The Omnivorous Reader

To Boston and Back

A history of the psychedelic ’60s

By Stephen E. Smith

The stoner who said “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t really there” got it wrong. Most of us who lived through those times recall what went down, even if we did inhale. But if your memory is less than eidetic, Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is an engrossing aide-mémoire, a jumbled catchall of social upheavals and artistic convergences that occurred in Boston half a century ago.

Walsh focuses on two narrative threads, one societal and the other musical, that evolved in parallel. The first is the founding of Mel Lyman’s Fort Hill Community, variously identified as a commune, cult or family; and the other is Van Morrison’s mystic stream-of-consciousness song cycle Astral Weeks recorded while the Irish blues rocker was hiding out in Beantown. Both events, although unrelated, had a transmutative effect on a flower-power generation searching for “peace and love” and alternative lifestyles.

Walsh begins with the not-so-secret culture-shifting decision by Bob Dylan to electrify his backup band and crank out a high-decibel version of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Members of the audience still debate whether Dylan was greeted with widespread booing, but Walsh maintains the crowd was exiting in a funk when harmonica player Mel Lyman took the stage and intoned a 20-minute dirge-like rendition of “Rock of Ages.” Lyman was a member of Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, a Boston group that had achieved modest national success. By 1966, he’d emerged as the charismatic leader of a community that squatted in abandoned houses in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury.

Lyman had drifted from California to North Carolina (he learned to play banjo from Asheville’s Obray Ramsey) and settled in Boston, attracting a coterie of subservient followers. His Fort Hill Community was no run-of-the-mill hippie commune. Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, the stars of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point; Paul Williams, the publisher of Crawdaddy magazine; musician Jim Kweskin; Jessie Benton, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton; two children of the novelist Kay Boyle; and Owen DeLong, a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, were all active members of the Fort Hill family.

Lyman asserted complete control over community members and employed LSD trips, astrological readings and physical intimidation to maintain discipline. Members remodeled dilapidated dwellings and distributed the counterculture biweekly newspaper Avatar to support themselves. The cult’s sole purpose was to serve Mel Lyman and his creative enterprises, and in 1973, Frechette and two other members of the family attempted, ostensibly at Lyman’s bidding, to rob a Roxbury bank to fund a film project. One member was killed by police, and Frechette was sentenced to prison, where he died under suspicious circumstances. Walsh delves into the cult’s internal disputes, most of which concerned the content and publication of Avatar, and he details the less seemly workings of the Fort Hill Community, branches of which are still active in Boston, Los Angeles and Kansas. What became of Mel Lyman is a mystery. It was reported that he died in 1978, but no death certificate is known to exist.

The second thread of Walsh’s secret history traces singer-songwriter Van Morrison’s gradual rise to national prominence via his recording of Astral Weeks, a 1968 Warner Brothers release that went unnoticed at the time but has since achieved cult status. Morrison had first emerged on the music scene as the lead singer of the Belfast band Them, who charted with “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night.” Morrison had a 1967 solo hit with “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but he’d made a bad business decision, signing with Bang Records, a company with mob connections. Warner Brothers had to buy out Morrison’s contract, and the singer moved from New York to Boston with his girlfriend Janet Rigsbee (aka Janet Planet), where he began composing the songs for Astral Weeks and playing rock clubs, high school gyms, roller rinks and amusement parks across New England with a group of local musicians known collectively as the Van Morrison Controversy. 

To record Astral Weeks, Morrison traveled from Boston to New York and laid down the tracks backed by jazz pros who’d never heard of the 22-year-old singer-songwriter wailing away in the vocal booth. Morrison never spoke to the studio musicians, but guitarist Jay Berliner, drummer Connie Kay, vibraphonist Warren Smith and bassist Richard Davis (the name of the flutist is lost to history) provided the backing that helped bring Morrison’s lyrics to life. The songs are about childhood, death and rebirth, and in “Madame George,” “Cyprus Avenue,” “Astral Weeks,” “Slim Slow Slider,” “Sweet Thing” and “Beside You,” Morrison’s craggy voice rings with a coarse authenticity. Astral Weeks has survived and sweetened over the years, and Walsh’s thorough investigation of the recording process reveals the inner workings of the musical experience without diminishing the album’s subtle ability to mesmerize listeners.

A slew of pop culture luminaries make brief appearances in Walsh’s history: Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground; Peter Wolf, future front man of the J. Geils Band; bluesman Howlin’ Wolf; singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman; Tufts University Shakespeare scholar David Silver; LSD guru Timothy Leary; and others. Since video and audio recordings of most of the principals exist, readers can access images of the characters and hear the crazy ideas they espoused. Dick Cavett’s painfully uncommunicative interview with Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette can be viewed on YouTube, and the album Astral Weeks is streamable on internet devices, as are numerous recordings of Mel Lyman, including his Newport Folk Festival “Rock of Ages” performance and eerie album cuts featuring Lyman and the Fort Hill Community. Jim Kweskin’s America Co-Starring Mel Lyman and the Lyman Family is available on CD. Fifty years out, a replay of these historic recordings in conjunction with a reading of Walsh’s detailed history will remind readers that the Grateful Dead had it right all along: “What a long strange trip it’s been.”  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Triumphant Return

Frazier is back with a new historical novel that reads like poetry

By D.G. Martin

Charles Frazier’s blockbuster first novel, Cold Mountain, marked its 20th anniversary last year. It won the National Book Award in 1997 and became a popular and Academy Award-winning film starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renée Zellweger. From Cold Mountain and the books that followed, Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods, Frazier gained recognition as North Carolina’s most admired writer of literary fiction since Thomas Wolfe.

Frazier’s many fans celebrated the April release of his latest novel, Varina, based on the life of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ wife. But, because his most recent previous novel, Nightwoods, had come out in 2011, they wondered why he had made them wait so long. The simple answer: Frazier refuses to work fast. Every word of every chapter of every one of his four books was reviewed, rewritten, replaced and restored by him to make the final product just right. It’s that process that makes Varina a book so full of rich and lovely prose it could pass for poetry. And well worth the wait.

