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DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN A REVIEW AND A
CRITIQUE
In
one of the back alleys at the World Congress of Reviewers and Critics some
years ago, the age-old debate surfaced once again. It always starts with the same question: What’s the difference between a “review” and
a “critique”? Naturally, I stepped forward with a theory, a trifling thing,
doubtless, but mine own. A review, I
pontificated, is where you describe the object.
Take, for instance, Jack Jackson’s
last offering from Kitchen Sink Press, Lost
Cause (a prophetic title, perhaps, considering the subsequent collapse of
KSP). It’s a $16.95 paperback, 164
8x11-inch pages; full color cover, black and white interior. Subtitled “The
True Story of Famed Texas Gunslinger John Wesley Hardin,” the tale told here
actually embraces a good deal more than Hardin’s life. The saga begins before the Civil War (in
1857) and continues through that conflict until 1895, when Hardin was killed.
While Hardin is the ostensible focus
of the book, Jaxon (for it is, indeed, the former underground cartoonist famed
for God Nose et al) puts the
celebrated gunman in the context of his times—namely, in the midst of a feud
between the Taylor family and the Sutton family, which, in turn, is fueled by
the racial prejudices of the region and the tyrannical government of the
post-war Reconstruction decades. Most
of the book is devoted to tracing the various connections between these violent
social currents.
Jaxon, who with Gilbert Shelton and
Frank Stack, was part of the University of Texas gang of campus cartoonists who
helped found underground comix after trekking to California in the late
1960s, has established a reputation as
a Texas historian with such previous works as Comanche Moon, Los Tejanos, and The Secret of San Saba. And
in Lost Cause, as usual, Jaxon has
researched his subject thoroughly, and the effort shows. The book smacks of authenticity in visuals,
lingo, and blood-letting incident.
That’s a review. Bare bones description.
The purpose of a review is to
acquaint readers with something they probably haven’t seen. So tell ’em what it’s like, kimo sabe. A review answers the question: Does this
item contain things I might want to see on my own, enough of them to justify
the price I will have to pay?
A review can go a mite further. It does no violence to the purely
descriptive nature of a
as
‘folklore,’ for their validity depends on who is using them and to what
purpose.”
In effect, Jaxon admits that the
story he tells is partially a matter of legend and fond familial bias. But it is also “the story of [his
ancestors’] struggle for survival in hard times, as best I can tell it (warts
and all).”
According to at least one source
other than Jaxon—namely, Draw: The
Greatest Gunfights of the American West by James Reasoner—Hardin, born in
1853, proved to have an ungovernable temper while still in his early teens, and
by the time he was 17, he’d killed several men in angry confrontations, often
under circumstances that implied the youth was acting in self-defense, but not
always. He was clearly a hothead who took offense easily and expressed his
displeasure with others by shooting them. This got him in trouble with the
law—and, during post-Civil War Reconstruction, with the army. He managed to
kill several of those who set out to apprehend him. By the time he was a little over 18,
he’d killed 27 people by some counts. He was captured occasionally, and even
jailed once, but he escaped and resumed his rampaging. When the comparatively
uncorrupt Texas Rangers came into power, Hardin decided the state had become
too hot for him, and he took his young wife and daughter and moved to Florida,
where he lived for some time. Later, after he moved his family to Alabama, he
was finally caught and sent to prison, and while incarcerated, he read a lot of
law books. When he got out in 1894, he took the bar exam, passed, and began
practicing law back in Texas, settling, at last, in El Paso. There, while
negotiating for an outlaw’s safe return from Mexico, Hardin became entangled
romantically with the man’s wife, and when she was arrested, Hardin bad-mouthed
the local deputy, whose father, also a lawman, came after Hardin and shot him
from behind while the gunslinger was drinking and throwing dice on the bar in
the Acme Saloon. A supposedly official count puts the number of people Hardin
shot to death at 44. After his death, his children arranged for the publication
of an autobiography Hardin had written that rationalized and excused most of
his killing as justifiable under one circumstance or another. Whether justified
or not, Hardin stands as one of the Old West’s most murderous gunfighters.
Given Jaxon’s sources and his
admitted bias, it should come as no surprise to find that in this account, John
Wesley Hardin is more victimized than vicious. He is merely a “soldier” in a kind of guerrilla war. Embroiled on the
Taylor side of the feud, Hardin is portrayed as a casualty in an unstable
social order made violent by post-Civil War racism and residual Confederate
pride, festering with a sense of injury at the presence of blacks in positions
of power in the Reconstruction. Hardin
goes “on the dodge” to escape punishment for an act that, under other
circumstances, might have been deemed self-defensive.
