Dark Twain

THERE WERE No HEROES--George W. Ogden--Dodd, Mead ($2).

George Washington Ogden is an oldtime newspaperman (born 1871) who has written westerns (Whiskey Trail, Windy Range, etc.) and whose verse was once reprinted in the old Literary Digest. There Were No Heroes, which he subtitles "A Personal Record of a Man's Beginning," is unlike anything he ever tried before. It is too bad that he did not turn his hand to such serious writing decades ago.

By far the best of the book is its first half: a bleak, sharp-eyed, sensitive account of what the world was like to a boy on a cruelly poor east-Kansas farm after the Civil War. In those pages George Ogden does a job on U. S. rural life such as many U. S. writers have tried and as few, living or dead, could improve on. At its best, it is what Mark Twain might have told if he had had the courage not to be genial.

No one in the Ogden family liked farming, or had any aptitude for it; in nearly 20 years of grim hard work they wound up with no more than they started with. It was "a round of servitude to beasts." It stripped parents not naturally unkind of every trace of tenderness. Every human effort to escape into a better world was suspect and contemptible. So far as George was concerned, life was virtually nothing but work, harder, always, than his body was yet capable of. He suffered also under a strong, sadistic elder brother, Harvey. Among other misfortunes he: fell into a well, was buried under a gravel slide, got one foot frozen, had the end of his thumb sliced by Harvey (deliberate torture), got his jaw knocked half in two by an ax (Harvey again, an accident, no apology). Occasionally a cowboy stopped for a few days -- most of them left lice --or a river baptism relieved the monotony: "As the women waded into the river, gasping with every breath, their long wrappers floated about their legs. Brother Jim, mindful of their virtue, would stoop and shove the dry fabric down, holding fast to the lady with one hand, and shove and shove until the robe had become wet enough to sink of its own weight."

Personal and harshly bitter though the book is in essence, it sets up with uncommon sensuous clarity a country and a people: Ogden's father, in one of the few gentle gestures of his life, caressing his mother's new grave with the flat of his shovel; "a fat untidy young woman, loose around the waist as a sack of duck feathers"; a man who, catching his wife in adultery, "fired a shot into the ceiling, and then he began to weep, assuring Jinny he wouldn't hurt a hair of her head."

By the time Ogden wrung his way free of this world, he felt he owed no one either gratitude or affection. "I always had given far more than I had received; if there was any debt, it was due to me." The morning he left home, forever, nobody was awake. He did not bother to wake them.

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