[In the following essay, Milton discusses Fisher's theme of primitive humanity in the “Testament of Man” novel series.]

With the subjects and themes of advanced society (at least in the last two or even three volumes of the “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy), Vardis Fisher is not at home. He is more vivid and more significant and more understanding when he deals with the primitive world, the “animal” world. This may be the result of his Idaho environment and of the primitive conditions under which he lived as a boy; but there is more to it than that. Fisher seems to think that man is still an animal in many ways, subject to non-reasonable pressures and to fears and prejudices which keep him from being a truly civilized creature. This is perhaps a rather obvious condition in man, one which need not be stressed. Nevertheless, there is considerable difference in the contemporary treatments of this condition in fiction. The eastern, or metropolitan, writer of recent times has tended to gloss over the historical reasons for this condition, even ignoring more than he should the deep moral responsibilities in which man has failed. It is too easy to blame a person's immediate social environment for his development, and to excuse his actions on the grounds of pressures brought to bear upon him in his business or his suburban community. Fisher probes back into man's psychological history, into his very origins, to find not excuses but reasons for his behavior. That man is still an animal, subject to primitive urges and irrational reactions, is one of the suggestions we are left with at the end of Fisher's monumental work, “The Testament of Man.”

Fisher finds barbarisms in modern society, as any perceptive sociologist or anthropologist can. From the autobiographical materials in the Idaho novels it is evident that the young Vardis Fisher was shocked and disturbed by the cruelties of men as well as by the harshness and indifference in the natural world. His later research for the twelve-volume “Testament” was undertaken in order to explain those cruelties and to provide some kind of answer to the questions raised in the “Vridar Hunter” tetralogy. Fisher also used the method of relating in vivid detail the barbaric nature of man, presumably to shock the reader into an awareness of the problem. One illustrative passage, from Tale of Valor, will be sufficient to indicate the kinds of details Fisher chose:

He had seen famished wolves at a carcass, and jackals, but they had not been so savage in their blood-and hunger-lust as these creatures before him, tearing the spleen apart with their two filthy hands, the liver, kidneys, the lungs, the guts, while blood gushed from the corners of their mouths and their eyes rolled in rapture as, choking and gasping, they wolfed it down. The one who fascinated Lewis most was a scrawny bowlegged brave who managed to possess nine or ten feet of the small intestine and now wed it into his mouth and down his throat, his cheeks and tongue sucking it in, his throat muscles rising in blood-filled rolls, as his two hands squeezed down the tube, forcing the contents out at the other end. In what seemed to Lewis only a few moments the long piece of gut disappeared.

(p. 249)

Fisher is not in favor of this primitive behavior, and yet he almost seems to enjoy describing it. His extensive use of animalism in the “Testament” series is designed to show that man has not been able to free himself entirely of his primitive origins, that even in the twentieth century he is socially and morally crude. The intention is to teach, to show that man need not be captive to his origins, that he has the ability and the power and often the will to be something higher and better than mere creature. It is obvious that certain parts of the history of the American West lend themselves easily to this particular theme. What goes wrong, as in the passage above, is the tone; Fisher goes beyond a literal description of the animalism and adds either irony or humor. Irony would work if it did not seem to be so purposive, as it often does in Fisher; humor could be employed as a relieving device, but it is not always used in that way in Fisher's novels. Perhaps Fisher exaggerates to the point of humor because this is the only way in which he can endure the barbarisms of which he writes; or perhaps he gives in to the impulse to shock his readers, partly for his own enjoyment. Sometimes it is hard to tell. We know that, as a person, he was sensitive enough (although he wore a cynical surface) to be terrified, even while fascinated, by the cruelties which man commits upon his fellow men.

Cruelty is a major theme throughout Fisher's work, appearing in such variations as the results of animalism and emotionalism, in men preying upon other men, and in a fear of the unknown which gives rise to inhuman behavior in the name of religion. Fisher believes that man has the intelligence to overcome his animalism and emotionalism, and his superstitions, but that he has refused to take this step forward; therefore, Fisher is often bitter and antagonistic against the human race, adopting the role of the village atheist in order to prod, to criticize, and to condem. He attacks stupidity and callousness, and he revels in the gore of barbarism, all the while trying to protect and nourish his own sensitive soul. One sympathizes with the man (and cries out for all men) after reading his Idaho novels, especially the Vridar Hunter story.

