Little Big Man (2 page)

Even Ralph Fielding Snell calls attention to this phenomenon, inviting his readers to consider a number of specific seeming inconsistencies in Jack’s narration, including the fact that while Jack’s own voice is often ungrammatical, his representation of Custer’s speech or of Indian discourse is always impeccable (
this page–
this page
).

Berger’s game here is a complicated one: By having Snell point out the seemingly surprising flashes of sophistication in Jack’s narration, he alerts us to the possibility that the entire narrative is a hoax; however, by calling attention to this verbal phenomenon, Snell diverts our attention from the even more unlikely aspects of Jack’s voice. The interplay between editor Snell and narrator Crabb can only remind us of that between editor John Ray, Jr., and narrator Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s
Lolita
. But just as surely as Jack’s voice belongs to the chorus of recent voices announcing that literature is a delightful hoax, it belongs to the chorus of “historical” voices determined to tell the way the Old West actually “was,” quite different enterprises united only by the medium of language.

What is perhaps most interesting in Jack’s voice is its ability to transcend cultural issues in pursuit of larger truths. This ability to synthesize the vagaries of his experience into larger propositions about reality does not make Jack wise, as the pattern of his personal disasters starkly attests, but he persistently pursues the grail of understanding, even when at considerable personal cost. He mulls the ironies of frontier conflict and routinely plays devil’s advocate to some of the most dearly held received truths of western lore, matching the wondering charm, escaping the sentimentality, and surpassing the wisdom of Huck Finn, another of Jack’s literary forerunners.

Finally, Jack is able to cast even the most famous battle in the history of the Old West into unexpectedly philosophical terms, seeing it for its unity rather than its conflict:

Looking at the great universal circle, my dizziness grew still. I wasn’t wobbling no more. I was there, in movement, yet at the center of the world, where all is self-explanatory merely because it
is
. Being at the Greasy Grass or not, and on whichever side, and having survived or perished, never made no difference.

We had all been men. Up there, on the mountain, there was no separations (
this page
).

It is through observations such as this that Jack transcends some of the limitations of both white and Indian worldviews, coming to understand, as Frederick Turner puts it, “both myth and history as radically human constructs.”

Although in many ways the story of Jack’s narrative is more fascinating than the story of his life, one aspect of that life is particularly significant: Jack’s quest is always for freedom. All the self-reflexive or meta-literary elements in this novel finally exist to direct our attention to the relationship between language and freedom. And it is in this light that
Little Big Man
, a literal model of the traditional “captivity narrative” most directly dramatizes Berger’s fascination with the ways in which language serves to make captives of us all.

In this one fundamental respect, Berger’s contribution to the literature of the frontier strikes a radically new note. Whether by virtue of a noble primitivism, as in the case of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, or by virtue of an opportunistic amorality, as in the case of most of the frontier characters of the southwestern humorists or the “wild and woolly” heroes of the Beadle dime novels, or Huck Finn striking out for new territory, the western hero has been at bottom the very exemplar of individual freedom—often of anarchic freedom. Deadwood Dick, for example, is beyond the reach of almost all obligations because he has survived hanging as a thief, a feat Jack approaches by surviving at the Little Bighorn.

What finally distinguishes Jack from Deadwood Dick and his other American literary predecessors is that
he is not free
: he may escape the trappings of captivity, whether at the hands of the Indians, the Pendrakes, or of commerical creditors, but Jack remains the slave of his own standards—his haunting sense of obligation to definitions. Jack repeatedly states his admiration for others who understand real freedom, but Jack cannot himself escape the bonds of his own definitions. As he diagnoses his own problem when he runs away from the Pendrakes, intending to return to the Cheyenne: “God knows I thought enough about it and kept telling myself I was basically an Indian, just as when among Indians I kept seeing how I was really white to the core” (
this page
). No matter how desperate or low his situation, Jack maintains his faith in codes of conduct but he cannot reconcile the competing claims of the Cheyenne standards—which he understands and respects—with white standards—which he simply cannot keep from measuring himself against, no matter how unjustified or contradictory he knows them to be. When Jack opens his narrative with the claim “I am a white man and never forgot it,” he refers to his personal curse more than to a matter of racial pride.

