Women's Lib Western

By Martha Duffy

THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING

by MARILYN DURHAM 246 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$6.95.

It can be said of First Novelist Marilyn Durham that she has the courage of her daydreams. The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing is basically pure feminine fantasy, but the treatment is so fresh and untroubled that the book is one of the most effective entertainments of recent months.

The heroine is a reluctant frontierswoman of the 1880s named Catherine Crocker. At 35--a refreshingly ripe age for a heroine--Catherine is marooned in a Wyoming mining camp with her boorish husband. After one quarrel too many, she decides to flag a train to civilization. But the train is robbed by four bandits whose hostage she becomes. Naturally, the leader is not your ordinary outlaw. Strong, silent and sexy, Jay Grobart is stealing in a good cause. Ten years earlier he killed his Indian wife, Cat Dancing, in a jealous rage. Having paid his debt to society, he is seeking to buy back his children from the Shoshone who adopted them.

As they face the privations and adventures that follow, Jay and Catherine quickly develop a Tracy-Hepburn love-hate relationship. Jay is cold and scornful; Catherine feels that she has traded one insufferable male for another. But eventually accommodation follows passion down a well-worn path.

Jay is a standard frontier alien, but Catherine is a refreshing variant of the headstrong heroine. She is a potentially capable woman to whom nothing has happened, so she has nothing to bring to a sudden flood of experience except some mulish preconceptions. Durham leads her through the standard scenes: the learn-your-place tethering by Jay, the strip-or-go-filthy decision, the threat of lascivious Indians. Catherine handles them all incongruously.

Though the narrative is occasionally crude, Author Durham has one important veteran's trait. The reader senses at once that he is in sure hands and trusts her. One feels that, like Margaret Mitchell, she knows absolutely everything about her main character and could tell as many tales as Scheherazade about her. Producer-Director Eleanor Perry, who has bought the book for the movies, has proclaimed it "the first Women's Lib western"--just what the movement needs. The remark is understandable because Catherine is ultimately stronger and less rigid than the men who try to run her life. But Marilyn Durham is not inspired by headlines. What she is doing is spinning her yarn in the age-old, instantly recognizable way.

If Cat Dancing is a modest tribute to the art of storytelling, it is a genuflection before the institution of the free library. When the author, a 42-year-old Evansville Ind., housewife, decided to write a novel, her first order of business was to figure out what kind would least display her ignorance. She had no degree, had never held a decent job, traveled, flown in an airplane, or so much as taken a vacation. But she was a magpie reader especially of fiction and history and she knew her way around a library. To wit: the setting of Cat Dancing comes from an old WPA guide to Wyoming. Its frontier details are lifted from children's books and such relics as Bannerman's mail-order catalogue of Civil War surplus. The structure emerged from the more realistic how-to guides for fledgling writers and from the fiction stacks, where the author compared dozens of first pages and studied transitions.

The finished product, which took four months to write, was then marketed according to library sources. When publishers listed in Literary Marketplace failed to respond, Mrs. Durham consulted a directory of agents and got results from New York's Ann Elmo (chosen because the author loves Augusta Evans' venerable tearjerker, St. Elmo). Now that heady success has crowned all these efforts, Mrs. Durham can be found in the periodical room studying her competition in Publishers Weekly and Variety.

She has not quite spent her life in a carrel. She has been married for 21 years to a Social Security field investigator and has two teen-age daughters.

But there is evidence that she lives a great deal in her imagination. She goes to a drive-in to think. Her first purchase when the six-figure movie and paperback money began coming in was a commodious secondhand station wagon: "For years I'd watched drive-in movies from a lawn chair while the girls sat in the Volkswagen. It was either that or scrunch up in back like Charles Laughton on top of Notre Dame." Even her speech shows certain dramatic cadences. Describing her research in children's books, she intones: "There did Marilyn Durham learn what dynamite looks like."

The Durhams have never had any money and have made no plans to spend their windfall. They are classic American doers. Kilburn Durham's vaguely modernist paintings are exhibited in an Evansville restaurant. For years the couple were members of a Mortimer Adler Great Books Club, but their group outlived the eleven-year club syllabus.

Perhaps because she is so methodical, Marilyn Durham seems rather beguilingly unaware of her book's freshness. She likes to call it a western gothic and says that the squaw Cat Dancing is "an Indian Rebecca -- there to give the hero a Past." She loves reading trash, has never met an Augusta Evans fan who didn't become a soulmate.

The Durhams are frank Anglophiles who have built an imposing half-timbered tower behind their house. In a neighborhood of housing-development bungalows, it is an astonishing sight. Marilyn Durham says that when Eleanor Perry writes to her describing things like the purple mountains of Monaco, "I sigh and look out at the clothesline." But she is gazing from an Elizabethan redoubt.

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