Because Varina is historical fiction, Frazier faced a challenge similar to the one Wiley Cash encountered in his recent book, The Last Ballad. Writing about a real person — textile union activist Ella May Wiggins in Cash’s case or Varina Davis in Frazier’s book — limits an author’s freedom to create and imagine without limits. The facts of history set firm and solid boundaries.

On the other hand, those real historical facts provide the framework within which Cash and Frazier, both, have succeeded in developing interesting and believable characters. Varina takes us back to the 1800s and the Civil War, a period it shares with Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons. The central character of the new book is Varina Howell Davis, until now an obscure Civil War footnote. Frazier refers to her as “V.”

He builds V’s story around an unusual fact. While living in Richmond as first lady of the Confederacy, she took in a young mixed race boy she called Jimmie. She raised him alongside her own children. At the end of the Civil War, Union troops took 6-year-old Jimmie away from V, and she never learned what happened to him.

Frazier begins his story 40 years later at a resort-spa-hotel-hospital in Saratoga Springs, New York, where V is residing. James Blake, a light-skinned, middle-aged African-American, has read about Jimmie. His memories are very dim, but he begins to think he might be that same Jimmie and sets out to visit V at Saratoga Springs.

When Blake calls on V at the hotel, she is suspicious, having been the victim of various con artists who attempted to exploit her fame. But something clicks. “She works at remembrance, looks harder at Blake’s broad forehead, brown skin, curling hair graying at the temples. She tries to cast back four decades to the war.”

Blake visits V for several Sundays, and Frazier builds his story on the growing friendship and the memories they share. During the course of Blake’s visits, V remembers her teenage years in Natchez, Mississippi; her courtship and marriage to Davis; life on his plantation while Davis is often away in military service or politics; living in Washington as wife of a U.S. senator and Cabinet official; being the first lady of the Confederacy; and her post-Civil War life when she becomes friends with the widow of Ulysses Grant and writes a column for a New York newspaper.

These are important subplots, but the book’s most compelling action develops in V’s flight from Richmond when it falls to Union troops at the end of the Civil War. In the book’s second chapter, V and Blake begin to recall their journey southward. As V prepares to leave Richmond on the train, Davis tells her she would be coming back soon because “General Lee would find a way.” But Lee does not find a way this time.

V’s family, including Jimmie, servants and Confederate officials, travel to Charlotte, where an angry mob confronts them at the rail station. Evading the mob there, they “traveled southwest down springtime Carolina roads, red mud and pale leaves on poplar trees only big as the tip of your little finger, a green haze at the tree line. They fled like a band of Gypsies — a ragged little caravan of saddle horses and wagons with hay and horse feed and a sort of kitchen wagon and another for baggage. Two leftover battlefield ambulances for those not a-saddle. The band comprised a white woman, a black woman, five children, and a dwindling supply of white men — which V called Noah’s animals, because as soon as they realized the war was truly lost, they began departing two by two.”

Their goal is escape to Florida and then Havana.

Supplies have shrunk and their money has become worthless. Rumors circulate that their caravan has a hoard of gold from the Confederate treasury and that there will be a big reward for their capture.

Frazier writes, “In delusion, bounty hunters surely rode hard behind faces, dark in the shadows of deep hat brims, daylight striking nothing but jawbones and chin grizzle, dirty necks, and once-white shirt collars banded with extrusions of their own amber grease.”

Like Inman’s trek toward home in Cold Mountain, V and her companions confront adventure and terror at almost every stop.

In Georgia, low on food and soaking wet, the group finds refuge in a seemingly deserted plantation house. As they settle in, two or three families of formerly enslaved people appear, accompanied by the son of their former owner, Elgin, a “white boy, who grew less beard than the fuzz on a mullein leaf.”

Elgin sasses and threatens two former Confederate naval cadets, Bristol and Ryland, who are accompanying V’s group. He blames them for losing the war.

Ryland responds in kind, “You’ve not ever worn a uniform or killed anybody, and you’re not going to start now. Have you even had your first drink of liquor?”

Ryland and Bristol laugh when the boy reaches into his pants and pulls out a Derringer pistol and points it at Ryland.

“And then Elgin twitched a finger, almost a nervous impulse, and an awful instant of time later, Ryland was gone for good.”

Frazier writes that Ryland had been transformed in a matter of seconds “to being a dead pile of meat and bones and gristle without a spark. Three or four swings of the pendulum and he was all gone.”

Instantly Bristol guns down Elgin. Before moving on, V’s group and the former slaves bury Elgin and Ryland, two more unnecessary casualties in a war that simply would not end.

With V’s group back on the road, we know their attempt to escape is doomed to failure. But Frazier’s dazzling descriptions give us hope, hope that is quickly dashed when Federal troops capture V and take Jimmie away from her.

Readers who loved Frazier’s luscious language and compelling characters in his earlier books will agree that Varina was worth the long wait.

But what are they to make of V, her husband, and the Confederate heroes who are bit players in the new book?

Perhaps Frazier leaves a clue with the final words, as James Blake remembers what V says to him on one of their visits at Saratoga Springs.

“When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.”  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 11 a.m. and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Endless Love

When all the time in the world isn’t enough

By Stephen E. Smith

My review copy of Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time fell open to an insert from Variety magazine announcing that the “story selection and rights have been acquired by SunnyMarch and Studiocanal” and that the film adaptation of the novel will star Benedict Cumberbatch.

Review copies always arrive with baggage — blurbs, author interviews, questionable testimonials, all of which I ignore. But it’s difficult to overlook a printed warning, tucked between the title page and cover, stating that the novel is soon to be a major motion picture. Before I’ve read the first word, I assume I’m being pitched a puffed-up film treatment, or worse yet, a story intended as fodder for the movie industry. A novel worth reading stands on its own.

Haig is a British author with an impressive track record. He’s written umpteen novels for adults and children, and his memoir Reasons to Stay Alive was on the best-sellers list for 46 weeks. So his latest offering certainly deserves a critical read, Cumberbatch notwithstanding. But like a film treatment that leaves the heart and soul of the story to be fleshed out by the filmmaker, this yarn about a 400-year-old man who could live to be 1,000 never quite comes together as a rewarding work of fiction.

