The Ox-Bow Incident (33 page)

In addition to being the inventor of a plot whose convolutions you will follow popeyed and goose-pimpled, Mr. Clark is the commander of a completely adult style, all bone and sinew, without a trace of the affectation of over-simplicity. If he has a fault, it is that of understatement, for which he will be freely forgiven.

On the basis of “The Ox-Bow Incident,” I don’t think
you can make any predictions about Mr. Clark. The thing is so darned perfect that it seems to deny the possibility of growth on the part of the author.… There’s a kind of cabinet-worker precision about “The Ox-Bow Incident;” everything—characters, plot, style, rhythm, even the title, so cool and complete—falls into place not mechanically but organically, as if the final effect had been calculated shrewdly and patiently, with nothing left to improvisation. Such a book can never be followed up by another of the same kind; it stands by itself. But whether or not Mr. Clark publishes a single line in the future, he’s a writer, here and now.

L. L. LEE

The Oxbow Incident
is Clark’s best known novel; it is also the one most directly concerned with man as a political animal, that is, man as member of a community. And nature seems almost ignored except as setting, as stage. But stages, certainly, are always symbolic, for they can suggest the attitude of the author of the drama. The stage does so here; nature functions as a symbolic comment upon men’s actions. The novel begins in the sunlight, in the beginning warmth of spring, but the main action takes place at night and in the cold. Nature, and so, Life, in a sense withdraws. The cold and the darkness symbolize the lynchers’ being outside of nature as well as their own inner coldness and darkness. The hanging at dawn, then, is not just a simple reversal, i.e., death occurring just as the day is reborn, but is also a deliberate assault by the lynchers against the continuing processes of nature.

Oxbow
is also the most ambiguous of Clark’s treatments of the American scene: not in its protest against injustice, certainly not in its obvious protest against racism. But it is ambiguous in that it is concerned with ambiguities: how
does one arrive at justice—and can man arrive at justice anyway?

What is justice to be based upon? Davies answers that it comes from the law, and that the law is based upon the majority will. This is good American doctrine. But every reader will note that Tetley goes through certain forms: he holds a kind of trial, and the decision is based upon the votes of the majority. That majority, though, is not of a group of individuals, but of a “pack” (as young Tetley calls them), men more afraid of being thought physically afraid than they are afraid of committing an injustice. And the action they perform is manifestly unjust, that is, it is wrong. The men are hanged to satisfy Tetley’s lust for power, and the group of “rugged individualists” surrenders to him.

Clark is indeed talking about more than a Western lynch mob; he is talking about the whole American society or, rather, the whole human society. And the horror lies in the irony: it is far easier to understand and forgive the brutal actions of slaves than it is to understand and forgive the brutal actions of men who think themselves free and act as slaves. Here is Clark’s most explicit criticism of the American Dream: the forms of law will not suffice if they are not based upon true individualism. And these Americans are not individuals nor are they concerned with individuals.

R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE
 

1. Many consider
   The Ox-Bow Incident
   to be the first serious Western novel in American literature, and Clark’s novel wholly overturns many of the conventions of the typical Western or “cowboy story” (in which conceits like shoot-outs, the triumph of good over evil, and the figure of the cowboy hero tend to loom large). Discuss the ways in which Clark transforms stereotypes about the West.
   
2. How do you understand the events leading up to the novel’s culminating moment, the lynching? What are the causes of the lynching as these unfold throughout the work? Is the train of events Clark delineates anywhere reversible?
   
3. Discuss the frontier society described by Clark. What impressions do you glean of the way life was lived on the frontier? What seem to be some of the distinguishing features of frontier life.? Are there aspects of life on the frontier that came as a surprise to you?
   
4. The mob, and ideas about mob violence, figure centrally in the novel. What, for Clark, is the mob?
   
5. Discuss the importance of the physical environment for Clark: landscape, weather, the way land is experienced. How does Clark put the physical elements to work in his book?
   How important are these to his story and to the novel’s overall effect?
   
6. Clifton Fadiman called
   The Ox-Bow Incident
   “a mature, unpitying examination of what causes men to love violence and to transgress justice.” Discuss what seem to you to be the causes of violence and transgression in Clark’s treatment of these themes.
   
7. While his novel takes place in the West, Clark’s ultimate subject, according to Wallace Stegner and others, is nothing less than civilization itself. In what ways, allegorical or otherwise, does
   The Ox-Bow Incident
   say things about civilization writ large, in your view?
   

T
HE
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
E
DITORIAL
B
OARD

Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Charles Frazier
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Richard Howard
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Oliver Sacks
•
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal

M
ASS
M
ARKET
T
ITLES
A
VAILABLE FROM THE
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY

The Arabian Nights
Translated, with a Preface and Notes, by Sir Richard F. Burton
Introduction by A. S. Byatt
0-8129-7214-7

The Ox-Bow Incident
W
ALTER
V
AN
T
ILBURG
C
LARK
Introduction by Wallace Stegner
0-8129-7258-9

The Lost World
A
RTHUR
C
ONAN
D
OYLE
Introduction by Michael Crichton
0-8129-7213-9

The Wings of the Dove
H
ENRY
J
AMES
Introduction by Amy Bloom Preface by the author
0-8129-7211-2

Swann’s Way
M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
Revised by D. J. Enright
Introduction by Richard Howard
0-8129-7209-0

The Mysterious Island
J
ULES
V
ERNE
Translated by Jordan Stump
Introduction by Caleb Carr
0-8129-7212-0

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ODERN
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IBRARY IS ONLINE AT
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Walter Van Tilburg Clark was born August 3, 1909, in East Orland, Maine. In 1917 his father became president of the University of Nevada and the family moved to Reno, where Clark spent his formative years. In 1931, after receiving a master’s degree from the University of Nevada, Clark moved to Vermont to pursue a teaching career. His first book,
Ten Women in Gale’s House and Shorter Poems
, was published in 1932.

In 1933 Clark was married to Barbara Frances Morse, and in 1940 he published
The Ox-Bow Incident
. It was enthusiastically praised by critics (Max Gissen, in
The New Republic
, for instance, called it “a triumph of restraint and workmanship”; Ben Ray Redman, in
The Saturday Review
, dubbed it “a sinewy, masculine tale that progressively tightens its grip on the reader”; and Clifton Fadiman praised it as “a masterpiece”).
The Ox-Bow Incident
immediately established Clark’s reputation as a major American writer, one whose moral and artistic seriousness transcended and transformed the Western novel. It was made
into a movie in 1943, and it remains a widely read American classic.

Clark published his second novel,
The City of Trembling Leaves
, in 1945; it was received somewhat more critically than
The Ox-Bow Incident
. In 1946 Clark returned to the West, taking up a teaching position at the University of Nevada. In 1950 Clark completed
The Watchful Gods and Other Stories
, his last published work.

Thereafter Clark remained a very active and committed teacher, and though he wrote much, he published little. At the time of his death Clark was working on two novels, and was editing the diaries of nineteenth-century frontiersman Alfred Doten. He died of cancer on November 10, 1971.