Vridar is the oldest child of Joe Hunter, an early settler in the Idaho benchland, a simple but hard-working man who is married to a puritan. Vridar is caught between the rigidity of his mother's beliefs and his father's easy lack of belief. His father ignores him and allows him to run loose, while his mother frightens him and tries to confine him within narrow moral limits. The frontier life in Idaho is brutal, wild, and animalistic. Vridar is an overly-sensitive boy who is constantly afraid of life and who is not loved by anyone. In Tragic Life is an episodic story, running in chronological order but leaving huge gaps in the life of Vridar. This does not matter, because Vridar's life is all of one piece and representative incidents and influences serve as well as the complete story. The treatment of the boy's life is extremely realistic, sometimes raw and shocking in its descriptions of a crude environment, but always the writing is terribly honest, sharp and clear, and occasionally figurative. Vridar is, in this volume at least, completely believable, contrary to the opinion of a Time magazine reviewer who had obviously never been west of Manhattan. Some of the minor characters are grotesques, but in their context, and from the boy's warped point of view, they work well and are successful within the author's intentions.

Vridar's childhood is tragic, in the sense that he is beset by every fear that it is possible for a child to know. The rest of his life seems to be governed by the first eighteen years. Whenever Vridar seems prepared to face life without fears, and with love, something turns up in his non-Idaho world which has direct correspondence with the pressures and cruelties of his childhood environment. In Passions Spin the Plot, Vridar takes his grief and fear with him to college in Salt Lake City. His life at college is both pathetic and humorous; Vridar is the victim of his extreme shyness, his sensitivity, his deep concern with morality, and his fear of the fierce competitions and dishonesties of life. This is a dark book. Vridar is, by most standards, mentally unbalanced. He sees all life as evil and purposeless. Read out of context, this novel is hopelessly grim; but it helps to establish Fisher's thesis that man is constantly under the control of senseless fears, whether in the Idaho wilds or in the city. Vridar is the product not only of his Idaho environment, but also of his entire culture and of his race. Although he is an exaggerated character, he is true to his prototype, and he is to be considered as representative of the men who are victims of their cultural history. This includes almost everyone.

The “love story” of Vridar and Neloa Doole is the wildest and most frustrating in American fiction. Neloa makes love indiscriminately to other men, acting from a natural and animal-like impulse. She ignores Vridar for years after he has fallen in love with her and finally marries him for what seems to be a matter of convenience more than anything else. Vridar the idealist, the romantic, is tortured by Neloa's lack of concern for him, but he must marry her anyway. Like Philip, in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, who felt compelled to return again and again to Mildred, the “vulgar slut,” so Vridar must have Neloa although he loathes her and can find no reasonable purpose in loving her. In a symbolic sense, Neloa is dark and mysterious Woman, an archetypal figure out of the primitive mists, and her power over Vridar is simply that of woman over man. Taken by itself, the relationship between Vridar and Neloa makes a powerful story, one of the most fascinating episodes in Fisher's work; but the conflict is never resolved, and the relationship ends rather meaninglessly (Neloa commits suicide) except for the slight turn which it gives to the growth of Vridar.

We Are Betrayed, the third volume in this series, finishes Vridar's years at college in Utah. His motto at this time is that “Honesty has to pay its price. It used to pay in hemlock or hanging. Now it pays in isolation. …” Vridar thinks that he is learning to be completely honest, and thus different from the people around him; but he is little more than a youthful idealist trying to play the role of the realist. And the closer he comes to what he considers realism, the more absurd he becomes. He has several, indeed many, honest characteristics, but they are exaggerated to ridiculousness. In typical youthful fashion he addresses himself to the exhortation, “To thyself be true,” and then proceeds to destroy (in his own mind) everything that has been built up in the past two or three thousand years. Much that is in our traditions may deserve to be destroyed, or relegated carefully to its historical place, but to have the cultural and religious structure of the world annihilated in one novel is, I think, going beyond the bounds of plausibility.

