Paradise is always the final frontier
All True Not a Lie in It By Alix Hawley Knopf Canada 384 pp, $29.95
By one of those familiar ironies of history, in which the son sets his face against the father, the quintessential American frontiersman, Daniel Boone, was raised in a Quaker atmosphere for which he could only feel antipathy. Alix Hawley’s fictionalized, first-person account of Boone’s career in All True Not a Lie in It begins, in fact, with an episode of the Boone family hauled before the local congregation of Quakers in the rugged hills of western Pennsylvania, to confess openly that Daniel’s unmarried sister has been “too conversant” with her lover. The result is that she is now with child. The neighbourhood children thereupon taunt the seven-year-old Daniel with the accusation that his sister is a “whore” — a label that will curiously persist in the family like some malign inheritance; Daniel Boone’s own wife and daughter will be accused in their turn of being “whores.”
Boone does meet some real prostitutes in the great city of Philadelphia. It turns out to be an education: these women have nothing to do with girls like Daniel Boone’s sister. But it is true that Boone does give the Quakers, with their admirably strict morals, their tendency to “smother in pity and kindness,” plenty of ammunition. Like all frontiersmen, Boone has powerful impulses to do exactly what he likes. What is the wilderness for, if not to extend such freedom to a brilliant hunter and explorer? The Quakers may well object. Others, who are ruder than the Quakers but equally censorious, may call frontiersmen like Boone “White Indians” or “border trash.” They may call their women “whores.”
In defiance of their objections, the boy Boone vows, “I will find a real paradise” — the place where game is abundant and where no white has ever set foot. For a while he finds what he’s looking for. But then the game in that region becomes poorer and poorer, and Boone spies smoke from settlers’ cabins in the neighbourhood and he knows it’s time to venture deeper into the wilderness.
Hawley follows the career of Boone, born in 1740, beginning with the family’s move from Pennsylvania to the comparative wilderness of the mountains of North Carolina. There, Boone establishes among the settlers a reputation as a deadly aim, equipped at first with nothing more lethal than a club. “I practice with my club until I can get any bird on the first throw, even pheasants,” he declares. Boone subsequently obtaining a rifle is like Jimi Hendrix receiving his first guitar — the instrument unlocks their genius. Boone wins every shooting contest open to him. And of course no four footed animal is safe with Boone in the woods. “I can follow the animals’ thoughts and I know which way they will run,” he says. In short, he is a harbinger of death.
“I believe I could fight Death itself,” Boone proclaims, having felt its presence so keenly, among both humans and animals. He has seen it take away his older brother, Israel, who also wished to do what he wanted — marrying a woman of mixed white and native blood — and then watching her die of consumption, before perishing himself of the same disease. There seems to be some connection, at least for Boone, between doing as you like and succumbing to the intimate embrace of death.
Throughout this narrative, Hawley balances a poetic appreciation of her characters, the weather, the landscape, and her story telling imperative. The poetic and the narrative are both powerful impulses, in art and in life. “Everyone wants a story,” William Hill, one of Boone’s childhood acquaintances pronounces. He then proceeds to write pulp novels glorifying Boone’s career. Hill recognizes his destiny. “You will be famous, Dan! I will make a book of you!” he shouts when he and Boone are still seven-year-olds. He makes good on this promise, which in turn kindles Boone’s suspicion that death may not be such an unwelcome visitor. “I curse Hill for his stories, for making me a famous man, when I have done no good,” Boone remarks. For one thing, Hill tempts Boone to “whore for land” — obtaining land on the basis of his celebrity-hood.
It must also be said that Boone takes great care to stay alive, particularly when overwhelmed by hostile Indians.
In her method of fictionalizing Boone, Hawley dwells not so much on his psychology as on his feeling of being carried away by large and sinister and beautiful forces. This is most powerfully conveyed in the first great climax of the narrative, Boone’s expedition into Kentucky. Here is the paradise he has been dreaming of all his life, Heaven on Earth. “Is there any great wrong with wanting Heaven now?” Boone asks.
It is the greatest curse of Boone, however, to immerse himself into this virgin wilderness, his dream of paradise, —
Hawley’s ability to convey the menace of paradise overwhelms
and then by his own actions, chiefly the introduction of his fellow whites into this uncharted land, to destroy that same dream.
Boone’s inability to resolve the curse makes Boone’s second great expedition, as a captive of the Shawnee nation, very grim indeed. The brutal murder of his son by the natives is another tragedy Boone cannot shake, a tragedy that drives him to the brink of madness — an urge to join his boy in the grave and so restore their bond of love. It shouldn’t be hard. “I feel Death sucking at my breath again,” he says. “So many times it has come so close.”
Hawley’s prose underlines the hallucinogenic sensation of Boone in the wilderness — her words and her sentences jar each other with their abrasive imagery. Describing a winter march, she writes, “The soles of my feet ache and burn, the skin is coming off and the new raw flesh shrinks from the cold. My lungs suck in the icy air, it stabs at my sore rib and my old broken ankle bone.” Metaphors are sinister, as when Hawley writes, “The river chuckles,” or, “His matted beard is like a frantic creature clinging to his face.”
So imagistic is the prose that the reader sometimes wonders what her protagonist is getting at. But Hawley’s ability to convey the menace of paradise is overwhelming, as well as her ability to make the reader share in the sorrows of her hero.