The Adventures of Barney Tullus by Don D. Walker

Abstract

390 Western American Literature novel in a re-ordered, re-worked form in English (done no doubt with great care and love by a long-time friend), then he should read Hinojosa’s version. Vigil-Pinon’s rendition is assuredly accurate and quite sensitive as she brings to task her considerable skills as a poet, with an excellent result. (See Thirty an’ Seen a Lot—1982, and The Computer Is Down—1987.) She has done a firstrate job, capturing the spirit, tone, and rhythm of Rivera’s masterpiece. CARL R. SHIRLEY University of South Carolina The Adventures of Barney Tullus. By Don D. Walker. (Albuquerque: Uni­ versity of New Mexico Press, 1988). 240 pages, $19.95. Probably not since Max Evans’ The Rounders has anything in western American literature provided as many laughs as The Adventures of Barney Tullus, purported to be by Don D. Walker, a distinguished professor and exceptional teacher at the University of Utah, now retired, who also has a tiny “ranch”—the “Flying W Ranch”—in southern Utah. WLA members will well remember such satires on academic criticism as the chapters “The Rise and Fall of Barney Tullus,” and “The Blue Saddle Blanket: The Novelist and the Nouveau Western,” delivered at separate meetings of the Western Litera­ ture Association, but readers who have not been fortunate enough to have received copies of “The Possible Sack” will find a wealth of humor in the short stories about Barney Tullus and the other cowboys, especially Mont and Sill and Burt, and the narrator of the stories, Andrew Monroe Pickens, on Mr. Pulley’sranch just outside of Pinville, Utah. One could only describe this collection of essays as running the gamut between the amusing and the hilarious. There are stories of Barney Tullus milking cows (“The Milk of Human Kindness”), chasing spirits (“The Devil and Barney Tullus”), and dealing with intrusions from the outer world— a supposed collector of cowboy songs (“The Singing Cowboys”), an efficiency expert (“The Evaluation”), two professors studying the myth of the cowboy (“The Western Experience”), and a professor interested in the literary life of the cowboy (“Cowboy Culture”). Somehow, Pulley’s cowhands manage to survive these and other experiences, and almost always with a moral to be learned from the experience. As Sill says at the end of “The Western Experi­ ence,” “it all comes down to motive. And there ain’t nothing a proud mouse would rather do than piss on a poor cowboy’s blanket.” Like Mark Twain, Walker, if indeed he is the author of all the stories, has the perfect sense of rhythm and timing, together with a command of the vernacular that makes this an exceptional book. Furthermore, the selections have been carefully made to give some coherence, some continuity, to the different tales which end with a mystery, “The Bunkhouse Murders.” The Adventures of Barney Tullus should be bought and read. But it is a collection that should be taken, like a popular brand of vitamins, one (chapter) a day. Otherwise, although there is no warning from the Surgeon General either on Reviews 391 the dust-jacket or the spine, the book can be hazardous to one’sribs, lungs, and diaphragm,—organic parts that can be injured by immoderate laughter. The book is not, however, the complete collection of Barney Tullus, and many fans may be disappointed by the absence of their favorite—mine being “Barney Tullus and the Bosboy.” One hopes that the University of New Mexico Press will publish another collection, perhaps called The Best of Barney Tullus. Both Dr. Walker and the editors at UNM Press should be faulted, how­ ever, on their failure to keep abreast of contemporary scholarship. Walker certainly is no longer accurate in his statement (p. 3) that “a critical history of Barney Tullus of course remains to be written, although earnest graduate students may already be at work on such a project.” Indeed that project has been completed (see my dissertation in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy in English at Metropolitan City’s Cosmopolitan College of Fine and Industrial Arts), and I am presently preparing a manuscript for the Western Writers Series (Boise State University) which, through both...