Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on our appreciation for Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, and Children of God, and our enjoyment of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove last year.

Summary in 4 sentences: Doc is a biographical novel of John Henry  “Doc” Holiday and his life up until 1881 when his close friends ,the Earp brothers were planning to leave Dodge City and move to Tombstone, Az.  Doc Holiday grew up in Georgia, had a classical education, attended University in Pennsylvania, but upon returning home to Georgia found that he had Tuberculosis – from which his mother died, so headed West to where the air was drier and he may have a better chance to live with or even beat his disease. The majority of Doc takes place in Dodge City and is an account of how a well-educated and cultured man adapted to the culture and people of a town on the edges of civilization, his relationships with the people there, his struggles with his tuberculosis.  Russell’s novel is based on extensive research on the people, times, and location, and her intent was more to be true to the people and their times, than to create an exciting, page turner novel. 

My Impressions: I really enjoyed reading this book, though it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.  I love Russell’s writing, how she filled out the characters and created a realistic picture of the world of Dodge City, which I found really interesting. 

Doc is a novel more in the form of a “doc”udrama, than a story using the traditional beginning-middle-end formula.   In novelizing Doc Holiday’s biography, Russell paints a picture of the characters of a few well-known figures in American folklore, that is very much at odds with the mythology that has come down to us, mostly thru dime-novels and television. She also provides a series of vignettes in the lives of those characters, which bring the town of Dodge City to life and makes it more real than the “wild west” popularized on TV. 

I just watched the 1939 movie “Dodge City with my mother, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, both well coifed and beautifully dressed in tailored western chic.   Flynn plays the role of Sheriff Hatton, doing much of  what Wyatt Earp did in real life – cleaning up Dodge City, which is wilder, and much more violent than what is described in Doc.    Olivia de Havilland is his virtuous and beautiful love interest whose heart Flynn (naturally) wins in the end.  My mother’s favorite TV show is Gunsmoke, also set in Dodge City in the 1880s and she still watches reruns daily.  Sheriff Matt Dillon runs the town like a wise, benevolent and well respected cacique.  These are but two examples of how Hollywood has mythologized Dodge City, and part of what inspired Russell to write a novel that rings much closer to the truth.  

In Doc, Russell’s Dodge City did include rowdy cowboys getting paid after months on the trail, getting drunk fighting, whoring, and shooting up the town. But it was a lot tamer than in the movie Dodge City.  Doc also included all classes of people making lives for themselves, as one would expect in any small frontier town far from the resources of civilization.  There is small town political intrigue, people struggling to survive, dealing with prejudice and racism, and tragedy.  The moneyed few had conflicting visions of how Dodge City should evolve, and they struggled with each other as they sought to steer the town and its laws in directions that favored their interests. 

Though he was young and consumptive (tubercular,) Doc Holiday became a prominent figure in Dodge City because he was unique. I found him to be the most interesting and compelling character in the novel  – a charming and very polite southern gentleman, the best educated man in town, a caring and generous dentist,  an excellent card player and gambler, a quick wit, quick on the draw, and with a multitude of surprising talents.  He was Stoic in dealing with his tuberculosis and other misfortunes. He rarely lost his equanimity, but when he did, and sometimes for what seemed like an insignificant slight, it was intense, and people paid attention. 

Doc Holiday was not ambitious for money or power – he knew he didn’t have long to live and had other values to live by.  He came to Dodge to set up a dental practice – the first and only one in the region, but had to become a gambler to earn enough money to live.  When on occasion he became financially embarrassed, his partner Kate was able to bail him out.  He befriended the Earp brothers who were established in the town – Wyatt and Morgan as deputy sheriffs, and James who with his wife, ran a bordello.

Doc’s paramour Kate was was also an intriguing character.  Born into European aristocracy, classically trained, she found herself with no way to make a living other than to rent out her body, and she continued to work as a prostitute with Doc’s full knowledge, while also being Doc’s companion, and when he was sick, his caregiver.   She was highly opinionated, mercurial in her moods, and nobody’s fool.  She was what one today might call a “wacko” and I liked her. She and Doc often conversed in French or Latin. 

Doc’s relationship with his companion Kate was a fun roller-coaster ride – they often fought, and their partnership was an on-again-off-again affair – she would leave him, and then come back.   Likewise,  we got to know James Earp and his prostitute wife Bessie, running the “best” whorehouse in Dodge City. Morgan Earp was easy-going and the most likable of the brothers, and shacked up with his gal Lou, also a former prostitute.  Wyatt Earp struck me as a different incarnation of Cal from Lonesome Dove; they are cut from the same cloth. But unlike Cal, Wyatt did have a gal, Mattie Blalock, also a former prostitute, and like Cal, he struggled to understand and relate to women.

I enjoyed stepping back 150 years to spend time with these folks and immerse myself into the life of Dodge City.   In Russell’s final chapter “The Bitch in the Deck,”  and in her author’s note and interview at the end of the book, she provides amplifying historical background, details and context to the characters she portrays in Doc.

