for old mostly white people who medicate with Michigan legal marihuana (no, really, that’s what we legalized in Michigan). I have found a new show that caps the peak of the Boomer nostalgia mountain. Wait. It’s animated. It has Elvis (portrayed by Matthew McConauhey). It touches on every media button of the 60s and you want to shake off the pain and bring on a new, appreciative state of mind. AGENT ELVIS, Here’s a link to a real review. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/agent-elvis-review-matthew-mcconaughey-netflix-1235354807/

PS You don’t have to be white, or even mostly white to watch this show. The part of you that enjoys this show is the part that is an old white or mostly white person living inside you.

Is this a review? Kinda. Go ahead and buy it. If you like Burke, you’ll like it. If you like Hackberry Holland, you’ll love it. If you think it is beneath your literary values to read a “cowboy story,” you’re just full of crap.

When I was in college back in the Pleistocene, the world was still enamored with Ernest Hemingway. He was the “man’s man” writer of the early 20th Century and that reputation lasted until near the end of my time teaching. Something happened along the way and men’s men, especially white men’s men, became passè in literature. That standard can be argued by a different literary generation than my own, BUT (you knew I’d say that, didn’t you?) a thing that critics raved about in the 30s and 40s, that catapulted Hemingway into his weird status as the epitome of “manly” is the same thing that catapulted him to a Nobel Prize for Literature. Like his character Hackberry Holland, Burke is a man/writer out of his own time. He handles the disconnect like a master.

It is my contention that much of the spirit of the Hemingway Code is captured (and its flaws demonstrated) in a parallel construction between a very good Hemingway book, The Sun Also Rises, 1926, and this very good Burke book, 2015.

A few housekeeping duties: In TSAR, the characters have just come through the War to End All Wars—the first mechanized war—and many millions are killed and maimed. In HOTRS, the main character is older and it is his son who has come through The Great War and experienced his own tragic injuries. This parallel is necessary for a master novelist to measure the moral effect on the human spirit. The lesson is taught through the rejection of religion. But both writers find that humans have a need for some moral equivalent to fill the void, aching in some ways to be filled by some spiritual meaning.

One of the clearest ways each novelist deals with the problem of spiritual loss is to convert man’s interaction with the natural world to “secular equivalents of religion.” Those actions can be taken alone or in communion with others, most often, other men. Consider this classic exchange between characters Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton. Note the language and the ritual-like behavior, especially in the treatment of the fish, a classic symbol of Christianity.

I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.

While I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day, so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of fems, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.

It was very hot on the dam, so I put my worm-can in the shade with the bag, and got a book out of the pack and settled down under the tree to read until Bill should come up for lunch.

…

“Get any?” he asked. He had his rod and his bag and his net all in one hand, and he was sweating. I hadn’t heard him come up, because of the noise from the dam.

“Six. What did you get?”

Bill sat down, opened up his bag, laid a big trout on the grass. He took out three more, each one a little bigger than the last, and laid them side by side in the shade from the tree. His face was sweaty and happy.

“How are yours?”

“Smaller.”

“Let’s see them.”

“They’re packed.”

“How big are they really?”

“They’re all about the size of your smallest.”

“You’re not holding out on me?”

“I wish I were.”

“Get them all on worms?”

“Yes.”

“You lazy bum!”

Bill put the trout in the bag and started for the river, swinging the open bag. He was wet from the waist down and I knew he must have been wading the stream.

I walked up the road and got out the two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. I spread the lunch on a newspaper, and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree. Bill came up drying his hands, his bag plump with ferns.

“Let’s see that bottle,” he said. He pulled the cork, and tipped up the bottle and drank. “Whew! That makes my eyes ache.”

“Let’s try it.”

The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.

“That’s not such filthy wine,” Bill said.

“The cold helps it,” I said.

We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.

“Chicken.”

“There’s hard-boiled eggs.”

“Find any salt?”

“First the egg,” said Bill. “Then the chicken. Even Bryan could see that.”

“He’s dead. I read it in the paper yesterday.”

“No. Not really?”

“Yes. Bryan’s dead.”

Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper. “I reverse the order. For Bryan’s sake. As a tribute to the Great Commoner. First the chicken; then the egg.”

“Wonder what day God created the chicken?”

“Oh,” said Bill, sucking the drumstick, “how should we know? We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.”

“Eat an egg.”

Bill gestured with the drumstick in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.

“Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?”

“After you, brother.”

Bill took a long drink.

“Utilize a little, brother,” he handed me the bottle. “Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers. Let us accept on faith and simply say—I want you to join with me in saying—What shall we say, brother?” He pointed the drumstick at me and went on. “Let me tell you. We will say, and I for one am proud to say—and I want you to say with me, on your knees, brother. Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors. Remember the woods were God’s first temples. Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that, Lady—that’s Mencken.’”