Tom Hazard, the narrator/protagonist, is living the uneventful life of a history teacher in present-day London, but his attitude toward humankind has been shaded by the trauma of witnessing his mother, a peasant woman accused of being a witch for raising a child (Tom) who hasn’t aged appropriately, executed by drowning in the 1600s. Tom is one of a small group of secretive humans who age at such a leisurely pace that they appear immortal to ordinary beings. They’re called Albatrosses, Albas for short, because the bird of that name is rumored to live a long life. Regular folks, those of us who usually expire before the age of 100, are called Mayflies. So what we have is a protagonist granted a long, disease-free life and a chance to observe the world with all its faults and favors who instead spends his time ruminating on the disadvantages of an existence that offers almost endless opportunity for pleasure. Which is the novel’s primary conceptual fault. Sure, Tom’s mother suffered an unfortunate end, and there’s the certainty of losing friends and loved ones who aren’t blessed with Tom’s affliction, and it’s likely Albas would be of interest to scientists studying longevity, but the blessings of a long and healthy life far outweigh these impediments. If fate offered us the chance to be an Alba, we’d probably rejoice.

Despite this obvious incongruity, the novel’s concept should allow the author to present the reader with complex and unfamiliar perspectives, and Tom’s longevity should have blessed him with insights into the mysteries of life that he can share with the reader. But none of this happens, although there is the occasional hackneyed rambling about the past and its relationship to the present: “There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was — is — a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.” That’s as philosophical as Tom gets.

“The first rule is that you don’t fall in love,” Tom is told by a fellow Alba, introducing an intended unifying subplot that centers on Tom’s emotional attachment to a woman in the present. Thus we have a contemporary love story, albeit a slight one. And there’s a manipulative antagonist, Hendrich, the head guy with The Albatross Society, whose purpose is to ensure that Albas remain a mystery to Mayflies. The narrative alternates scenes set in the present with chapters that explicate Tom’s backstory. In his former existence, he loved a woman, Rose, who died of plague, and he has a daughter, Marion, also an Alba, who has disappeared and is the object of a half-hearted search that stretches into the novel’s melodramatic conclusion. But none of these characters is adequately realized, and they function merely as plot devices or foils.

During his passage through time, Tom meets Shakespeare, Captain Cook, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and others, but these historical characters appear to no particular purpose and only serve to tease the reader with subplots that never quite materialize. Tom is hired by Shakespeare to play lute at the Globe Theatre and finds himself in a minor dustup that does nothing to advance the plot, and he discusses The Great Gatsby and the fleeting nature of happiness with Fitzgerald: “‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband [Scott]. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment forever’” — a simplistic reading of Scott and Zelda’s story that will strike Fitzgerald aficionados as clichéd.

How to Stop Time has received positive reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Kirkus, People and other media, but potential readers will have to part with hard-earned bucks for the book and, more importantly, they’d have to spend hours reading 330 pages that they’ll likely find less than satisfying. They’d be wiser to save their money for a theater ticket and popcorn. With Benedict Cumberbatch in the starring role, the movie might be worth the price of admission — and their valuable time.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Mysteries of the Swamp

A supernatural risk for John Hart

By D.G. Martin

John Hart, who grew up in Salisbury, is the author of five New York Times best-sellers, The King of Lies (2006), Down River (2007), The Last Child (2009), Iron House (2011) and Redemption Road (2016).

Both The King of Lies and Down River won Edgar Awards, making Hart the only author to win this prestigious award for consecutive novels. He has a bag full of other honors, including the Barry Award, the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Award for Fiction, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, the Southern Book Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature.

Hart declares his favorite of all these successes is the The Last Child. So it should come as no surprise that his latest, The Hush, is a sequel to that book.

Readers of The Last Child met Johnny Merriman as a 13-year-old, followed his search for his missing sister and his traumatic childhood, and came to know his troubled friend Jack. In The Hush, as Hart explained to me recently, Johnny “is living alone in the wilds of this swampy area called the Hush, which is an abbreviation for Hush Arbor, an area of 6,000 acres of rough, mostly swampland. Johnny is the owner. It is the remnant of a 40,000-acre tract that his family owned in the 1800s.

“He is withdrawn from society and lives in the swamp, by himself. His only connection to humanity really is his buddy Jack, from The Last Child. Jack is now a young attorney in town in his first week in practice when the book opens. It’s what he’s always wanted to do, to take control of his tumultuous life and get that kind of logic and reason, wrap his hands around that and live by those standards.

“But it becomes very difficult for him because the more time he spends with Johnny in the Hush, the more he begins to fear that things are not as they should be. There are mysterious things afoot in the swamp, terrifying things, dangerous things that Johnny is unwilling to talk about.

“Jack pushes, Johnny is recalcitrant, so part of the tension in the story is what grows between these two best friends as Johnny clearly is guarding some sort of secret that terrifies his best friend, and he flat out refuses to discuss it. That’s a big part of the book, what’s going on in the Hush.”

Hart introduces existence of the supernatural powers in the Hush gently. After a terrible fall from a rocky cliff on the property, Johnny is cut, bruised and bloody. Back in town for a quick visit, Johnny allows his stepfather, Clyde, to bind up these serious wounds, and then hurries to leave and go back to the Hush.

Clyde says, “You want to go, I know. I can see that, too. It’s always Hush Arbor, always the land. Just tell me one thing before you leave. Help me understand. Why do you love it so much?”

Hart writes, “He meant the silence and the swamp, the lonely hills and endless trees. On the surface it was a simple question, but Johnny’s past had branded him in a way few could ignore: the things he’d believed and leaned upon, the way he’d searched so long for his sister. If Johnny spoke now, of magic, they’d think him confused or insane or trapped, somehow, in the delusions of a difficult past. Without living it, no one could grasp the truth of Hush Arbor. Johnny wouldn’t want them to if they could.”

But some part of that magic is revealed to Jack when he visits Johnny in the Hush a few days later. Although Clyde had described Johnny’s horrible wounds, they were not apparent to Jack. Johnny “was shirtless and still and flawless. There wasn’t a mark on him.”

The reader who might have expected the usual John Hart thriller is on alert. Magic and the supernatural are going to play a big role in this saga.