Vridar now, in rapid succession, serves time in the army, becomes a bootlegger and a friend of whores and pimps, becomes a father, and begins graduate study in English at the University of Chicago. While in Chicago, he spiritually deserts his unfathomable part-Indian wife and falls in love (intellectually) with Athene Marvell, an educated girl who is completely different from Neloa. Neloa drinks poison and Vridar goes to pieces, first in the hospital and then in the morgue:

Her eyes were closed. There was a smile on her white face and it was the smile that he had known and loved; and there was brown stain on her lips, her chin; but he did not see the stain. “Neola?” he said.

Then he heard a sound and listened for a long moment, with wonder taking him: and he screamed, so sudden and terrible was his joy. “Neola, I knew you wern't dead!” He bent over her. … He bent lower, his face close to her heart; and in this body he worshiped, looking so queenly under the white gown, he heard a strange gurgling. Swiftly he touched her hand and it was like ice; her white cheek, her throat; and shrank back, horrified. … He buried his face in her hair, smelling of it, until he felt again deeply, that she was not dead. … A man knocked on the door. … He crossed the room to the door and stopped and looked at her again; and all the anguish of his heart broke into a cry. He ran back and put his arms around her and knelt, with his cheek to her cold cheek. And he was still there, kneeling, holding her close, when two men came and led him away.

(pp. 365-66)

And a little later Vridar vomits as the body of Neloa is put into the furnace at the crematorium. But first he has vowed, in her name, to finish his work and to be honest with himself and others. Unfortunately, honesty by itself is not literature, not even realistic literature, and the force of Neloa's death and of the heightened writing (as in the passage above which tells of her death) is lost in Vridar's foolishness and in Fisher's determination to make literature out of what he considers truth. Truth figures prominently in this novel and in the one which follows, but it is never identified and never given life. It is the truth of the scholar's facts, not the truth of humanity. Fisher, of course, frequently tended to think that the two were the same.

No Villain Need Be concludes the tetralogy. In the first volume Fisher was a novelist; he produced a powerful and effective piece of fiction with the action, characterization, scene, and strong sense of conflict which we expect from fiction. Gradually, through the next three volumes, fiction gives way to a kind of loosely-dramatized exposition. In the last volume there is almost no action. Through endless conversations, Fisher presents all of his ideas in encyclopedic fashion, thinking them through as he goes along. The novel is tedious, and it resolves nothing. Fisher later was aware of this, although he occasionally pointed to an anonymous reviewer or two who thought this volume was the best of the four. At the end of the novel, he pleads for “thorough exploration first, and then a tradition leading to, and finally resting upon, the inviolable responsibility of leadership.” He indicates that Freudianism and Marxism have something to contrbute, but does not make clear what that is or to what, exactly, they are to contribute. Fisher was not a politician; he might have liked to be a psychologist; he probably was more than anything else a moralist. But he too was dissatisfied with the conclusion of Vridar's story, and he wrote the entire “Testament” series in an effort to resolve Vridar's problems.

Long before the job was accomplished, however, he created a fictional community in the Antelope Hills section of Idaho, a community made up of the relatives and neighbors of Vridar Hunter. As seen in Toilers of the Hills, this is a community of silences, loneliness, vast indifference, terrible mystery, and, sometimes, madness. This is the region that made Vridar into what he was, but seen from a different point of view. The chief character is Dock Hunter, one of Vridar's uncles, who brings his second wife, Opal, to the Idaho benchlands. She comes reluctantly, he eagerly. Dock believes in the promise, half-myth and half-truth, that “next year will be the year.” His one aim is to conquer the land, and he works hard and cheerfully while his wife bears children and decays. There is a good deal of hope at the end of the novel; Dock seems to have overcome the arid land with his formula for dry-farming. But Opal has grown old in the meantime, although she is only thirty-one; the land has taken its toll on her. The final effect is that of tragi-comedy.

Fisher paints a vivid picture of the harshness and the beauty of the land. It is within this juxtaposition (almost a paradox) that the mystery of life is to be found, and Fisher is at his best in dealing with this mystery. His descriptions of nature are frequently magnificent. The people are a little less than magnificent; most of them are weak people with enough flaws to keep them from struggling on a high plane. A few of them survive the land and the climate with some kind of grace. But they are a people without tradition, without a legitimate place on the frontier, because they have brought almost nothing with them, and it is already too late to carve an empire out of a frontier which has vanished, leaving behind only a vague tradition of hope and courage. These people are in every way isolated, by circumstances as well as by the land:

And everywhere were silences, strangely apart and alone: the small green silences in coves along their way, the round silence of each hill or the flat silence of each plain, great solitudes that filled the sky and lay over the mountains and beyond. There seemed to be no sky, Opal thought; only thin dusty air no bluer above than below, only whitish altitudes as far up as the eye could see.