“Here,” I said. “Utilize a little of this.”

We uncorked the other bottle.

AMEN! If the same activities and conversation had been held between two medieval monks, very little might change. Hemingway and other men of his time, think Teddy Roosevelt for example, transmogrified the cathedral to the wilderness.

Along very similar lines, Consider this from Burke’s House of the Rising Sun. Burke tells us early in the story, Hackberry Holland has a certain moral void of which he is aware: Hackberry got put in jail twice on drunk and disorderly charges and sank into all the solipsistic pleasures of dipsomania, a state of moral insanity that allowed him to become a spectator rather than a participant in the deconstruction of his life. Also, if he wished, he could visit the path up Golgotha without ever leaving his home. Who needed nails and wooden crosses and the Roman flagella and the spittle of the crowd when an uncorked bottle of mescal or busthead whiskey was close by?

Cruder, perhaps, but appropriate to an Oklahoma cow wrangler.

In this long (over 400 pages) novel, Burke pauses at nearly the exact center of the story to insert this scene of his lone protagonist encountering his own moral deficit after he kills a man (justifiably, if you squint).

That night Hackberry put on his canvas coat and a flop hat and went down to the riverside with a wicker chair and a bait bucket and a cane pole strung with a fishing line and a wood bobber and a treble hook and a weight made from a miniè ball, and set up shop at the edge of the water. He baited the treble hook with a piece of liver and cast it close to an eddy behind a downed cottonwood tree where yellow catfish as thick as his upper arm hung in schools. But the real purpose of his visit to the riverside was not to catch fish. A few feet away, under a tangle of cable left over from a logging operation, was the hiding spot he had chosen for the artifact he now thought of as the cup. He had wrapped it and its wood case inside a rubber slicker, and then a tarp, and tied it with rope, and at night had buried it up the slope in a dry spot that never collected water.

He was not sure why he was drawn to this particular spot by the river on this particular night, but he knew his purpose did not have to do with fish. The truth was, he could not deal with the image of the burned man lying in the alley, his head resting in the Mexican woman’s lap, blood pumping from holes in his stomach.

Hackberry shut his eyes and opened them again, trying to restart his thought processes before they led him into the dark places that were a trap, never a solution. He looked over his shoulder at the tangle of cable and the burial spot he had planted divots of grass on. “I don’t know if you actually used that cup or not, but I need some he’p.”

He was surprised at his request. He had never been keen on prayer and in fact was not exactly sure what it consisted of. In his experience, religious moments tended to occur when people were about to fall off a cliff or get rope-dragged through a cactus patch.

“I was set up, but I doubt if anybody will believe that. Were it not for the sheriff in Bexar County, I’d probably be charged with manslaughter. The sheriff in Bexar County is not the type of man I want to be indebted to. I’m open to any suggestions you have, sir.”

There was no reply. The moon was full above the hills, its mountains and craters and ridges like an enormous bruise on its surface. Hackberry looked again at the burial spot. “Tell me what to do, sir. Tell that boy in the brothel I’m sorry. Maybe he was a friend of my son. The prewar army was a small group. Sir, what am I going to do? I feel absolutely lost.”

He felt his cane pole throb in his hand. His bobber had been pulled straight down in the eddy, the moisture squeezing from the tension in the line, the weight of the fish arching the pole to the point of breaking. He slipped his hands down the pole and grabbed the line and twisted it around his wrists and pulled the catfish clear of the eddy and the rotted cottonwood, through the reeds and onto the bank, it long, sleek, grayish-yellow sides and whiskers and spiked fins coating with sand.

He put his foot across the fish’s stomach and worked the treble hook free of its mouth, then picked it up by the tail, avoiding its spikes, and swung its head against a rock, slinging blood on the grass. He put the catfish in the bait bucket and squatted by the water’s edge and began washing the blood and fish slime from his hands. The water clouded and the blood disappeared inside it, but he could not get the smell of the fish and what it reminded him of off his hands.


I contend this scene is every bit as artful a construction as the one from Hemingway. And every bit as demonstrative of a man seeking out and practicing spiritual rituals in his participation in nature.

I will assert here that this scene is also very similar to the scene in Huckleberry (Hackberry) Finn, in which Huck has his conversation with God about the nature of friendship inside of religion and the law.

This novel was an old man author doing an excellent job of examining what a moral life is like to an old man character. At one point I took it to heart when someone admonished Hackberry Holland to choose in which Century he wanted to live. It does give an old man pause.

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