Fair Blows the Wind by Louis L’Amour
1979; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1979.0004
ISSN1948-7142
Autores ResumoReviews 365 upon novels like Martin Eden and The Mutiny of the Elsinore as accurate projections of London’s darker self. In other words, despite his sophistica tion, Mr. Sinclair succumbs to the Biographical Fallacy, confusing the literary masks with the man who created them. This error is due, in part, to Sinclair’s eagerness to present an original thesis; and he is compelled to make thesis fit subject even if it occasionally requires telling the truth slantingly. The thesis runs something like this: Jack London was a myth making genius possessed by demons (oedipal, narcissistic, perhaps homo sexual) which drove him to bully his way out of the gutter into the literary marketplace and onto the front page; he became a nightmare-ridden hypochondriac obsessed with the chronic dysfunctions of his aging body, victimized by the fatal delusion that he could cure himself through self administered drugs. It is not a pretty picture, but it should serve to remedy the misconceptions about Jack’s alleged suicide and the myth of London as superman. There is something lacking, however, in this portrait, and it is the most significant element in London’s complex persona: the infectious good nature and the sheer joy of living that in his better moments charmed everyone who knew him. Missing this, Mr. Sinclair also fails to account for the astonishing vitality that in less than twenty years created fifty books, more than a handful of which have become universal popular classics. EARLE LABOR, Centenary College of Louisiana Fair Blows the Wind. By Louis L’Amour. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978. 282 pages, $7.95.) Fair Blows the Wind is a kind of extended footnote intended to docu ment the European roots of the Chantry family whose American descend ants have appeared earlier in L’Amour westerns, particularly in Over on the Dry Side (1975). The novel is a companion of Sackett’s Land (1974) and Rivers West (1975), which tell of the earliest members of the other two families — the Sacketts and the Talons, one Welsh and the other French — whose adventures L’Amour has been chronicling in recent years. The Chantrys are Irish and Tatton Chantry is the first of the name, having adopted it from a mysterious stranger when his father, an Irish scholar, was killed by English raiders around 1580. In Fair Blows the Wind he tells his own story, which he begins in appropriate L’Amour fashion near the end, stranded temporarily on North Carolina’s outer banks in the mid-1590’s, and then recalling the events of his life over the past sixteen years. Those years include several lifetimes of adventure, much of it involv 366 Western American Literature ing the art of swordfighting. His ultimate hope, “that I might found a family and let our blood march on down the centuries to come,” is eventu ally realized when he marries a Spanish woman of Peruvian origins and rebuilds his father’s Irish home. Although the novel is full of action which L’Amour develops amid a good bit of sixteenth-century historical detail, it is marred both by excessive coincidence and by L’Amour’s obvious attempt to tap the historical fiction market. The novel may serve as a good example of what can happen to a writer of formula westerns when he tries to substitute a swordfighter for a cowboy and all of Europe for the American West. Stripped of the neomythic elements of character and landscape that L’Amour inherited from earlier writers of popular westerns, his storytelling art seems aimless — and would indeed be aimless if he could not count on his faithful readers to be curious about the first Chantry. As it is, L’Amour works hard, and in more pages than usual, to estab lish a remarkable pedigree for the Chantry family. Tatton Chantry is descended from an Irish chieftain, he reads Latin and converses in several languages, he publishes pamphlets and stories while a resident of London, he is befriended both by Spanish aristocrats and Henry of Navarre, and he earns a fortune from his entrepreneurial ventures in the shipping trade. All this and swordfighting too. WILLIAM A. BLOODWORTH, East Carolina...
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