Little Big Man Read online

  BY THOMAS BERGER

  Adventures of the Artificial Woman

  Arthur Rex

  Being Invisible

  Best Friends

  Changing the Past

  The Feud

  The Houseguest

  Killing Time

  Little Big Man

  Meeting Evil

  Neighbors

  Nowhere

  Orrie’s Story

  Regiment of Women

  The Return of Little Big Man

  Robert Crews

  Sneaky People

  Suspects

  Who Is Teddy Villanova?

  THE REINHART SERIES

  Crazy in Berlin

  Reinhart in Love

  Vital Parts

  Reinhart’s Women

  LITTLE BIG MAN

  A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Delta Trade Paperback edition / October 1989

  Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  Chapter 1 and part of chapter 2 originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Esquire magazine in slightly different form.

  Copyright © 1964 by Thomas Berger

  Introduction copyright © 1989 by Brooks Landon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.

  The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78899-3

  v3.1

  To Mary Redpath

  CONTENTS / Little Big Man

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Brooks Landon

  Foreword by a Man of Letters

  Chapter

  1 A Terrible Mistake

  2 Boiled Dog

  5 I Make an Enemy

  4 Pronghorn Slaughter

  5 My Education as a Human Being

  6 A New Name

  7 We Take on the Cavalry

  8 Adopted Again

  9 Sin

  10 Through the Shutter

  11 Hopeless

  12 Going for Gold

  13 Cheyenne Homecoming

  14 We Get Jumped

  15 Union Pacific

  16 My Indian Wife

  17 In the Valley of the Washita

  18 The Big Medicine of Long Hair

  19 To the Pacific and Back

  20 Wild Bill Hickok

  21 My Niece Amelia

  22 Bunco and Buffalo

  23 Amelia Makes Good

  24 Caroline

  25 Custer Again

  26 Trailing the Hostiles

  27 Greasy Grass

  28 The Last Stand

  29 Victory

  30 The End

  Editor’s Epilogue

  Introduction: The Measure of Little Big Man

  HAD THOMAS BERGER never written anything other than Little Big Man, he would have earned a respected place in American literary history. Just as surely as there can be no single “Great American Novel,” Little Big Man has by now been almost universally recognized as a great American novel, and while its genius was not immediately apparent to large numbers of readers or to all initial reviewers, that genius has now been recognized by some two dozen scholarly studies and uninterrupted popular sales in the more than forty years since it was first published. As L. L. Lee so accurately observed in one of the first articles to give careful consideration to Little Big Man: “This is a most American novel. Not just in its subject, its setting, its story (these are common matters), but in its thematic structures, in its dialectic: savagery and civilization, indeed, but also the virgin land and the city, nature and the machine, individualism and community, democracy and hierarchy, innocence and knowledge, all the divisive and unifying themes of the American experience, or, more precisely, of the American ‘myth.’ ” Surely Frederick Turner was correct when he concluded in a 1977 reassessment of Little Big Man for The Nation that “few creative works of post–Civil War America have had as much of the fiber and blood of the national experience in them.” It now seems safe to predict that Little Big Man the novel will match its survival skills against those of Jack Crabb, its 111-year old protagonist. And in some ways, Little Big Man must be acknowledged as Berger’s greatest novel, the one in which he took on the sweeping matter of his American literary and mythological heritage and made a lasting contribution to both.

  Little Big Man is a story purporting to tell the “truth” about the old American West. It is ostensibly transcribed from the tape-recorded reminiscences of “the late Jack Crabb—frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne—in his final days upon this earth.” That Jack’s final days come some 111 years after his first, and that he claims to have been the sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, puts this “truth” in some doubt. Equally strong and contradictory evidence exists that the last of the old-timers is hopelessly senile and that he is a fiction maker as concerned with developing his own story as a narrative to be read as he is with relating the incidents of his life. Furthermore, Jack’s narrative comes to us through the patently unreliable editorship of one “Ralph Fielding Snell,” a fatuously gullible and weak-minded self-professed “man of letters,” who not so incidentally reveals a number of parallels between his life and that of his narrator. Snell, who does admit to some doubts about Jack’s story, also admits that he passes on its claims only after his own emotional collapse of some ten years, and his foreword and epilogue contain numerous hints that this emotional condition persists.