(p. 4)

Opal subconsciously realizes that there is no longer a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end. That search has ended, leaving only the backwash, the poor farmers struggling to conquer a land that is hardly worth the taking. In some respects Fisher is here a western Erskine Caldwell. The difference is that he lacks Caldwell's grotesque humor, although he touches upon it in some ways, and he pays more attention to the qualities of the land—in a regional sense of emotional response to it:

His mind groped for words that would make her understand the mystery of there (mountains), the deep living power of them, almost the intelligence of them. Between all these and himself, he admitted, there existed a kinship, something for which he could find no words, a feeling of love sometimes, or of fear and wonder.

(p. 100)

It is the cyclical drama of nature with which Fisher finally commands our attention here:

Upon them, in the fall of the year, and upon Dock most of all, there fell a silence, and into their eyes there came the fear of men haunted by the ruthless power, unseen and beyond control. But with the awakening of another spring they gathered hope again and marched with greater courage into the long hard work of another year. … And it was at this that Opal wondered most, at the fierce silent drama between these men and the hills.

(p. 251)

At the last, Opal becomes reconciled to the land and to her house. She and Dock, uncomplex but endurable, discover “houseness” in a new and traditionless land of limited opportunity.

The achievement of “houseness” is the theme of April also, although the method of this novel is somewhat different from the rest of Fisher's work. Kitty Weeg and her daughter, June, are removed from the real world, having taken refuge in the romantic world of books—cheap romantic novels. Of Kitty it is said, “Of the mad and terrible and beautiful world she knew nothing. …” In the midst of human and natural conflict

… Kitty Weeg was as serene as the white dishes in the cupboard, for she did not, June realized, live in this world at all: she ate and slept and combed her hair and went now and then to the spring for water or to the cellar for a jar of fruit; but she had escaped into a world of books, and she lived within the romantic legends of love and despair, hope and triumph.

(p. 197)

And Kitty comes to nothing, as, perhaps, most people come to nothing. By the end of the novel she has been forgotten. The story belongs to her daughter, for a long time enmeshed in her mother's romanticism. June is a stout and homely girl of twenty-four who should have married long ago. She has been courted, in a way, since she was eleven by Sol Incham, another homely and lonely person. June spurns him because he is not as dashing and romantic and gallant as the characters in her mother's novels. Sol is merely honest, steady, good, and sincere. June tries instead to find some kind of perverse satisfaction in three other people: (1) a new hired hand, William Wallace Argyll, a young and slender man who thinks he is a poet, and whom June baffles with her play-acting, her pretenses at being another girl, named April, who is something like the girls in the cheap novels; (2) an old maid, Susan Hemp, with whom June thinks she has affinites, though Susan always throws June out of her house; (3) Virgin Hill, the most beautiful girl in town, very popular, to whose house June goes one day so that she can just look at her, observe her, and admire her, and whom she insists on kissing on the mouth before she leaves, to see what it is like to kiss a beautiful girl. The atmosphere of this novel is unreal, except that it is grounded in the usual people of the Antelope Hills area, people who figure in the Idaho novels, and also in the land itself which is very real even though seen frequently through the romantic eyes of June. Sol, too, is very real. But a partial mystery surrounds June, Kitty, Susan, and Jon Weeg. Herein lies, presumably, the “fable” of the subtitle of this novel.

June is one of the many “little” people in the world. She is not important enough to achieve great victories, nor can she be the material for tragedy. Her problems are little ones, her successes are little ones, and she can at best gain a small satisfaction from life. April is like Frederick Manfred's The Chokecherry Tree in which the chief character lives in the shadow of the giants, just as the chokecherry tree grows beneath the cottonwoods. The life of the “little” person is warm and humorous in many ways, even though plagued with the cruelty of gossip and human weaknesses. April is the most cheerful of all Fisher's novels, and he said that it was his favorite. June gradually abandons her romantic notions and comes to accept Sol:

In the course of time he fell upon the subject of his empty house and this became for her a symbol of his need: something empty and unused, a loneliness waiting for a woman, for gentle ways to smooth it into beauty and response. The house haunted her.