And so, wronged by an oppressive
society, he becomes an outlaw only because the
It’s that old story. Like many biographers of Western bad men,
Jaxon makes his subject the hero of the tale by making him also the victim of
circumstance. A good boy gone bad
through no fault of his own. But, as I said, Jaxon admits that the facts are
flexible and slippery (and probably contradictory). And he also admits that the story he’s telling is more story than
history. And it’s an engaging and
rousing story, fascinating in its detail, labyrinthine in its unfolding.
And with that last sentence, this
so-called review becomes a critique.
A critique is evaluative. The minute an erstwhile review offers an
opinion about the work being described, the review becomes criticism. If a reviewer says whether something is good
or bad, worthwhile or not, he stops being a reviewer and becomes a critic. A
critique adds the weight of its judgement to a review. A critique has at least two purposes: first,
it either recommends something— or condemns it; second, a critique adds to the
analytical discourse about the artform under scrutiny. Critiques set artistic standards. And to the extent that artists agree with
the standards, criticism may influence the actual performance of an art.
Criticism is necessarily all
opinion. And since everyone is entitled
to an opinion, we can’t fault a critic for his opinion. We can, however, agree or disagree. And we can demand of critics that they
provide logical reasons for their opinions. Reviews, on the other hand, should
reflect no opinion. As purely
descriptive enterprises, they should describe as objectively as possible.
Some practitioners of this peculiar
craft do both reviews and critiques. They do critical reviews. And
some—well, this one anyhow—add a whole furbelow to the fustian, vaporizing on
about various stimulating but tangential matters. The scheme is to supplement the critical review with some sort of
reading matter that is intrinsically interesting in-and-of itself. The theory here is that even if a critical
review is read by someone who isn’t at all interested in buying the object being
reviewed, the essay can be informative enough or amusing enough to engage a
reader’s interest and sustain it for the duration.
Like the rest of this diatribe, I
hope.
Despite the dubiousness of Jaxon’s
interpretation of the protagonist’s motivations, when it comes to the history
of the period, the book seems to accurately reflect the grindingly desperate
milieu of Hardin’s times. Jaxon
successfully conveys a sense of the civic disorder and lawlessness in
post-Civil War Texas. But Jaxon’s passion for factual accuracy threatens to
undermine his sense of story. The
milieu he is describing is complex, the relations between a horde of personages
complicated. Jaxon’s admirable attempt
to link cause and effect to specific individuals is often blurred by a
profusion of names and offhand references to incidents now pages in the past.
In short, although his picture of post-war Texas is probably very accurate,
it’s crammed with too much information in too little space. The confusion inherent in the complicated
situation is therefore compounded and reigns through the first half of the
book.
I’m not sure there’s any better way
of doing it, though—not if you intend to capture honestly the context out of
which the famous gunslinger arose. In
any event, once we get about halfway through the book, Hardin emerges from the
welter of characters in the cast, and his story holds all the pieces together
somewhat better.
Expending so much of his narrative
on tracing tenuous connections, however, Jaxon seems to have exhausted himself
by the time he’s three-quarters of the way through the work. The end of Hardin’s career, especially,
seems rudely short-changed. Jaxon
rushes to conclusion, and in his haste, leaves out much potentially fascinating
material. For instance, he passes over the Florida adventures of our gunman in
a single panel.
According to report, after killing a
local sheriff in Texas, Hardin felt the heat of the law and left the state,
taking his wife and children with him to Florida. There he was so thoroughly covered by his alias of J.H. Swain that
local authorities asked for and received his help in rounding up some suspected
criminals. Hardin shot and killed one
of them. This incident would have made
good reading under Jaxon’s pen.
So would the supposed scene of
Hardin’s subsequent capture. He had
left Florida, where his cover had been blown, and was living in Alabama but had
gone south to gamble in Pensacola Junction, Florida. He was finally arrested, cornered in the smoking car of a
train. Deputies rushed him from
opposite ends of the car, and Hardin made a move to resist their intentions,
but as he pulled his pistol from his waistband, it got caught in his
suspenders, and before he could free it, the cops were upon him. One of them exulted, “John Wesley Hardin—you
are the worst man in the country.” And
then he undercut his critique by presenting the killer with a cigar.
