MICHAEL ALLEN University of Mississippi "Only the eternal nothing of Space": Richard Hugo's West Any understanding of Richard Hugo's West must begin back in the 1890s when three easterners invented the West that has played such an important part in American culture in this century. The West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen ''''ister grew out of the expansive energies of easterners who made, consciously or unconsciously , a myth of American toughness overcoming the vast potentialities of the West's natural resources. Owen Wister wanted his novel, The Virginian (1902), to become a national fable, uniting North and South, East and West; what he created was the figure of male hero who would have few feelings, few human connections and few needs; who would do his job in the wilderness successfully and make that wilderness accessible to eastern expansion. Since Wister, the popular understanding of the West as a region has always been tied to that male hero: the tough man and the vast landscapes are as inseparable as cowboy and horse. It was perhaps, as G. Edward White maintains,' merely an expression of popular temperament that Wister gave voice to; whatever the root cause, the making of the myth bears Wister's name. His Virginian has given us generations of men who have feared feelings, who have been quick to fear aliens of whatever color and to deny their need for human contact -Th IG. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: lIa e West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (New ven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 73. 26 Western American Literature for fear of being less than masculine; who have valued the physical above the emotional, the big above the necessary, the tough above the humane. Richard Hugo, taking a similar tough-guy stance and living in a similar landscape as the Virginian, has given us, in The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), a poetry which works against this myth of the West and the western hero. Unlike Wister, Remington and Roosevelt, Hugo is a born westerner who owes nothing to eastern sion or that eastern establishment from which the three makers of West came: nothing, perhaps, except his childhood poverty during the Depression. Where Wister and his friends found beautiful solitude and toughness, Hugo takes that same landscape and expresses the need for human community, for the necessary presence of human feelings to keep a man sane and whole. He has seen the remains of those expansionist energies which Roosevelt and Wister applauded and he has seen as hardly heroic: Cries of gold or men about to hang trail off where the brewery failed on West Main. Greedy fingernails ripped the ground up inch by inch down the gulch until the hope of gold ran out and men began to pimp. Gold is where you find it in the groin. ("Helena, Where Homes Go Mad") 2 If Hugo had seen that early Wyoming settlement of Medicine Bow, from which the Virginian rides off into the mountains, he would have far more of the bottles and tin cans outside the saloons. That trash part of the human presence, indicative of human needs and dreams of the people who lived there. For Hugo, the West is a dream that does belong to those who would - and do - exploit its land; the dreams the West are those failed hopes of the poor and the greedy and the who came there to find a better life. To Hugo, the American dream is not the unlimited possibilities of expansion but the ache of need. His landscape, vast and rugged as it still is, is a place where a possibilities are limited by that ruggedness and its associated weathers and winds that beat against human enterprise and make those connections between people that much more important. 2Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (New York: 1973), p. 10. Subsequent quotation from this book are followed by page references. Michael Allen 27 In Montana then, Richard Hugo's West is born, big and "thick as a fist / or blunt instrument" where "long roads weave and curve / red veins of rage" ("A Map of Montana...