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.

Writers of the Purple Prose

Back in the day, when there was no Slate or Salon or Vanity Fair or New Yorker, there were their traveling equivalents, the troubadours. With a guitar or lute or mandolin, they strode about the countryside, the combined equivalent of Saturday Night Live, Bill Mahr, Steven Colbert, and Jay Leno, with perhaps a touch of Tony Bennett thrown in, and in some noticeable cases, more than a little Billy Collins.

Through the words and tropes of the troubadours, fifth- and sixth-century English audience got word of the exploits of that kid, you know which kid, Arthur the one who withdrew the sword from the stone. Story goes that Arthur was merely extracting the sword for his brother, who was too busy learning things to do on and from a horse. Story continues that the brother couldn't have extracted the sword from the stone because--well, because he wasn't entitled to. Only Arthur could do it because Arthur was the proper king, the true king of England.

Closer to our time, the written and printed words were on their way to replace the troubadour as the major means of educational information, propaganda, and entertainment. Arthur already had a number of written accounts set in motion among them by Mallory and later by Tennyson.

Nearer still to our time was the appearance of the quintessential novel of the American West, The Virginian, followed in quick succession by the second quintessential novel of the American West, Riders of the Purple Sage. Often referred to in satire as Riders of the Purple Prose, this second Western had a variation on the theme of the first, an epic encounter between two clashing cultures. In The Virginian, the clash was between the rancher and the farmer; in the latter novel it was between the Mormon and the non-Mormon, the Gentile. The stakes in each were humanized and obvious. In the same year as Riders appeared, another archetypal figure appeared, undergoing the same ritual of passage in his territory that the eponymous protagonist ot The Virginian experienced, the same type ordeal as Lassiter in The Riders of the Purple Sage experienced, and the same status-affirming battle over his territory that Tarzan experienced.

How can these diverse figures be logically poured into the same mould? Arthur, The Virginian, Lassiter, and Tarzan are all symbols of the seemingly taciturn man of the land, the individual who is not only able to but is willing to mete out the law, the moral law of the land he occupies. It is this certainty of the moral high ground that imparts dignity and stature to all of them, that makes them the archetypal leader of a particular sort. Each is in his own way a Libertarian writ large. There are other elements to add to this equation, properly supplied by surrounding legends. Amusing as it may be to think of Robin Hood in Marxist terms, or for that matter Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, each is enhanced by a larger heart for the working class, for his fellow man in general. He may be of noble birth but his heart is big enough to empathize with the common man. All he needs now is the love and companionship of A Good Woman. We get some lovely possibilities for revisionist history and archetypes when we consider the amusing potential of Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, drawn to the Mediterranean sensuality and good looks of Rebbecca, deciding to fulfill his life with her as a companion instead of his choice, the Lady Rowena. Imagine a scene in which the rabbi refuses to marry Sir Wilfrid and Rebbecca because he is a Gentile. That is not, of course, how the story went; it went that although Rebbecca ad Ivanhoe were attracted to one another, such things were not accepted much less done at that time.

We have come some distance from the mythic Arthur through the creation of The Virginian by Owen Wister, not long out of Harvard University, where he had previously written of another archetype, the college boy/man in a work called Philosophy 4. Nor are we far from the creation of a Los Angeles dentist, Zane Gray who, tired of looking at cavities, brought us the wandering gunman, Lassiter. And so it goes through the panoply of the evolving West until it became the iconic Wild West, and we see the evolution of John Wayne evolving from his role as Billy the Kid in the film Stagecoach (which was ripped off from a short story by Guy De Maupassant) to his more relentless Libertarian self, Ethan in The Searchers, setting off to find and retrieve his niece who had been carted off by, ugh, Indians.

Much has been made of the iconographic art on the walls of caves, extolling the virtues of animals and perhaps recording hunting deeds. Our caves are the pages of popular literature and film, from which our archetypes emerge into the bustle of a civilization that doesn't always know how to behave.