Unraveling and understanding the source and the reasons for this magical power on the land provide the spine on which Hart builds this book.

But as the book begins, Johnny faces another serious challenge, a non-magical one. His title to his land is being challenged by a member of an African-American family who lived on the land for many years and whose claim is based on a deed from 1853. Johnny’s legal claim is sound, but he used all his money to pay prior legal fees. Now, although he owns thousands of acres of land, cash-wise he is broke. So he wants his friend, the brand-new attorney Jack, to represent him.

He tries to persuade Jack to fight his legal battles. But Jack’s law firm forbids him from taking on Johnny as a client. Instead, the firm hopes to represent a wealthy out-of-town money manager and hunter who wants to force Johnny to sell his land, or failing that, find another way to acquire it. Why? The hunting in and near the Hush is dangerous, exciting, and promises the possibility of extraordinary game. When that man is mysteriously killed while hunting in the Hush, Johnny becomes a prime murder suspect. Meanwhile, some members of the African-American family that lived on the land show magical powers, especially while they are in the Hush. Traumatic events in 1853 involving Johnny’s slave-owning ancestors and those of the African-American enslaved family still cause trouble on the land.

Hart’s imaginative resolution of these troubles brings the book to a powerful and violent conclusion.

But there is a risk here for Hart. His prior books have, with only one minor exception, held to the standard rules for thriller writers. Those rules call for the mysteries to be solved without the aid of magic or the supernatural.

Hart is betting that the richness of his characters, his compelling storytelling, and the story’s supernatural landscape will hold his thriller fans despite breaking his old rules. Taking this risk, he hopes, will expand his appeal and share his storytelling talent with an even wider audience.

Taking risks, even those with high stakes, is not a new activity for Hart.

In fact, he seems to thrive on risk. For instance, he gave up his job as a stockbroker about 15 years ago to complete his first novel. That risk-taking paid off when The King of Lies became a best-seller in 2006.

Then Hart, after a string of three more successful books, risked upsetting his working routine by moving with his wife and two young children from Greensboro to Charlottesville, Virginia. Although the move disrupted his writing program for several years, it finally led to Redemption Road, which became a critical and commercial success. His completion of  The Hush shows that Hart is fully back on his game.

Now, will the risk of making the supernatural an integral part of his work pay off for him?

Nothing is for sure.

However, the complex and rich stories in The Hush and the book’s supernatural but satisfying conclusion suggest that he is again on the right track. PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

A Generous Voice

The distinguished reign of a poet laureate

By Stephen E. Smith

I have seen the ones I love leave this world as shadows without wings.

The purple martins that come up every year from Somewhere

Leave as easily as they jetted into their gourds in March.

And I have held my father’s hand as he was dying

And my mother’s, lying in her lap like dried peas . . .

From Paul’s Hill

Shelby Stephenson

North Carolina Poet Laureate

With the death of Poet Laureate Sam Ragan in 1996, the office of state laureate ceased being a lifetime appointment, and sitting governors began selecting poets laureate (with recommendations from the state’s writing communities) who would promote an appreciation for an often misapprehended genre. Recent laureates have been chosen for the excellence of their work, their influence on other writers, and “an appreciation for literature in its diversity throughout the state.” The revised guidelines grant tenures ranging from a standard two-year term to five years, depending upon the governor’s readiness to select a new laureate and the willingness of the poet to serve. With the exception of a disquieting hiccup during the McCrory administration, governors have chosen poets laureate who exhibit exceptional talent and generosity — and the process has been, thank God, more or less devoid of politics.

But the job of poet laureate, the physical act of getting behind the wheel of a car and driving to every corner of the state to give readings and workshops, has turned out to be anything but cushy. In fact, it’s full-time work, offering little in the way of compensation and requiring immense dedication. Beginning with Greensboro’s Fred Chappell, who was the first of the new poets laureate and whose Midquest is the finest book (poem) written by a poet of his generation, and continuing with Kathryn Stripling Byer, Cathy Smith Bowers, Joseph Bathanti and Shelby Stephenson, our poets laureate have been barnstorming nonstop for more than 20 years.

From December 2014 to January 2018, Stephenson has given 315 readings, lectures and workshops, traveling from Hatteras to the Tennessee border, twice, and driving more than 25,000 miles within the state. Stephenson, who officially leaves office when a new laureate is appointed later this month, has gently touched the lives of thousands of North Carolinians, and he leaves us with an ambitious 52-part poem, Paul’s Hill: Homage to Whitman (Sir Walter Press), which is the logical and artistic culmination of his past work framed within the hard edges of the perplexing new world in which we find ourselves.

Raised in a large family that farmed in Johnston County, Stephenson is deeply rooted in a rural environment and possessed of a strong sense of longing for a particular time and place that’s never failed to offer the purest vision. His primary subjects, the foundation upon which he’s shaped most of his poems, are family, the natural world, the cycle of life, even the plank house where he was born, and despite a reliance on memory and the intensely personal nature of his poetry, there’s a restrained use of nostalgia in his work. When reading his leapfrogging lyrical lines, the reader is left with an overwhelming appreciation for the life the poet has lived and his eagerness to share his most personal moments.

The light plays shadows where once cordwood readied the woodbox.

My mother’s lost in the steam of her kettle.

I rub my face, as if parting curtains,

Wonder if I see myself in the rose-blue feathers smeared on the picture-window.

Bliss fades into pattern I’ll ride later, dross and all.

White moon, hold me in your arms.

Bathe my thoughts so wild onions may climb the cold

Sister Night to say to morning, “Hello, again.”

A mix of spoken language and the rhymes and rhythms, the literary tongue is interspersed with hymns, dogs, goldfinches, tulip poplars, cornstalks, collards and  country music resonating in song titles and country lyrics, even in the irony of a long-forgotten radio advertisement sung by Arthur Smith and the Crackerjacks:

If your snuff’s too strong it’s wrong

Get Tuberose get Tuberose

To make your life one happy song

Get Tuberose get Tuberose.

