The Time It Never Rained by Elmer Kelton

Abstract

230 Western American Literature This sensitive collection penned by a sensitive man should be read with pleasure by historians, folklorists, and critics of literature alike. RICHARD C. POULSEN, University of Utah The Time It Never Rained. By Elmer Kelton. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1973. 373 pages. $6.95.) Elmer Kelton’s new novel, The Time It Never Rained, is one of the best American novels of the year. I deliberately used the term “American” novel rather than “Western” because even though the book deals explicitly with the problems of contemporary west Texas ranchers during a period of prolonged drought, Kelton implicitly raises fundamental issues which probe dramatically beneath the parochial concerns of cowboys. In The Time It Never Rained, ranchers talk continually about such practical matters as their herds, their crops, and the prospects of rain; but beneath such practical matters, Kelton analyzes the ultimate and potential dignity of man when not only survival but humanity itself is at stake. Reduced to its basic narrative utterance, The Time It Never Rained is a powerful restatement of the Job story. Charlie Flagg, the aging, stubbornly independent hero, endures all the personal and environmental hardships which life and nature impose. At the end of the novel, when the rain finally comes after six years of drought, Charlie emerges much poorer in possessions but with his human dignity entirely intact. Unlike most of his fellow ranchers, he is neither a ward of the government nor a cog in a corporation. Kelton establishes his hero’s dignity and courage in a fascinatingly simple manner: not on the bravado codes of vengeance or the horrifying acts of violence which characterize much of our, so-called, popular western literature, but rather on such elemental values as those which all honest people must struggle to learn from whatever sources they can. Charlie Flagg learns his from the Indians and the early settlers of west Texas who knew that the life producing truces among men and beasts and land are uneasy ones, ones painstakenly formed and perilously preserved, ones easily and disastrously broken by such unpredictable natural events as too much wind or too little rain. As Charlie and the oldtimers saw it, the delicate balance on which survival depends creates relationships which are almost sacred in their mysteriousness. “He sensed the seasonal ebb and flow of life in the ground beneath his feet. He sensed birth and death and rebirth, as generations of his forebears had sensed it living tied to the earth.” Charlie Reviews 231 discovers, however, that his view is the old way and, like himself and the old coyote on his ranch, the old way of life is crippled and dying. Govern­ ment subsidies and corporate farming are creating a new system of imper­ sonal values. Almost alone among the ranchers, Charlie refuses to sell “his freedom bit by bit” and be paid for it “on the installment plan.” As one of the government supervisors said, “He’s gone out of style, but the world will be a poorer place when it loses the last of his kind.” Though Charlie Flagg dominates the novel, other finely drawn ranchtype characters cluster about him : his quietly determined wife is more stubbornly concerned about his diet than she is anxious about the drought; his prodigal son, Tom, the rodeo circuit rider, manages both in his life and in his career to fall short of winning a championship; the loyal Flores family live on Charlie’s ranch and work for him until the drought forces them to leave; his banker supports Charlie in a cause which both he and Charlie know is bound eventually to fail; and Page Malden, his enterprising old friend, dashes madly about in his cadillac trying frantically to keep his financially shaky cattle kingdom from falling apart. With Charlie Flagg, these, and a host of other supporting characters make The Time It Never Rained almost unique as a modern novel: a refreshing affirmation of the rugged dignity of man, a wasteland which is not full of Prufrocks. In effect, like the hero he created, Elmer Kelton has refused to compromise his artistic vision to accommodate modern acclaim for bravado brutality and weeping narcissism...