Western Hero Research Articles

The Western Hero as Logos, or, Unmaking Meaning

F r e d e r i c R e m i n g t o n , M o u n t e d C o w b o y in C h a p s w ith B ay H o r s e , c a . 1 9 0 8 O i l o n c a n v a s , 3 0 1 /4 " x 18 1 /8 " C o u r t e s y B u f f a l o B il l H is t o r i c a l C e n t e r , C o d y , W y o m i n g . G if t o f T h e C o e F o u n d a t io n S U S A N J. R O S O W S K I University of Nebraska-Lincoln The Western Hero as Logos, or, Unmaking Meaning With its gestalt-like capacity to take on the symbolic shape of our desires and anxieties, the Western has proved itself a ready forum for cultural constructions of identity. During the Cold War, critics Robert W arshow and John G. Cawelti looked at the W estern’s depiction of violence; when political winds shifted to issues of gender identity, critic Jane Tompkins read the Western for what it told her about “the power that men in our society wield” (18) and Lee Clark M itchell for what it revealed of “making the man” (Westerns 3). Seeking to understand what something means, we look to the Western, where meaning is made. That is my subject in this essay, though I propose to change the focus from what something means to how meaning is made in the Western, or (more accurately) how it is unmade. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of a literary genre identified by its hero’s reluctance with (Cawelti) and hostility toward language (Tompkins). In doing so, I acknowledge that the W estern’s close identification with a laconic style makes it superbly adaptable to the visual medium of film, thus giving rise to the interdisciplinary crit­ icism so characteristic of the field (e.g., Warshow, Cawelti, Tompkins, and M itchell). I propose now to return to the Western form ula’s wellspring in literary texts, to explore more closely the nature and implications of its story of language. Best-seller lists provide representatives of the literary Western. These are, after all, the books whose long-standing popularity made them the classics of the genre and, therefore, basic to any under­ standing of it: Owen W ister’s The Virginian (1902), the novel that 270 Western American Literature announced the Western; Riders o f the Purple Sage (1912), the most popular novel by Zane Grey, who “all but single-handedly confirmed the shape of [the] powerful new narrative form”; and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1954), whose nostalgic perspective “offers a distillation of the Western itself” (Mitchell, Westerns 95, 123, 193).1All three nov­ els immediately manifest action familiar to the Western: an outsider enters a community, defends the tow nspeople/settlers/farm ers against the Indians/wilderness/ranchers, and after restoring order, departs. Convention has it that these Western plots focus on regener­ ation and redemption, which are, as Cawelti has pointed out, the reward “for those protagonists who can respond to [the West’s] chal­ lenge by recovering basic human and American values” (Adventure 233). The regeneration is embodied in the promise of a future, for in “the end, hero and heroine are clearly on their way to marriage, a family and a settled life thereafter” (.Adventure 235). But beneath this action, what is at issue is language. That is, the three novels are variations upon a single plot, shaped by gender, by which a man comes into a situation unsatisfactorily structured by words and dis­ places language by establishing himself as the Word— the Virginian, Lassiter, Shane. In each case, the plot concerns silencing and focus­ es our attention on the “thing” itself, on physical ways of knowing; knowledge or understanding is revealed not by language but by ges­ ture, by looking, by...

