Tragic Glory: L. D. Clark's Existential Vision

J. Douglas Canfield

 

Journal of the Southwest, vol. 40, #1, Spring 1998

 

If I am still of this earth, it is the earth as history and the earth as dust.—A Bright Tragic Thing (300)

 

L. D. Clark has written four novels and several short stories about the Cross Timbers country of Texas. His latest—and best—novel, A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas, is a fictionalized account of the Great Hanging in Gainesville, Texas, in 1862, when Union sympathizers were executed under the barest pretext of law in the early Confederacy. A great-grandson of one of the hanged, Nathaniel Miles Clark, L. D. Clark feels this history deeply; moreover, his grandfather wrote memoirs about the hanging of his father, which Clark has edited and published as Civil War Recollections of James Lemuel Clark.

 

The title of Clark’s Bright Tragic Thing comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, part of which serves as Clark’s epigraph:

Glory is that bright tragic thing

That for an instant

Means Dominion.

     The key to the meaning of Clark’s novel lies in the juxtaposition of glory with the tragic, a juxtaposition that yields a profound existentialist vision. That vision transcends Christianity, particularly of the evangelical kind, and focuses on the power of the individual to create his own meaning through words, stories, recollected history.

     Throughout his introduction to his grandfather’s Recollections, Clark uses the word "tragedy" to refer to the Great Hanging, as the aging Todd Blair does in the fictional account (12). That he uses the term with meaning beyond that of common parlance is evident from both extrinsic and intrinsic evidence. A veteran of World War II, Clark attended Columbia University on the GI Bill and earned both under-graduate and graduate degrees. In the mid-twentieth century tragedy was a hot topic, from neo­-Aristotelians especially at the University of Chicago to European existentialists. As he informs me in private conversation, Clark took a year-long course in Greek literature and engaged in extensive conversations about the nature of tragedy. Despite his Christian upbringing and the thoroughly Christian ambience of the Cross Timbers country, in his short story “The Wall” Clark writes of a young boy’s first encounter with family death, a story that concludes with the boy’s wondering if the preacher who supposedly had the gift of tongues really had spoken to God, would that have had any effect whatever on the wall? (Is This Naomi? 25). This wall is a metaphor for the inscrutability of death. Instead, the boy searches “the darkness behind his eyes, to know whether some word or other gift lay there that might carry him, when he opened his eyes, beyond the wall."  In other words, the boy seeks his own words, those of the incipient artist, to cope.

     From its opening scene in a smithy, Clark’s first novel, The Dove Tree, written while he was still a graduate student, infuses Greek imagery and allusion into the atmosphere of a Texas tragedy. The protagonist Haley Blair, as a college student has an affair with the wife of a professor, the beautiful and voluptuous Doris, who has been educated herself in the Greek classics. She shares her knowledge with her adolescent consort, who in turn sees her ‘incarnate in all the heroines and goddesses she talked about” (41). After the death of his wife Lissie, the middle-aged Haley, himself a property owner and therefore a member of the minor gentry, has an affair with a white-trash woman, Terry Boland, which he justifies in an imaginary sermon extolling pagan Greek gods and goddesses as opposed to the god of Judeo-Christians, who “had made a God out of the worst in themselves” (99). Haley’s vision is positively Nietzschean: ‘The Greeks were correct.... This is no world for weaklings”: gods and goddesses may interact, and if humans are heroic enough in their response, they may “become as one of them’ (100-1). Haley reconverts to Christianity and repents of his liaison with Terry, however, determining to punish her with neglect for seducing him. But the Greek “Fate” he has cavalierly speculated about earlier (200) comes back to haunt him.

     After Lissie’s death, Haley and his son Duncan move out of the Blair family home into another more modest—and less haunted with family spirits, Lissie’s being the latest. Since the execution of his grandfather Nathaniel in the Great Hanging and Nathaniel’s subsequent burial, there have been rumors about gold being buried on the Blair place, and many a speculator has dug looking for it in vain, Haley’s son Duncan decides to camp out at the old place and guard it with one of his father’s .22 rifles. While Haley and supposedly Duncan too are off at a revival meeting, where Haley cements his relationship with the respectable widow Flora Houston by witnessing with her publicly, Terry’s brothers decide to dig under the dove tree by the main house. Duncan fires a warning. Terry has inexplicably followed her brothers and after they run away charges Duncan, who without warning shoots her dead.

     Amon Lamb, the protagonist of Clark’s second novel (in terms of composition, not publication) A Charge of Angels, taunts an older, still fanatically Christian Haley with his father’s belief that “you put that boy up to shooting” Terry (32). Indeed, in the earlier novel Haley knows himself and is told by his brother Gilbert that even after Haley’s disarming him, Duncan still has a gun at the place. Haley speculates that Terry may have been coming to warn him of her brothers’ plans. But his speculations are self-serving. The reader suspects that the jilted Terry charged Haley’s old house, his wife’s old house—especially since he and Duncan and a cousin had torn down the shed of their trysts—to demand recognition. One thinks of Faulkner’s Charles Bon.  In a sense, like Charles, Terry gains the recognition she sought in her death at the hands of the son of the man who has turned his back on her because of class.

