Walter van Tilburg Clark's 1940 western, The Ox-bow Incident, was required reading in English classes at Erasmus Hall High School during the Eisenhower years. I assume that I studied and possibly even answered some assigned questions about the novel, but judging by the minute shards of information that my porous head has retained, I’d be hard put to swear yea or nay.
The Ox-bow Incident is still in print and apparently still part of many curricula, which is a surprise, considering its racist caricaturing and taboo language. For those who can overlook its offenses, it raises some peculiarly American questions about violence and personal responsibility. It's not a beautifully-crafted novel: it takes a long time to get going, leaves gaps in the continuity, and although just a couple of hundred pages long, is peopled by more characters than I could easily track. The principal defect is that the narrator, a young cowpoke named Art Croft, is never forced to choose between the good guys and the bad.
Despite these defects, The Ox-bow Incident proved to be well worth the re-reading, largely because of the story, which is inventive and which takes a number of surprising, unexpected turns. It's an anti-western, I now realize, in which readers wait in vain for a white-hatted hero to ride to the rescue and to wing the black-hat and bring the gang of bad guys to justice. Instead, thugs and bullies drag the weaklings down to their own level. Although I had already read my share of Zane Greys, I’m sure that I did not understand that Clark was toying with the conventions of the western genre. Nowadays, The Ox-bow Incident seems less kin to Riders of the Purple Sage than it is to Lonesome Dove.
Clark wrote when Hitler was menacing the world and he clearly aimed his shafts at temporizers and appeasers. I suspect that at Erasmus, my teachers understood The Ox-bow Incident in the context of the anti-communism that was the religion of the 1950s. I would not be at all surprised if the novel is now taught as anti-Jihadist, but it needn't be, because it's not so much anti-this or anti-that as it is about decency and the need to stand firm for law and justice. "Because most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than anything else," says the author, and because "real" men, so-called, believe that it's manly to take the law into their own hands, the cowboys and shopkeepers and drifters who cohere into a necktie party are defenseless against masculinist demagoguery.
While Clark never uses the word "honor," he implies that the cowardly-fearful would think it dishonorable to back off from their commitment to violence.
I think it was Spinoza who said that "honor" was a "slavish dependence on the opinion of others." His definition could serve as a an epigraph to this novel. Honor, as well as law, justice both domestic and international, masculinity, and violence, are all matters of contemporary debate, and as a consequence, The Ox-bow Incident hangs in there quite nicely.
I've now seen the 1943 William Wellman-Henry Fonda-Dana Andrews-Anthony Quinn film of The Ox-bow Incident. It's faithful, much too faithful to the book. I found it plodding and prosaic, inoffensive, but far too moralistic. It was just the merest tad more optimistic than the bleak novel. The political semi-allegory was barely there.
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