The problem is that Jack’s sense of himself always looks beyond the concrete satisfaction of his very real accomplishments to the impossibly abstract ideal of civilization; Jack judges himself not as a man but as a
white
man. Hard-nosed pragmatist or cynic in so many things, Jack is a sucker for the ideal of civilization and progress even though he finds the reality inexorably disappointing. For him, Mrs. Pendrake emblemizes civilization, even when her actual conduct profoundly disillusions him:

She always knowed the
right thing
so far as civilization went, like an Indian knows it for savagery.…

I figured to have got the idea of white life, right then. It hadn’t ought to do with the steam engine or arithmetic or even Mr. Pope’s verse. Its aim was to turn out a Mrs. Pendrake (
this page
).

The point of all of this is that while Jack’s sensibility is beyond sentimentality in most matters, at heart it is hopelessly romantic in its acceptance of the myth of progress and civilization, the myth of white culture that steamrolled the West. Intellectually, Jack is all for the Indian concern with what
is
as opposed to the white preoccupation with how things
should be
, but his commitment never grows firm enough to afford him any satisfaction.

The one seeming exception in Jack’s life demonstrates the true extent of his misery. On the night of his Indian son’s birth, the night before Custer’s attack on the Cheyennes camped along the Washita, Jack achieves his greatest moment of personal freedom, overcoming his white sense of morality to fulfill his Cheyenne obligation to his wife’s sisters. Before making love to the three sisters, Jack faces his usual dilemma (“my trouble lay in deciding whether I was finally white or Indian”) but for once manages to suppress his “white” standards: “There could be no doubt that I had once and for all turned 100 percent Cheyenne insofar as that was possible by the actions of the body.… No, all seemed right to me at that moment. It was one of the few times I felt: this is the way things are and should be. I had medicine then, that’s the only word for it.
I knew where the center of the world was
” (
this page
).

Once, but not for all. The key phrase in Jack’s reverie is “insofar as that was possible by the actions of the body,” and what he fails to achieve is liberation through the actions of the mind. Custer’s attack shatters his peace, destroys the world whose center he had just found, and throws him back into the clutches of white standards and expectations. Appropriately enough, the only real and lasting triumph in Jack’s life must be created and measured in accordance with those white standards. That triumph is his “uncorrupting” of the young whore Amelia, the one hoax in his life that really succeeds, based as it is almost entirely in the abstract ideals of white society, and carried off almost entirely through the medium of language.

In fabricating the new Amelia, Jack most closely approaches the ideal of white society symbolized for him by Mrs. Pendrake. In this one area Jack manages to free himself from culturally imposed definitions and to act not as some standard of conduct dictated, but as he chose. His explanation reveals a momentary insight into his own ever-losing struggle with absolute definitions. Acknowledging the suspect nature of Amelia’s claim to be his niece, Jack defiantly states that since all of his “real” families had been torn from him by disaster, he had earned the right “to say who was or wasn’t my kin” (
this page
). For once Jack manages to define a situation. But when Jack records his satisfaction at Amelia’s success, he measures his pride in cultural rather than personal terms, judging his success at arranging her respectability “about as high as a white man can aspire.”

Jack’s
achievements
are Cheyenne, his
aspirations
are white, and therein lies a kind of captivity against which his shiftiness has no power. What may be the most significant of the many levels of meaning in
Little Big Man
is not that Jack survives but that he suffers—ever victimized by his own hypostatization of “white ideals. Jack displays many of the afflictions of Nietzsche’s man of
ressentiment
, fighting and scheming for physical freedom but always hobbled by his own sense of impossible obligations. The moment of his greatest victory also reminds us of his ultimate submission to the tyranny of self-imposed definitions, just as the Indian victory at the Little Bighorn marked the end of the Plains Indian way of life.

