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5.0 out of 5 stars
Creating the tribal myth, May 27, 2010
"It was a force mounted and armed and accoutered without consistency, piebald and paint buffalo runners, blooded bays and chestnuts, Henrys and Sharps and Winchesters and Colts and double-barrelled scatterguns, a Derringer in a coat pocket, skinning knives and Bowie knives, hatchets, a Confederate cavalry sabre hung scabbarded on a saddlehorn, smoke-stained buckskins and bar-stained broadcloth, broken plug hats and glossy fur caps, loud checked shirts and patched linen, canvas dusters and wool capotes, parfleche-soled moccasins and high heeled riding boots. Every face bearing a different mark of vice or virtue, motive or resolve." - The punitive expedition ready to ride against American Indian horse thieves, in THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY
The Great American Myth, or Legend if you will. As I understand it having been born shortly after World War II, it's the American Western; stout-hearted pioneers and brave cavalry troopers battle marauding Indians on the endless plains, lonely lawmen out-draw desperadoes in the main streets of dusty settlements, and honest (and sometimes singing) cowboys - spurs a janglin' - drive herds across an unforgiving landscape to cow towns where gold-hearted saloon girls await. The Myth, first created by writers of cheap pulp fiction for the masses, was adapted to the Silver Screen by Tinseltown in the first half of the twentieth century and the legend became firmly established as God's Own Truth in the minds of an idolizing and fulfilled citizenry.
The Myth has been perceived as national in scope, but is, I think, more accurately appreciated as "tribal." The intrepid heroes of the sagas, especially those in the Moving Pictures, are virtually always WASPish. Indeed, that's but one aspect of the Myth that was spoofed in the film
Blazing Saddles. But, I digress.
THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY begins in the spring of 1873 as two young, Indian warriors steal the horses from a band of wolf hunters encamped on the plains of Montana Territory. Later, after having made the long walk to Fort Benton, the remounted wolfers ride out to recapture their horses and punish the thieves. Joining the vigilante group is "The Englishman's Boy", a young American wanderer until recently the gun-bearer for a visiting - and recently felled by disease - English dandy on a Wild Frontier hunting vacation.
Also in this novel by Guy Vanderhaege, it's 1923 Hollywood. Harry Vincent, a young title-writer laboring in the bowels of Best Chance Pictures, is summoned to the Hollywood Hills home of his studio's reclusive head, Damon Ira Chance. Harry is persuaded to track down an aging bit-player in the Western films of the day, Shorty McAdoo. Shorty is elusive, but is also rumored to be the last, genuine, Indian-fighting cowboy alive. Damon suspects Shorty has a story to tell, and he wants Vincent to get it.
The reader will surmise from early on that the Englishman's Boy and Shorty McAdoo are one and the same.
In alternating chapters, the reader follows both the outcome of the wolfers' punitive expedition and Harry's task to find Shorty and get his story, the latter evolving into Vincent's struggle to maintain his integrity and self-esteem in the face of Chance's film-making obsession.
THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY is also, incidentally as a sub-plot, a window on the Hollywood of the 1920s, in itself an American Myth that will not withstand close scrutiny untarnished. But that is perhaps best left to another account that has been, or has yet to be, written.
This brilliant novel serves to remind that the West could be, and certainly was, a capricious, cruel and violent place with nary a Hoppy, Roy, Gene, Paladin or Marshall Dillon within a day's riding distance. In the evolution of films within my lifetime, I first realized something was amiss with the Myth with the "Spaghetti Westerns", in which life and death were gritty affairs and the heroes not always clean-shaven, neatly-pressed and admirable. And the White Hats seemed in short supply. Then, with the screen adaptation of
Lonesome Dove, perhaps the greatest TV miniseries ever made, we saw indeed the random cruelty and brutality and fickle dangers to be found in rivers and forgotten arroyos and around isolated campfires in the Old West. Finally, in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning
Unforgiven, any romantic notions that we had left regarding the Great American Myth were perhaps shattered forever. One wonders why Westerns have become Hollywood's forgotten genre; nobody would now believe a resurgence of the mythology.
THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY describes a particular instance in the fueling of the Myth. Perhaps the book's most moving chapter is the last in which such tribal myth-making is depicted as being a cross-cultural phenomenon - as if that was ever in doubt.
THE ENGLISHMAN'S BOY is a wonderful, thought-provoking, eloquent read that itself would supply the script for an epic film.
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