38 The New York Reviewand promptly offended the president
of her school by publishing an article
in The Seattle Times criticizing teach-
ers’ low salaries. The editorial listed
many jobs requiring less training that
paid more, including waitressing and
bricklaying.
The official retaliated by telling her
she was “out of harmony” with the
school and calling her doctor (who once
consulted for the school) to inquire
about her health. Having previously
seen the physician about her difficult
periods, she began to fear gossip about
the state of her “genital organs” or
“sexual virtue.” Enraged, she browbeat
the president right back, shaming him
for “his nonsense” and emerging victo-
rious, with her job, if not her privacy,
intact.
On June 23, 1920, she sailed for
Japan and went on to China and Korea,
writing as a freelancer. There’s no ex-
planation of why or how her “dream” of
world travel evolved, and she ends her
account abruptly, on a wistful ellipsis,
betraying a surprisingly conventional
hope: “A secret wish hid in my heart; I
hoped I was going to find someone.. .”
There are few memoirs one wishes were
longer, but this is one. It was composed
at least in part in Soviet Russia (where
she also wrote about policies on contra-
ception for Sanger’s Birth Control Re-
view), and in her book, which actually
covers twenty- seven years, she reveals
little more about her travels and noth-
ing about her later journalism career.One distinction of My First Thirty
Years lies in Beasley’s devotion to ac-
curately recording a portrait of the
mother–daughter relationship in all its
emotional weathers, its dark frustra-
tions and disappointments, its seasons
of helpless love and nostalgia when
she and her sisters found a cozy ref-
uge with their remaining parent, lis-
tening to Lucy wax sentimental over
her southern childhood. Herself a vic-
tim, Lucy had nonetheless often tor-
mented her children, telling them they
were just like their father. In moments
of distress, she acted like an animal,
“hissing” and “rearing and pitching,”
invoking vermin to berate them: “toad
frogs” and fleas.
Losing her fear of Lucy as an adult,
Gertrude yearned to rescue her, vowing
that she would tell her mother’s story.
In what must have been one of their
last meetings, she squired Lucy around
Chicago, embarrassed by her friends’
astonishment at the older woman’s un-
educated talk, then ashamed of herself.
“How I ever dared to be critical of a
woman whom life had hurt and scarred
as it had hurt my mother was incom-
prehensible,” she writes. She marveled,
too, at how her sensitivity to Lucy had
shaped her own personality, observing
that there “was something inside me
that looked just like my mother.”
In a harsh irony, Beasley’s fate may
have been sealed by repeating her
mother’s gossip. Recalling Lucy’s
mockery of a Baptist pastor who ap-
peared in their down- at- heels Abilene
neighborhood “to preach to the wash-
erwomen and the prairie dogs,” Beas-
ley casually notes in her memoir that
Lucy suspected a friend’s mother, Mrs.
Paxton, of fooling around with the pas-
tor. Her friend’s sister, Mildred Paxton,
would marry a powerful lawyer, Dan
Moody Jr. By 1925, when Beasley’s
book came out, Moody had become theattorney general of Texas. Two years
later, Beasley found herself in a contre-
temps in London that saw her briefly
institutionalized there.
According to Bert Almon, a Texas
scholar who researched the suppression
of Beasley’s book for This Stubborn
Self: Texas Autobiographies (2002),
British customs seized proofs of her
book, which they characterized as
“grossly obscene”; she was arrested in
August 1927 after deliberately break-
ing the window of a hotel from which
she was being evicted. Released, she
sailed for New York, writing a para-
noid letter to the US State Department
while on the boat, claiming there was
a conspiracy to have her “executed.”
She then ended up in the asylum. By
that point, Moody was the governor of
Tex a s.
She died in 1955, at the age of sixty-
three, in obscurity. In 2018 The New
York Times published a belated obitu-
ary in its Overlooked No More series,
referring to Almon’s suggestion that
Moody may have been responsible
for an “unofficial interdiction” of her
book. In the 1940s Texas Rangers did
detain a bookseller for selling a copy
to the University of Texas library. Lucy
had begged her family never to reveal
their shameful sexual secrets, and the
book’s revelations apparently upended
all of their lives. The year it appeared,
Lucy moved from Abilene to Califor-
nia. It’s hard to believe the timing was
an accident.The West as hell on women and horses
emerges as a theme in Robin McLean’s
stunning debut novel, Pity the Beast.
The hero of our “garish and transient
frontier fiction,” as R.W. B. Lewis once
wrote, is the American Adam, a con-
ception expanding on Crèvecoeur’s
definition of the continent’s “new
man,” a breed born into a world with-
out aristocracy, forging the principles
of freedom. So what happens when
Eve takes the reins? Can she ever enjoy
such freedom? That’s a question posed
by this revisionist western. It opens
with a long first section culminating in
perhaps the most memorable gang rape
since the Sabine women.
Pity the Beast does not take place in
Beasley’s Texas but might as well. Thetime is an eternal present; the setting
is somewhere remote out on the range,
near the fictional Mormora Mountains.
It begins with a timeless scene, a man
excoriating his wife for being unfaith-
ful: “You fucked me over. You fuckin’
fucked me over.”
That’s Dan. They’re in the barn, and
Dan’s wife, Ginny, is tending to a preg-
nant mare whose water has just broken.