Stephenson’s early poems took their inspiration from the land, but in the last 25 years he’s dealt critically with the guilt posed by slavery, the destruction of the natural environment, the dangers of romanticism, the relationship of the past to the present, and the twitches and ticks of contemporary life all infused into Paul’s Hill, anchored steadfastly in the present by the inclusion of the mundane elements of daily life and a use of language that dissolves the distinction between precincts of poetry and prose. His is the voice of a man viewing the present with skepticism, occasional distaste and a trace of anxiety.

The flag of the Oklahoma-bombing holds one tiny baby, fire-scarred

And that September, towering out of words, humble beyond relief,

Some hint of lushness — and you among the moon’s heaving night —

listening to whispers . . .

Judged by productivity, Shelby Stephenson has, for 50 years, created poetry of high quality. Beginning with Middle Creek Poems and moving forward through his 10 books to Paul’s Hill, he’s demonstrated continued growth and has perfected a distinctly individual voice cultivated with a single-minded devotion to his vision of a North Carolina in transition. As he’s matured as a writer, he’s stepped out of the tobacco rows, assuming the role of critic, teacher, reviewer, social commentator — and, most importantly, a distinguished and generous poet laureate.

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

Wrestling Prose

An iconic insider on the art of writing well

By Stephen E. Smith

In his latest book, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee deconstructs the process he’s spent a lifetime perfecting: writing on obscure subjects and delighting a discerning readership with technical explanations, entertaining narratives, and meticulous description, all of it couched in impeccable prose.

He begins by analyzing the most complex component of the writing process: structure. Using as an example his New Yorker article on the Pine Barrens, McPhee admits to spending two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard staring up into the branches and leaves and “fighting fear and panic” because he couldn’t visualize a structure for the material he’d assembled. Years of extensive research — interviews, articles, books, personal observations, etc., all of it cataloged on coded note cards — had gone into the project, but he couldn’t overcome the dread of banging out that first sentence and arranging the material in a readable form. Eventually, he overcame his writer’s block and produced an article that morphed into the bestselling book, but the experience was painful — and instructive. In an attempt to convey the intricacies of the process, McPhee employs a series of drawings and diagrams that, unfortunately, do little to untangle the complexities of problems he’d confronted. But readers shouldn’t be deterred. As with many of McPhee’s books, there’s a preliminary learning curve to overcome before landing on the safe side of abstraction.

In “Editors and Publishers,” McPhee delves into the internal workings of The New Yorker and the publishing house of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. His insider anecdotes are informative and humorous and include character sketches of the editors and editorial staff, affectionately detailing their eccentricities. “Mr. Shawn [editor of The New Yorker] actually seemed philosophical about its [an obscenity] presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, were in no sense burdened as he was.” He also contributes an anecdote concerning Shawn’s objection to writers turning in copy about locations that were cold, such as Alaska or Newfoundland: “If he had an aversion to cold places it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food” — although Shawn approved a McPhee proposal to write about eating road kill in rural Georgia. 

In “Elicitation,” he dispenses useful advice on the art of interviewing, citing as an example his experience with comedian Jackie Gleason. His description of “The Great One,” bits and pieces of relevant detail — Gleason called everyone “pal” — creates a living and breathing facsimile of the comedian, and older readers will find themselves transported back to The Honeymooners and the loveable peccadilloes of the irascible Ralph Kramden. In a Time cover story on Sophia Loren, irony functions as description, succinctly capturing Loren’s appeal: “Her feet are too big. Her nose is too long. Her teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of ‘a Neapolitan giraffe.’ Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are huge. Her forehead is low. Her  mouth too large. And, mamma mia, she is absolutely gorgeous.”

Gleason and Loren notwithstanding, McPhee devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of “frame of reference,” pieces of common knowledge that a writer employs to enhance a subject’s comprehensibility. He cautions against using allusions that don’t possess durability, warning that writers should never assume that anyone has seen a movie that might be used as an allusion. “In the archives of ersatz reference,” he writes, “that one [movies] is among the fattest folders.” He notes that popular culture changes with such rapidity that it’s dangerous for a writer to conclude that any allusion carries the weight of meaning necessary to elucidate a subject. To prove his point, McPhee polled his Princeton students using references such as Paul Newman, Fort Knox, Cassius Clay, Rupert Murdoch and discovered that the majority of his undergrads registered a low degree of recognition — and when it came to identifying Peckham Rye, Churchill Downs, Jack Dempsey, George Plimpton, and Mort Sahl, his students were blissfully ignorant.

In his final chapter, McPhee again confronts writer’s block. In a note written to a frustrated student, he suggests a remedy: “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft. With that you’ve achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with eye and ear.”

If there’s a fault with McPhee’s writing, and it’s difficult to find even the smallest gaffe, it’s an occasional touch of the dictionary disease: demonym, multiguously, bibulation, horripilation, etc. — words that will force the reader to touch his index finger to the Kindle screen, or God forbid, crack open a dictionary.

McPhee is straightforward, practical, and illustrative, detailing the struggles serious writers endure on a daily basis and pointing out, finally, that creativity is the product of what the writer chooses to write about, how he approaches the subject and arranges the material, the skill he demonstrates in describing characters, the kinetic energy of the prose, and the extent to which the reader can visualize the characters and story. As always, he writes with grace and charm, and Draft No. 4 earns a niche on the bookshelf next to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the Harbrace College Handbook, Writing Down the Bones, Roget’s International Thesaurus, and the OED.   PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

A Carolina Classic

Revisiting Cold Mountain

By D.G. Martin

Charles Frazier’s classic novel, Cold Mountain, was published 20 years ago and more than three million copies have been sold. The book inspired a popular epic film and an opera staged in Chapel Hill in September. As North Carolina’s most admired work of literary fiction since, perhaps, Look Homeward Angel, it should be on the bookshelf of every home in our state.

The book’s great success has made its story and its characters familiar and memorable. When the name of Inman is mentioned, we think of a tired, war-worn, wounded Civil War soldier walking across the Piedmont and foothills determined to make his way back home to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the lovely Charleston-reared Ada, whom he hardly knows, but deeply loves. She is out of place, struggling, and starving on a mountain farm. Ruby, an uneducated mountain girl, full of energy and grit, rescues and restores Ada and the farm, where the two women await Inman’s poignant return and the accompanying tragedy.

