574 The American Century: Literature since 1945symbolically significant man who settles in a Ohio River town; In the Heart of the
Heart of the Country (1968) takes us, in turn, in a series of stories, into a landscape
of bleached lostness where objects assume a discreet pathos, buildings have strangely
vacant air about them – and characters are, as it were, absent presences. “Where
their consciousness has gone I can’t say,” observes the narrator of the title story.
“It’s not in the eyes.”
Among other writers whose work tended to cut through Western mythology
during the immediate postwar period were Vardis Fisher (1895–1968), whose
tetralogy published just before the war became Orphans in Gethsemane (1966);
Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909–1971), author of The Ox-Bow Incident (1940); and
Frederick Manfred (1912–1994), whose trilogy The Primitive (1949), The Brother
(1950), and The Giant (1951) concentrates on what he calls Siouxland. But those
who have most effectively wedded a grainier, unsentimental portrait of the actual
West to a sympathetic understanding of its potential as myth are Frank Waters
(1902–1995), Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) and – from a later generation – Larry
McMurtry (1936–). In The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942), Waters offers a harsh
account of the conflict between white and Pueblo Indian laws, as he tells the tale of
a young man experiencing an initiation into a nonwhite, nondualistic view of life:
a view that sees the land in terms of union and stewardship rather than possession
and conquest. “So little by little the richness and the wonder and the mystery of life
stole upon him.” The landscape acts upon character in this novel, until the two
merge. And other books by Waters explore similar rites of immersion and
illumination, among the underclass of a Mexican border town (The Yogi of Cockroach
Court (1948)) and a young woman living in New Mexico (The Woman at Otoni
Crossing (1966)). Stegner once said that he was seeking “a usable continuity between
past and present.” That search is perhaps most noticeable in Angle of Repose (1971),
in which the narrator, a retired historian, sets out to write his grandparents’ – and in
particular his grandmother’s – story, chronicling their days carving a life for
themselves in the West. The book subtly disposes of what the narrator calls “several
dubious assumptions about the early West,” pointing out, for instance, that “large
parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses.”
But it also fiercely interrogates a new West that has lost touch with its past. “I get
glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don’t
completely correspond,” says the narrator as he browses through his grandparents’
papers. “I’d like to live in their clothes for while.” He does so; and his act of research,
of remembering, becomes an act of recovery. He discovers, precisely, the usable
continuity between his present and his past, and the “angle of repose” where the lives
of his ancestors came to rest in him. McMurtry has moved between very different
modes. His work includes novels honoring the land and the earlier generations who
were its stewards (Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963)), books
satirizing small-town life or urban displacement (The Last Picture Show (1966),
Cadillac Jack (1982), Texasville (1987), When the Light Goes (2007)), and fiction that
casts a cold but not entirely unromantic eye on such traditional Western themes as
the trail drive (Lonesome Dove (1981)) and Billy the Kid (Anything for Billy (1988)).GGray_c05.indd 574ray_c 05 .indd 574 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM