Evening star., 1947-05-04
Guthrie Given
HighProiisefor
Fine Writing

Tme WHIlng
THE BIG SKY
BY A. B. Guthrie, jr. fWillinn1
Sloane Associates; $780,
Reviewed by
CARTER BROOKE JONES.
When a writer fuses q time, q
region and a group Of people into
such coherent whole that you
can't imagine one element without
the others, the result is a picture
which you can. hang in your
memory. It is what we call litera-
ture. And Mr.. Guthrie has written
such novel.
I feel that THE Big Sky" deserves
to live, because it depicts seq
ment of American history in way
that lifts 1t above the topical in
terests, the folkways of its day. The
talk and customs of the period
d83o-1843 in the Vest are reclaimed
In faithful detail-the story would
have no reality If these settings
were neglected-but beyond them
is an elemental sweep OF country
and character that is timeless.
To call 'The Big Sky" historical
novel would be, perhaps uniten-
tionally, to belittle it. There have
been SO many in the category In
recent years, most Of them costume
plays, often based on careful re-
search, but usually without the
basic unity of theme that makes an
occasional novel a work of art.
A Real Achievement.
Mr.. Guthrie is q Lexington (Ky)
newspaperman, who was born in
Indiana and grew to maturity in
Montana. This is his first novel.
! venture to add that a lot of non
sense is written on the topic of first
novels. Mr.. Guthrie Is not a writer
Of promise" With "The Big Sky
he has ochieDed, If he never pub
fishes another line. This book is
as mature and unfaltering as If he
had been turning out novels for
20 years.
This is the story Of "the noun
tain men," as they were called, who
trapped furs in the Rockies before
the West was settled. They fought
the cruel country and loved it. They
fought Indians when they had to,
and sometimes learned to like them.
The mountain men discovered
passes that settlers afterward
trekked across; they understood the
language of the wind and the
streams, and they could read on
leaves and twigs where animals or
men had gone. They were burly
men, hard as the rocks about them,
little given to sentiment, but they
didn't know the meaning of fear,
and they could be generous, even
kind in their own peculiar way.
Proper Mountain Men,"
This is, more particularly, the
story of Boone Caudill, who as a
youth of II leaves his cabin home in
Kentucky after taking his last whal-
ing from Pap and knocking the old
man cold. Boone takes up with an
other footloose youth, Jim Deakins,
and together they join the French
crew of keelboat bound far up the
Missouri into the fabulous West of
buffaloes and beaver and Indians.
They are taken under the wing of
Dick Summers, a veteran mountain
man. He feels that he can make the
two boys into proper mountain
men," He does.
For years the three friends wan
der over the Rockies, taking the val
liable beaver, shooting their meat,
fighting SHOWS and floods and, on
occasion, Indians. Who, In the
trapped security of a city job,
puppet moving on the strings of a
complex social order, will not envy
those mountain men their freedom,
their good lusty life. for all their
hardship and hazard?
Fine Writing.
Caudill, finally, takes the Indian
girl he long has admired, and set
ties down with the Piegans, loving
their rlomadic life of hunting and
in the Montana coun-
try. He does go back to Kentucky.
There has been a tragic misunder-
standing, and he quits his squaw,
leaving Jim, his best friend, lying
dead at her feet. But you know he
won't stay. He doesn't.
There is almost unbearable sus-
pense in some of the dramatic epi-
sodes with which the book abounds.
But never once does one of those
men step out of character, become
that he Is not and
couldn't be. The story is written In
prose that sings. Yet the writing
never is self conscious, never ornate.
It flows with lyrical simplicity as
the whole panorama Of an era even
then beginning TO vanish Is seen
through the eyes and thoughts OF
plain, unlettered, indomitable men.
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