Michael Peverett: Oliver Strange, <em>Sudden Makes War</em> (1942)

Saturday, September 02, 2023

Oliver Strange, Sudden Makes War (1942)

"I'm lookin' for a man." (Ch I)

The novel's themes get sounded early, with this resonant opening. But what kind of man is young Dan Dover seeking? Not a target for vengeance, it immediately transpires. A father to replace the one who (unbeknownst to him) is about to be murdered? An elder brother (compare Ch IV)? A hired hand, a soldier? A male lover? (The western genre's concealed homoeroticism gleams momentarily e.g. in Yorky's breathless hero worship -- "You oughta see him stripped!" -- or the comedy of Blister and Slow waltzing round the bunkhouse.)

Sudden, taking up the opening chapter's coin challenge, immediately establishes a level of trust and understanding with Dan (and soon with Yorky, too). In both cases it's as a self-effacing enabler that he notionally presents himself, while his quiet authority -- as a human being, a man -- says something different.

What Dan is really looking for, Sudden perceives, is the man in himself: Dan, the promising rancher's son, must grow into the big man who not only replaces but supersedes his father. Likewise Yorky, the self-destructive and sickly "lunger" from the back streets of New York, is, as Dan says, "due to be some sort of a man, an' we'd like it to be a real one" (Ch XI).

Sudden Makes War is an old-fashioned statement of a theme that was once popular but has almost been driven out of serious literature (for all kinds of reasons): the value of an older and wiser friend in helping us to meet our potential.

. . . a vast rampart of grey-spired, arid-topped mountains, their lower slopes shrouded by dense growths of yellow and nut-pine, stretched along the horizon beneath the slowly sinking sun. (Ch II)

Oliver Strange never visited America, but he had done his homework. Yellow Pine, in the western states, means a large timber tree such as Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa); nut-pine means a "pinyon" with edible seeds. These are smaller trees; the commonest species is Pinus edulis. Both occur in the region where the book is set (Arizona, we'll eventually learn), but whether they grow in similar habitats, and how Sudden could distinguish them from forty miles away, does not appear. The detailed geography of the Sudden books is largely imaginary.

About midway between thirty and forty, heavily-built, his close-cropped fair hair, blue eyes, and somewhat square head gave him a Teutonic appearance. He was meticulously attired . . . (Ch IV).

It's a detail that's long forgotten by the time we learn that Chesney Garstone's real identity is "Big Fritz", New York forger and bankbuster (Ch XXV). Those two sentences are about the only explicit indication of the novel being written in the midst of WW2 and its anti-German sentiment. The occasional hints at Garstone's physical cowardice are perhaps meant to be pointed too, though they are contradicted by e.g. his decisive assault on Lake (Ch XIX). It isn't cowardice, it's just that he puts himself, and his own skin, first.

But the WW2 background goes deeper than that. The war surely accounts for both the novel's title and the urgency of its meditation on manhood and values, its gentleness, its emphasis on teaching, its revulsion from lawless violence but, inseparably, its rejection of pacifism too. For though this mellowest of the Sudden novels might more appropriately be called Sudden Makes Peace (as, at some level, we all grasp), the implication is clear that peace has to be made, it cannot simply be wished into existence.

"So long, son," Sudden said, as he swung into the saddle. "Keep outa trouble, but if that ain't possible, see it through." (Ch XXVI)

[It's the other chief villain, Bundy, who does the tough stuff, e.g. bushwacking Dave Dover and planting evidence to make it look like Zeb Trenton, or shooting Trenton when it's going to seem like Dover's men, or shooting Flint when it's going to seem like Sudden. Bundy is uncomplicated or undeveloped, depending how you look at it: he has no known social attachments or history; and his childishly sketchy aspiration is simply to gain a fortune for himself and light out for California. All in all, as Sudden villains go, Garstone and Bundy are remarkably pure illustrations of selfish greed, and of the inability of such men to work together without double-crossing each other, as are the book's lesser villains; the scene of finding and unpacking the cache in Ch XX is heavy with our certainty of what lies behind apparent concord; I think Garstone only escapes from it alive because the others aren't organized. Greed, simply greed, the mainspring of the world. There are no scenes in Sudden Makes War of sadistic cruelty or bestial lust, as in some of the other Sudden novels. Even Garstone's interest in the lovely Beth Trenton, it's apparent, is solely about securing Zeb's property to himself. Beyond greed, the only additional passion that we register is Garstone's particular loathing of Yorky. Perhaps a premonition of his eventual nemesis, or an unwelcome reminder of his own seamy roots...]

