Honey in the Horn
by H. L. Davis
Summary
Clay Calvert is a ranch hand in the employ of old Uncle Preston Shiveley when he is tricked into helping his stepbrother Wade break jail, and from then on he is loose in Oregon with reasons of his own to keep moving. This is the homesteading Oregon of 1906 to 1908, and the novel's real subject is everybody else who is loose in it too.
Clay takes up with Luce, the daughter of a travelling horse trader, and the two of them join a wagon migration across the state. Wade turns up again with an accusation of horse theft and is hanged for a crime he did not commit, which settles Clay's problem without cleaning his conscience. Luce vanishes with her father while Clay is away getting help for her, and the last stretch of the book follows him through the wheat harvest and onto a Columbia River scow before the two of them find each other again on the road west.
The plot is honestly the least of it. Davis writes the settlers as a gallery: hop pickers, land promoters, preachers, sheriffs, Indian families squeezed to the margins, every one of them rendered with a dry, unsentimental comedy that was nothing like the noble pioneer fiction of the day.
The title comes from a line in a square dance tune, which is about right for the book's temper.
Around four hundred pages, loose limbed and digressive on purpose.
Best for readers who want the settlement of the West written by a sceptic with a poet's eye for landscape and no patience at all for the myth.
Historical Context & Significance
Honey in the Horn won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1936, after taking the Harper Prize for the best first novel of 1935. H. L. Davis remains the only Oregon born winner of the fiction Pulitzer.
He came to fiction sideways. He was first noticed as a poet, and he and James Stevens soon published Status Rerum, a privately printed manifesto savaging the Portland literary scene, which made him enemies and a name. H. L. Mencken took him up, published his prose in the American Mercury, urged him toward fiction, and called this book the best first novel ever published in America. Davis wrote it in Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He published four more novels and a good deal of short work without ever matching the splash, and Oregon critics still periodically argue that he deserves to be far better known. The book itself is also read now with clear eyes about its era: its portrait of the dispossession happening at the edges is one of its strengths, and its language about Native people is its period's.