     So Haley is responsible for Terry’s death, even if he does not consciously murder her through a surrogate, as Amon suspects. Then, ignoring the tragic implications of her rush to death, Haley tries to triumph over her when he tears a piece of cloth off a rag hanging on the Bolands’ clothesline after the surviving brothers have pulled up stakes: the rag is from one of the dresses Terry wore during their affair, and Haley appropriates the strip, placing it in the same pocket where he had placed a strip of Lissie’s satin wedding gown that he removed, even before she was dead, to prepare for the death ritual of wrapping a lock of her hair in it. Thus he trivializes Terry’s protest, ignoring her as subject and objectifying her as just another woman he has plowed through.

     But the tragic consequences strike Haley despite his effort to deflect them, His son Duncan resists Haley’s attempt to appropriate and control his mind through religion. Duncan completes his journey to manhood when he argues with the preacher Brother Bob that he won’t blindly accept a doctrine imposed on him but instead must “feel” the rightness of it (315), the rightness of any ethic or metaphysic he adopts. Moreover, he believes the family house “made” him kill Terry (313), that spirits employed him in a “sacrifice” (314). He rationalizes these spirits as “all the wrongs” that had been committed on the Blair place—explicitly, the invasive digging for gold. But the “vengeance” of which he is the instrument, the attentive reader will infer, is his mother’s, Lissie’s, against the woman who has invaded her land, who has metaphorically at least defiled her bed, and who was charging her house, demanding recognition. Finally, Haley loses Duncan, who resists his preaching as well. As he has with Brother Bob, Duncan parts with Haley, telling him he does not understand the Bible and must figure out truth for himself.  Joining the Navy, Duncan lets Haley’s final, fanatical apologia slip out of his mind’s hands into the ocean: “[He saw the wad of paper smeared with a few words rising and falling through the wave tips.  He imagined them flattening and dissolving it, but he also imagined them brushing it along undamaged until it washed ashore at the limit of the waters” (360), Duncan’s final act is to smile—out of a Nietzschean gaiety of acceptance of his father's—and perhaps the world’s—absurdity, The sacrifice of Terry has allowed him to be born as the blacksmith of his own destiny.

     Told by a boy, another member of the extended Blair family, Clark’s third novel, The Fifth Wind, seems almost Texas tall tale, Alaska Blair, whose name connotes faraway places and visions, is a long-lost cousin who returns to Milcourt, the fictional center of Clark’s Cross Timbers. Alaska has had a vision of the Holy Ghost and comes back to found a new sect, one that eschews the traditional Christian god of crime and punishment:

“There was no such place as hell, Alaska said. Why think of God as laying down certain rules and pitching anybody in the fire that didn’t follow them? Would any human being with any kindness whatever in him do a thing like that: punish the worst man he could think of by roasting him forever? Such a God would have to be a monster who made his creatures only to satisfy his lust for revenge. There was no such God. He had just been imagined out of the worst human qualities and given unlimited power, The real God, Alaska said, lived in every motion of the universe, and not just in the sky or in a house or in a book. He was not to be addressed by any certain form of words called prayer … No! God was alive in us, just as all the veins and muscles of our bodies were alive. He was alive in every stirring and sound of nature around us—in wind, moon, cloud, bird and insect. Even the dead were alive in the vast body of God, We were creatures, Alaska said, with a divine gift for sharing in the eternal body of God. We could reach out into the other parts of creation, here and now, and touch and bring into our own being a little of all the life that God lived outside us.” (27)

     North Texas, with its multiple sects of conservative Christianity, is just not ready for such a message, Luckily for Alaska, when the Holy Ghost fails to descend to earth at his invocation, folks don’t castrate or kill him but just strip him, beat him, and humiliate him “with a great noise of shouting and laughing” (31). Allowed to remain in town, he carries on his successful law practice, his only talk of the Holy Ghost being “that every time right won out in the courtroom and wrong was put down, the day of the Holy Ghost drew that much closer” (40). The boy’s Pa (Gilbert Blair) “snorted and said one honest lawyer working by himself couldn’t win enough cases to make the world fit for the Holy Ghost if he stayed at it day and night for a thousand years.”

     The Fifth Wind moves on from folk humor, however, to a form of Southern tragic grotesquerie familiar to readers of Faulkner, Alaska decides that one signal case might draw down the era of the Holy Ghost. But the case he fixes on is that of a black man suspected of rape and lynched by burning—an immolation Alaska interprets as “the sacrifice that always has to come about to open up any new age... The shame of that black man’s death was meant to bring in true brotherhood between us all” (57).  As the boy explains it, the color line of American racism had been bent a bit in the Cross Timbers because of the split between Unionists and Confederates and the Great Hanging. He notes, however, that the “curse” his great-grandfather thought he was escaping in coming to Texas “overtook him, naturally, just as it did the whole country” (52). We know from The Dove Tree that his great-grandfather was Nathaniel Blair, and that the curse overtook him in the slavers’ hanging of opponents. An old Negro who had driven one of the mass execution’s corpse wagons reminds the community of that incident.  Then Alaska parodies biblical style in a broadside parable detailing another violent episode in the country’s history, one involving race. Clark’s metaphoric refrain is that Alaska has gone one step too far.