High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music

Reviewed by: High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music Timothy Sweet Cecelia Tichi. High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1994. 318 + xiii pp., 23-track CD. $39.95 cloth. In her preface to High Lonesome, Cecilia Tichi confesses that she’s only been listening to country for five years, but you would never guess it from the wealth of material synthesized here. The accompanying CD gives a 56-minute sample of the music, ranging from Hank Williams to Robin and Linda Williams and showcasing one of the three stars of the book, Emmylou Harris (the others are Dolly Parton and Rodney Crowell). Some fifty songs are listed in the permission credits; the discography runs to twelve two-column pages. Tichi guides us through the music by identifying some of its major themes (such as home, the road, loneliness, the Wild West) and mapping them onto canonical American literature (Jefferson, Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, Steinbeck, Kerouac, and many others), in order to demonstrate country’s expression of “the American identity.” Her goal is not to generate new readings of the literature, but rather to use the commonality of themes to address a problem faced by scholars of country music (as well as by the musicians themselves): the “problem of country music’s status as serious music worthy of respect.” With the South Atlantic Quarterly bringing out a special issue on country music [End Page 405] (edited by Tichi), the battle for scholarly respectability seems nearly won, but the problem may still exist for readers who don’t work in English or American studies departments. The comparative thematic analysis leads in some useful directions—for example, the discussion of the often unrecognized importance of loneliness as a cultural topos, to which country music provides a “secret map.” At other points, however, this approach has its drawbacks. Infrequently, the theme distorts a text, as in the chapter on “road” songs, where Tichi imagines Jefferson, in the famous passage on the Blue Ridge from Notes on the State of Virginia, to be “issu[ing] a personal invitation to seek your future in the West across and beyond the Shenandoah Mountains.” The problem is not the deliberate misreading itself so much as the supposed universality of the mythic paradigm that produces it—a paradigm that makes us want Jefferson to be looking west when he was in fact looking east. In chapter 6, “Red, Red Rose,” the theme get us off track. Here the central image of a wild rose is not sufficient to organize the real topic of the chapter, which is class. This topic deserves a more pointed and thorough exploration, since country music frequently articulates white working-class resentment, but such an exploration would distract from the claims Tichi advances about country’s ability to express a universal American identity. We need to know how the Nashville branch of the culture industry so successfully constructs a particular identity or narrow range of identities as fundamentally “American” and gets people to believe in them. Tichi gives us tantalizing glances at this sort of analysis. She notes, for example, that the cowboy-singer was a retrospective formation, a product of music marketing with virtually no connection to the cattle drives of the latter third of the nineteenth century. As country music became commercialized, “cowboy clothes . . . were a shortcut out of the hillbilly’s overalls, an image makeover with a certain advantage in terms of status.” Dropping this historically oriented line of inquiry, however, Tichi goes on to describe the ways in which Western songs, such as Tex Ritter’s theme for High Noon, “give expression to [the] inner life” of the “individualist American typified as a self-reliant western hero.” The last third of the book, beginning with chapter 8, “Nature’s Music,” is the best. Here questions of “the American identity” recede into the background as Tichi examines how country artists regard [End Page 406] their work. She points out that song writers and music journalists often appeal to the category of natural genius and speak of a song as “a whole entity, intact, virtually existing before it is written down.” This...

Zane Grey and Images of the American West

The western novels by Zane Grey have been source of imagery about the American West for almost the entire twentieth century. The plots and characterizations of Grey's popular novels set in the American West have been thoroughly examined, but it is less clear how his work acquired fundamental role in the creation of western imagery. With the ability to influence much of the public, mass media dominate the molding of popular culture. A medium that repeatedly projects set of simple ideas can define the amorphous perceptual lenses through which people view landscape and fuse them into clear, uniformly perceived place image. Movies and television now often clarify place perceptions, but literature traditionally played key role. Speculation about the meaning of the American West, landscape that occupies center stage in American folklore, is more profitable with an understanding of the evolution of the ideas that are attached to the place. This article explains how Grey's distinctive combination of spatial, temporal, landscape, and social elements crystallized the enduring idea of mythical West and qualified him as place-defining novelist (Shortridge 1991). My mapping and analysis of Grey's settings lead me to contend that he shaped popular attitudes about the extent of the boundaries of the West and the location of its core. Furthermore, the temporal settings of these novels proved integral to continuing popular acceptance of the western myth. I also illustrate how Grey's evocative portrayal of the landscape and social characteristics of the region is representative of western imagery. I discuss modern ramifications of Grey's imagery in each section, and review of the western myth making that preceded Grey and his unparalleled record of popularity provides the context for understanding his power of place definition. DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN MYTHS The image of region as large as the West is complex. Its most central and enduring theme is that of the frontier, vast and stunning landscape where brave cowboys, rugged individualism, and dream fulfillment are the rule. Some of the common elements of popular western literature, especially pastoral innocence and deadly violence, may be traced to James Fenimore Cooper's Tales (Hart 1950). Dime novels by E. Z. C. Judson (alias Ned Buntline) and others created new heroes: Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill were bolder and younger than Leatherstocking and used horses and repeating rifles to battle the harsh elements of the Great Plains (Smith 1950). Novelists were not alone in shaping western myths. Newspapers extensively covered Billy the Kid's adventures and the shootout at the O.K. Corral (Estleman 1987). The Indian-killing and heroine-rescuing exploits of cowboys were adapted straight from dime novels into the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, which ran from the 1870s to the 1910s (Riegel 1947). The first wave of painters to popularize the West was epitomized by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Their sweeping canvases of outstanding natural features depicted the region as an unspoiled and magnificent wonderland (Kinsey 1992). People, if even present, were reduced to insignificant figures standing in awe of nature. By the end of the nineteenth century, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell portrayed the landscape as spectacular but beginning to come under the control of mountain men, cowboys, and Indians. Even though the cowboy had become popular by the end of the nineteenth century, he did not supersede all other western heroes, and he was not always portrayed as hero (Boatright 1980). When dime novels acquired trashy reputation toward the end of the nineteenth century, eastern publishers searched for writer who could address the colorful characters of the West more seriously (Athearn 1986). The search culminated in 1902 with Owen Wister, a Pennsylvanian who sat in South Carolina to write book about Virginian living in Wyoming (Marsden 1978, 207). …

