Go West, Young Writer

Western novel, the--a longform narrative set in the area defined by the western slope of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, from about 1850 until the present day; any pulp, mainstream, or literary narrative dealing with a combination of moral and ethical issues being investigated in an atmosphere suggestive of Western issues and needs; a regional novel evocative of the customs, language, and politics of the American West.

The Western novel was thought by critics and publishers to have had its heyday before the ending of World War II, a belief ratified by the press run of Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel, Lonesome Dove, a sprawling, laconic, and limber narrative, reminiscent in its evocative way of a clutch of wild horses at playful romp. Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature that year, has cowboys, Indians, cattle drives, cattle rustling, saloons, and dance hall girls; it had the dry stoicism of aging lawmen, broken relationships, sudden and violent death, horses, and the relentlessness of the overhead sun, scorching everything including the patience of otherwise taciturn men. 

 Also included were women who resented the dull humdrum of prairie life and the need to have a decent dinner for the men who worked the farms and ranches. In short, Lonesome Dove had humanity, just as surely as McMurtry's earlier works, Horseman, Pass by, and The Last Picture Show captured core samplings of the artifacts and zeitgeist of particular times in the American West. So too did Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose bring to dramatic life the conflicting personality types who were taken up with the grandeur of the landscape.

It probably began with Owen Wister's The Virginian, which helped articulate and define codes of behavior that through cliche and repetition became stereotypes of what to expect. Ditto that for a seemingly iconic work from dentist-turned-author Zane Grey, and his Riders of the Purple Sage, who did give us Lassiter, a prototype Western hero who can also be seen in Jack Schaefer's Shane, although more nuanced and believable in Schaefer's Monte Walsh. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's 1940 Western, The Ox-bow Incident, is set in the Nevada of 1885, taking on the theme of frontier justice and its applications to strangers appearing in the midst of a small town where everyone knew everyone else. A.B. Guthrie's 1947 novel, The Big Sky, uses three fictional mountain men to dramatize the early Caucasian denizens of the West, foragers, hunters-and-gathers, to use the anthropological terms, setting the stage for the farmers and ranchers to follow. 

The Big Sky is undershot with a sense of Paradise about to devolve, of a persistent sense of impending foreclosure as humanity en mass moved to encounter it.

The Western novel is an historical novel, just as likely to have its pulp and mainstream visions as any other genre, but equally apt to have works of substantial worth, works that accurately define and dramatize the human condition, as it was and as it still is. The 1975 Glendon Swarthout novel, The Shootist, has been acclaimed by the Western Writers of America as "One of the best Western novels ever written," an indication that John Bernard Books, a legendary gunfighter who arrives in the El Paso, Texas of 1901, has about him an aura and subtext like that of Monte Walsh and of McMurtry's iconic Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call. Although now recognized as an idiosyncratic and vital force in the field of the thriller, Elmore Leonard has many a memorable Western novel and short story to his credit, notable among them and worthy of study, 3:10 to Yuma, Hombre, and the short story, "The Tonto Woman."

Western themes abound, barbed wire and its implications being one, a logistical impasse between cattle and sheep ranchers another, and free range versus controlled range yet another. Even with the enormous success of Lonesome Dove, the historical writer is likely to find a sense of publishers' conventional wisdom that the Western has seen its heyday, but it would be a shame for the writer who has a genuine feel for the land, people, history, and potential of the American West to be barbed wired off by such conventional wisdom.

Why?

Why should we (as readers/audience) care (about what we read/see)?

Some years back, never mind how many, as Ishmael of call me fame was heard to say, you became the editor of a writer who'd written his way up the ladder from the early half-a-cent-a-word pulp magazines to the point where he was turning out two hardcover mysteries a year in addition to being story editor an chief writer for a then major TV series, a man who still had time to write books for you, memoirs largely, such as The Pulp Jungle, reflections about the storytelling trade as well as collections of his earlier work. Around this time, and because you'd had a visible relationship with this writer, you were assigned the task of luring another writing machine away from his publisher, shifting his enormous productivity to the company that paid your weekly salary and expense account.

The first writer was Frank Gruber, the second Louis L'Amour. Neither was what you would call a prose stylist, which says it all for the placement of prose style in the hierarchy of writing DNA. Although largely unknown today, Gruber's work then found a target audience, attracted readers.

At the time of his death just a tad over twenty years ago, all hundred one of his books were in print. His works have literally sold hundreds of millions of copies, are still popular and finding new readers today.

They both substituted story for style; their work had so many other qualities that it did not require style on that level of aesthetic nicety. From each man I learned a way of looking at the central figure in a story as a platform for qualities and goals that caused readers to stop what they were doing in order to sign on to the text. Each writer spoke of traits and quirks that caused characters to get up a bit earlier to get a jump on the day or to relish an extra guilty hour of sleep when they should be up. Each had an instinctive appreciation for a person who needed to feel right about "things," which is to say the details, rules, and morality of life.

Jack Schaefer's Monte Walsh was such a man, a cowboy who wanted the life of the trail more than anything else, a man whose very epitaph spoke his life's story: A Good Man with a Horse.

The men and women we care about are men and women who care about others, who care about things, who have some built-in hard drive for what is right and what isn't. Stories are subversive by nature; they work away at the things these men and women know to be wrong, pushing them up against the odds of being forced to break from their code one or twice then pay the price of rue or guilt or some need to atone, some way to get back on track with The System, whatever The System may be.

We readers should care because the authors of works, even inelegant works, evoke care and concern within us. We writers should care enough about something to write about it with the passionate force of abandon. If storytelling is an exercise, it is an exercise of the muscles of passions and caring about things and loathing other things and empathizing with the conflicting forces within humans that drive them over boundaries.

A story does not have to be gift wrapped in style to leave a lasting effect on our reading self; it is gift enough that we have been made to care.