As in Homer’s Odyssey, the returning soldier’s travel toward home provides the framework for a series of adventures and contacts with a variety of compelling characters. The book opens with the battle-wounded Inman recovering in a Confederate hospital in Raleigh. Outside the hospital a blind man is selling boiled peanuts. When Inman asks what he would give for just a few minutes of sight, the peanut man replies, “Not an Indian head penny.” He explains there are things he would never want to see. Inman understands, because he remembers vividly the horrors of war and the battles he experienced and wishes he had never seen them.

As Inman’s condition improves, he resolves to desert, leave the hospital, and begin his walk toward Cold Mountain. Not long after his trek begins, in the woods near a river, he sees a fallen preacher bent on killing a woman he has impregnated. Inman rescues the woman and brutally punishes the preacher.

Soon afterwards, he encounters and angers some armed and dangerous locals. They follow him to a river crossing. As he canoes across the swollen river they fire a barrage of bullets that destroy the canoe and almost kill him.

After Inman’s escape, he meets a deceitful redneck named Junior, a farmer and bawdyhouse keeper, who drugs Inman and sells him out to the Home Guard. After marching its prisoners in chains for several days, the Home Guard loses patience and executes its captives. Inman survives miraculously and goes on the road again, but only after returning to extract vicious revenge on Junior, whom he finds salting ham in his smokehouse.

Frazier describes the brutal details. “Junior raised up his face and looked at him but seemed not to recognize him. Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat’s and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. There was no movement out of him but for the bright flow of blood which ran from his nose and cuts to his head and the corners of his eyes. It gathered and pooled on the black earth of the smokehouse floor.”

The fight with Junior is only the beginning. Along the way to Cold Mountain are encounters at every stop, many of them bloody. Inman’s travel home, like the Civil War battlefields, is marked by violence and death.

Frazier writes, “He could not even make a start at reckoning up how many deaths he had witnessed of late. It would number, no doubt, in the thousands. Accomplished in every custom you could imagine, and some you couldn’t come up with if you thought at it for days. He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious.”

But Inman has another, softer side. He loves nature and carries with him Bartram’s Travels, William Bartram’s description of his travels in the American South in the 1770s. In Inman’s view, “the book stood nigh to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”

Bartram’s description of a mountain scene that reminded Inman of Cold Mountain was his favorite selection. “Having gained its summit, we enjoyed a most enchanting view; a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields . . . companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers of Magnolia, Azalea, Philadelphus, perfumed Calycanthus, sweet Yellow Jessamine and cerulean Glycine frutescens, disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.”

When Inman read this passage aloud to Ada at their reunion, “he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face.”

Alternating with the chapters describing Inman’s travels are reports of Ada’s and Ruby’s growing friendship and success in managing the farm together.

The superstitious Ruby gives us a picture of farm life 150 years ago. Frazier writes, “The crops were growing well, largely, Ruby claimed, because they had been planted, at her insistence, in strict accordance with the signs. In Ruby’s mind, everything — setting fence posts, making sauerkraut, killing hogs — fell under the rule of the heavens . . . November, will kill a hog in the growing of the moon, for if we don’t the meat will lack grease and pork chops will cup up in the pan.”

Inman finally makes his way back to Cold Mountain. His homecoming and reunion with Ada are joyful, but short lived, as Inman dies in a firefight with the Home Guard.

Giving away the closing is not a spoiler. After 20 years in print, the book’s ending is no secret. But people still ask Frazier, why didn’t you let Inman live and make a happy ending?

Frazier explained to me that the real Pinkney Inman died in a gunfight with the Home Guard. Therefore, he said, “having that knowledge in my mind, I wrote the character to go with that ending without really fully accepting it. But at that point, where I had to decide, then I realized, it’s going to feel fake if I come up with a way for him to survive this.”

Frazier continued, “I got to the point toward the end of the book where I had to decide. And I drove all the way from Raleigh up to Haywood County. There’s a cemetery there, in a little town called Clyde, where Pinkney Inman is buried, but there’s not a marker. And I just walked around, looked at the view, and I just thought, you know, there’s only one way to end this, that I knew what happened from the first page of writing this book, to the real character, and it’s built in.”

Frazier’s decision resulted in the classic that has stood the test of time. Reading it cover to cover is still a moving experience.

But also, like Bartram’s Travels for Inman, we can pick up Cold Mountain and “read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight.”  PS

Charles Frazier tells much more about Cold Mountain and his experiences writing the book in his interview on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch at: https://video.unctv.org/video/3004954333/

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Words to Ponder

David McCullough’s speeches deliver gentle sermons on the American character

By Stephen E. Smith

“If we are beset by problems,” David McCullough wrote in a 1994 commencement address, “we have always been beset by problems. There never was a golden time past of smooth sailing only.”

McCullough’s The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For has arrived in bookstores at an opportune moment. Whatever your political persuasion, there’s little doubt that we’re in need of inspiring words that suggest where we go from here — and David McCullough is superbly qualified to point us in the right direction. He’s the recipient of Pulitzer Prizes for Truman and John Adams, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback, and he’s the author of 12 bestselling popular histories. Moreover, McCullough doesn’t shrink from his responsibility as a forward-looking historian, reminding us in his introduction that we live in a time of uncertainty and contention and that we need to recall who we are and what we stand for and “. . .the importance of history as an aid to navigation in such troubled, uncertain times.”

To that end, The American Spirit is a collection of 15 chronologically arranged speeches delivered by McCullough over a 25-year period, most of them college commencement addresses or remarks offered at the anniversaries and the rededications of monuments and historic structures such as the White House, the Capitol, and Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia. Using these ceremonies as a platform, McCullough focuses on the contributions of the famous and near famous — John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Simon Willard, James Sumner, John Quincy Adams, Margaret Chase Smith and JFK — whose spirit and commitment to the nation helped shape our moral core.