Lying on the soft, springy bed of pine-needles, Yorky gagged and choked as he drew in the odourful air. "Hell, this'll kill me," he gasped.
"No, cure yu," the puncher assured. "A dose o' this every day'll heal them lungs o' yores, but it's strong medicine, an' yu have to get accustomed ; it's the breath of the pines." (Ch V)

Sudden's successful treatment for Yorky's TB isn't such a fantasy as it may seem to modern readers who have learnt to think that nothing is effective but authorized drugs and vaccines. By the time that strictly medical treatments for tuberculosis (both curative and preventive) became available, the mortality rate from this terrible nineteenth-century killer had already reduced by 90-95%. (I mean in the west; in some other parts of the world it remains one of the most deadly diseases.) The reasons for this are still debated. Thomas McKeown argued that the prime cause was economic (better nutrition) and the secondary cause was better hygiene: TB, while an infectious bacterial disease, was in practice a social blight incurred by youths such as Yorky, this "spawn of a city sink" (Ch VI), the result of poverty, dirt and bad lifestyle. Also, the alleviating effects of high altitude on TB sufferers had long been recognized, hence the spread of high-altitude sanatoria.

"No, cure yu," the puncher assured. The inventive range of verbs used intransitively to annotate direct speech was evidently a contemporary stylistic of western and other genre novels. Many have become standard ("gasped", "grinned", "smiled", "urged", "jeered", "sneered", "advised", "retorted", "insisted"...), though my impression is that authors with literary aspirations continue to shy away from using them in this way. Some of Strange's other verb choices now look a bit odd. Apart from "assured", compare "Sudden misquoted" (below), or e.g. "...he apologized", "....he consoled", "....Bowdyr greeted", "....Sudden defended", ".....he debated" -- which all appear in the next few pages.

"Tryin' to figure me, Dan?" Sudden asked, with a dry smile, and when the quick flush told he had hit the mark, added, "Shucks! yu have a right to know." (Ch V)

Sudden Makes War is so rich in narrative material that it finds no room for some of the most familiar motifs of the other books in the series. One of those is the revelation that Jim Green is a wanted outlaw with an undeserved reputation as a killer, a fact that elsewhere is typically exploited by the villains. Here, though the narrator calls him Sudden, it's unclear if anyone else in the novel ever learns of this monicker, though you would suppose that Dan gets told about it now.

To give another example, the two warring outfits are the Circle Dot and the Wagon-wheel. Any reader who has followed the series is instantly alert for a future cattle-rustling scene in which it's explained how the Circle Dot brand can be easily converted into a Wagon-wheel brand by using a running iron. But having set up the storyline, Strange never uses it.

Or consider the locket that Dan finds in the abandoned tent (Ch XXIII). A hackneyed property in lost-heir plots ever since the earliest days of European literature, and so used by Strange himself in former novels, but here it has no such function, is just a wink at the reader, another reminder of the novel's overflowing wealth of narrative.

". . . Anyway, the story of the cache oozed out, an' there's been more than one try to find it, but Cloudy is big an' hard country." (Ch VIII)

The Cloudy country will be the setting for most of the second half of the book (its cave and cache distantly recalling Tom Sawyer). We hear of it first as the source of the Circle Dot's coveted water. Old Cloudy is apparently a principal mountain giving its name to the large wilderness around, a country that tenderfeet will inevitably get lost in. When Beth and Sudden escape from the cave, they find the country below them shrouded in morning mist (Ch XIX), which eventually breaks up: "That scurry 'pears to be on the move.." (Ch XXI). (Scurry: a flurry, more usually of rain or snow.)

