Book Review: Wyoming Summer

Title: Wyoming Summer

(The copy I physically own still has its original, pretty dust jacket, but it's in poorer condition than that library discard is guaranteed to be...)

Author: Mary O'Hara (Alsop)

Date: 1963

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 286 pages

Quote: "I have named one of the yearling fillies Flicka...a beauty with the same coloring Floss had--golden coat and cream-colored mane and tail...Why should this little filly not be the heroine of the horse story I am going to write?"

The writer known as Mary O'Hara had a life more interesting, and layered in fiction, than any of her fictional characters ever had. Rich society girl (her real birth name was Mary O'Hara Alsop) turned part-time rancher, she struggled with then-unmentionable health and marriage problems in youth. Her two children were brought up by their father. In midlife she tried composing music in the classical tradition, and had some success in that fading genre--some of her real compositions are discussed in Wyoming Summer. She tried a romance about humans, a youth whose lack of social background is compared to that of a "catch colt" (a term defined in Wyoming Summer). Then she thought of writing stories, not exclusively for children but teen-centered, about some of the adventures her husband's teenaged students had with the horses they rode during summer camp at their ranch.

Those stories became a trilogy of novels. By some standards they're bad, sentimental novels. The most powerful novel in the series, My Friend Flicka, builds up to the dramatic climax of an injured feral horse (more precisely a filly) becoming too ill to stand up and climb out of a stream where it's fallen into the cold water. Little Ken McLaughlin fails to pull Flicka out of the water, instead he falls in, and he lies all night in the cold stream holding Flicka's head above water. In the morning the power of True Love (for we might as well admit that some presexual children feel True Love for animals) has allowed Ken to absorb Flicka's infection in some mystical way, so when the child comes out of the hospital Flicka is healthy as, well, a horse, and "gentle as a kitten."

Unsentimental readers apparently always suspected that something like that really happened, and, "The filly died, didn't she?" someone demanded of Mary O'Hara. She did, O'Hara admitted, but she ought to have got well. A lot of readers--maybe all of us clapped dutifully, too, to revive Tinker Bell in Peter Pan--wanted Flicka to have recovered.

At the end of My Friend Flicka the filly is strong and healthy, but in Thunderhead and Green Grass of Wyoming she's become a rather weak character, considering how intensely Ken projected love onto her in volume one and how vibrant a horse-personality she'd seemed to be. Well, the adult reader is not surprised. In the other two novels about the fictional Goose Bar Ranch, we're told that Flicka is a big strong race horse, but we hardly even see Ken riding her. In real life that's because the sick filly died, and the real Flicka was a pretty animal but not a "heroine," and the real "Goblin" was not even half Thoroughbred and his mother was a funny-looking crossbreed and he wasn't raced...

Nevertheless most of the animal stories that went into the Goose Bar Ranch trilogy were true, even if the "Goblin" colt was a draft horse and the boys at the real Goose Bar Ranch weren't O'Hara's sons, and, for that matter, the identity of O'Hara's husband as "Michael Bergwin of the Goose Bar Ranch" has been deliberately blurred. There was a filly who didn't become docile when stressed out, so rather than try more brutal means to "break" her O'Hara and "Michael Bergwin" let her run with the rest of the breeding stock. There was a colt O'Hara persuaded her husband not to sterilize, although that meant he, too, had to be kept away from the only male horse Bergwin kept. There was a Swedish farmhand who demonstrated a traditional dance. There was a bull who attacked, not O'Hara, but a visiting customer, and had to be killed. To some extent even the animals' short stories were fictionalized for the novels, because novels are fiction; but there were animals like those.

In Wyoming Summer O'Hara shares some animal stories that didn't fit into the novels, too. The McLaughlins have a normal cat. The almost-real-life Bergwins have a normal cat and a social cat...and O'Hara explains why the social cat didn't belong in the horse novels, nor did the hyperactive dog O'Hara made it a project to calm. They would have been a distraction from the horses' story.

Wyoming Summer is not a full or accurate memoir; neither is it a true work of fiction. It's an out-of-sequence narrative compiled from pieces of diaries patched together into one fictional summer season, some vaguely noted as having taken place earlier than others. Perhaps the original entries weren't dated and worked naturally in a phenological rather than chronological order; whether something was seen in 1939 or 1959 seems to matter less than whether it was June or July weather. Some people seem to be identifiable but have actually been fictionalized a bit; the idea was to preserve living people's privacy. O'Hara wrote a memoir explaining some of these things, a little later, after more people had granted permission and/or died.

So where does this semi-true story of how the fiction trilogy was written fit into the trilogy? I'll say this much. I read My Friend Flicka when I was seven years old and rated it among the top five books I'd ever read for at least another seven years, before I became too old to suspend disbelief. I read Thunderhead at nine, Green Grass of Wyoming at ten, and Wyoming Summer at sixteen. From that day forward Wyoming Summer has been my all-time favorite of O'Hara's books.

They're not exactly Sunday School books. They contain little doctrine and some New Agey ecumenical thoughts. Nevertheless O'Hara's life and thought and all her works were saturated with an appreciation of beauty, and of the Highly Sensory-Perceptive perception of beauty, that are profoundly Christian; she didn't try to suppress that appreciation or make it less specifically Christian in the novels, either. Many of her generation discarded Christianity. O'Hara was too perceptive to do that. If it could be proved that Christianity were not true, she affirmed, the existence of beauty would prove that something like Christianity is true. She wrote no altar calls into any of her books but she did write about the way the sky seems dome-shaped from a high elevation, about long arching ribbons of whitewater, about colts whose "manes and tails seem to have a separate life, every hair springing out," about birch groves with fluttering green leaves, and about the colt who really did develop infected wounds from running into barbed wire, require a lot of nursing, and recover.

She doesn't preach about these things...until she comes to a point where it seems relevant to mention a Christian book, thought, or experience, and then she says (in the novels too) that she believes in a Creator because she loves all these beautiful created things.

My Friend Flicka was the bestseller and is widely available at low prices; O'Hara's other books are moving into the collector price range. This web site will do the best it can. Currently I have to say $10 per copy, $5 per package (which could include the fiction trilogy as well as Wyoming Summer), $1 per online payment. If Amazon sellers step up to offer better prices, then we will too. As always, feel free to mix old books by living authors, who receive 10% of the total cash price for which we sell their vintage books, into the package with this one; O'Hara no longer has any use for $1.50, but by now searching for the label "A Fair Trade Book" will pull up over a hundred books by living authors and you're welcome to suggest more.