Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Fred Erisman Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. By Jackson J. Benson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 336 pages, $29.95. Students of western literature have long needed a scholarly biography of A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Under the Big Sky seems to meet that need, at least on the surface. Wholly traditional in form, it follows Guthrie through the ninety years of his lifetime. We learn of his boyhood in Choteau, Montana; his journalistic career in Lexington, Kentucky; his Nieman Fellowship at Harvard; his triumphs with The Big Sky (1947) and the screenplay for Shane (1951); his turn to full-time writing; and his subsequent dalliances with Hollywood. Each of his major works—the "Dick Summers" trilogy of The Big Sky, The Way West (1949), and Fair Land, Fair Land (1982) and the "Settlement" trilogy of These Thousand Hills (1956), Arfive (1971), and The Last Valley (1975)—comes in for passing mention, as do his five Chick Charleston mysteries and his late-in-life environmental writings. But Benson does not neglect Guthrie's shortcomings either. We see the failure of his first marriage, the tangled courtship leading to his second marriage, his estrangement from his children, and his struggles with alcohol. All the expected pieces are there—which leaves one wondering why the book is ultimately so unsatisfying. Benson has ample resources to invigorate his work. He uses extensive interviews with Guthrie's friends and family, he excerpts Guthrie's letters, and does scholarship a favor by retrieving Charles E. Hood's 1969 University of Montana master's thesis, itself a full-scale biography of Guthrie. He draws heavily and perhaps uncritically upon Guthrie's autobiography, The Blue Hen's Chick (1965), for the first half of his work, peppering his text with informal anecdotes from a [End Page 300] variety of sources. From all these, he strives to assemble a fully fleshed picture of Guthrie the person, Guthrie the artist, and Guthrie the student of western history. The emotional and intellectual flesh is largely missing, though, and where we expect acuity, we find only coziness. A roseate good feeling permeates the book as Benson spins his yarns. Guthrie, invariably called by his life-long nickname, "Bud," ambles along, seemingly untouched by the vicissitudes he meets. "Wally" Stegner, "Benny" DeVoto, "Dick" Hugo, and Bud's younger brother, "Chick" (for Charles), have affable speaking roles. When his wife weans him away from spirits and onto wine, we chuckle at Bud's skill (described twice) at filling wineglasses to the brim and note the portentous disclosure that he was "a happy drunk" (251). The anecdotal structure and eccentric documentation make it difficult to tell when Benson is detailing fact or drawing a long bow for the sake of ambience, and what results is a reader's biography, not a scholar's. Jackson Benson has given us memorable lives of John Steinbeck and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and we are in his debt. Here, however, he nods. We come away from Under the Big Sky knowing a great deal about Guthrie's day-to-day life, but distressingly little that is fresh about the writer's ideas, concerns, and substantial contribution to western literature. Benson gives us the words, but the music is absent. Fred Erisman Texas Christian University, Fort Worth Copyright © 2009 Western Literature Association