     He takes other outrageous steps, however. He lives with a black woman, whom he claims as his wife, though there were laws against miscegenation, first moving her into his law offices in the courthouse, then, after she is pregnant, moving her into a house down at The Creek to live just like folks.  The community comes to feel “that marriage and family and the pressure of race against race had been thrown completely out of kelter” (86). What is worse, word spreads that Alaska believes his “wife” will give birth to a great prophet who will usher in the domain of the Holy Ghost or who might even himself be the Holy Ghost incarnate. A man with a touch of Negroid comes to minister to this Holy Family, and Pa himself witnesses at their place a weird religious ceremony with touches of Vodov.

     The more progressive element in the community (the descendants of the Unionists?) experiences ambivalence: “the fear that Alaska might topple the world as we knew it, and the wonder at the same time that [Alaska] might by miracle produce a new world” (102). But the more conservative elements teeter on the edge of racist violence, Then Alaska, his wife, and their minister just disappear. The most racist group admits rousting them in the middle of the night to scare them out of town. We never know for certain what happens. We get instead a dream vision from the boy, Eston Blair.

     For this story is as much Eston’s as Alaska’s, From the beginning, Eston is fascinated with his visionary cousin—so absorbed that he fills in narrative gaps through his imagination:

“It was almost before I knew it that this sort of seeing began for me, and soon it was natural enough: this envisioning of Alaska when he was absent—as if for me too an experience had begun on the night of the first norther that never quite came to a close, has never yet come to a close, for that matter. For all these years later I still find myself inventing occurrences that may have taken place beyond those where I was present, many of them now far more complex than I was able to imagine as a child.” (41)

     Yet like Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Eston is possessed by history, by his story, which is as much of the boy’s maturation as it is of the man's tragic overstepping.

     Eston literally matures during the story from boy to pubescent male capable of responding to the fecund sexuality of Alaska’s wife, with the exotic Greek name Amarantha. Metaphorically he matures when he sets out to confront Alaska one last time, playing hookey from school.  Finding his way through the Ursury Thicket to Alaska’s place on The Creek, Eston seeks the source of Alaska’s vision, and Alaska responds to him in “a voice quiet and slow like one man speaking to another man in the presence of a great mystery, or a great danger, or both” (115).  Alaska has been waiting for a vision of the Holy Ghost since about Eston’s age and had only ever seen him once, the night his father died, when Alaska was far away in Canada: “It all commenced with what I took to be a dream” (116), a vision of his father on a hill from which he inferred his father’s death.  Alaska says he woke up, then pursued another vision to the top of a rise, a vision of flames and brightness: ‘[T]he most glorious instant my life would ever have to grant me.  And a Whisper came out of the air I couldn’t possibly have misheard. That Whisper said ‘Holy Ghost’ (117). But the last thing Alaska feels compelled to share with Eston concerns his lifelong wait for the Holy Ghost’s Second Coming: “I never did think it’d take this long” (119).

     Perhaps Alaska’s whole vision was a dream—elements of it seem too fantastic to be real, like his climbing naked out a travel court window and walking into the hills in the moonlight. Perhaps the vision is a way for the psyche to cope with what Clark calls in his short story the wall the mind encounters at the experience of death, especially that of a patriarch.

     Howbeit, at this point in the narrative Eston describes his own psyche as the conjunction of two different geographies: one that of the Cross Timbers with its literal topography and its (cursed) history; the other that of the land of vision Eston himself entered most notably one night as a young boy whose parents are gone and who experiences absolute-zero loneliness:

"Only there was nobody in the world but me ... To this day I’d never be able to set down in so many words how the light fell on that empty world: a light that could hardly have come from any sun—a twilight soft and suffocating, a twilight aching to my eyes, a twilight eating into my soul, a twilight that could only glimmer in pain on the unreal geography of a totally empty and lonely earth.” (121)

     It is no accident that Clark juxtaposes Eston’s with Alaska’s formative vision. Whereas Alaska’s had turned him into a New Age Christian fanatic, as it were, Eston’s had turned him into an existentialist author, whose juxtaposed geographies compel him to provide imaginative closure to Alaska’s history:

“It was another whole set of thoughts that brought the two geographies of my life as close together as they could ever lie in a rhythm to carry me on towards manhood. This set of thoughts came to a lynching and a burial— not in fact a killing and a grave, but what those might have been in a full-blown hastening vision on the edge of dream.... “[T]he hooded figures lay hold of them, put ropes around their necks, fling the ropes over high limbs, mount each victim on a stand, pay out enough rope, pull the stands away. The heads jerk and the bodies fall and go limp. The faces turn serene at once.  ...I have to dream up a place underground for them, far back in the Ursury Thicket out of the reach of all searchers.... Alaska and Amarantha and the child--now born, though what he looks like I can’t say--are underneath and within and around and above this place as they could never be on this side of the border of dream." (125).