A couple of other aspects of this book that appealed to me:

REAL CHARACTERS – At the front end of the book Russell gives us a list of all the characters – including horses – in the book, and italicizes the few that are fictional. The vast majority are historical and she based her portrayal of them on what she was able to find in the letters and other records she researched.

LANGUAGE – When writing in her own voice, Russell adjusted her language as much as possible to the language of the 19th century midwest.  The cowboys and midwestern characters in her book also spoke in earthy and simple American prose.  Doc himself speaks in the language of a well-educated southern aristocrat – eloquent, refined and delightful.

RACE – two important characters in the book are fictional: John Horse Sanders a mixed race Native/African American young man, and Jau “China Joe” Dong-Sing, one of the many Chinese who immigrated to the US to do manual labor.  Their experiences reflect how in that time and place, non-whites had few rights, and were considered by many as free game and easy prey to any nefarious characters who wanted whatever they had.

PROSTITUTION – Many of the female characters were prostitutes and most of the male characters patronized them in the various bordellos in Dodge City.  The sex trade was open in much of America at that time, and was just part of the background noise in Dodge City, though the prohibition movement  also gathering steam at that time, was also targeting prostitution. All the Earp brothers’ partners  had been and a couple still were  prostitutes, renting out their bodies to men, to make a bit of extra money.   A single woman didn’t have many options in Dodge City in the 1870s, and in an economy built largely on spendthrift cowboys at the end of a cattle drive, prostitution and gambling were lucrative sources of income for many who were struggling to survive.  

DEATH Doc had watched his mother die of tuberculosis and he knew that his disease would also be terminal.  Russell makes clear that his disease was often excruciatingly painful.   But he soldiered on and did his best to not let it slow him down.  At one point in the book, Doc appeared to be on his death bed, and his friends put up a death watch to protect him and provide anything he needed in his final days. Eventually he recovered, but he knew it was just a short reprieve; sooner rather than later, his time would come.  His tuberculosis, and knowing that his time was short colored all that he did.   Russell has a great section on death and hope on page 289

MUSIC – Doc was a truly accomplished pianist in his youth, but never played in the bars or bordellos, of Dodge City because, he said, the pianos were all out of tune.  At the end of the book, Bat Masterson threw a big party, and Kate had a good piano brought in.  Doc finally sat down and played his favorite piece, The Emperor Concerto by Beethoven.  Those present didn’t even know he could play the piano and were stunned by his virtuosity – and for Doc, it was an almost other-worldly, ecstatic experience.   This scene was powerful, and moved not only all those at the party, but me, the reader. 

A few quotes from the novel that caught my eye: (page numbers from paperback edition shown)

“Dodge City had a single purpose: to extract wealth from Texas…there was really only one rule to remember. Don’t kill the customers.  All other ordinances were customarily negotiable.  p28-29

Doc: “Nora honey, I’m perishin’ for a dish of peaches in cream.  Will  y’all join me?”  p 93

Doc: “Do tell sir!  We are agog with anticipation.” p105

Doc to Father Angensperg:  “You heard Chopin?  I am prostrate with envy, sir!…We are an atoll of culture on this godforsaken ocean of grass.”  p107

It would be nearly a century before proper police procedure for handling crimes went much beyond (1) arrest a suspect within a few hours and (2) beat a confession out of the bastard.  p189

Doc: “We are none of us born into Eden. World’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand?  Abolitionists thought that all they had to do to right an ancient wrong was set the slaves free.  Trouble was, they didn’t have a plan in the world for what came next. Cut ’em loose. That was the plan. Let ’em eat cake, I guess.” p259

Nine out of ten Lakota died of tuberculosis in those days….p282

She was the last person in Kansas anybody should feel sorry for, given that she was tolerably pretty and her daddy was indecently rich and her whole life was laid out before her like a banquet on a fine lace tablecloth, and yet….p295

Hope smiled. The Fates laughed.  p295

Wyatt Earp thinking to himself:  Farming is a suckers game. You can work like an ox – put everything you’ve got into the land – but if the weather doesn’t break you, the markets will.  p 308

They had come to believe that combat and commerce presented similar challenges and drew on similar talents;  the tactical brilliance Elijah Grier displayed in battle had made Bob Wright an astonishingly successful entrepreneur. Others saw risk and danger; they saw openings and opportunities.  Others stood stunned in the face of shifting complexity; they cut through to solutions that seemed to arise without thought or effort. p 319

Doc: “Toujours l’audace!”

Doc:  “A gentleman is judged by the  way he treats his inferiors, sir.” p324

Doc: “Ovid tells us that Fortune and Venus befriend the bold.” p326

Doc: “Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am an unhappy man…’ p344

In a standup contest, remorse and self-loathing can battle whisky to a draw. 356

The Milky Way was strung across the sky like the diamond necklace of a crooked banker’s mistress. p379