(p. 67)

And so June becomes a “little hero” by conquering that house, by cleaning it and cooking a meal for Sol who finds her there and is finally accepted by her. The charm of April shows up in striking contrast to the tragedy which is Dark Bridwell. The land is the same; the people are part of the same community, but the relationship is physical only. A great spiritual gulf separates these two novels.

Dark Bridwell is, I am convinced, not only Fisher's best novel (although it was only his second out of twenty-six) but one of the masterpieces of the American novel. It is a true tragedy of the end of the American frontier; it achieves the status of myth, although firmly anchored in the Idaho soil; and Charley Bridwell, through his peculiar strengths and weaknesses, becomes an American Lear. Fisher's own weaknesses as a writer are held in check more successfully in Bridwell than anywhere else, and although the people and the incidents are similar to (in many cases the same as) those in the early part of the Vridar Hunter story, they take on a deeper significance in Bridwell and are shaped more artistically and more powerfully.

The story is told through three characters: Charley Bridwell first, then his son Jed, and finally Charley's wife Lela. There is some overlapping of incidents because of the three views, but the story does not falter; in fact, it proceeds so inexorably that it seems pulled by fate, a dark fate in spite of Charley's cheerfulness. And brooding over the whole story is the author. He does not interfer or intrude, but his presence is felt in the way that a supreme but disinterested intelligence is often felt by sensitive people. This particular point of view serves to achieve, for the reader, the correct distance between himself and the material. The reader is drawn into the story by its immediacy and reality, but he is also aware that he is confronting a work of art. Control of distance is a refinement of the central intelligence of Henry James and is, I think, one of the major technical achievements of twentieth-century fiction. Although it has its origins, I suspect, in Madame Bovary, it is to be found more in American fiction than European, and more often in western American fiction than eastern.

Charley Bridwell is a child of nature. He drinks a great deal and indulges in “unpitying devilries,” but he is lovable. He takes what he can get and gives what he has. He is completely at one with nature, fearing nothing, daring everything, but content to let things take their natural course. He is not ambitious, and he is not without tenderness; yet, like an animal with a short memory, he will disregard his own family unless they are in physical danger. He is deeply affected by his natural environment, although his reaction to it is a primitive one. When he watches the forces at work in the swift rapids of the river, similar forces well up in him:

And as Charley watched, there came upon him that strange and deep emotion that always took him by the throat when he saw life wrenched into blind violence. It was a lust to kill, as if through murder he would have to seek his way to peace. It was a black power that gripped him and made him do brutal or reckless deeds. He had little strength against it; and if he did not abuse man or beast, drawing from savagery an aftermath of calm, he had to give himself to some fierce experience.

(p. 51)

In this particular instance, he dives recklessly from a high bank into the boiling river, disappears from sight until Lela faints from fear, then appears with a devilish grin on his face, “triumphant … a river demon.” Charley is a man with a place but without a time; he is a mountain man born too late. The frontier, the life of the wilderness, is gone forever, and Charley cannot adjust to even the meager society of rural Idaho.

Neither is Charley able to adjust to his natural environment entirely. He does not fear a dangerous and busy life, but neither does he want it. He prefers peace and solitude and serenity, and thus appears lazy to his family and his few friends. Like an animal, he would reconcile himself to nature, but to a mystical aspect of it, not to all the particulars. On the other hand, Lela hungers for the dangerous and busy life but is afraid of it. And so the two people are at cross-purposes with each other and also within themselves. The river becomes a symbol of these differences:

Charley hated it. He hated the river's senseless going to an unknown and futile end, the loud tongue of its monologue, its grotesque buffoonery, its crazed barn-storming on its way to the sea. And its stage-struck gestures, its steady infernal booming, awakened a cruel hunger that had stood unused in his being. He stepped out of long indolence, feeling the great surging of life, yet despising it. How, he wondered, could a man rest in peace, when Nature dramatized even the melting of snows?

(p. 98)

The description of the river is significant, because it is also the description of Charley. In a way, he is nature, or naural man, and when he hates the river he hates himself. He senses that he is possessed by some kind of dark and primitive evil (perhaps ignorance), but he can do nothing about it. He even breeds another like himself, his son Jed, who can with fascination study a snake:

Though they were enemies, the spirit of this snake was his spirit; their two souls reached back anciently to the same dark source. Their ancestry was the same wilderness of desire.