     Eston’s vision is of lynching by the KKK, a vision from the geography of the Cross Timbers with its history of hangings and violence. But it is also from the geography of the dreamworld, similar to Alaska’s vision of an immanent God, which Eston turns into an existential possibility:

“Since the time of Alaska and Amarantha I can never look at my corner of the Cross Timbers without a mighty grief but also what never fails to lie at the core of that grief: the assurance that Alaska and Amarantha and the child cannot be endlessly absent or dead. Any day can bring them back.”

Eston’s Second Coming, however, will not be eschatological. It will be closer to the Greek notion of the return of Astraea, in this case of the social justice of racial brotherhood: as with Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin, a vision of the possibility of redemption from the South’s “curse.”

     The attentive reader cannot forget what Uncle Buck, the corpse-wagon driver, has said to temper Alaska’s optimism:

“Bad men'll always be killing, and ain’t no Holy Ghost going to stop them. I seen all that a many and a many a year ago. I seen forty-fifty men hung right down yonder by the creek on that old Hanging Elm .... And they was all white men, too, them that got hung and them as done the hanging.  Now if you can’t stop the same kind of folks from killing one another, how you going to stop different kinds from doing it?” (58)

It may be that the aging Eston will lament along with Alaska, “1 never did think it’d take this long.” But that’s the thing about an existential vision: it offers a way out of the pessimism of history into the prospect of Becoming.

     If these earlier works by Clark give us an insight into his version of the tragic, A Charge of Angels provides insight into his notion of glory. The title of this novel alludes to the Gospel story of the Devil’s temptation of Christ to hurl himself from the pinnacle of the temple, abandoning himself to the care of the angels and thus manifesting his divinity. The protagonist Amon Lamb jumps off from this text, as it were, to establish his own, existentialist philosophy of Becoming:

“But you know, sometimes I sort of wish [Jesus] had jumped], even if it was the Devil that told him to. His answer was, you’re not supposed to tempt God. Yet, to my way of thinking, you never would get nowhere if you didn’t tempt God. If you set around waiting for God to tell you a thing’s right before you start in to it, you’re liable to find yourself waiting till doomsday. It’s safe enough up there on the pinnacle if you never make a move. But you have to hold so still you might as well be dead.” (45)

So Amon jumps and goes into a free-fall that may end up in “sheer destruction,” (138). Indeed, Haley Blair, full-fledged (conservative) religious fanatic by the time of this novel, demands of his fellow citizens, as he tries to whip them up against Amon, “Why is so much tragedy connected with what he does?” (128). One Sunday listening to a sermon Amon remembers youthful visions, one of a “strange” light in a hollow that seemed to reveal things as if “at the very beginning or the very end of the world” (11), another of a light that shone on one of a pair of twin girls transforming her to “a nymph” out of Greek mythology (12). Possessed by “a feeling that something big and maybe terrible and maybe wonderful was about to happen” (18), Amon returns to that hollow and experiences a Presence: “The back of my neck, bared up to the sky, commenced to tingling like something or somebody was breathing on it’ (23). Pursuing this Presence later, he follows bees that seem to lead him to the site of an old Indian massacre, where he unearths a tomahawk, which he hides in some rocks, because Haley Blair is near, planning to return for it later.

     The discovery of this tomahawk does have the “wonderful" consequence of eventually bringing Amon into contact with the ancient spirits of the place, what Faulkner calls the Old People. The tomahawk under his arm as he prepares to reburry it, “[T]he flesh and blood of me changed for a second, from the touch of some holy thing, into all the flesh and blood that had ever lived” (102). Amon reinterprets all his previous visions as constituting “a foreground for what I’d never remembered before: men in animal skins seemed to be running along the banks of the creek hunting food with flintrock knives, and fighting with tomahawks like the one I had under my arm. The blood they had shed of men and beasts seemed so real I imagined the tomahawk warm and sticky under my arm.”

     The blood is a reminder that nature—that human history—is red in tooth and claw. Amon feels he has “accomplished some great thing,” and indeed, the reburial of the tomahawk marks the coming of rain that ends a drought he had felt his sacrilegious invasion of this site had caused.

     If the vision Amon has and the consequent rains are aspects of the “wonderful,” there have also been “terrible” consequences to Amon's tampering with the daemonic sacred. More serious than the drought is Amon’s prankish sharing of ghost stories with the gullible and superstitious Yas Blair. Because Yas can’t keep his mouth shut, soon the site is crawling with the curious, and a child falls into a poorly covered well. Rescuing him, Amon has another experience, in “the strangeness and terrifiedness of this place,” of its mysterious Presence, But all the community cares about is the dangerous recklessness Amon has unleashed.

