Elmer Kelton’s “Other” West

Abstract

F R E D E R I S M A N Texas Christian University Elmer Kelton’s “Other”West The elements defining the mythic Western are well known. It is a story set somewhere in the American West, a raw and as yet untamed environment that nevertheless possesses great beauty and majesty. It focuses upon a distinctive central character—the larger-than-life West­ ern hero, intuitive, individualistic, and seemingly invincible, who re­ sponds with charismatic effectiveness to the challenges posed by the land and its people. And it offers a specific kind of action, a story of violent transition as the frontier yields to civilization, the wild becomes tamed, and the rural gives way to the urban.1These are the traits of the Western, and they control the best-known writings of Owen Wister, Zane Grey,Jack Schaefer, Louis L’Amour, and a host of lesser authors. What we often overlook, however, is a second but far from second­ ary form ofwestern fiction, which resembles the traditional version, but which tells of another, more mundane West. Hints of this “other”West often occur in the classics, where for every mythic hero we frequendy discover a less colorful counterpart. Behind the Virginian, for example, stands Judge Henry; behind Lassiter, Jane Withersteen; and behind Shane,Joe Starrett—all persons who operate in a workaday world more concrete and far less romantic than that of the myth. In our fascination with the vividly compelling heroes of the mythic West, we tend to pass over these persons, disregarding their role in establishing the authentic human context that gives the myth its meaning. These homely, realistic denizens of the “other” West are the per­ sons of whom Elmer Kelton (1926- ) writes. Though he began his career in the 1950s writing pulp Westerns in the traditional mode, publishing primarily in Ranch Romances, in eight major novels written since 1971 he shifts his focus from the mythic to the mundane West.2As 292 Western American Literature he does so, he draws upon the basic materials of the traditional Western, emphasizing land, character, and action, but he tempers them with an empirical knowledge of the actual West gained from his years as an agricultural journalist. The outcome is a substantial body of work very much a part of western literature, yet one that, in its focus upon con­ crete realities rather than romantic myth, gives the “other”West its due by emphasizing the quiet heroism of the far-from-mythic folk who really won the West.3 At the heart of the classic Western is the overall setting of the story: i.e., “the symbolic landscape [in which] the action takes place and the influence this landscape has on the character and the actions of the hero” (Cawelti, Adventure, 193). We know this land from many Westerns, and most particularly from the Western film, our vision of the West more often than not that of John Ford’s Monument Valley, where monoliths and saguaro cacti surround humanity with constant remind­ ers of the inherent power of nature. We see, literally or in the mind’s eye, a stylized western landscape, and we are subliminally prepared for the epic events that follow. Kelton’s land, in contrast, is that of West Texas, a setting as environmentally formidable as any in the traditional Western, but one that is a far cry from Ford’s visually stunning West or the abstract, symbolic landscape that Cawelti identifies. Kelton’s is, instead, an accurately drawn portrait of a bleakly unforgiving locale that must be accepted on its own demanding terms; it is a humanized West, to be dealt with by human means, but it is no less challenging for all its reality. That challenge appears in a variety of ways. For some of Kelton’s protagonists, it is the very size of the land; as he gets his first glimpse of the region, Gideon Ledbetter, the ex-slave Buffalo Soldier of The Wolf and the Buffalo (1980), “was jumpy like most of the others who rode through this strange and formidable land for the first time. It was . . . bigger than he had imagined the whole world to be” (50). For others, it...