The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man : A Revisionist View

70 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man The Hollywood Indian in Little Big Man: ? Revisionist View Margo Kasdan and Susan Tavernetti In Little Big Man Arthur Penn directed a film that inverts the mythologies of American frontier history usually presented in the western genre, and, in particular, the story of the westward expansion. The film combines established generic conventions—the post-Civil War period, Great Plains setting, conflict between whites and Indians—with a reconsideration of western history, a revisionist treatment of legendary figures of the time, of the western hero, and of Native Americans in a comic and ironic tone. This combination makes the film distinctive (while at the same time sows the seeds for such contemporary westerns as Dances With Wolves) . The fusion of elements in the film, including its representation of Native Americans—respectful yet satirical, convincing yet not entirely authentic— is the subject of this paper. Through the works of writers, artists, and photographers, Americans have been taught two contradictory myths about Indians. One, deriving from the Puritan fear of the uncontrolled wilderness and its inhabitants, depicts them as bloodthirsty savages. The other, which flourished in the writings of the eighteenth-century European Romantics, presents Native Americans as noble savages. In this conception, the unspoiled wilderness is a spiritual place uncorrupted by civilization; therefore, its original inhabitants are also pure and at one with the spiritual side of nature. The idealistic view was perpetuated in nineteenth-century America in such works as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's celebrated narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Both conceptions found a place in James Fenimore Cooper's popular novels five of which, including The Last of the Mohicans, were gathered in The Leather Stocking Tales, published between 1823 and 1841: Indians were wild, uncivilized, ferocious, but also brave, dignified, proud, and wise teachers. The visual arts of the period transformed these literary stereotypes into powerful images that helped create the basic iconography of the Hollywood western film. Concentrating on dramatic portrayals of buffalo hunts, exotic tribal dances and ceremonies, as well as on heroic portraiture of the natives, George Catlin painted romanticized scenes of Indians within landscapes reminiscent of the garden of Eden, yet in vivid, nearly "Technicolor" hues. Upon his arrival in the new world, Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer drafted striking panoramic views of the Margo Kasdan Ts Professor Tn the Department of Cinema it San Francisco State University. Susan Tavernetti is Professor of Film in the Department of Film/TV at" De Anza College, Cupertino, California. They collaborated on the second edition of The Critical Eye: An Introduction to Looking at Movies published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Film & History, Vol. XXIII, No's. 1-4, 199371 Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) and Chief Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) are here framed together, identically attired, a sign of their kinship. Jack Crabb has become a full-fledged member of the Cheyenne and, as their spokesman, will finally tell the truth about the tribes' s culture, experiences and ordeals. Photo courtesy of the Publicity Department/Ciname Center Films. 72 Kasdan - Tavernetti / Little Big Man frontier and remarkable scenes of wild natives in the fierce Buffalo and Scalp Dances which mirrored his preconceptions of a savage America. These artists' representations of the Plains Indians were widely distributed through lithographs and aquatints. These works established the "facts" of Indians on horseback and wearing primitive costumes in ceremonies and molded that conception of them in the popular imagination. In contrast to this fabrication of an untamed yet noble people, the artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell introduced the "cowboy-as-epic-hero," a character-type whose role was to repress the threatening Indians and win the west. It was not until the early twentieth century when Edward Curtis posed Native Americans before his camera—recording a romanticized vision of the "noble" Indian and a vanishing way of life—that their cause was championed once again.1 Shaped by the marketplace, the popular media of the day— from paintings to photographs, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to dime novels and illustrated magazines—reinforced this dual conception of Indians, depicting Native Americans both as scantily-dressed men with feathers in...

