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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen

1985; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1985.0015

1948-7142

Robert E. Morsberger,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Reviews 343 peoples, places, genres, schools, movements, colleges, awards, societies, maga­ zines, journals, newspapers, etc. The encyclopedic Hart has updated his extensive chronology and added to his treasure-house over two hundred biog­ raphies, more than a hundred summaries of literary works, and nearly six hundred revisions of earlier entries. The alphabetical arrangement, systematic patterns, and incisive style display the classical scholarly virtues of order and clarity. Among graduate students the Oxford Companion remains something of a vade mecum, at times even a deus ex biblion. I recall how I prepared for the “well-stocked-mind” part of the American literature section of my own doctoral examination by grazing in the pastures of the Third Edition (890 pages) : Abie’s Irish Rose to Zury: The Meanest .Man in Spring County. Is there a teacher of American literature who does not own or have ready access to some edition of this standard reference work? The Fifth Edition contains over 5,000 entries. A student of America’s literary taste, a Frank Norris scholar, and a long­ time member of the Western Literature Association, Professor Hart establishes in his indispensable volume a balanced representation of western American writers — major, minor, literary, and subliterary — all the way from John Ernst Steinbeck to John Beauchamp Jones. That, say, Enos Mills, C. L. Sonnichsen, John Graves, and Elmer Kelton do not appear in the Oxford Companion does not surprise us. The nonpresence, however, of Frank Waters, Jack Schaefer, Edward Abbey, and Larry McMurtry is a little puzzling. In spite of Professor Hart’s “fresh and thoroughgoing revision,” specialists now and again will stumble on fluff. The essayette on Wilbur Daniel Steele, for instance, gives the mistaken impression that That Girl from Memphis is not one of Steele’s western novels. Again, the entry on Western American Literature still has this journal published at Colorado State University. But only an insufferable pedant would find joy in counting the inevitable little imperfections of a literary companion so substantial and faithful. MARTIN BUCCO Colorado State University The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. By Ron Hansen. (New York: Knopf, 1983. 304 pages, $14.95.) Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979), a novel about the Dalton gang, was the best historical fiction at that time on western outlaws. With The Assassi­ nation of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hansen presents an even more substantial work. Despite lots of violence, presented as graphically as in a Sam Peckinpah film, Hansen’s outlaw novels are not mere shoot-em-up Westerns; instead, he combines a meticulous’reconstruction of the American past with a sense of historical irony. What made Desperadoes work so well was the perspective of Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor, looking back on the 344 Western American Literature last days of the frontier from the perspective of Hollywood in 1937. Jesse James deals with the ironies of fame. Though a cold-blooded killer, Jesse James appeared to many people even in his lifetime as a heroic figure, a gal­ lant outlaw whose theatrical exploits brought excitement to an otherwise drab era that Lewis Mumford has called the brown decades. So long as his victims were only banks and railroads (but he also robbed the sightseeing bus at Mammoth Cave), the public cheered Jesse on and relished the romanticizing of his crimes in dime novels. Politicians championed him, newspapers de­ fended him, and hundreds of mourners attended his funeral. Yet Hansen is at pains to de-romanticize Jesse James, giving us a complex character — a devoted father and husband who could shoot in the back mem­ bers of his own band that he feared might betray him, an outlaw who could be gallant and courteous but who also blew out the brains of an inoffensive bank teller whom he had already struck senseless, a man fond of quoting Scripture and doctoring himself with patent medicines, a killer who served for a time as choirmaster, a person compounded of dangerous and deadly unpredicta­ bilities. Jesse enjoyed his notoriety, and after his death, his mother capitalized on it by selling relics of the celebrated outlaw, much as the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald did. For an irony that...