     After this first serious consequence, Haley Blair warns Amon lest more ensue. Despite his retrieving the tomahawk and throwing it down into the well, another “tragedy,” to use Haley’s word, does ensue: in a horrendous thunderstorm, a sign to Amon of what he ‘had stirred up” (106).  Yas, hoping to catch sight of the ghost at the site, is swept away and drowns, In danger of lynching, Amon flees from Texas.  Strangely enough, though he is still in free-fall from his jump, having crossed the Red River, Amon says he “never had felt so free in my life” (130)—a freedom that still contains both but seems to be shifting from the terrible to the wonderful.

     “And so all that night I slept in the woods under a cool sky with the stars quivering and sending out sparks, and it was like the whole sky was rolling to carry me and the stars on a good long journey with some kind of wonder at the end of it” (130).

     The wonderful remains mixed up with the terrible, There are further consequences to Amon’s weird behavior.  Repulsed by his talk of ghosts and visions, his lover Ellen in effect sends him packing across the Red as well.  Amon pursues a substitute, one Dilly, who has fled marriage with a religious fanatic, Orville. Never able to consummate with Dilly because of his enduring memories of Ellen, Amon eventually sizes Dilly up as a two-timer who enjoys the wrong kind of men, leaves her to her no-count new husband Wert and answers Ellen’s plea for him to return home. But the jealous Orville chases the wrong lover to Texas, nearly kills Amon, and does shoot Haley before he is gunned down by the law. Haley’s words come back to the reader: “Why is so much tragedy connected with what he does?"  It seems to be the price of the “wonder.” “When it’s all said and done, how glad I am I tempted God by leaping” (187), Amon concludes. Why was it worth the risk? Because the Ellen he returns to is pregnant:

“The Ellen I knowed and loved and had held so many times in my arms wasn’t only hugging me back, she was pressing me into the round knot of the baby in her womb, like it couldn’t grow without her doing that,,.. I thought of a covered earth and the new life swelling underneath, of Ellen’s womb and of the ground storing up to raise all the green things in the spring.” (173-75)

     Two things have contributed to Amon’s capacity for appreciating and living in the wonderful: the jumping off and consigning himself to the angels not of the Christian heaven but of the pagan, daemonic earth; and the writing out of his story, finding the words that create the self he becomes. The fate of his tablets of writing “don’t concern me. My life concerns me. What started out to be the worst year of my life, so far, has come out to be the finest. Writing about it as I went helped me to make it the finest, But the writing’s turned into a record now, and the record don’t belong to me, Just my life belongs to me. If anybody else ever happens to pick up the record and read it, why it belongs to them.” (187)

     That is, it belongs to us—to appreciate the tenuousness of the wonderful inextricably entangled with the terrible to make up a life worth living.

     A Bright Tragic Thing relies on the same interpenetration, renamed glory and the tragic. The latter manifests itself in a number of ways. First, the inescapability of the “curse” of slavery (76), as Nathaniel Blair crosses the Red River only to discover plantations in North Texas: “a danger you could not escape, wherever you went” (24). Six or so years later, eighteen-year-old Todd Blair wishes “we’d never come to the Cross Timbers in the first place, especially when I recalled how Pap had looked on this part of the world: his notion of settling in a frontier place out of the way of secession and slavery troubles—and how I’d suspected from the start ... that those troubles could track you down in the Cross Timbers as well as the next place” (41-42). As he rides home after his father’s arrest as a Union sympathizer, Todd narrates:

“Comanche’s hooves beneath me, and Old Prince’s behind me, clopped along steady and sharp on the road, through this country I’d ridden over so many times within the peace of that sound, only to have it contending now with the rhythm of despair. And still I wished, and still I wondered, why Pap and the rest of us had ever delivered ourselves years ago to this disaster” (42).

     Another aspect of the tragic in the novel is closely related to this inescapability: inevitability. Todd remembers an abolitionist’s ‘declaring that no matter how rich and fine a plantation might appear, any social structure with slavery at the bottom of it lay under a curse, and like the house built on the sand that structure would fall, and great would be the fall of it” (76). Todd sees this inevitable conflict in terms of us and them—plantation owners and farmers, slavers and non-slavers, some, at least, as the previous quotation hints, with abolitionist sympathies. As he visits Colonel Oldham, the figurehead the slavers use to legitimate their cause and set up their mock jury and trial, to enlist his aid, Todd comes to a startling insight, one we would today call “postcolonial.” Watching the young women on Oldham’s plantation, Todd comments:

“Here we sat, a young man and an old man, enthralled by three young ladies on what passed for a fashionable stroll.  In me the grace and rhythm of those three figures withdrawing across the landscape reawakened the throb and the fever I’d undergone during their recent presence in the dining room, with a new thrilling of dread from what must have been evident as well to Colonel Oldham: that what we were truly contending about lay framed in the picture before us, in the setting and the manner of the girls in walking through it—a world sustained by the fine tall house behind us, with its fluted columns and its cluster of slave cabins in the rear, and spreading out from it around us and the girls the outbuildings and the tended fields... [E]verything lying before our eyes in the scene completed by the girls walking trough it was at stake in what was going on this moment in Milcourt, and beyond that in what was ripping the nation to pieces.” (75-76)

     What is at stake is an elitist, aristocratic way of life for a few built on the backs of masses of human cattle.

