4: Remember Ben Clayton

By: Stephen Harrigan
Finished: January 12
Pages: 368

Wendy was so very right about this one. This is a book of heart break, war, and loneliness, and the different ways that parents can fail their children. I haven't read a lot of books in my day that make something as boring as sculpture making a fascinating read. I find sculpture beautiful, but I also feel that it would make a deeper connection if there were pictures. However, this novel discusses the art so clearly that the artwork comes to life upon the page.
It is sometimes difficult for me to think that Comanches roamed the plains of Texas little more than a 100 years ago, and that there were people who lived through that time and saw the advancement of Texas to its own country and then a state of the union is a fascinating and fast history. This story follows the lives of three families and how the mutual drive towards a sculpture to remember a boy named Ben also becomes the drive to reconnect the past with the present, and keep the past alive. The first family is a father and daughter pair of sculptors, the father, Gil, a successful but arrogant and prideful man whose choices lead his family to tragedy. His daughter, Maureen, is trying to make it as a sculptor in her own right.
The second family is the aforementioned Ben's, living with regret and loneliness in the hills of west Texas after the war, disagreements, and death separate a man and his son forever.
The third isn't a family. The third is Ben's friend, Arthur, who survives the battle that killed Ben, with horrifying superficial and psychological scars. After the war, he stays in France, helping to fix what had been broken in the war. The task of restoring the soil of France to productivity gave him an abstract satisfaction, but it was not as deep or a genuine as another feeling he could not hold on to for more than a few moments at a time, let alone define. This sensation had something to do with not really wanting the trees to grow again or the birds to be sweeping across the blank gray sky or rising from the reborn fields. he had taken some sort of comfort in the complete deadness of everything, in the silence, in the understanding that the world had been seeking an end for itself and had finally found it. He had been content to share in that stasis of oblivion, and he rested that life was starting to surge on." (82) Arthur has already lost his family back home in Ranger, Texas to influenza, and losing Ben seems to break him. " The last thing he remembered was...staring in stupefaction at Ben's already dead body. He remembered the feeling of betrayal as well, the sense that Ben had purposely left him for some plane of experience that was more interesting...Even the death of his family, which he know should have left him howling with sorrow and shock, was something he seemed to have accepted with fatalistic understanding. It was not that he had ceased to feel, only that he had ceased to be impressed." (91)
Maureen's difficulties with her father originate from a number of problems, mostly her independence, and one of them is her on again off again suitor, a professor from the University of Texas who comes to visit. Vance is an amusing man:
"I don't know, a rough character like myself, lurking around his daughter."
"You're hardly a rough character."
"As if you would know. You didn't see me get into a saloon brawl the other day over Spenser's use of the Petrarchan sonnet." (145)
The most tragic figure, yet the one I understood the least was Ben's father, Lamar, who survived living with Indians, and carving a hard life for himself out of the desolation that is the West Texas Plains, and I both wanted to hug him and smack him upside the head.
"All his life he had treated the things that brought him pride and comfort as if they were shameful secrets--even his love for his own son. There were times when Ben was older, when they were riding fence together or camped out during the roundup, that he had felt such contentment in being with him that he thought he ought to say something out loud about it. But he never had, not that he could recall. he had expected Ben to know his own value to his father just as he had expected Gilheaney tonight to know the quality of his own work. You shouldn't have to tell people what ought to be plain to them already." (189)
The book is staggering in the depth of emotion and sorrow that can be felt from chracters that, at the time, seem like pictures. Thinking back on it brings a tightness in my chest because it is just so real. Listen, you have to read this book to really understand the emotional punch behind the random quotes I stick up here because they stuck out to me while I was reading.
"It was different from the model he had seen in Gilheaney's studio that first time, the one that had startled him so much he had forgotten who he was and where he was. It wasn't like Gilheaney was trying to steal Ben away anymore. Ben was there, in the statue, all by himself. It wasn't like he was put there by the artist, like he was shaped by Gilheaney's hands; it was like he and Poco had just showed up on their own.
It was there in the face, whatever it was: the quality that made Lamar believe that the sculptor had succeeded. He saw the innocence and trust that had been in Ben's eyes when he was a boy, when he had been so proud to ride and work alongside his father. He saw some kind of wanting in that face too, not a lack of anything but an expectation, the bright sort of yearning that Sarey used to have when she talked about what it would be like to see Europe or some other such place.
But there was anger too, and you couldn't miss it. Lamar didn't know how Gilheaney had got it into Ben's expression, but it was there. It was the fury that had been in Ben's face the last time Lamar had seen him, a fury Lamar had never been able to erase from his memory and that Gilheaney had somehow seen and understood and sealed into the sculpture.
The funny thing was that from one moment to the next you did not know what you were looking at: the innocence of a child, the buoyant expectation of a young man, or the anger of a betrayed son. They were all bound up together, like they might be in a living face, impossible to pin down or pry apart." (328)
"If Lamar Clayton had had an artist's vision, if he could have detected the fate of his son as it slumbered in the stone of his own tragic life, there might have been a better ending than this forlorn monument. But even an artist's eye, as Gil had learned, could not necessarily detect what was buried in the hearts of the people the artist was supposed to love." (329)

I leave you with the image as I see it in my mind. Driving on a pretty deserted two lane highway through west Texas. Surrounded by rolling hills, and mesas, and gullys, to the side there is a man standing next to his horse, looking out at the wide free land, one hand resting against the saddle. It seems as if in a moment he will put foot to stirrup, shove off the ground and into the saddle, and ride back into the past from whence he came, but instead the statue that tells no one to remember Ben Clayton stands forever looking into the sunset, and into heaven.

Good Reading,
Caitlin