Raymond Carver’s Review of Hardcastle
Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness – From his book: Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose
In a time when so much fiction is being written and published that doesn’t seem to count for much, it should be said at once that this is a book about something—and something that matters. It has to do with the nature and meaning of friendship, love, obligation, responsibility, and behavior. Big concerns. But this is a big book, and one that throws light on—I’ll say it once and without embarrassment—the human condition. It gives more than a passing glance at what Melville called “the blackness of darkness,” but it helps hold back that darkness a little. It asks, early on and with all seriousness, How should a man act? And it’s to his lasting credit that Yount has the intelligence and insight and very great literary skill to show us, page by page, the lives of the people who inhabit this fine book as they are revealed in all their glory and imperfection.
Fiction that counts is about people. Does this need saying? Maybe. Anyway, fiction is not, as some writers believe, the ascendance of technique over content. These days we also seem to be long on novels and short stories in which people are reduced to nameless or otherwise easily forgettable “characters,” hapless creatures who have nothing much to do in this life or, even worse, go about doing unthinking and uncaring things to their own kind. In fiction that matters the significance of the action inside the story translates to the lives of people outside the story. Do we need to remind ourselves of this? In the best novels and short stories, goodness is recognized as such. Loyalty, love, fortitude, courage, integrity may not always be rewarded, but they are recognized as good or noble actions or qualities; and evil or base or simply stupid behavior is seen and held up for what it is: evil, base, or stupid behavior. There are a few absolutes in this life, some verities, if you will, and we would do well not to forget them.
Except for a frame of a few pages at the beginning and again at the end of the book—pages in which an old man appears with his grandchildren in Elkin, Kentucky, in the summer of 1979—the action of the novel takes place during the summer and fall of 1931 in that same Kentucky hill town. The hero is nineteen-year-old Bill Music, who has left his parents’ worn-out farm in Shulls Mills, Virginia, to go to Chicago for a ninety-day course at Coin Electric. He had hoped to better his lot and earn a living as an electrician. But when he finds himself scavenging out of garbage cans because there are no jobs, he decides to give up his dream and head for home. Hunger forces him to leave the train just outside of Elkin. A mine guard named Regus Bone mistakes him for a “Communist” labor organizer, puts a gun in his face, and wants to place him under arrest. But Music is tired and hungry, and Bone, feeling sympathy, lets him recuperate a few days with him and his mother, Ella Bone. Music and Bone become friendly, and Music decides to hire on as a mine guard himself at the princely sum of three dollars a day.
It’s dangerous work being a mine guard. Mine guards carry guns, as do some of the miners. Music and Bone pull their shift together and look after one another. On their days off from work they build a pigpen, go coon hunting, build and set rabbit traps, chop down a tree filled with bees and honey. Gradually, a deep friendship develops between the two men. Meanwhile, Music has fallen in love with a young mother and widow named Merlee. After a few months, Music becomes tired and ashamed of being a mine guard. Bone has also become disillusioned. They turn in their badges. But there comes, as we knew it must, the inevitable and fatal conflict with the Hardcastle Mining Company goons. Bone is ambushed and killed. Music survives his friend. “And although he saw it come, the news of Regus’s death didn’t seem to reach all the areas of his understanding for months or even years afterward, so that it took a very long time to come to the end of his grief.”
Music will marry Merlee and stay in Elkin to build a life. He doesn’t go home again. Besides, “He suspects home is simply not a place at all, but a time, and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”
Lionel Trilling has said that a great book reads us. Somewhere in my twenties, I read this and pondered its meaning. What exactly was the man saying? It sounded wise, learned, and insightful, and I wanted to be those things. When I finished reading Hardcastle, this remarkably generous but unsparing novel, I was reminded of Trilling’s words and I thought, So this is what he was talking about. Yes. How true. This is what he meant, yes.
Hardcastle by John Yount. New York: Richard Marek,