     Yet at an earlier moment Todd, waiting for other Unionists to gather into a force to liberate the prisoners, has another insight that militates against an us-and-them dichotomy:

“I saw peopling the darkness other faces collected around [Peg Madill’s]. None of them resembled Peg’s except in this small feature or that tint of complexion, or in nothing at all—beyond what was everything: the kinship of ancestry, of race; the profiles of men in my own isolated community gathered from the far-flowing human stream of those who had left the villages of Britain and landed on wilderness shores to migrate West, West, West. It was the face of my people, but suddenly the face worn by friend and foe alike—and that was the terror.... I was out to kill men of my own blood, and they were out to kill me” (52-53).

     The great tragedy of the Civil War is that it pitted like against like, brother against brother. For the Unionists, the Other was not radically Other. And ironically, the curse of slavery is not extraneous to the Blairs themselves. Even though they refused slaves as wedding presents (22), Nathaniel carries with him a wife who is herself the daughter of a plantation owner. Seeing Colonel Oldham’s “honest-to-God plantation mansion out here on the wild rim of Indian country” (66), Todd reflects:

“As I sat staring, an impulse flickered in me beyond surprise, some recognition of that house besides resemblance to others seen in the passing distance from an ox-wagon: a memory, a dream. Neither, and both. When it came clear to me grew uneasy: this house recalled one in Kentucky I’d never seen, only heard Ma describe, the house where she was born and spent her girlhood" (66).

     Why does this realization make him “uneasy”? Perhaps because of what Ereud called the unheimlich, that strange or foreign frightening thing that turns out to be heimlich, at home in us, the dark truth we have suppressed. Was the Other in the Civil War just a mirror image of the self.  As history repeats itself in “Delta Autumn,” Faulkner’s aging Uncle Ike discovers that you cannot really repudiate the past.

     Todd never consciously pursues this uneasiness. Instead, he focuses on the inevitability not in some psychological inscape but looming on the larger horizon: “It terrified me, this certainty that I was losing Pap to an immensity of time never to be crossed ....“ (37). Falling into a Romeo and Juliet love affair with the niece of the real leader of the Confederate oppressors, Colonel Ticknor, Todd laments, “Yet crying out and kicking against the barriers before us could not make them fall, As I knew. As I knew. . . The many obstacles that divided us—the what and the who--made defeat seem inevitable” (217). The “what” is secession and the struggle over an economic system based on fundamental immorality; the “who” is the class difference that separates the Blairs from the Ticknors— and ultimately Todd from the niece of his father’s murderer.  Like Northrop Frye, Todd associates this inevitability also with the seasons, with the tragic season of autumn:

“For here was this familiar yet mysterious delay of autumn, forcing itself on me as a premonition of death, With an uncontrolable quaking in my soul I knew that from now till Sunday [the day his father was supposed to be released by the jury] I’d be in terror that the first blight of winter would arrive before my father could be freed: decreeing the end of his life as well as the dying of the year—cold to wilt the leaves, to strip the limbs, and by fate dire and unfathomed to pluck my father out of his life.” (220)

     Todd’s analysis becomes positively metaphysical, moving beyond “fate dire and unfathomed” to entertain “the suspicion that all things including this [Romeo and Juliet] passion were ruled by a universal injustice all the more horrifying for being inevitable:

"A diabolic, indifferent urge for the perpetuation of generations, a passion that required the death of my father in the operation of its natural and merciless law” (220).

     Tragic inevitability reaches its climax when Colonel Oldham, traveling with Todd to Milcourt to ensure that the jury’s word will be kept and Nathaniel will be released, by random chance encounters bushwhackers up a little-known trail (hence it could not have been an ambush by Unionists, an interpretation that prevails both in fiction and history [Recollections 36-37], and is assassinated. As a result, the jury’s clemency is rescinded, a dozen Unionists are summarily executed, and the rest are given quasi-trials. Several more, among them Nathaniel, are executed the Sunday they were to be released. Clark is at his absolute best in making us feel the agony of this tragedy: in Todd’s last fracturing interview with his father, in his mother’s finally standing up out of stupefaction to watch.

     Yet even here, at the moment of the killing of the two benevolent patriarchs, the Unionist Nathaniel and the Confederate Colonel Oldham, the tragedy is not reduced to melodramatic Manichaeanism, for Todd’s apocalyptic dream reveals interimplication in not a Christian vision of final justice but an existentialist nightmare:

“I saw Colonel Oldham slumping in the saddle, smeared, flowing yet crusted with blood, while I tried frantically to hold him up, while he went on sinking, sinking, slipping through my arms.— But no? he was not acting this out as true dying, rather as a ghastly pretense, a game: mocking also, playing the corpse and laughing in scorn at my stricken seriousness. And then! Hearing the shots I’d fired, seeing a figure lurch and tumble from a horse—and that was also Colonel Oldham over there lurching and tumbling.—Besides, the Spencer was coming to pieces in my hands, and I couldn’t make it fit back together... Why, I too was at last infected with the mockery of the people passing, passing, all in play, all in play. And in horror every hope faded: any hope ... in this game of apocalypse” (250).