B
ROOKS
L
ANDON
University of Iowa      

Foreword by a Man of Letters

IT WAS MY PRIVILEGE
to know the late Jack Crabb—frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne—in his final days upon this earth. An account of my association with this remarkable individual may not be out of order here, for there is good reason to believe that without my so to speak catalytic function these extraordinary memoirs would never have seen the light of day. This apparently immodest statement will, I trust, be justified by the ensuing paragraphs.

In the autumn of 1952, following an operation to correct a deviated right septum of the nose, I convalesced in my home under the care of a middle-aged practical nurse named Mrs. Winifred Burr. Mrs. Burr was a widow, and since she has by now herself passed away (as a result of an unfortunate accident involving her Plymouth and a beer truck), she will not be hurt by my description of her as stout, over-curious, and spiteful. She was also incredibly strong and, though I am a man of some bulk, when washing me tumbled me about as if I were an infant.

I might add here, in acknowledgment of the current fashion in literary confession, that from this treatment I derived no sexual excitement whatever. I dreaded those ablutions and used every feasible device to gain my freedom from them. Alas! To no avail. I believe she was trying to provoke me to discharge her—a self-damaging enterprise, since nursing was her livelihood. But Mrs. Burr was one of those people who indulge their moral code as a drunkard does his thirst. Her late husband had been an engineer of freight trains for thirty years, and hence her idea of an adult male American was a person who wore sooty coveralls and a long-billed cap made of striped pillow ticking.

She did not think my physical disrepair serious enough to require a nurse (although my nose was swollen and both eyes black). She disapproved of my means of life—a modest allowance from my father, who was well-to-do, afforded me an opportunity to pursue my literary and historical interests with relative indifference to, and immunity from, the workaday world, for which, notwithstanding, I have the greatest respect. And, as one might expect from a widow, she took a dim view of my bachelorhood at the age of fifty-two, and went so far as to let drop certain nasty implications (which were altogether unjustified: I was once married; I have numerous lady friends, several of whom came to call during my period of incapacity; and I do not own a silk dressing gown).

Mrs. Burr gave me many an unpleasant hour, and it might seem strange that I let her figure so largely in the limited space of this preface, the purpose of which is to introduce a major document of the American frontier and then retire to my habitual obscurity. Well, as so often happens in the affairs of men, fate uses as its instrument such an otherwise unrewarding person as my quondam nurse to further its inscrutable aims.

Between her attacks on me with the washrag and her preparations of the weak tea, toast, and chicken broth that constituted my sustenance during this period, Mrs. Burr was driven by her insatiable curiosity to poke around the apartment like a common burglar. In the bedroom, she operated under the guise of her merciful profession. “Got to get some clean puhjommas on yuh,” she would say, and deaf to my instructions, would proceed to ransack every drawer in the bureau. Once beyond sight, however, she pretended to no vestige of decency, and from my bed I could hear her assault, one by one, the various enclosures throughout the other rooms, desks, cabinets, and chests—many of them quite valuable examples of Spanish-colonial craftsmanship which I procured during my years in northern New Mexico, where I had gone to strengthen my weak lungs on high-altitude air.

It was when I heard her slide back one of the glass doors of the case containing my beloved collection of Indian relics that I was forced to protest, even if the vibration of a shout did make my poor nose throb in pain.

“Mrs. Burr! I must insist that you let my Indian things alone!” cried I.

She shortly appeared in the door of the bedroom, wearing a magnificent Sioux headdress, reputedly the war bonnet of the great Crazy Horse himself, for which I paid a dealer six hundred and fifty dollars some years ago. I was too agitated at the moment to appreciate the sheer visual ludicrousness of this fat woman under that splendid crest. I was too shocked by her heresy. Among the Indians, eagle feathers belonged exclusively to the braves, and a squaw would no more wear a war bonnet, even in jest, than a modern woman would climb into her husband’s athletic supporter. Readers will pardon the uncouth comparison; yet it is not unjustified, for there are few lengths to which our women will not go (the pun is intended), and what Mrs. Burr was actually doing, albeit unwittingly, was to dramatize the malaise of our white culture.