McCullough is a believer in the Great Man theory, a biographical approach to history that offers access to a wealth of the inspiring words spoken by the founding fathers and their intellectual descendants. Quotes, memorable and repeatable as they are, are the stuff of thought-provoking commencement speeches — Stephen Hopkins, who suffered from palsy, scrawled his signature to the Declaration, saying, “My hand trembles, but my heart does not”; Margaret Chase Smith stood up to Joseph McCarthy by announcing that she didn’t want to see the Republican Party achieve political victory through “fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear”; physician and patriot Benjamin Rush reminded his fellow citizens that they were in need of “candor, gentleness, and a disposition to speak with civility and to listen with attention to everybody”; and John Adams offered a simple, timely truth: “. . . facts are stubborn things.”

Predictable themes emerge from the collection — the importance of education, the significance of history, the impact of language, and the value of selective reading — and McCullough brings up the oft repeated assertion that we’re raising a generation of ill-informed Americans who are historically illiterate and that it’s imperative that we redouble our efforts to teach our citizens to value their forebears.

But the strength of these essays is also their weakness. Commencement addresses and most dedication speeches are essentially mildly annoying sermons, timely reminders of the better citizens we ought to be. Americans, unfortunately, have a long tradition of ignoring good advice (jurist Clarence Darrow claimed that no American is absolutely sure he’s correct unless the vast majority is against him). On the other hand, McCullough’s faithful readers will find reinforcement and encouragement in his lofty words. He’s most persuasive, and insofar as preaching to the choir is productive, these speeches succeed admirably.

Not all the essays are straightforwardly instructive. In a 2007 address at Lafayette College, McCullough emphasizes the bonds that have long existed between Americans and the French, connections that are often overlooked in a world where the French chart an impartial course. (We may have changed “French fries” to “freedom fries” when the French claimed Iraq had no WMDs, but events proved them correct.) He reminds readers that the Marquis de Lafayette and the French military were instrumental in winning our struggle for independence and that 80,000 Americans died in France during World War I and 57,000 during World War II. “Time and again,” McCullough writes, “Paris changed their [young Americans’] lives and thus hugely influenced American art, American literature, music, dance, and yes, American science, technology and medicine.”

In a 1994 commencement address at the University of Pittsburgh, McCullough proposed that the university take responsibility for rehabilitating the inner-city, working to eliminate drug addiction, violent crime, racial tensions, illiteracy, homelessness, and the cycle of poverty — the selfsame problems that trouble the country still. “And why not let it begin here in Pittsburgh,” McCullough said, “this city of firsts, with the University of Pittsburgh leading the way?”

Taking a purely cynical view, it will no doubt occur to readers that The American Spirit will make a thoughtful birthday, holiday or graduation gift, and that McCullough and/or the publisher are in it for the money. After all, the book’s contents were written long before we found ourselves in our present dilemma. But it’s more likely that readers who carefully consider McCullough’s words will take the book in the generous spirit in which it’s offered. As McCullough writes: “Yes, we have much to be seriously concerned about, much that needs to be corrected, improved, or dispensed with. But the vitality and creative energy, the fundamental decency, the tolerance and insistence on truth, and the good-heartedness of the American people are there still plainly.”  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Omnivorous Reader

Revolutionary Scars

A revealing look at the cost of civil strife

By Stephen E. Smith

They’re called “uncle books,” popular histories you gift to your Uncle Leo so he can kick back in his easy chair and read about political and military luminaries such as Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton. These lengthy narrative histories, which are generally revisionist in intent and convey idealized portraits of their subjects, have done much to shape our beliefs about the founding of the Republic. What they haven’t done is examine the plight of ordinary Patriots, Loyalists, British and Continental soldiers, African-Americans, Native Americans and German auxiliaries, the brave, long-suffering souls who did most of the fighting and dying during the Revolutionary War.

In Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, Holger Hoock attempts to set the record straight by revealing the brutality of our first civil war, and describing in graphic detail the torments endured by ordinary soldiers and innocent noncombatants on both sides of the Revolution. Hoock writes: “For two centuries this topic has been subject to whitewashing and selective remembering and forgetting. While contemporaries experienced the Revolution as frightening, messy, and divisive, its pervasive violence and terror have since yielded to romanticized notions of the nation’s birth.”

Hoock supports this thesis with statistics that suggest there was suffering aplenty. Per capita, 10 times as many Americans died in the Revolutionary War as in World War I and five times as many as died in World War II. Among prisoners of war, the death rate was the highest in American history. Between 16,000 to 19,000 Continentals died while confined by the British. And Hoock argues convincingly that Loyalist noncombatants routinely suffered imprisonment and torture at the hands of Patriots.

Hoock offers as an example the experience of Edward Huntington, who was convicted of being a traitor to the Patriot cause and was sentenced to spend “the rest of his life sixty to eighty feet underground in a dark, damp, claustrophobic tomb.” Huntington was transported to an infamous copper mine in Simsbury, Connecticut, and was lowered deep into a dismal cavern where he could not stand upright. He shared his incarceration with “violent criminals serving sentences from one year to life for horse thievery, aggravated burglary, highway robbery, sexual assault, and accessory to murder.” The subterranean chambers had no natural light, limited air circulation, constant dampness and employed a communal tub as a toilet, a breeding ground for “fevers, influenza, respiratory problems, dysentery and typhoid.”

Patriots employed arson, rape, confiscation and public shaming against their Loyalist neighbors, but tarring and feathering was the preferred punishment. The case of John Malcom, a Boston customs official, is cited as typical. After having hot tar and feathers applied to his naked body, Malcom spent two months in bedridden agony before fleeing to England, where he petitioned Parliament for monetary redress by sending pieces of his skin as proof of his loyalty. When such punishments failed to satisfy Patriot vengeance, many Loyalists were “killed by mobs or at the hands of marauding bands, hanged by order of councils of safety or assemblies of various states, or executed following court-martial.”

Hoock gives British atrocities, including Banastre Tarleton’s dishonorable conduct at Waxhaw, passing mention, but his primary focus is on lesser known campaigns, such as Washington’s genocidal response to Iroquois raids in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. Washington’s objective in punishing the Six Nations was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” To that end, the Continental Army destroyed 45 towns and all of the Native Americans’ crops and food stores, plunging the tribes into starvation. Iroquois retaliated by torturing and mutilating Continental soldiers. Patriot  Lt. Thomas Hubley recorded the barbarity in his diary that “their heads Cut off, and the flesh of Lt. Boyds head was intirely taken of and his eyes punched out. . . his fingers and Toe nails was bruised of, and the Dog had eat part of the Shoulders away likewise a knife Sticking in Lt. Boyds body.”