(p. 167)

And so Charley and after him Jed symbolize the dark origins of man, the primitive spirit, evil in its ancient sources of ignorance, base desires, and lack of intelligent control. Yet Charley is capable of tenderness, and Jed is capable of turning against his father.

Lela finds something else in the river:

It was a tireless hunger, ancient but forever young, baffled but forever seeking, as if under the earth's calm surface there was a great unrest, out of which it came eternally, speaking the language of life. Night and day … she heard the sound of its travel … until life spun within her like an eddy of feeling isolated from all meaning, condemned to a timeless fever of striving, but exiled from all change.

(pp. 271-72)

She never finds what she is looking for, because Charley is always there to frustrate and thwart her desires, but the river remains a “symbol of the up-reaching life, and its going [gives] her strength.” Like the white whale in Moby Dick, the river is whatever man makes of it; it is a mirror in which each person sees himself. Like Ahab, Charley Bridwell hates what he sees. But, like King Lear, Charley is blind to the dangers around him, blind through vanity, and this blindness leads to his defeat.

Two people hate Charley. One is his son Jed, named after a man whose teeth Charley once kicked out. The other is a sheepherder named Adolph Buck. Adolph runs off with Charley's daughter, and Jed takes away Charlie's wife. Charley, the man for whom truth lay in “the lurking sunlit vision, standing in all the accidents of ill luck and chance,” finally becomes the object of a hatred which rises to the level of myth and destroys him.

Jed has inherited both the Bridwell lust for devilment and the deep brooding intensity of his mother. The latter gives him the sensitivity to see that his father is cruel (though perhaps innocently) to Lela; the former charges him with the desire to excel his father's “cunning ingenuities.” The mixture makes Jed into a strange boy, intensely cruel, yet often likable, shaped not only by his blood-inheritance but also by his environment:

Everything around him … invited him to solitude or to reckless deeds. The great mountains, the untamed head-strong river, the wild animal life and the lonely blockade of winter months—he felt the power of all these, and their ruthlessness, and their savage ways.

(pp. 151-52)

Jed leaves home when he is fourteen. During the next nine years Charley becomes lazier and more cruel, neglecting Lela while she bears several more children and is slowly and spiritually starved. She is isolated in the wilderness with a man who is little more than the wilderness himself. Then, in an archetypal pattern, Jed returns to take his mother away. The final scene in the novel is one of the largest, wildest, and most significant in American fiction. Charley, in an animal rage, turns on Jed and almost kills him, but Lela beats Charley senseless with a club and goes off with Jed. Another son waits for Charley, thinking that he too will leave with them, but Charley remains, and in madness he drinks and raves, curses and laughs like a devil, and tries to come to terms with his grief. He cannot change, and in the morning he walks away, never to be seen again.

And yet his ghost remains with us, just as the ghosts of primitive man still walk beside us and ride in us whenever we succumb to the dark forests and the strange madness of our savage origins. We have made some progress; Jed, although evil himself, is less so than Charley. For a time he exceeded even Charley in cruelty, and I see this as an oblique reference to such things in man's history as the Inquisition, with which Fisher deals in My Holy Satan (1958). But somehow there is progress, increased love and rationality, making its way through the primitive evils. The shadows remain, but the river finally flows on, taking Lela and her children with it.

The shadows and the potential light, the barbarisms and the struggle toward rationality, the cruelties and the occasional hope through the beauties and the mysteries of nature—these permeate all of Fisher's fiction. Some of his later work is heavy with exposition and autobiography, presumably the result of his increasing impatience with superstition, ignorance, and fear, all of which he tried valiantly to overcome. While his life work rarely swerved from its predetermined course, established by his youthful reaction to the Idaho wilderness, the early and archetypical Dark Bridwell remains his most artistice blending of the literally real and the mythical. From the American western experience comes the universal story of mankind.

Works Cited

Fisher, Vardis. April. Caldwell, 1937.

——— Dark Bridwell. Boston, 1931.

——— Tale of Valor. New York, 1958.

——— Toilers of the Hills. Caldwell 1928.

——— We are Betrayed. Caldwell, 1935.