Books, Arts & Manners: Midway in the Journey

Desert Light, by Chilton Williamson Jr. (St. Martin’s, 240 pp., $15.95)

In the classic stories of the American West, the region signifies not only place but also a psychological or moral condition. The West is the central symbol in a typology whose subject is individual freedom outside the social context: freedom as a joy and a danger. From Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West to the young Eastern lawyer Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the pilgrimage of the hero is a labor of self-rejuvenation and self-discovery, a distancing from the tame and artificial circumstances that may conceal the essential characteristics of the human condition, including the fact that all social order rests finally on someone’s readiness to enforce its sense of justice “with a pistol in his hand.” The action of these narratives is often the pacification by the hero—as the Deerslayer, the Virginian, or Shane— of some state of nature. His achievement is usually violent—both a cause for admiration and for distance, separating him from the neighbors whom he protects—“settlers” who do not wish to recognize honestly the costs of civilizing a wild place. But it is also a moment of personal fulfillment and transcendence—of a competence beyond formal, tepid boundaries of “law” that takes away tentativeness, cynicism, and the danger of spiritual paralysis.

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M. E. Bradford

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Desert Light, by Chilton Williamson Jr. (St. Martin’s, 240 pp., $15.95)

In the classic stories of the American West, the region signifies not only place but also a psychological or moral condition. The West is the central symbol in a typology whose subject is individual freedom outside the social context: freedom as a joy and a danger. From Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West to the young Eastern lawyer Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the pilgrimage of the hero is a labor of self-rejuvenation and self-discovery, a distancing from the tame and artificial circumstances that may conceal the essential characteristics of the human condition, including the fact that all social order rests finally on someone’s readiness to enforce its sense of justice “with a pistol in his hand.” The action of these narratives is often the pacification by the hero—as the Deerslayer, the Virginian, or Shane— of some state of nature. His achievement is usually violent—both a cause for admiration and for distance, separating him from the neighbors whom he protects—“settlers” who do not wish to recognize honestly the costs of civilizing a wild place. But it is also a moment of personal fulfillment and transcendence—of a competence beyond formal, tepid boundaries of “law” that takes away tentativeness, cynicism, and the danger of spiritual paralysis.