The fate of African-American combatants is, as one might expect, particularly disturbing. In most cases, slaves were promised their freedom by the government for which they fought, but their treatment was at best exploitive and their well-being of little concern to those who tendered assurances. Many slaves who served the Revolutionary cause found that promises weren’t kept, and the British treated African-American soldiers as disposable laborers, abandoning thousands to die of disease, before transporting the survivors to Nova Scotia, or Jamaica and other West Indian islands.

The bitterness occasioned by the Revolution lingered long after Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, and acts of vengeance and retaliation took the form of physical violence and executions. Hoock recounts the 1782 hanging of Joshua Huddy, commander of a New Jersey Patriot militia, and the Patriots’ retaliation — known as the “The Asgill Affair” — in which Gen. Washington ordered that a British officer, Capt.Charles Asgill, be executed. Eventually, Asgill was released, but a generation of brutal warfare had habituated Americans to a thirst for revenge that no treaty could assuage.

Although Scars of Independence isn’t a pleasant read, it makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Revolution, and it’s another reminder that brutality is the norm in war, especially in civil wars. The question for readers is this: Are we obligated to acknowledge the abominations committed by our forefathers? As Maxim Gorky, a man who knew something of the horrors occasioned by civil strife, wrote: “I have no desire to make anyone miserable, but one must not be sentimental, nor hide the grim truth with the motley words of beautiful lies. Let us face life as it is. All that is good and human in our hearts needs renewing.”

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Wickedest Town in the West

An OK place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-1980s, actor Robert Mitchum appeared on a late-night talk show to promote his latest film. The host asked if the movie was worth the price of admission and Mitchum replied: “If it’s a hot afternoon, the theater is air conditioned, and you’ve got nothing else to do, what the hell, buy a ticket.”

Readers should adopt a similar attitude toward Tom Clavin’s Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. If you’re not doing anything on one of these hot summer afternoons, what the heck, give it a read.

Dodge City is a 20-year history of the Kansas military post turned cow town that has come down in popular culture as the Sodom of the make-believe Wild West. No doubt Dodge had its share of infamous gunfighters, brothels and saloons, including the Long Branch Saloon of Gunsmoke fame, and there were myriad minor dustups, but nix the Hollywood hyperbole, and Dodge City’s official history is straightforward: Following the Civil War, the Great Western Cattle Trail branched off from the Chisholm Trail and ran smack into Dodge, creating a transitory economic boom. The town grew rapidly in 1883 and 1884 and was a convergence for buffalo hunters and cowboys, and a distribution center for buffalo hides and cattle. But the buffalo were soon gone, and Dodge City had a competitor in the cattle business, the border town of Caldwell. Later cattle drives converged on the railheads at Abilene and Wichita, and by 1890, the cattle business had moved on, and Dodge City’s glory days were over.

Clavin focuses on the city’s rough-and-tumble years from 1870 through the 1880s, explicating pivotal events through the lives and times of the usual suspects — Bat Masterson, the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday et al. He fleshes out his narrative by including notorious personages not directly linked to Dodge City — Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Hickok, “Big Nose” Kate, Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, the Younger brothers, and a slew of lesser characters such as “Dirty Sock” Jack, “Cold Chuck” Johnny and “Dynamite” Sam, all of whom cross paths much in the manner characters interact in Doctorow’s Ragtime. Also included are abbreviated histories of Tombstone — will we ever lose our fascination with the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral? — and Deadwood.

If all of this sounds annoyingly familiar, it is. There’s no telling how many Wild West biographies, histories, novels, feature films, TV series, documentaries, etc., have been cranked out in the last 140 years, transforming us all into cowboy junkies. Our brief Western epoch has so permeated world ethea that blue jean-clad dudes in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, might be heard to say, “I’m getting the hell out of Dodge,” in Uzbek, of course.

Clavin offers what amounts to a caveat in his Author’s Note: “. . . Dodge City is an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research. I attempted to follow the example of the Western Writers of America, whose members over the years have found the unique formula of combining strong scholarship with entertaining writing.”

So what we have is a hybrid, a quasi-history not quite up to the standards of popular history, integrated into a series of underdeveloped episodic adventure tales that ultimately fail to entertain. If Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough are your historians of choice, you’ll find that Dodge City falls with a predictable thud. It’s simply more of the same Western hokum. The writing isn’t exceptional, the research is perfunctory, most of the pivotal events are common knowledge, and the characters are so familiar as to breed contempt.

If you have a liking for yarns by writers such as Louis L’Amour, Luke Short and Larry McMurtry, Dodge City isn’t going to make your list of favorite Westerns. Without embellishment, the narrative loses its oomph, and the episodic structure diminishes any possibility of a thematic continuity, which is, of course, that the lawlessness that marked Dodge City’s formative years is a metaphor for the country as a whole, that violence and corruption are a fundamental component of American life.

On a positive note, readers of every persuasion will likely find the book’s final chapter intriguing. Clavin follows his principal characters to the grave. Wyatt, the last surviving Earp brother, ended his days in Los Angeles at the age of 80. Doc Holliday died in Colorado of tuberculosis at 36, his boots off. “Big Nose” Kate, Doc’s paramour, lived until 1940 at the Arizona Pioneers’ Home, dying at the age of 89.

Of particular interest is Bartholomew William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s dapper buddy in the “lawing” business. Whereas Earp’s claim to fame ended with his exploits as a Western peace officer and cow town ruffian, Masterson went on to a life of greater achievement. He became an authority on prizefighting and was in attendance at almost every important match fought during his later years. He was friends with John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey. In 1902, he moved to New York City and worked as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His columns covered boxing and other sporting events, and he produced op-ed pieces on crime, war, politics, and often wrote of his personal life. He became a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and remained a celebrity until his death in 1921.

It promises to be a long, hot, unsettling summer. If you’ve got nothing better to do, turn off cable news, slap down $29.99 and give Dodge City a read. It’s little enough to pay for a few hours of blessed escapism.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.