The Way of the Western: Finale

In 1956, author Donald Hamilton (primarily known among Western fans for his "Ambush at Blanco Canyon," which became the movie The Big Country) wrote in the introduction to an anthology of Western stories that he edited:

...The free-riding ranch girl and the saloon-busting free-for-all are part of our stock-in-trade; are we going to discard them in the interests of mere accuracy?...The Western reader expects to be entertained by a good yarn first of all. If it's authentic, so much the better, but the average reader isn't going to give a story much higher marks because something like it actually happened... ...Let's not get too enamored of absolute historical accuracy, and for heaven's sake let's us not start thinking of ourselves self-consciously as great creative artists inheriting a grand literary tradition stemming direct from Owen Wister...Let's remember that we also have an inheritance from Zane Grey and the Beadle and Adams dime novels which were lousy literature and stinking history, but which entertained millions—and who's too proud to be an entertainer?

When I read that introduction (you can read it in full here), I think my reaction was the opposite of what Hamilton intended. My first thought was that the ensuing decades have proved his view to be a short-sighted one. As cheerfully well-intentioned as it was, I think that attitude espoused by writers has ended up helping to marginalize the very genre Hamilton set out to champion.

Reading his remarks a few weeks ago helped to crystallize a train of thought I've been following recently, which sort of brings me full circle back to the beginning of my blog series on the Western genre begun seven months ago. In my introductory post, I talked about how I used to think that the Western's own popularity, leading to its eventual over-saturation with flimsy, historically-inaccurate, copycat "shoot-em-ups," was one of the main things that resulted in its downfall. But my view on this altered: I came to believe that the decline of the Western was primarily an ideological infiltration, in which mid-20th-century values became more and more reflected in the new Western movies and books of those decades, until any sense of the culture and mores of the original West was gradually eaten away.

I took a look at some of the ways this happened in subsequent posts, mainly by comparing classic Western films to earlier Western literature. We looked at how the average American settler was frequently portrayed as a weak-willed coward compared to gunfighter "heroes", and how superficial portrayals of historical "facts" leads to caricatures and skewed impressions. We saw how quasi-accurate film adaptations of books can twist or change their authors' original themes or intentions, and how even choices of artistic style can affect viewers' impressions of history.

Now, after reading the Hamilton piece—subsequent to having gotten a pretty comprehensive survey of the Western genre in the 20th century by reading the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories—I'm beginning to piece in the role that Western writers have played in all this. I believe the mass of inaccurate and clichéd Western stories did contribute to the genre's problems, though by no means did they play the central part that I once thought.

It only takes a glance at today's bestseller lists to see that every popular literary trend is quickly plagued with bandwagon-jumpers—and the early popularity of literature set in the American West was no exception. As early as 1904, Montana author B.M. Bower has her protagonist in Chip of the Flying U venting his irritation over a magazine story that bears little resemblance to reality (slyly noting that it appears in the pages of "one of the Six Leading [magazines]"):

“I wish I had the making of the laws. I’d put a bounty on all the darn fools that think they can write cowboy stories just because they rode past a roundup once, on a fast train,” he growled, reaching for his tobacco sack. “Huh! I’d like to meet up with the yahoo that wrote that rank yarn! I’d ask him where he got his lack of information. Huh! A cow-puncher togged up like he was going after the snakiest bronk in the country, when he was only going to drive to town in a buckboard! ‘His pistol belt and dirk and leathern chaps’—oh, Lord; oh, Lord! And spurs! I wonder if he thinks it takes spurs to ride a buckboard? Do they think, back East, that spurs grow on a man’s heels out here and won’t come off? Do they think we sleep in 'em, I wonder?”

O. Henry, who spent fourteen years of his early life in Texas and his later life writing for a living in New York City—producing around forty Western stories among his other works—also poked fun at the ignorance of imitation "Western" writers in his short story "The Plutonian Fire," collected in The Voice of the City in 1908:

"You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could—" "Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to."

In 1922, Eugene Rhodes published an essay titled "The West That Was," and if I haven't already referenced it a dozen times I feel I should have. It's probably the top piece of nonfiction writing I would recommend to someone with a genuine interest in the literature of the American West: a no-nonsense, still-relevant assessment of where the Western went wrong, and also the myriad of good opportunities that the history of the West offered for good American writers to go right. He lists a number of factors that contributed to the creation of Western caricatures and stereotypes, among which are the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill and his ilk, the "movies" (yes, at this early stage where the word was still put in quotation marks), and

...the unceasing flood of lurid "Western" novels and stories—written, not at secondhand, but from imitation of a copy of an imitation of what some writer who got his dope from what some one had said of what someone else had written on doubtful information from a man of poor memory and few scruples.