Tracks in the Snow: Essays by Colorado Poets ed. by Ray Gonzalez

386 Western American Literature Siringo. By Ben E. Pingenot. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989. 232 pages, $29.50.) Charles A. Siringo (1855-1927) was a Texas cowboy, Pinkerton detec­ tive, private detective, and autobiographer, writing not one but three auto­ biographies. Siringo is a well-written and well-documented biography; it is both sympathetic to Siringo and judicious in its estimate of his character. Siringo’s life could be divided into four parts: the cowboy, the detective, the author, and the sunset Westerner. Thus we get from this book some picture of the range life of the 1880s and 1890s, of the industrial conflicts of the ’90s (Siringo was the Pinkerton man in the Idaho mining labor battles), and of the Hollywood circle of Westerners in the 1920s: such men as authors Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Henry Herbert Knibbs, outlaw Emmet Dalton, actor William S. Hart, and vaudevillian Will Rogers, about whom, as a group, someone should write a book. This biography captures what is uniquely interesting about Siringo’s career as a writer. What he had to sell was authentic adventure. He was a truly self-made writer, self-taught and self-promoted. He was engaged in legal battles with the Pinkerton agency, as a result of which he could not publish what could have been his most intriguing adventures. His last years in the Los Angeles area were a struggle to keep himself in lodging while he tried to publish his last autobiography. Charles Siringo is the sort of character that the Wild West myth has trouble with—the western hero who does not die with his boots on. Nor did he retire from the scene; he lived on into the twentieth century and became part of it. He published his first book, A Texas Cowboy, in 1885, the same year that Owen Wister came to Wyoming and discovered the cowboy. The next year, Siringo and his first wife and their daughter came to Chicago in time for the Haymarket riots. He had two more careers and three more wives before his twilight years in Hollywood. Ben Pingenot’s Siringo is a book that helps clarify our understanding of the passing of the West. Mr. Pingenot is a past president of the Texas State Historical Association. His bibliography is a good example of what the biographer needs to look for, where to look for it, and the fun of looking. ROSCOE L. BUCKLAND Western Washington University Tracks in the Snow: Essays by Colorado Poets. Edited by Ray Gonzalez. (Arvada, Colorado: Mesilla Press, 1989. 122 pages, $8.95.) In 1986 there appeared two small anthologies of Colorado poetry. One of these, City Kite on a Wire, was brought out by Ray Gonzales, a well-known Denver poet and editor. Now Mr. Gonzales has edited a collection of essays by Colorado poets, most of whom appeared in one of the earlier anthologies. Reviews 387 There are fourteen essays in the volume, ten by men and four by women. Although there is great diversity in these essays, each of them follows, roughly, a similar pattern. Each of the authors has something to say about modern poetry in general and about his or her own poetic background. Each essay is followed by one or more recent poems by the author, many of them very good. Mr. Gonzales, in his introductory essay, recalls his first serious contact with modern poetry in a university classroom and ties this in with his early life on the deserts of West Texas and New Mexico. Another contributor, Susan Tichy, found her poetic subject during a stay in the Philippines; and still another, Bruce Barton, grew up in North Dakota and populated most of his early poems with loons. Nearly all of the authors show how their poetic subjects relate to experiences of their early years. Although these poets now live, or have recently lived, in Colorado, there is little in their poems or their essays that would label them as western or regional poets. Their concerns range across the world. Many of the poems and a number of the essays are concerned with politi­ cal, social and moral issues and in this respect are unlike a...