  Yet against all of this postmodern self-reflexivity stands the disarming realism of Jack’s tale, the authority and credibility of his voice. The action in Little Big Man is episodic, its story a macaronic of historical events and personages, its atmosphere the swirling myths that transformed people and events into America’s defining epoch: the West. What unites the disparate threads of the novel’s action and its swings between the antithetical world views of white and Indian cultures is Jack’s voice and vision as he takes his place in the great American literary tradition started by James Fenimore Cooper with his character, Natty Bumppo—the legendary Leatherstocking.

  Significantly unlike Leatherstocking, however, Jack can be counted on to describe frontier life with both humor and accuracy. Whatever else may be said of Jack Crabb, let there be no doubt that he gets things right whenever he speaks of customs or events in the Old West. Indeed, Jack’s description of Cheyenne life draws heavily from anthropological studies such as E. Adamson Hoebel’s The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains and George Bird Grinnell’s The Fighting Cheyennes. Likewise, when Jack speaks of Custer or the cavalry, the fine points and drawbacks of specific handguns, the growth of frontier cities, or other matters of white culture, he is equally accurate and often insightful. There is simply no way of knowing how many of Jack’s experiences Berger directly or indirectly drew from other sources. Acknowledging many of those sources, Berger says of his research: “After reading some seventy books about the Old West I went into a creative trance in which it seemed as though I were listening to Jack Crabb’s narrative.” The brilliance of Little Big Man, however, has much more to do with Berger’s principles of selection, com
bination, and comment than with the diversity and accuracy of his sources.

  And it should not be overlooked that Jack also consistently offers a folksy-sounding but astute critical commentary on the literature of the West. Indeed, one of the wonderful ironies inherent in Berger’s structure is that Jack, the ostensible man of action, reveals much more literary sophistication than does Snell, the ostensible “man of letters.” Just as surely as Jack’s account of his life explores the nature and importance of western myths—both white and Indian—it also explores the linguistic and literary mechanics of myth-making, whether in history, anthropology, journalism, or the novel itself.

  Berger has so crafted Jack’s voice as to make it at once a part of and comment on the process through which the Old West has been created for the public by language. First and foremost, Jack is a storyteller, with his primary allegiance to language rather than to history. Actually, as Berger would no doubt specify, history is language, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the case of the “history” of the American frontier. One of the most appropriate ways in which Berger designed Little Big Man as the “Western to end all Westerns” was to make Jack’s voice and character such an obvious pastiche of fact and fantasy, of literary myths and received truths. From Cooper onward the literature of the frontier has been filled with seemingly crude and unlettered characters who ultimately drop their rough personae to reveal either noble birth or genteel background and education. Berger plays against this specific western convention by keeping Jack’s persona scrupulously democratic and unprivileged while allowing just enough narrative sophistication to show through to call Jack’s true nature into question.

  One of Berger’s most significant stylistic accomplishments is the creation in Jack of an “unsophisticated” colloquial voice that captures the essence of the American frontier vernacular but escapes its limitations. The vernacular ring to Jack’s voice rises primarily from a smattering of well-codified colloquialisms: “commenced to,” “a deal of,” “they was,” “knowed,” and so on. Combined with Jack’s use of natural, historically appropriate metaphors and the accuracy and specificity of his details, this technique more than masks the sophistication of Jack’s narrative technique. Using relatively few of these colloquial code words, Berger efficiently imparts backwoods credibility to Jack’s narration without limiting the precision of either his syntax or his diction.

  In fact, what is most remarkable is that Jack’s voice rings so true while also containing so many unexpected signs of sophistication. Included in his vocabulary are such unlikely terms as: “recumbent,” “quandary,” “signification,” “obdurate,” and “circumferentially.” And more significant than this erudite vocabulary are the delightful precision and rhetorical craft of many of Jack’s sentences, such as this one:

  As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic—such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog—but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ home instead (this 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—whic
h 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).