DISCOVERIES

Perhaps the hardest thing about writing is condensing the senses down to the page with its insulting lack of dimension. On top of that, to reproduce how the mind, a mind, processes and perceives that information. Often, the most a reader gets is a personality, fully formed, with little indication of how it got to be that way, how the wind and the landscape and the parents and grandparents and the wars and economies all combined to create that character. Thomas Savage, in this 1967 classic of western literature, finally reprinted, does this with an elegance and parsimony that most writers strive for but never achieve. And that’s only one thing to admire. The descriptions of Montana, the Burbank ranch at the turn of the century, when the locomotive, referred to by cowboys as “the power,” was just starting to interrupt steer herding and carve pathways of industry across the west, are pure but full of portent: “One comes to count on the usual and the expected, the appearance of the sun, the chilling voice of wild geese wedging south, the breakup of the ice, the shy green grass on the south slopes, the heady breezes that disturb the purple camas.”

The people who live and work here are caught in this moment in history, a pivot, with the Indians still making their way to reservations in Idaho, by foot, a part of that landscape. The cowboys, with a new awareness of themselves as moving picture “cowboys” are losing the connection to the land, their cosmography: “The new sun rising above the eastern hills showed a world so vast and hostile to individual hope that the young cowhands clung to memories of home, kitchen stoves, mothers’ voices .... “ In this, the novel resembles “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which a thoroughly despicable character is made somehow sympathetic, given the pace of change and the historical forces ripping him apart.

At the center of the novel are two brothers, Phil Burbank, 40, and George, 38, local aristocracy, worth more than $15 million, heirs to a ranch their parents, the Old Gent and the Old Lady, all but abandoned to them, decamping to a hotel suite in Salt Lake City. Phil, the smart one, has the stronger connection to the ranch. It is Phil and not George, who sees the symbolic figure of a running dog, “in pursuit of some frightened thing,” in the rock formation behind the ranch. He bathes in a sacred spot once a month, refuses to change for dinner, hates “sassiety” and will not fraternize outside his class. Phil fights his own homosexuality with a predatory hatred of “sissies,” anyone weaker than himself, which in his mind includes Jews, Indians and women.

George on the other hand, Abel to Phil’s Cain, is all kindness, slowness and generosity. It is George who has a shot at happiness, and Phil, with his deep, deep instincts, knows this.

That happiness comes in the form of Rose Gordon, widow of Johnny Gordon, a good man who killed himself, leaving Rose and their fragile son, Peter, who loves reading and flowers and wants to become a doctor like his father, to fend for themselves. George marries Rose, not knowing that it was his brother Phil, calling Johnny’s son a sissy in a barroom brawl, who began his long slide into depression and suicide. The boy grows up with a cold spot in his heart, a desire to avenge his father’s death and to salvage his mother’s happiness. When the two are brought into the Burbank family, Phil does his level best to destroy Rose, turning her into an alcoholic; plotting to create a wedge between her and her son. Peter, possessed of his father’s quiet wisdom, gets his chance for revenge.

Savage writes like thunder and lightning. A flash will illuminate startling detail, a rumble will bring a fierce revelation, a philosophy, a big picture. It has a jarring, unsettling effect, like many great books, a reminder of inevitable change, of civilizations crumbling.

In the western silence, the male imperative, people die clutching secrets and wisdom never spoken of. When a father tells his son “I love you” and tries to explain the importance of kindness (“To be kind is to try to remove obstacles in the way of those who love or need you”), you hold your breath for the lightning. And it comes, cracking the Earth and revealing the sparkle of coldness, of cruelty, in human nature.

In her afterword, Annie Proulx calls Savage “one of the first of the Montana writers,” yet he was, she writes, “rarely included in the western literary lists.” Savage, born in 1915, grew up in Montana, heir to the fortunes of two families following his parent’s early divorce, one in sheep and one in cattle. There has been much bemoaning of the fact that “The Power of the Dog” was never a bestseller, never got the recognition of the number of readers it deserves. Some books are like aquifers under the desert. They rest patiently, bubbling up in springs when we most need them.