Heroism, Home, and the Telling of Shane

FORREST G. ROBINSON Heroism, Home, and the Telling of Shane The title character of Jack Schaefer's classic, Shane, may be said to embody virtually all of the qualities usually associated with the Western hero—or, indeed, more generally with the Ametican hero. He is handsome, youthful, even boyish. Joe Starrett, the proud homesteader who befriends Shane, remarks to the gunfighter: "There's still a lot ofkid in you." Young Bob Statrett, Joe's son and only child, goes on: "The first teal smile I had seen yet flashed across Shane's face. 'Maybe. Maybe there is at that.'"1 He is utterly independent and self-reliant— "cool and competent," Bob observes, at a climactic moment, "facing that room full of men in the simple solitude of his own invincible completeness" (254). He is "as self-sufficient as the mountains" (161). And, when the chips are down, he reminds Bob's father, "There's no man living can tell me what I can't do. Not even you, Joe" (243). He is solitary, taciturn, socially remote. "Shane was not anxious to meet people. He would share little in their talk" (124). He has no respect for the other homesteadets, and he makes no effort to disguise his contempt (165). He is itinerant and homeless—"I was fiddle-footed and left home at fifteen" (77), he declares—and disinclined to talk at any length about his past. "He had no news about himself," says Bob: "His past was fenced as tightly as out pasture" (71). As Bob insists at the novel's end, Shane's origins are mythical, intertwined with the destiny of the region and the nation, and somehow subsumed in the latitude of his autonomy and the depth of his self-completeness. "He was the man Arizona Quarterly Volume 45 Number 1, Spring 1989 Copyright © 1 989 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 004-1610 Shane73 who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane" (274). "No bullet can kill that man," observes another of the homesteaders; "Sometimes I wonder whether anything ever could" (266). Shane's autonomy and invincibility are inseparable from his spareness and simplicity. He is uneducated. This apparent lack is in fact a source of strength, fot there is no veneer of sophistication to obstruct or obscure his natural, integral authority. "What a man knows isn't important," says Joe. "It's what he is that counts" (119). It is knowledge of farming that Starrett has in mind, but his words point toward the larger futility of "book-learning." Thus Shane is a man of very few words. When he speaks, he does so primarily with actions. He says nothing to Joe about uprooting the enormous stump that stands near the farmhouse. Instead, without so much as a word's warning, he assaults it, and Joe soon joins him in the silent, exhilarating test of strength. The episode advances through two brief, tellingly silent tableaus . As the work begins in earnest, the men's "eyes met over the top of the stump and held and neithet of them said a word. Then they swung up their axes and both of them said plenty to that old stump" (93). Much later, when the work is finally done, "they both looked up and their eyes met and held as they had so long ago in the morning hours. " Bob goes on: The silence should have been complete. It was not because someone was shouting, a high-pitched, wordless shout. I realized that the voice was mine and I closed my mouth. The silence was clean and wholesome, and this was one of the things you could never forget whatever time might do to you in the furrowing of the years, an old stump on its side with toot ends making a strange pattern against the glow of the sun sinking behind the far mountains and two men looking over it into each other's eyes. (107-08) This wordless communication between the two men is a stage in the deep moral and emotional bonding between...

The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology by Rita Parks

188 Western American Literature The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology. By Rita Parks. (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. 190 pages, $19.95.) Parks offers a useful, if somewhat outdated, survey of a type in its develop­ ment and subsequent reconstructions from historical reality to representation on large and small screen. She begins with a survey of different kinds of Western heroes—the Mountain Man, Soldier, Cowboy, Man with a Gun— and their convergence in the myth of the Westerner who emerged in the Beadle dime novels, The Virginian, and the works of Zane Grey. She then follows the transformations this figure undergoes through visualization, from its embodi­ ment in early screen stars like William S. Hart and Tom Mix through its codification and elaboration in the work of directors like John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. Against what she calls the “epic” vision of the West characteristic of films, Parks suggests that TV series like Gunsmoke and Bonanza domesticate the hero and redefine the vast open plains of the screen into a “pastoral,” a vision of an Edenic small-town glory. Parks covers a lot of cultural territory succinctly. If she tends to categorize a little stiffly, her essential analysis ishelpful and her range impressive. (Best is the historical section where she traces the mythic types back to their sources.) The study reads, however, as something of a period piece. There are no refer­ ences to any Western films or TV series after 1973, nor to any critical texts published after that date. Thus Parks doesn’t take advantage of much of the new thinking about popular culture and its relation to audience. She does not, for example, attempt to explain the relative failure of Westerns in the last years in films and TV (and their continued popularity in books). Nor does she confront issues of gender or race and how they have altered our analytic and descriptive assessments of the West as region and myth. PAUL SKENAZY University of California Alaska: Reflections on Land and Spirit. Edited by Robert Hedin and Gary Holthaus. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. 322 pages, $24.95.) The persistent theme of Arc.tic-American literature isnature, and for good reason: nature is the controlling force in the polar regions as it is not in lower latitudes and more benevolent climates. Alaska: Reflections on Land andSpirit is a celebration of nature on the last frontier, assembling a rich collection that includes works as early as John Muir (1879) and as recent as Richard Nelson (1989). It is only the third anthology of Alaskan writing—the other two being Ernest Gruening’s An Alaskan Reader: 1867-1967 (New York: Meredith Press, 1966) and Morgan B. Sherwood’sAlaska and Its History (Seattle: Uni­ versity of Washington Press, 1967)—and it is the first anthology to devote itself entirely to nature writing. The book includes a number of strong selec­ tions by both well known—Sigurd Olson, Jack London, Olaus Murie—and ...

