Fortune’s Favorite

“Atardy and subordinate genre,” sniffed Jorge Luis Borges at the North American western novel in his “Lectures on American Literature,” particularly in contrast to his beloved poesia gauchesco --”gaucho literature”--of South America. But that was 1967, and the westerns that Borges referred to were written by Zane Grey and LouisL’Amour. We don’t know if he ever got around to reading Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man,” Charles Portis’ “True Grit,” Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” Ron Hansen’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward, Robert Ford,” N. Scott Momaday’s “The Ancient Child” or any of the other dozen or so works of fiction that have helped usher in the golden age of the American western novel.

One wonders particularly what Borges might have made of Bruce Olds’ dazzling and exhilarating “Bucking the Tiger,” a novel which lights a torch for American historical fiction. Olds even begins with a quote from Borges: “I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse.”

The tiger in “Bucking the Tiger” is the top card in a faro deck, a vivid metaphor for life’s fortunes, and its pursuer is none other than John Henry “Doc” Holliday, Georgia-born son of a plantation owner and Confederate army officer, Ivy league (dental school) graduate, gambler, pistoleer, faro dealer, tubercular patient and self-imposed Far West exile. In many Old West narratives Doc is merely a colorful appendage to the story of Wyatt Earp and the events leading up to the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, but in various forms his legend has stubbornly maintained its independence. In the hugely popular 1905 potboiler “The Sunset Trail,” by New York-based editor Alfred Henry Lewis, Doc is a pulp version of a figure out of a Conrad novel who “mixed up in everything that came along. It was the only way I could forget myself.” In Pete Hamill’s script for the 1970 movie “Doc,” a Vietnam War allegory with Wyatt Earp standing in for Lyndon Johnson and the predatory spirit of modern America, Doc is a civilized cautionary voice amid the carnage of Tombstone.

Olds’ Doc Holliday is simpler yet more complex, revealed to us in tantalizing glimpses by a score of witnesses real and fictitious, something in the manner of Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid, an obvious influence on Olds’ conception. Bat Masterson, peace officer turned journalist, recalls him as “hotheaded, impetuous, quarrelsome and reckless, his temper disputatious at all times” and “a hopeless romantic.” According to Earp, he was “by natural temperament a philosopher and fatalist whom life had made a dark and caustic wit.” Everyone from Doc’s real-life frontier companion, Kate Elder, to the fictional W.H. Munny (played by Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven”) to fellow consumptive Franz Kafka (“the disease of my lungs is nothing but an overflowing of my mental disease”) is called to account.

Like Jean-Luc Godard, Olds likes a good beginning, middle and end--just not necessarily in that order. Olds’ assumption is that the simple story of Holliday’s life--a youth in antebellum Georgia, the tragic early death of his mother, his attempt at establishing himself in a respectable profession, the apocalyptic realization that tuberculosis had given him just a short time to live, his consequent westward drift and commingling of destinies with Earp--supplies enough narrative force, and he changes surprisingly few known facts. That “Bucking the Tiger” qualifies as a novel at all is almost entirely the result of Olds’ sensitivity to the multiple interpretations inherent in the facts. The playful and witty text of “Bucking the Tiger” uses a mix of styles, tones, tenses and forms, including memoirs (real and reconstituted), interior monologues, poetry, popular song verses (Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets,” a harrowing primer on tuberculosis) and lists that read as though they were printed out from Doc’s subconscious (“bluff the man, not the hand,” one aphorism on poker cautions, while another advises, “Never bluff an amateur, he almost always will call”).

Where facts are unavailable, Olds has re-imagined Doc’s past. His Doc is raised in “the text of a storybook, palmy days, jasmine and honeysuckle, day after day this blue, everlasting summer,” his impressionable mind filled with melancholy Irish airs, the poetry of Poe and Baudelaire and unrequited love for his cousin Melanie (who eventually retires to a nunnery). Wisely, Olds leaves the core of Doc’s mystery intact, not attempting to explain what the real Holliday never did, namely the reason he left home, moving on and on till, “[a]t last, the universe could not locate itself in him.” Was it lingering melancholy over his mother’s death? A search for a climate where a consumptive could breathe without pain? An unrequited love? The mystery goes to the grave with Doc who, on his deathbed, is shocked to discover his boots are still on.

Gallantly, though, Olds allows Doc a crack at lighting a candle to his own psyche. “All I ever wanted was to be the hero of my own life. More’s the pity, then, that the hand I was dealt was littered so with jokers.” But ultimately fitting for the eternal wild card in the West’s most enduring legend.