The mare is in trouble because she too
has had illicit sex (at the same time as
Ginny) with a Percheron, a breed of
heavy draft horse originally bred for
war. This Percheron, owned by Shaw,
a neighbor and Ginny’s lover, is so big
that the small mare, bought at a can-
nery auction, may be killed by the size
of the foal she’s about to deliver. The
birth is thus a bitter reminder of Gin-
ny’s infidelity, the hottest gossip in
town. The couple have been together
for twenty years; sentiment is running
heavily against the cheater.
Dan leads the horse up a hillside to
the shade of a lone oak, a spot over-
looking Shaw’s land and the Perche-
ron’s paddock. There, for the next sixty
pages, Dan and Ginny continue their
argument. The mare struggles to give
birth to a dead foal; by the time it has
left her body, she’s unable to stand. To-
gether, the couple carry the dead foal
to an offal pit and hurl it in.
At the oak, others arrive, bearing
liquor: Ginny’s venomous half- sister,
Ella, who sees herself as the good
woman; Ella’s husband, Saul; an array
of neighbors who’ve heard about the
mare’s plight; a guy with a pistol; a
mule skinner; a rodeo kid. Over the
course of the afternoon, they drunk-
enly try to bring the mare to her feet
by lifting her with ropes tied to the
oak; by evening, they’ve constructed a
bizarre wooden contraption to support
her with a sling.
The scene turns into a picnic, then a
party, then a melee. The sisters bicker;
Ginny smacks Ella. When the more
benign guests depart and the day’s
drinking takes effect, an angry knot of
Ginny- haters gathers around a bonfire,
embroidering elaborate images of her
sexual crimes in graphic language that
excites them: “Screwing... groping and
sucking... dripping and moaning.” Her
face, one man suggests, “is sin.” Egged
on by Ella, Dan drags Ginny behindthe oak, rapes her, beats her uncon-
scious, and the remaining men, includ-
ing Saul and the rodeo kid, take their
turns. Then they drag her body to the
pit, throw her in, and shovel lime on
top.
Ginny, however, is not dead. By
dawn she has regained consciousness
and manages to climb out by creating
a staircase of calf carcasses. Putting a
merciful bullet in the mare’s temple,
Ginny takes off into the mountains on
a cob, pursued by Ella, Saul, Dan, the
mule driver with his string of mules,
and a tracker. They’re intent on killing
her to cover up their crime; she’s intent
on wreaking vengeance on them. A
greenhorn deputy from New Jersey fol-
lows their trail, and so does the rodeo
kid.
It’s a slow- motion chase, the
stuff of westerns from time almost-
immemorial, or at least since The
Searchers (1956), but as it develops,
we take a sharp turn into experimental
metafiction, as the author begins self-
consciously parodying the genre itself.
Ginny, who we learn is the sixth in a
line of women named Virginia, may be
a reference to the first western novel,
Owen Wister’s 1902 The Virginian,
and to “virgin,” which Ginny is not.
In westerns, as in the Bible, women
require constant sexual classification
and, if warranted, elimination. These
searchers conclude that Ginny deserves
to die: “Adam would have dropped Eve
in a pit too.”
Things get murky. The narrative
is soon littered with Ella’s numbered
“Mule Thoughts,” written in a note-
book; the doomed deputy’s postcards
to his mother; and stage directions
revealing that the rodeo kid is a stock
figure: “Ain’t it time for another rip-
roaring episode of The Long Trail of
That There Kid?... Starring the kid as
THE KID.” There are science- fiction
passages, too, introducing geological
deep time, notes from a post–climate
crisis future when shallow seas have
again flooded parts of the West and bi-
ologists are attempting to reintroduce
a giant race of mules, beginning with
“Adam” and “Eve.”
The whole thing eventually devolves
into Quentin Tarantino–style violence,
but it’s those first hyperrealistic sixty
pages that stay with you, an opening so
arresting that it stands apart and unbal-
ances the rest of the novel. The rape in
Pity the Beast takes up the problem of
the whore, stretching back in an unbro-
ken line through Western life and liter-
ature. Beasley knew the power of such
epithets, lasting “far beyond child-
hood.” The issue is ubiquitous in the
genre and beyond. Cormac McCarthy’s
men are beset by “Goddamn whores.”
McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, probing
Hollywood sentimentality, ends on the
word, a whispered explanation for the
suicidal burning of the town saloon by
a man torn by lust and self- loathing:
“The woman. They say he missed that
whore.”
That’s a line harking back to John
Ford’s seventeenth-century revenge
tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the
Renaissance handbook on women’s
vile “hot itch” and “belly- sports.”
And farther, as McLean implies, to
the Bible, which is full of whores and
what they deserve. Pity the Beast, at its
best, suggests that women have always
been the half- dead horse men beat be-
cause they hate themselves for being
animals. QTURKEY VULTURES
Since the wind knocked down power lines
and lightning set a birch aflame
from within, three turkey vultures roost
along the topmost branches,
matted black feathers with small red heads,
unfortunate harbingers of death,
though really, almost comically alive—
hunched as though deciding
some minor point before slipping off
on the umbrellas of their wings to rid
the roads of evidence of violence not theirs.—Maya C. PopaFraser 36 38 .indd 38 12 / 15 / 21 5 : 42 PM