet and thus feminizes and minimizes Savage’s concerns. This critique of the feminine recurs in Weltzien’s dated description of a women’s clinic as the product of “alternative lifestylers” (191) or, more troublingly, when describing the murder of Savage’s daughter-in-law as the “chronically unfaithful, alcoholic” woman’s fault (177).

Weltzien’s biography convinces readers that Savage is an important American West writer, but it is far less convincing in its attempt, heavy-handed at times, to position Savage as a birth-to-death gay man whose sexuality completely shaped his life on the page, in the home, and beyond. Weltzien overlooks substantial queer scholarship and documented experience and posits Savage’s sexual orientation as permanent and fixed, even though Savage himself did not make such a claim. Compressing the complexity of Savage’s identity into a tidy label, Weltzien writes, “He never breathed a word about his sexuality, as far as I can determine, to his mother, Bess Carlson, or anyone else. Though he had flings with girls and later led a heterosexual life, he was gay” (41).

He repeats this reductive tendency throughout, working hard to...