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'Bucking The Tiger' by Bruce Olds

'Doc' Holliday's hand was full of jokers

Sunday, September 02, 2001

By Allen Barra

	Bucking The Tiger By Bruce Olds Farrar, Strauss & Giroux $25.00

He’s the Georgia-born son of a plantation owner and Confederate army officer, Ivy League (dental school) graduate, gambler, pistoleer, faro dealer, tubercular patient and self-imposed far-West exile.

In many Old West narratives, Doc is merely a colorful appendage to the story of Wyatt Earp and the events leading up to the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881, but in various forms his own legend has stubbornly maintained its independence.

In the hugely popular 1905 potboiler “The Sunset Trail” by Alfred Henry Lewis, a New York-based editor and author, Doc is a pulp version of a figure out of a Conrad novel who “mixed up in everything that came along. It was the only way I could forget myself.”

In Pete Hamill’s script for the film “Doc” (1971), a Vietnam War allegory with Wyatt Earp standing in for Lyndon Johnson and the predatory spirit of modern America, Doc is a civilized, cautionary voice amid the carnage of Tombstone.

Olds’ Doc Holliday is both simpler and more complex, revealed in tantalizing glimpses by a score of witnesses both real and fictitious. Bat Masterson, peace officer turned journalist, recalls him as “hotheaded, impetuous, quarrelsome and reckless, his temper disputatious at all times” and “a hopeless romantic.”

According to Wyatt Earp, he was “by natural temperament a philosopher and fatalist whom life had made a dark and caustic wit.”

Everyone from Doc’s real-life frontier companion, Kate Elder, to the fictional W.H. Munny (played by Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven”) to fellow consumptive Franz Kafka is called to account.

Olds’ method lights a torch for American historical fiction in the 21st century. The playful, witty text uses a mix of styles, tones, tenses and forms, including memoirs (both real and reconstituted) interior monologues, poetry, popular song verses (Van Morrison’s “T.B. Sheets,” a harrowing primer on tuberculosis) and even lists

that read as if printed out from Doc’s subconscious. (My personal favorites are aphorisms on poker, including “bluff the man, not the hand,” “never bluff an amateur, he almost always will call.”)

Amazingly for so imaginative a work, most of the novel is grounded in fact. Where facts are unavailable, Olds has reimagined Doc’s past for him. His Doc is raised in “the text of a storybook,” his impressionable mind filled with melancholy Irish airs, the poetry of Poe and Baudelaire and unrequited love for his cousin Melanie (who eventually retires to a convent).

Wisely, Olds does not try to explain why the real Holliday headed for the Old West. Was it his mother’s death? A search for a climate more hospitable to consumptives? A death more suitable for a gambler than wasting slowly away?

Doc chose to leave home, moving on and on until “at last, the universe could not locate itself in him.”

Ultimately, as Olds realizes, the mystery surrounding Doc Holliday’s life is more intriguing than any explanation of it. Gallantly, though, he allows Doc a crack at lighting a candle to his own psyche.

“All I ever wanted was to be the hero of my own life. More’s the pity, then, that the hand I was dealt was littered so with jokers.” But ultimately fitting for the eternal wild card in the West’s most enduring legend.

Allen Barra writes a sports column for the Wall Street Journal.