The Graywolf Annual Four: Short Stories by Men ed. by Scott Walker

372 Western American Literature Once aLegend. By TackCummings. (NewYork: Walker and Company, 1987. 182 pages, $16.95.) “It was tough, lusting after the wife of the man who’d been my idol.” This observation by Drew Hardin, 25-year-old naive narrator of this formula West­ ern, reveals both the principal focus of this novel and its often wooden diction. Hardin rides into Staffold, Arizona, in 1915 to meet legendary manhunter Frank Ladd, whose fame rests on his capture of railroad robber Ike Tolbert. Tolbert has just been released from his 20-year prison sentence and has imme­ diately murdered his judge. Ladd, learning of Tolbert’snew crime the very day young Hardin arrives, determines to capture Tolbert again. Drew hopes to witness this second capture, especially when he sees Lola, Ladd’s 35-year-old wife of “well-formed figure” who once was a trick-shot artist. The trio head north, catch up with Tolbert, who then escapes through a cave filled with “bat pee,” and encounter Indians before finding their man in Colorado. Finally old Ladd outwits a modern young sheriff and manages, with the help of Lola (“Little Sure Shot”) on two dramatic occasions—well, you can imagine the outcome. Although the author of five other novels, Cummings falters here. The too obviousplot and the shallow characterizations preclude even enough credibility for sheer escapism. Drew Hardin knows only what he has read from books and expresses his learning woodenly: “I read a book about how mercenary women are.” He expresses vaguely his disillusionment with his hero: “He had made some mistakes in judgment that had had their effects.” Lola says to an Indian of sixth-grade education: “You must be a matriarchal society.” Yet Lola is potentially the most interesting character; all the action swirls around her. In short, this $16.95 progeny of powder-burners, despite an effective chase scene in the penultimate chapter, fizzles. The effect of change in the West is an old theme, seen in works as various as Frederic Remington’spainting The Fall of the Cowboy and Elmer Kelton’s most recent novel. If you want to see this theme handled with skill that evokes real interest in characters and actions, ignore this mediocre formula Western and read instead Kelton’s The Man Who Rode Midnight. BOB J. FRYE Texas Christian University The Graywolf Annual Four: Short Stories by Men. Edited by Scott Walker. (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988. 226 pages, $7.50.) This volume of thirteen stories proves a welcome addition to Graywolf Press’sreputation for handsomely published and easily affordable samplings of noteworthy new fiction. Like its fine companion volume, The GraywolfAnnual Two: Short Stories by Women, almost all of the stories in this fourth annual have been previously published in magazines or collections. Reviews 373 Richard Ford’s “Great Falls” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Car­ ried” are the best examples of the understatement and gentle insight that run throughout most of the tales in this collection. Ford’snarrator recallshis experi­ ences as an adolescent boy watching through a series of ambiguous episodes the break-up of his parents’marriage. Ford’s achievement is that he manages to identify clearly and simply the subtle and sudden forces that can change the course of a life forever. O’Brien’s story depicts a platoon of young soldiers in Vietnam “humping” a burdensome load of physical and emotional baggage across mountains, through jungles and into ambushes, stopping only to joke away their fears or dream of loves left behind. Ultimately, the objects carried in their packs become symbols of the men themselves, as their fading photo­ graphs and assortments of weaponry become physical manifestations of their hopes, horror and courage. Other stories, such as William Kittredge’s “Phantom Silver,” are more boldly imaginative in their approach and evocative in their imagery. Kittredge transforms the legendary figure of a Lone-Ranger-type Western hero from a rescuer of the innocents into an aging, incestuous shell of a man, mutilated in form, whose silver bullets fire impotently into the onrushing tide of the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. Frederick Busch’s “Dog Song” similarly employs brutal, almost surrealistic images in...

