The Peripatetic Reviewer

I WAS taken to see Buffalo Bill by my Uncle Renny. He was seventeen and he wore a derby, a high stiff collar whose rounded points came together concealing the knot of his striped cravat, and a Brooks suit that buttoned up close under his chin. Uncle Benny was very sensitise to appearances and to girls. He did not seem to share my anticipation of the Wild West Show, and I was too young to realize that my shrill presence was the cause of his embarrassment. I was eight.

Temporary bleachers had been erected enclosing the arena, and I remember that we climbed up to our seats at the very top. My legs were too short to reach the plank which formed the next row below us; my toes simply dangled in the menacing opening, but after one look down 1 had exes only for the portal through which Uncle Benny said Buffalo Bill would soon make his appearance. Then the cowboy band struck up, and he did. He was on a white horse, and in his immaculate buckskins and gleaming bools, his flowing hair which reached to his shoulders, white goatee, and beautiful Stetson, he was the most romantic Westerner I had ever seen, or ever shall. He rode slowly around the enclosure, and a cowboy went ahead tossing blue glass balls into the air which he casually shot to smithereens. The spectators rose, shouting and applauding; I piped up, “Yea, Buffalo Bill” — and swiftly disappeared into the chasm between the seats. I descended in a sitting position, missed the crossbars — which was lucky — and thumped into the soft earth with the solidest part of my anatomy. It took Uncle Benny a few seconds to discover my absence, and longer than that to thread his way down through the excited audience. “Stay where you are!” he shouted. I had no impulse to do otherwise. After he brushed me off, the unbuttoning — ‟to see if there was anything wrong” — must have mortified him far more than it did me. There seemed to be no good reason why we shouldn’t go back, so be produced our stubs again and we returned to our seats just in time to see the holdup of the Deadwood Coach.

Because Will Cody was a master of the art of selfglorification, it is very difficult to separate the facts about him from the fiction. In Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Oxford University Press, $6.9.5), Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright have presented a lively, affectionate, and very picturesque account of Buffalo Bill’s fantastic success and his grandiose, but sad, decline. From the boy’s youth, which is already encased in legend, a few facts emerge. Isaac Cody, his father, was an outspoken abolitionist who was knifed in a rally on the Kansas border; and at the age of eleven young Will, with his melting brown eyes, fine features, and blond curls, became the chief support of his widowed mother and his sisters. He was first employed, at forty a mooth, as messenger on the great wagon trains then opening the West; he learned the trails leading out of Fort Laramie, and as a crack horseman he carried the mail in the famous Pony Kxpress; he learned to scout from Kit Carson and Jim Bridger; and from Wild Bill Hickok he learned how to be swift and deadly with firearms — all this before he was seventeen.

Cody proved himself again and again as a daring, dependable scout in the Indian fighting, and bis killing of Yellow Hand with his famous cry “First scalp for Custer!” was probably his most celebrated exploit. But it was as a hunter that he first caught the imagination of the East. The railroad crews needed meat, and Cody, working on contract, supplied them with buffalo, 4280 killed by his own hand in seventeen months. The dudes wanted to hunt with him, and when they came, they found Buffalo Bill irresistibly charming and they carried him back with them to New York. That six weeks’ visit in 1872 projected Will Cody into a part he was to play for the rest of his life.

It is in the build-up of the great Show that the biographers provide their most authentic and enjoyable materials: tho corralling of the famous Indians, the starring of Annie Oakley, the command performance before Queen Victoria, the recordbreaking year of 1893 when in Chicago alone he played to more than six million — all this reaped a fortune which Buffalo Bill spent with both hands. His forty-thousand-acre ranch near North Platte, his lavishness abroad, his courtship of Katherine Clemmons, the English actress, his huge gifts to his sisters, his building of the Irma Hotel in Cody, his greenbacks for any beggar, were all part of the living legend. One gathers that he could not have been an easy husband to live with, and Louisa Cody, had she survived, might have helped to make this a less adulatory book. But why be critical? The old photographs and programs, the woodcuts, and even the Remingtons attest to this man’s glamour. Let him glitter!

In Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (1811— 1846) (McGraw-Hill, $7.00) Gordon N. Ray has carried to eloquent completion his affectionate study and research of more than a decade. This is the best biography of Thackeray that has yet been written: it is understanding and objective; it is appreciative and critical; it places him sensitively and naturally in his own surrounding, and judges him by nineteenth-century standards, not ours. The preparation for such a biography has been arduous. It began with a study of Thackeray in Paris; it was broadened during the Blitz by Professor Bay’s editing of the four volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, unpublished material entrusted to him by the family; and it was further amplified in 1952 by the publication of The Buried Life: A Study of the Relation Between Thackeray’s Fiction and His Personal History. Out of such assimilation and scholarship has grown this vital, full-length portrait.

In his aspiration and early struggles I find Thackeray singularly appealing. I like him for his size (he grew to be six loot three) and for his modesty; I like him for his gusto (he was devoted to painting and literature, to the theater and wine); I like him for his temptations (gambling was in his blood), for the May he had to confide in women, and for the generosity of his ideals. I come closer to him than I could ever come to Dickens, and much of this, I am sure, is Mr. Bay’s doing.

We shall all dwell on favorite passages in a biography as capacious as this. As an editor I have always been curious about the false starts, the blundering and groping which a writer of talent commits before he finds his true course. Thus I followed with special interest Thackeray s years at Cambridge, from which he was sent down for gambling; his brief flirtation with law; and his bachelor years in London where he made his first uncertain excursions into illustrating and journalism. Indeed he had squandered most of the tidy fortune inherited from his father when in 1836 he fell in love with Isabella Shawe. From this time forward he had to support himself by his pen.

Thackeray’s domestic life which began so happily on Great Coram Street was destined not to last. Isabella was an indifferent housekeeper and quite incapable of coping with her infant daughters who were born in quirk succession. Her mother was a troublemaker and before long the free-lance writer was seeking the sanctuary of his clubs. The more difficult things became with Isabella the more strenuous was the schedule he set himself, and not until too late did he realize that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown — from which, in fact, she never recovered, These chapters of his middle life— “A Year of Bain and Hope”; “Bachelor Life” (after Isabella has been sent to an institution); and “Free-lance” — show the disillusion, the testing, and the developing of a major novelist who could not be deterred. The subtitle of Professor Bay’s book, “The Lses of Adversity,” has been well chosen.

The final judgment on Thackeray’s work will be presumably given in a sequel. But by placing his writing in its historical setting Dr. Bay has very effectively reminded us of why Thackeray s accomplishment is out of fashion with modern critics. “For many years,” he writes, “the pattern novelist has been James Joyce, who repudiated his family, his country, and his religion in order to devote himself wholly to his art. Thackeray’s way was very different . . . he was content to work out his literary destiny within the limits imposed by the common life of his age, to share existence as it must be lived under the normal conditions of middleclass society.” The difference is worth pondering.

All along the New England coast are rocky teeth, tiny islands with no more vegetation than seaweed and their only inhabitants the gulls. One of these, north of the Isle of Shoals and to the east of Portsmouth, is the site of Kenneth Roberts’s new novel, Boon Island (Doubleday, $3.75). Here in December, 1710, an English merchant vessel bound for Portsmouth was smashed to bits in a matter of hours. The northeaster flung the captain and crew to sodden safety on the rocks, and here in stark misery they survived until the audacious rescue from the mainland. So much is history.

It seems to mo that Mr. Roberts has described the castaways’ cruel, bitterly cold struggle in the only way that the stay-at-home can take it in. He tells the story through the eyes of an Oxford undergraduate, a supercargo who records the ordeal with compassion: we see the self-discipline and restraint imposed by Captain Dean; we see the patience with which he controls his vexing, wrongheaded mate, Christian hangman, a man whose temper is only subdued by the common misery; we share in the painfully won protection of canvas and cave, and can even imagine how the survivors adjusted themselves to the cannibalism without which they would have perished. This novel with its bleak courage and fortitude reminds me of that, narrative by Nordhoff and Hall, the story of Captain Bligh’s famous trip in the open boat, Men Against the Sea.