Cactus Thorn by Mary Austin

Abstract

Reviews 175 guitar; Sgt. Stanley Norman, drums or weak bass; Sgt. Mark Reiter, piano. Together they make up The Roy Warner Trio, and when they play, they turn their ordinary lives into ballads, the whole novel becoming a performance— a dance of music and language that says more than either medium could alone. Jazz is of course the underlying language. Perhaps only Ed Lueders— a gifted jazz pianist and writer (The Clam Lake Papers)—could have written this seemingly simple, yet immensely complex, powerful cuento of our times. He makes the sea his central metaphor, the troopship USS GeneralSimon P. Bliss almost one of the characters, and held within this metaphor of the sea is a mythic tale of a man who may or may not have fallen overboard. (The Man Overboard himself seems hardly character at first, for He is Lost. No one seems to know even His name.) Later, this man becomes very important to the three men who merely rode that ship back from World War II to unknown destinies. In the end, the name of the Man Overboard can’t be separated from nine names of men supposedly aboard the General Blissbut who do not answer at the huge roll call—eight of whom seem to be even more mysteriously lost than is the Man Overboard. Lueders’ novel could be favorably compared with Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools in the sense that The Wake of the General Bliss is also a mystic novel of the sea. And flickers of The Ship of Fools remained in my mind as I read. Moby Dick? The Secret Sharer? All present and accounted for aboard the General Bliss, but only as the whispers of sympathetic ghosts in the rigging of another ship bound on a deep, deep sea voyage, all their voices almost lost in the wind. Lueders’novel isvery much his own. As I said, Edward Lueders has written a fine novel, a wonderful novel. Do read it. KEITH WILSON Las Cruces, New Mexico Cactus Thorn. By Mary Austin, with foreword and afterword by Melody Graulich. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1988. 120 pages, $14.95.) Austin has added novelistic expansion to the landscape and simple plot­ ting of her superb desert tales in order to develop some of her familiar themes: the spiritual force of the land, female superiority, male fatuity, and the arti­ ficiality of marriage codes. Like all Austin heroines, desert-reared Dulcie Adelaid Vallodon is selfsufficient and intuitively wise, and like the lovely cactus flower she resembles, she carries a thorn, her mother’sdagger. Grant Arliss, a social reformer seeking rest in the desert, finds himself alone with Dulcie in a remote retreat. When they become lovers, he experiences the renewal that for him is the meaning 176 Western American Literature of sexual union. Dulcie’s alcoholic husband interrupts their idyll. After Dulcie takes her dying husband to a hospital, Arliss returns to New York, electrifies his followers with ideas derived from Dulcie’s, and becomes engaged to the daughter of a powerful politician. Dulcie trustingly joins Arliss in New York, believing that his highminded social principles also apply to his personal life, but he cares more about the threat to his position than about her feelings. When she realizes she has been “used—exploited,” she stabs him, escapes unseen, and returns to the healing desert. As Graulich indicates, Austin modeled Arliss on Lincoln Steffens, who dumped her for another woman. At their worst, the men in Austin’s novels are egocentric, at their best, inept, unless they learn from an earth mother or Mother Earth. Arliss muffs his chance, and by telling the story largely from his perspective, Austin mercilessly exposes his hypocrisy. Austin’s editor identified the novella’s weakness when he rejected it because “the hero’s defection and his subsequent murder by the lady are not made absolutely convincing.” Arliss’s treatment of Dulcie in New York is so heartless that his portrait sometimes seems a man-hating diatribe. Though her “cactus thorn” foreshadows the stabbing, Dulcie herself neither exhibits a capacity for violence nor shows that Arliss’s death is essential to her peace, as other foreshadowing suggests...