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Confessions of Johnny Ringo by Geoff Aggeler

1988; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1988.0133

1948-7142

Robert E. Morsberger,

Music History and Culture

246 Western American Literature Lost in West Texas. By Jim W. Corder. (College Station, Texas: Texas A. &M. University Press, 1988. 116 pages, $14.95.) What’s lost in West Texas is not Jim Corder, but a way of life. Corder remembers the days of his childhood, remembers a people living in an inhos­ pitable place on the edge of a badlands called the Croton Breaks, remembers the difficulties of farming, of scraping by in a place of too little rainfall. Later he returns to find it much changed, most of the people gone, the buildings boarded up. He has written elegies, regretting the loss of a way of living in a place he admits was “never an Eden.” I liked many things about this book. I enjoyed the well-written essays, particularly those about cooking, restaurants, education, gardens. I enjoyed the ease with which the essays could be read, obviously the work of one who has taken the pains to please the reader. In fact I found no single essay about which I had any serious complaint. What was bothersome was that several essays seemed to be saying essentially the same thing. I became frustrated by being told too many times about the house on the edge of the Croton Breaks, too many times about the number of ears of corn the author ate at his grand­ mother’s. Ultimately the problem is not of writing but of book making. With the worthy motive of selecting previously written essays with a common theme, common subject matter, someone failed to realize that to do so was to risk being repetitious. No doubt essays on West Texas have an opportunity for greater sales than a book of essays by Jim Corder on more general subjects. But I would relish reading more essays by one so thoughtful and well-read, by one who writes so skillfully. DICK HEABERLIN Southwest Texas State University Confessions of Johnny Ringo. By Geoff Aggeler. (New York: Dutton, 1987. 310 pages, $18.95.) Though Johnny Ringo appears in most histories of the Southwest, very little is known about him. So vague ishis story that in the film world he features as the very different protagonists of both Stagecoach and The Gunfghter— and neither interpretation resembles Aggeler’s Ringo. Building upon the frag­ mentary records of the historical Ringo, Aggeler, a professor at the University of Utah, has constructed a plausible and tragic history for him. Though full of action, this novel is not just a shoot-em-up Western but a serious psychological study of how an idealistic young man who wanted to be a physician becomes an outlaw and seasoned killer. His real name is not Ringo but Ringgold. Rebelling against his boyhood exposure to the hellfire and damnation religion of his mother, whose minister also heads the local vigilantes and fulminates that the wages of sin are death, Reviews 247 Johnny becomes a skeptic looking for faith but unable to believe that there is hope for the sinner. Though he cannot accept the more forgiving faith of the local Catholic priest, he learns Greek and Latin from him and always carries the Greek and Roman classics in his saddlebags. Determined to become a healer, not a killer, Johnny enters college in Missouri, where he becomes friends with his cousins the Youngers and their cousins Frank and Jesse James. When Colonel Younger is bushwacked by a Yankee officer, Johnny, seeking revenge, is caught up in the tragedy of the Civil War, which “set the mark of Cain upon him.” He experiences the hysterical butchery of battle, and after the woman he loves is killed by Yankees, he takes part in the atrocities of Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas. After the war, he has a peaceful and fulfilling interlude for six years as a schoolteacher in Texas, enjoys a subdued romance with a respectable widow and is about to marry her when he gets involved in the bloody Mason County War and returns to the violence that he thinks is an irrepressible part of his nature. The book is a saga of loneliness. Changing his name to Ringo, Johnny becomes a lost soul, drowning his sorrows in booze...