     The fragmenting of the Spencer repeating rifle marks Todd’s own oedipal implication in the absurdist end game of the killing of the Father.

     This vision is neither Todd’s nor Clark’s final version of things. There is intermixed in the novel glory that will not be eclipsed. Glory in the pulse of the land itself that the aging Todd refuses to leave: “a cadence, a rhythm, the rise and fall of life in this place, this land itself" (13). Glory in solitary oneness with the land: “All my life, off and on, I have found myself in some strange place where I sense, if only for a little while, that the land itself understands my solitary presence, and that a silence out of the earth responds to a silence in me” (65). Glory in his horse Comanche’s precision pursuit of a buffalo: ‘[H]ow glorious that shone in my heart” (143). Glory through the notch in the hills behind his home Todd plans to use for his and his family’s escape, an escape he can finally take only alone: “Ever since I’d first seen it that notch had told me of some great and wonderful place lying beyond it, a spot never to be reached except by passing through that notch—a passage waiting to be taken some day in assurance of a glowing future” (210). And above all, the glory of Jenny Ticknor. In an image that tempers the association of autumn with tragedy, Todd compares the color of Jenny’s hair to the “bronze light that streams unexpected some morning in the glory of autumn” (137). Their love making catapults Todd into another realm:

“When the culminating instant of panting release came, it was like a transformation into fire, like being wrapped in one flame with Jenny, a flame that burned us out of present existence and left us helpless and still and silent for a little space but in sure knowledge that soon we would rise up newborn, never to be the same again.” (216)

     This positive image of regeneration at least tempers Todd’s later depiction of it as “a diabolic, indifferent urge for the perpetuation of generations, a passion that required the death of my father in the operation of its natural and merciless law” (220). And leavening the tragedy is the Bildungsroman aspect typical of Clark’s novels. Despite his nightmarish subconscious fear that all is a game, despite his theory of inevitability, Todd is capable, unlike Eston Blair (who can just watch and imagine), Amon Lamb (who is more victim of circumstance), and even Duncan Blair (who does not know why he shoots Terry Boland, though he does rebel against father and patriarchal religion), of significant agency. Early on he calls out the mob leader, Harley Dexter. When Harley calls him a “boy” and suggests he’s out of his league in dealing with matters of “treason,” Todd retorts “I’ll make you think ‘treason’ And I’ll make you think ‘boy,’ you bug-eyed sonofabitch, if any harm comes to Pap” (33). But this is just youthful bravado. Much more significant is his attempt to appeal to Colonel Oldham, an appeal that might have succeeded if not for random chance. Todd saves Jenny Ticknor from bushwhackers and saves his mother and siblings from further persecution at the hands of the Confederates, Most significant is his standing up to Colonel Ticknor and Harley Dexter, the two leaders of his enemies.

     Though Todd contemplates assassinating Ticknor, he stands up to him more impressively by articulating in his teeth his father’s and the Unionists’ position: “It ain’t a crime, I reckon, to want to bring back the Union when they didn’t vote to leave it in the first place” (195). Ticknor Calhoun-like response—The Union is over and done with. Texas is now the biggest and strongest state in the Confederate States of America—and it always will be. Texans decided this question in a free and fair election. The ones that voted the other way will have to abide by that decision—is not unarguable. But Ticknor's fanaticism finally manifests itself in his rejection of Todd’s final appeal that, after all, he had saved Ticknor’s niece from rape and murder: “YOU DID YOUR DUTY AS A MAN. I MUST DO MY DUTY FOR MY COUNTRY. SEE THAT YOU DO THE SAME” (260). Whatever Ticknor knows in his heart of hearts, he has allowed himself to become a “madman ... gone insane for his cause.” He is an essentializer to the point of being a fascist.

     Instead of enlisting in the Confederate Army, as Ticknor had threateningly urged, however, Todd prepares to strike out for Union lines, He has no immediate revenge in mind. But when Harley Dexter gets the drop on him, his Spencer apparently unloaded, Todd rises to the occasion, tricks Harley into a gunfight and kills him with the remaining chambered round. Todd and Comanche escape north, join a Union cavalry detachment, and return years later victorious. Out of tragedy Todd has forged a meaningful existence, a self capable of mature, defining action.

