Borrowed happiness

"You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well," said Morgan, "I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness."

Mary Doria Russell, Doc

Mary Doria Russell's magnificent 2011 novel Doc may be fiction but at times it reads like biography. It reads like truth, or at least like a truth we would like to believe. Biographies of John Henry "Doc" Holliday, especially the earliest ones, painted him as more gunfighter than dentist, more drunken gambler than polished Southern gentleman. Russell seeks to set the record straight.

I first learned Russell was writing a novel about Doc Holliday when I heard her speak several years ago in Columbus. She mentioned, as she does briefly in the novel, that Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, was his second cousin. What's more, Mitchell may have modeled Ashley Wilkes after him, she said. The refined Doc Holliday was as out of place in Dodge City as Wyatt Earp would have been in Atlanta. He settled there under the mistaken belief the prairie air would cure his tuberculosis, from which he was slowing dying. He drank because it relieved his coughing. He gambled because it paid better than dentistry and didn't require as steady a hand. He carried a gun, even if illegally, because he often won at cards and was wary of sore losers.

Russell blames Bat Masterson for starting and spreading the stories about Doc Holliday being a notorious gunfighter. Masterson doesn't fare very well in Doc. Nor does Kate Harony, the well educated Hungarian prostitute who was Doc's on-again, off-again mistress. The author blames Kate for much of what went wrong in Doc's life, including the Gunfight at OK Corral, which is not dealt with directly in this novel. It was her idea that they move to the dusty prairie town of Dodge City.

The Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan and James, are painted with almost as much affection as Russell paints Holliday. James and his wife run a brothel where the women are protected and treated with dignity. Morgan is a bookish young man, a friend to all, who views Doc as his mentor. Wyatt comes through as tough yet almost saintly. He enforces the law equally for all, whatever the consequences, attends church and avoids liquor. After his first dental appointment with Doc Holliday, he at first refuses the free toothbrush offered, thinking it must be a bribe.

There are mysteries in the plot, yet they are hardly necessarily, for it is the characters that actually move the story along. Even those who know the history will want to read Russell's version of it.

For all his trials with declining health, an often angry Kate and the false stories spread by Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday makes the most of his life in Russell's novel. When happiness eludes him, he feeds off that of others.