Montana has long been the last Eden of American literature, a land of plenty where you could still dance with wolves, and stuff yourself with wild life in the company of writers hunting the absolute under the stars. They are called Thomas McGuane, James Welch, William Kittredge, Richard Ford or Rick Bass, and of course Jim Harrison, who disappeared pen in hand. To these names must be added that of a tenor born in 1915 in Salt Lake City: Thomas Savage, the Giono of the Far West, whose pen resuscitates the magical settings of pioneer America.
It was there, on a ranch in Montana, that Savage spent all his youth, an enchanted period until the end of the 1930s. Like an authentic cowboy, he learned to handle the lasso, to break the foals. , to tend the herds, to tan soul and leather in the dust of the great plains, under the jagged tiara of the Rockies. An often hostile world, where “the stakes, broken by the long icy winters and the howling of the wind, took refuge in alcoholism and crisscrossed the bars where they scrutinized the reflection of their fierce faces in the mirrors behind the counters”, writes Savage.
John Wayne lookalikes
In his writer’s bag, a dozen novels in which John Wayne look-alikes, with their feet in the stirrup, express their immoderate love for the West. Of this mythical land, Savage is not satisfied with exalting the burning beauty: he shows how it shapes manners, how it infiltrates the folds of hearts by subjecting beings to its violence, its excess, its indomitable savagery. “I always believed that the landscape formed people. They resemble the natural elements that gave them birth, because they are above all creatures forged in the bowels of the earth, ”explained Savage, whose work erupts like a thunderstorm.
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“The Power of the Dog” or the power of the landscape over souls, according to Thomas Savage
Published in 1967 in Boston, The power of the dog is considered a cult novel in the United States, where it appears in school curricula. Here it is reissued in a new translation by Gallmeister and we discover a superb – and tragic – family camera, under the guise of country song bucolic. Everything is there, the murmurs of the wind and the pain of men, the horses whistling and destinies breaking, the summers burning and the death advancing at a wolf’s pace, in a breathtaking crescendo.
A world full of prohibitions
We are in the heart of Montana, in 1924, on an imposing ranch where the two Burbank brothers, hardened bachelors, rule over a thousand oxen and a dozen farm boys. George, the youngest, is a good dough, a silent hard worker, a little obtuse but generous. He saw in the shadow of Phil, the eldest, a beautiful spirit doubled as a monster “with the long reptile gaze”. Cultured, arrogant, perverse. And who plays his macho role to perfection, to hide the homosexuality that has tormented him since adolescence – the worst of infamies, in this world of boors steeped in prohibitions.
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A novel about a deadly family in the American melting pot
Everything changes when George commits the irreparable by marrying Rose, an ex-pianist of bastringue that bad tongues drag in the mud. The couple move upstairs and, in a few months, the Burbank ranch will turn into hell. Because Phil decided to eliminate the intruder, no matter what. He harasses her, humiliates her, overwhelms her with his contempt. Poignant scenes, where the prey is gradually allowed to be devoured in the large silent building, under the pale reproductions of Fragonard. In the face of so much treachery, George remains powerless. Between the two brothers, hatred is at its height. Rose begins to drink. More and more. She sinks, body and soul. Phil won.
Chekhovian finesse
Won? Not sure. Because the demons he persists in muzzling will eventually overwhelm him in turn, while Savage relishes his revenge in a masterful outcome. The power of the dog is not just a documentary on rural America from the interwar years. It is a novel which attacks a major taboo – homosexuality – in an era subject to the most retrograde prejudices. And these pages are above all the story of a fratricidal, pitiless struggle, as if Cain and Abel had landed in this savage West where animals are castrated with daggers.
The story begins in the style of a cambrousard western but we discover, over the pages, that Savage has the touch and finesse of a Chekhov, over a scenario that can be read at a gallop. With, in emphasis, these words taken from the Psalms, the mystery of which penetrates every sentence of the American: “Deliver my soul from the sword. And my loved one, from the power of the dog. ”
Roman
Thomas Savage
The power of the dog
Translated from the American by Laura Derajinski
Gallmeister, 390 p.
Citation:
To be good is to remove obstacles in the way of those who love you or need you.
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