     Out of the mixture of tragedy and glory, then—Todd calls the Great Hanging episode in his life “that enthralled existence in the ordeal of slaughter and glory” (296), comes possibility. Even at the moment of Pap’s hanging, Todd is moved by the juxtaposition of the father he can’t watch and the vision of his stolid mother behind to push to the verge of that possibility:

“That sight [of Ma] and the quivering of the giant limb with it tore my heart loose and swept it away through the terrible world holding us prisoner to where maybe that world came to the frontier of—what? If not of hope at least of a pause, an arrest, on the emptiness of the future.” (267)

     Such emptiness has no absolute meaning or determinacy of its own. Toward the end of the novel Todd lays over his experience narrative emplotments designed to fill the void, to make sense of his experience. Over the cave he hides in till his family is safe and the time is propitious for his escape north Todd lays this interpretation:

“Because this entering and leaving the cave seemed to mean that I was in a tomb myself just as Pap was—and the Lord had once been—I too biding time till the resurrection, and as though my own at least was at hand. This last, this ancient act beginning in despair and ending in victory, brought a glimmer of solace in contradiction to the fright of my dead father’s presence: as if having Pa and the Lord with me could bring me one day out of this cave to stay, and into a new life.” (271)

Clark teases us with this Christian rhetoric, as if we are headed for a reaffirmation of its metaphysics.  After having killed Harley, Todd throws his body in that cave from which he himself has emerged, and then rolls “a big rock over the mouth of the cave” (281). To the metaphor of resurrection Clark adds the Christian rhetoric of “remorse” (296), employing the traditional conceit of tomb/womb: “remorse entangled with the regret that I’d buried him so near my father’s grave, and also with a new and strange sense of fellowship created between us by the sharing of that cave: a tomb for him, for me a place of symbolic death and resurrection” (296). After the war, Todd overlays the rhetoric of sacrifice and expiation: 

"Being near that spot once more, with War gone from the world, in course of time I had another change of heart, coming to wonder why Id ever regretted killing him. Instead, I now felt entitled the consolation of that sacrifice performed by my own hand: and that the worst of the lynchers, in paying for my father’s blood with his own, had in a sense died for his cohorts as well, and even expiated the crime the whole town was guilty of for allowing the massacre to take place. Let that, I concluded at last, be sufficient to keep me at peace with the bones of my father. The pain of having Haney Dexter’s tomb on our land in sacrilegious proximity to my father’s gave also eased away. This seeming flaw in the nature of things could now at last be fitted without disruption into the new pattern of existence.” (300)

     Nevertheless, Todd’s final vision eschews Christian for existentialist metaphysics that combines both the psychoanalytic and the sociological, as well as both tragedy and glory. Employing, to borrow a phrase Clark uses anent Todd’s and Jenny’s vows, “those best of all words” to tell his story, his history (218), Todd comes to the realization that, “gleaming as visions of immortality,” the glorious moments of Todd’s life are finally inseparable from the dark ones, “the torment inseparable from the rapture” (300):

“I realize that I cannot long to recreate the marvel of that life without simultaneous consent to seeing my father subjected to a hideous death … My blood courses to a deeper conviction that I need not after all shut my eyes to the immolation of my father in order to value the brightest splendor of existence: that indeed life of this intensity cannot exist without acceptance of the immolation; and on the verge of delirium I discover in myself the ability to reconcile the contradiction of such acceptance. It may be that this endeavor comes to no more than pitting my will against the inexorable laws of circumstance, never to be actualized in time, yet in these rare moments I glimpse a silence outside time where I have the power to offer up myself in my father’s place. It comes to me as a great consolation, this ever-potential surrender of my own life, this willingness to submit to vicarious sacrifice. This and this alone, in brevity but in mightiness, inspires in me consent to a boundless universe where the father and the son must each be willing to yield up life in perpetual sacrifice to redeem the other.” (301)

     “It may be” that such an “endeavor” is meaningless, Todd admits, but he chooses a vision of a “boundless universe” where the acceptance of tragic “immolation” and the willingness to undergo it in a reciprocal oedipal sacrifice has the "potential” to redeem existence from meaninglessness precisely because humans—not some transcendent or even immanent god—choose to endow such words with meaning, with glory. Such “Dominion,” to return to the Dickinsonian epigraph, is tenuous indeed. But Todd’s “consent” to it is a Nietzschean gay/tragic affirmation: if he had to journey through it all over again, says the aging Todd, “Oh yes, I would go” (302). Todd’s affirmation is the logical culmination of Clark’s fiction about the Cross Timbers, a story that is his story, too, if not strictly history. If it is also about “the earth as dust” (300), then Clark has created an existential quintessence for us to wonder at.

 

J. DOUGLAS CANFLELD is Regents Professor, Department of English, University of Arizona

 

Works Cited

 

Clark, L. D.  A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas. El Paso, Tex.: Cinco Puntos Press, 1992.

 

A Charge of Angels. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1987.

 

The Dove Tree. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.

 

The Fifth Wind.  Tucson, Ariz.: Blue Moon, 1981.

 

ed. Civil War Recollections of James Lemuel Clark: Including Previously Unpublished Material on the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, in October 1862. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1984.

 

© 1998. Douglas Canfield