"No, I'm serious. 'Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, may stop a hole to keep the rats away.' At present, I'm only stopping the holes these foolish people make in one another. . ." (Ch VIII)

Doc Malachi is slightly misquoting Hamlet V.1. Shakespeare is often a background presence in the Sudden novels, and nowhere more than in Sudden Makes War. Yorky, hidden in a tree, by chance overhears the villains plotting (Ch IX); it's the basis of many an Elizabethan plot. The episode of the thwarted train robbery (Chs IX-X) blithely borrows a storyline from 1 Henry IV. When the book enters the enchanted Cloudy country and especially when it atomises into a chaotic series of disappearances and chance encounters between different parties (Chs XIX-XXIV), we're in the ambit of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

And of course Dan and Beth Trenton find themselves in a Romeo and Juliet scenario, attacted across a warring divide. But this love story isn't tragic. It's an unwritten rule of the Sudden books that the good characters never die. The murder of Dan's father, early in the book, is one of the points when this basic rule comes closest to being contravened (another is the death of Mary Lesurge in Sudden -- Goldseeker). In this case the shock is lessened because the reader never meets Dave Dover while he's alive. From Dan's remarks we can also suppose that the elder Dover, for all his good qualities, had some of the harsh authoritarianism manifested by his opposite number, Zeb Trenton.

"What will a gun cost me, Jim?"
"Probably yore life," was the grim reply. (Ch IX)

In a book where much emphasis is placed on not just loosing off wildly, Sudden himself is notably chary with gun-play. I wondered, re-reading the book for the fortieth time, whether he actually went though the whole novel without taking any lives? Well, no: at the end both the principal villains die from Sudden's bullets (in highly extenuating circumstances). It happens once before that, too, but this time with an irony that Sudden recognizes: his chance shot at the cattle stampeders kills an outlaw, Benito, who formerly saved Sudden's life (in Sudden Rides Again); it's a little parable about how this novel is striving to move on from mere blind violence, and mostly succeeding, but not always.

Perhaps Sudden's most breath-taking feat in Sudden Makes War is his death-defying leap across a pitch-dark chasm with Beth Trenton in his arms (Ch XIX). It's an amazing thing, but maybe what's most amazing is that Sudden had his loaded guns with him --- we know this because he kills a rattlesnake in Ch XXI. There's no rational explanation for why he didn't simply sit tight and shoot at the pursuers in the cave, but his leap precipitates everything that follows: Beth's and Sudden's "death" and miraculous return to life; Beth's discovery of who mourns her "death", and who doesn't; Dan and Yorky's facing up to apparent tragedy and failure. Most important, it leads to the formative and idyllic morning in the wilderness that Beth Trenton spends with Sudden (Ch XXI); these two incomers who are, ultimately, the novel's bringers of peace (in Holstian phrase).

"Needs must, when the banker goes on the prod," Sudden misquoted. (Ch XIII)

The proverb Needs must, when the devil drives is recorded from c. 1500. It's sort of in Shakespeare (All's Well, I.3) but can't be regarded as a Shakespearean tag.

The taunting tone and the fear that he might be too late after all, roused the rancher to fury. "You damned whelp," he stormed. "If it weren't for my niece ----"

"Skittles!" Dan interposed. "She'll be in no danger 'less you all try to hide behind her. Set your dawgs on when you've a mind." (Ch XVII)

Oliver Strange drew vocabulary from everywhere. The American setting freed him up creatively (i.e. to break the rules of formal English without getting enmeshed in his own culture's stifling web of class markers and judgments), but he was quite untroubled about enriching his "American" dialogues with astute borrowings from British slang, often from the distant era of his youth. The exclamation Skittles! (meaning Rubbish! or Nonsense!) is recorded from 1905.

Yorky secured the gun, examined it anxiously, and then appealed to the others. "Ain't he the ring-tailed wonder o' th' world?" (Ch XXII)

"Ring-tailed wonder" is a proverbial expression, apparently American in origin and going back to at least 1900.

". . .Then, mebbe, when I'm free, yu an' me'll go take a look at the country somewhere." (Ch XXVI)

Oliver Strange, like his cowboy hero, kept his promises. Eight years later, when he was nearing eighty and just two years before his death, he produced a final novel, Sudden Plays a Hand, which does indeed feature the post-Range Robbers Sudden going for a supposed jaunt with Yorky. It's hard to judge when I only have the shortened Corgi version to hand, but Sudden Plays a Hand strikes me as pretty forgettable. The more important thing about this closing exchange is the quiet implication that with Sudden Makes War Strange had triumphantly completed the arc of Sudden's solitary quest (its ending had been written first), and he had also broken out of it; Sudden's attachments to the Circle Dot people were too deep, he couldn't simply leave them behind. So this was goodbye to the formula of a hero who rides uncomplicatedly onto the scene without prior relationships.