Then there is Zane Grey, whose warm defense was Donald Hamilton's main object in the piece quoted at the beginning of this post. Love him or hate him, you've got to admit Grey helped to shape the Western genre as the 20th century has come to know it. I don't think his particular faults lie so much in gruesome errors regarding the cowboy's habitat and accoutrements (it has been a long time since I've read one of his books, so that is a qualified statement) as in his larger-than-life, melodramatic characters and plots. Grey probably had no clue he was perpetrating the groundwork for years of Western clichés to come; he was simply indulging his own predilection for purple prose and high emotions. But there his books are; and who knows how many readers formed their ideas of The West and The Cowboy from them? Rhodes is tactful about Grey—mentioning a couple of his books that he enjoyed, and then adding: "By advice of counsel, I am saying nothing of his later books...I will say this, however—counsel or no counsel—that in "The U.P. Trail" Mr. Grey foozled one of the finest opportunities ever missed by any American writer." (I have not read The U.P. Trail. As I recall, I decided to pass on it after reading a review that tallied up the number of times the heroine was kidnapped and re-kidnapped in the course of the book.)

So it would be foolish to deny that by the mid-20th century, there were plenty of clichés, stereotypes and plot tropes that had little foundation in the real West thriving on the movie screen and in the pulp paperbacks and magazines. But the real problem, as far as the future of the Western was concerned, was not the cliché nor the absurd. The problem was that anything of reality that remained in Western stories and films was being tarnished by association. What the cheap "Western" did was to make it easy for the revisionist historians of subsequent decades to declare, and the uncritical public to believe, that everything about the Old West was a fraud and a myth. Because there were elements about the popular "Western" that were patently ridiculous, it made the whole genre ripe for skewering by the revisionists. It became a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And here's where I think writers like Hamilton went wrong, however well-intentioned: by knowingly perpetuating the clichés of the Western just for the entertainment value, they helped turn it into a parody of itself—making it easy prey for politically-correct ideologies of later years looking to discredit American pioneer history.

There are multiple factors in this. Gene Rhodes is right in pointing out that the anointed literati of his day were hostile to Westerns, having "explicitly declared war upon (1) The Puritan, and (2) The Pioneer." And let's face it, people, the highbrow literary scene in America has been carrying on that war ever since. So the Western was left to the share of the pulp writers, who could see the potential attractiveness and fun to be had with this particular branch of Americana, but didn't have the wherewithal or the desire to deal in historical accuracy, realistic (speaking in a sense of human nature) characters, or literary quality.

One of my new favorite quotes on this whole subject is from award-winning author Richard S. Wheeler:

The pessimistic historical revisionists have one thing wrong. Westering people brimmed with optimism and joy, and their high spirits and laughter dissolved their tribulations. The mythic Western catches that. 'Realistic' literature about the West usually doesn't.

(For a striking example of this dichotomy within the work of one writer, see New Hope by Ernest Haycox.)

That's what we can't lose sight of. We can point out the flaws in a book or film—as I've been doing throughout this blog series—but that doesn't mean we should also toss out the grain of truth that the stories sprouted from. We mustn't forget that the rancher, the cowboy, the schoolma'am, the stage driver, the frontier trooper, and the homesteader were real human beings engaged in real, legitimate professions, not merely the cute inventions of a pulp writer or screenwriter, just because pulp writers and screenwriters have given us tales of cowboys and ranchers (or ranchers' daughters) doing absurd things. It is a far cry from trying to restore a clear view of a historical period to trying to wipe it from the record altogether. (Rhodes again: "A Romancer is a man who loves something; a Realist is a man who hates something.")

Let me freely admit, here, that I'm speaking as someone whose point of entry to the Western was through John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Zane Grey, and Max Brand; and whose earliest stories were very much along the lines of what Donald Hamilton's piece celebrates—and I'm not ashamed of that, though a few of my early pieces of work definitely make me squirm. We've all got to start somewhere (and there's definitely some good stuff, after their own fashion, in the oeuvres of those gents). And goodness knows I'm all for engaging, entertaining stories! But what I have slowly come to realize is that what I really want to write from here on out, and what deep down I've always been groping after writing, doesn't really fit the pattern of what this present generation calls a Western. If Dorothy Johnson's short fiction, for example, or Alan LeMay's The Unforgiven was newly published today, it would probably be more accurately categorized according to modern standards as "American historical fiction," though the settings and themes are completely and thoroughly Western. Today, I don't know if you can call a book a Western if there isn't a gunfight in it and get away with it. A quibble of terminology? Maybe. But maybe in some cases, there comes a time when you have to accept that negative associations have become irretrievably bound up with certain terminology, at least for your own generation.

For you see, what I think I've gained out of all this is that I don't have to lament "the death of the Western" any more, because I am not dependent on the legacy of the Western to carry on with my own work. I don't see myself any longer as following in the tradition of Wister, Grey, or even L'Amour, so I don't have to lament that their coattails are no longer there for me to hang on. I see myself drawing a little inspiration here and a little there from quietly solid middlebrow authors you might never have heard of; authors whom the American literati have turned up their highbrow noses at. I see myself as trying to grasp some of those opportunities for telling stories from our history and heritage that Gene Rhodes encouraged American writers to go after. If it didn't sound just a little bit too grand for one unambitious, rather shy author, I'd say I looked forward to trying to start a new tradition.

As far as the Western is concerned, perhaps it is a case of Le roi est mort—vive le roi!

image: "Fencing Crew" by Grant Redden