Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien

Abstract

Reviewed by: Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien Paul Lindholdt O. Alan Weltzien, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2020. 257 pp. Hardcover, $40. Professor emeritus Alan Weltzien has hit upon a captivating story that begins in Dillon, Montana, where he taught for twenty-nine years at the University of Montana Western. Author Thomas Savage was raised there, moved East for college, wed his sweetheart, fathered three children, wrote thirteen novels— and conducted an adulterous homosexual affair that threatened to disintegrate his household. A batch of family facts buoys the psychological insights in this first Savage biography. The book ventures into territory many straight angels fear to tread— into gender politics. Annie Proulx, in her afterword to the reissue of Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog (1967, 2001), characterizes the male protagonist as “a vicious bitch,” which Weltzien considers “a violent, homophobic phrase” (101). In novel after novel Thomas Savage returned to the landscapes of his childhood and young adulthood. Those landscapes include southwestern Montana and Central Idaho. “In his fiction,” Weltzien writes, “ranches wreck people and small towns often do as well” (223). In an approach-avoidance pattern combining inspiration and disdain, Savage recalls Thomas Wolfe and his Asheville, North Carolina; Sherwood Anderson and his Clyde, Ohio. Savage wrote a more autobiographical fiction than most of his predecessors, though, and Weltzien does a fine job of cross-referencing Savage relatives with their fictional avatars. The philistines that people his novels become mouthpieces for Savage to satirize the dearth of elegance he discovered in the Intermountain West. There is much to admire in the way this book places Savage within American intellectual history. Eschewing the genre Westerns of Zane Gray and Owen Wister, Savage instead practiced “a steady excoriation of his hometown” (178). He criticized the settler-colonial tradition made popular by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and other “professional Montanans” whom he discredited (188). Invited back to Dillon in 1983, Savage was a featured writer and keynote speaker at an arts festival— only after Guthrie turned the sponsors down. A fan of Savage and his “queer-inflected” West (215), Weltzien presents [End Page 87] an extended lament that the author remains a mere “footnote in American literary history” (208). The gender studies elements in this good biography recommend it. “Savage flaunted his gay desires through his luxury sports cars,” Weltzien writes, “the bright luster of their finish and the purr of their engines” serving as stand-ins for himself (73). Costly cars as identity markers, including a Rolls Royce, belied his economic condition: his books never sold well. The thirteen superb photos in the book modestly exclude a revealing nude photo of him that features “a festooned braid of seaweed serving as his G-string” (79). Commendable, too, is Weltzien’s sleuthing through Savage’s life to discover his male lover, one Tomie dePaola, who told a chilling story. The two were caught by surprise in Boston, and dePaola was battered by Savage’s upset son. Afterward, “Tom insisted on sex, which dePaola characterized as ‘very rough’” (93). Following that sad interlude together, Savage “cut ties and reverted to his older loyalty,” his wife and children (94). Alan Weltzien is a good friend whose work I admire. Having edited volumes on Rick Bass, Norman Maclean, and John McPhee, he has built a solid standing as a biographer. He has also published multiple articles on Savage, spoken on him at conferences, and led tours within what he dubs Savage West. Contrary to that other West, which is “a repository of national wish fulfillment perpetuated by popular cultural production” (215), Savage West is a literary site where women are accorded great respect and male ranchers get bared as the brutes and bullies that would turn Montana politically red. Parts of this biography seem to have been rushed into print. In 2019 Palme d’Or winner and director Jane Campion began filming The Power of the Dog, Savage’s most celebrated novel (110). In the interim, COVID hit, film production was delayed, and this biography bears a couple dozen blotches in documentation, grammar, spelling, and punctuation...