Why Jaxon leaves out such colorful
tidbits is puzzling. Perhaps since they
didn’t take place in Texas and since he is retailing Texas legends here, he
decided that leaving the Florida incidents out would be a good way of
shortcutting to the now-looming last pages of his allotment for the book. Jaxon
also leaves out an incident that displays better than anything in the book
Hardin’s essential heartlessness.
In Abilene, Kansas, where he met and
was befriended by Wild Bill Hickok, Hardin one night killed a man for
snoring. It was, possibly, an
accident. Staying at the American House
Hotel, Hardin started shooting through his bedroom wall into the next room,
hoping to awaken the snoring sleeper there and to discourage him from
snoring. Hardin’s first shot awakened
the stranger; his second killed him.
Judging by some reports, even Hardin
was chagrined at the incident and later passed it off as a justifiable shooting
of a man trying to steal his pants. But
he apparently made another reference to this misadventure when he complained
about the lies people told about him. “They say I killed six or seven men for snoring. Well, it ain’t true: I only killed one man
for snoring.”
In any case, Hardin, fearing
Hickok’s wrath over the killing of the sleeping man, fled Abilene, exiting the
hotel through the window of his room and across the roof of the hotel
portico. Jaxon depicts precisely this
scene but gives scant reason for Hardin’s flight—“Hardin ... feels the heat of Wild Bill’s wrath and
decides to head for home himself, double-quick.” According to some reports,
there’s no truth in the snoring man incident at all: Hardin’s dispute with the
famed lawman arose because Hardin wanted to keep his pistols at his side
despite a town ordinance against carrying guns in public.
Perhaps these omitted adventures
are, in Jaxon’s judgement (having studied the matter more than I), more fiction
than fact. But he’d already decided to
opt for the legend as well as history, so why leave out some of the more
picturesque aspects? Dunno.
Perhaps because these incidents do
not jibe with Jaxon’s portrait of Hardin as a kind of Texas Robin Hood,
battling the forces of authoritarian oppression on behalf of the poor abused
underclasses of the state. Judging from the sources from which I extracted the
fragments in the foregoing paragraphs, Hardin was a conscienceless murderer, an
asocial menace. A killer without
qualm. To justify his behavior by
cloaking it in the pseudo military necessity of an inter-family war or in the
unsettled state of law enforcement in post-war Texas is to excuse the behavior
of an absolutely unrepentant monster. But you wouldn’t know the monster by reading Lost Cause.
I don’t think that Jaxon distorted
Hardin’s story for any disreputable motive. Harboring sympathies to the Taylor clan, Jaxon would naturally see
Hardin in a more favorable light. And
it could be that the traditional case against the gunman is more rumor than
fact. Or that the facts are too hotly
contested, too contradictory to rely upon and to set aside familial sympathies
in favor of. Whatever the case, John Wesley Hardin is more explained in this
book than he is completely described. And perhaps that is the problem. Jaxon may be seeking to explain how it was that a nice young man— a
preacher’s son no less! named after the founder of the Methodist church—went so
far astray. And perhaps too many of the legendary acts of Texas’ wildest
wildman could not be explained. So
Jaxon left them out.
But sometimes evil cannot be
explained. Sometimes, it seems simply
to exist in certain people without cause or justification. And perhaps John Wesley Hardin is such an
instance. If so, explaining his actions
only masks his essential evil.
Whatever the causes, Jaxon’s book
gives us a somewhat different Hardin than most historians of the West would
expect. But the milieu—the sense of
place and time—that Jaxon creates is persuasive and absorbing. It is probably also accurate. And herein lies the value of the book: it
gives us a palpable sense of Texas in those turbulent times. And it also gives us an absorbing story that
is profoundly ponderable.
FOOTNIT: This essay appeared at the Fantagraphics website some years ago, while Jaxon was still alive and working. In recent years, a lifelong muscular disorder atrophied his hands and feet, and eventually, he couldn’t draw anymore. Drawing was living to Jaxon, so on June 8, 2006, he took his leave, kneeling on the graves of his parents near Stockdale, Texas, where he shot himself and died. He was 65. It does such a man no disrespect to reprint here a critique of one of his last works that is as honest and as straight-forward as Jaxon was himself and as well intended. |
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