The Best of the West ed. by Joe R. Lansdale

56 Western American Literature Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960. ByChristine Bold. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. 215 pages, $27.50.) In the Introduction to Selling the Wild West, Christine Bold asserts that her book “is not a survey of the publishing industry or of Western authors” (pp. xv-xvi) but a study of representative authors whose works show “a ten­ sion between formula and individual initiatives” (p. xvi). She makes the nice point that popular authors are similar to the Western hero in that “they react against the imposition of restraining conventions” (p. xvii), and in the main body of the book she frequently shows how these authorial reactions are reflected in the characters. Chapter by chapter, the book offers insightful analyses of authors, works, and traditions, even though the overall focus or thesis isoccasionally stretched, as in the chapters about Remington and Schaefer. Chapter one provides a fascinating discussion of the dime novelists, and chapter two offers a fine articulation of Wister’simprovements on Cooperian conventions and his devia­ tions from dime novel formula. The discussion of Remington is engaging in iself, but it labors too hard to bring his work into the focus of the book. Chapter three returns to the central interest of authors working within the constraints of commercial production, tracing Zane Grey’s “muted rebellion” (p. 91), the tension between classicist and hack in Max Brand, and the “interplay between author and formula” (p. 123) in Ernest Haycox. This chapter is right on target, like chapter one. Chapter four contains a good discussion of Alan LeMay’s three major works, and it explores Louis L’Amour as the quintessen­ tial mass-market paperback writer who uniquely practices salesmanship and self-promotion in his own work. The discussion of Schaefer, however, pursues a different line of inquiry from the main thesis, and it doesn’t fit well. Luke Short would have fit in quite well here. Chapter five, on anti-Westerns, isbrief but effectively balanced. Generally, the book offers succinct, comprehensive views of selected authors, and it reflects good work in synthesizing background material. In dis­ sertation style it is frequently derivative and heavily reference-noted, but it delivers fresh perceptions on individual works and authors, and it has a read­ able prose style. This book has not exhausted the subject of popular Western fiction, but it has made a significant contribution, and it should become a standard reference work. JOHN D. NESBITT Eastern Wyoming College The Best of the West. Edited by Joe R. Lansdale. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986. 178pages, $12.95.) Contemporary literary techniques frequently illuminate traditional and modern western fiction themes in this collection of twelve stories, a poem and Reviews 57 a teleplay from the Western Writers of America. Ranging from pulp magazinestyle adventures to folk traditions and fantasy, these tales are most diverting when exploring unfamiliar literary territory. Resolutely traditional are Jeff Banks’s“Making Money in Western Bank­ ing” and Elmer Kelton’s “A Bad Cow Market.” The former, with its bandit who plans one last big bank stick-up before retirement, iseffective only because of its O. Henry-type climactic twist. The latter introduces the commonplace theme of the superiority of rural life over urban, as an impoverished rancher contemplates moving to San Antonio. More compelling is the excellent “Night of the Cougar,” by Ardath Mayhar, in which an almost supernatural beast stalks a backwoods woman with two young children. Equally haunting is Neal Barrett’s “Sallie C” with its strange desert hotel, kept by Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, and peopled with stranger inmates: Orville and Wilbur Wright; eleven-year-old Erwin Rommel, the future German field marshal; and the Kid himself, not dead at all but helplessly paralyzed by Garrett’sbullet. Hackneyed dialogue and stereotyped characters mar William F. Nolan’s “The Night Hawk Rides,” a teleplay about a Zorro clone protecting ranchers from wicked Mexicans in early Texas. It isnovel only in form. Brian Garfield’s “At Yuma Crossing” is vastly superior in artistry and psychological depth. The desert junction of the Gila and Colorado Rivers pro­ vides the setting for a wandering loner, a “Gringo...

Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 by Christine Bold

56 Western American Literature Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960. ByChristine Bold. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. 215 pages, $27.50.) In the Introduction to Selling the Wild West, Christine Bold asserts that her book “is not a survey of the publishing industry or of Western authors” (pp. xv-xvi) but a study of representative authors whose works show “a ten­ sion between formula and individual initiatives” (p. xvi). She makes the nice point that popular authors are similar to the Western hero in that “they react against the imposition of restraining conventions” (p. xvii), and in the main body of the book she frequently shows how these authorial reactions are reflected in the characters. Chapter by chapter, the book offers insightful analyses of authors, works, and traditions, even though the overall focus or thesis isoccasionally stretched, as in the chapters about Remington and Schaefer. Chapter one provides a fascinating discussion of the dime novelists, and chapter two offers a fine articulation of Wister’simprovements on Cooperian conventions and his devia­ tions from dime novel formula. The discussion of Remington is engaging in iself, but it labors too hard to bring his work into the focus of the book. Chapter three returns to the central interest of authors working within the constraints of commercial production, tracing Zane Grey’s “muted rebellion” (p. 91), the tension between classicist and hack in Max Brand, and the “interplay between author and formula” (p. 123) in Ernest Haycox. This chapter is right on target, like chapter one. Chapter four contains a good discussion of Alan LeMay’s three major works, and it explores Louis L’Amour as the quintessen­ tial mass-market paperback writer who uniquely practices salesmanship and self-promotion in his own work. The discussion of Schaefer, however, pursues a different line of inquiry from the main thesis, and it doesn’t fit well. Luke Short would have fit in quite well here. Chapter five, on anti-Westerns, isbrief but effectively balanced. Generally, the book offers succinct, comprehensive views of selected authors, and it reflects good work in synthesizing background material. In dis­ sertation style it is frequently derivative and heavily reference-noted, but it delivers fresh perceptions on individual works and authors, and it has a read­ able prose style. This book has not exhausted the subject of popular Western fiction, but it has made a significant contribution, and it should become a standard reference work. JOHN D. NESBITT Eastern Wyoming College The Best of the West. Edited by Joe R. Lansdale. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986. 178pages, $12.95.) Contemporary literary techniques frequently illuminate traditional and modern western fiction themes in this collection of twelve stories, a poem and ...

Deadwood by Pete Dexter

360 Western American Literature Deadwood. By Pete Dexter. (New York: Random House, 1986. 365 page: $17.95.) "A picture is the beginning of misstatement and misunderstanding. Y01 got people looking at it with all different opinions, and they make up storie to go with them." These are the words of Pete Dexter's Wild Bill Hickok who, like a good western hero, realizes that to be famous is to be public prop. erty and prefers to move along the trail ahead of his reputation. Historica figures from the Black Hills pioneer dayspeople the novel; Dexter claims tha1 the events and all the characters, save one, are "real." The assassination 01 Wild Bill occurs halfway through the book, but the momentum of the narrative continues as those who loved him and thought they knew him-'-Charley Utter, Agnes Lake, Calamity Jane Cannary, and others-wrestle with their memories and learn about Bill from each other. The tale unfolds mostly through the perceptions of Bill's best friend, "Colorado Charley" Utter. Like Gatsby's Nick Carraway, Charley judges people and considers events in a way that sets him apart from the rest of Deadwood's denizens. In a move that does The Virginian's narrator one better, Charley is forced to confront his deep love for Bill when Bill saves his life, and the complexity of Charley's reaction reveals hitherto unexplored emotion beneath the surface of a macho gunman. Charley is pained that while he has to admit what he feels, Bill, because he has "as much feelings as a hawk," is "incomplete. One half of a perfect man." Throughout the novel run intertwining images of bottles and themes of drinking (people never eat, but they guzzle brown whiskey and pink gin all day in a quest to release the personality and alter perception) and the liberty of the human soul. As much as Charley wishes to preserve the Bill that he knew from fiction-mongers in the press, he realizes that what's set in stone hereafter-his perceptions or anybody else's-is not Bill at all, and that Bill ultimately has his freedom. Thus Dexter releases himself from the onus of "truth" in a historical narrative, using fact to create a superbly entertaining and thoughtful novel about how fact necessarily becomes fiction. MARGARET A. LUKENS University of Colorado Snapshots: Glimpses of the Other California. By Gerald Haslam, with a foreword by W. H. Hutchinson. (Walnut Creek, California: Devil Mountain Books, 1985. 120 pages, $7.95 paper.) This, his fourth collection, makes clear that Gerald Haslam has become one of our best short story writers. And though the subtitle emphasizes that these are stories about "the California ignored by the golden state's stereotype ," they're also much more. These are western stories of the best sort: ...

Crane's Coxcomb

Crane's Coxcomb George Monteiro (bio) Not even Conrad, who observed that Stephen Crane was "the only impressionist and only an impressionist" (Stallman, Letters 155) (later explaining that his "impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface" [192]), perceived the extent to which Crane was taken with the uncanny ways in which personal impressions determine behavior. For as Crane saw it, impressionism—that notso-beautiful necessity of perception—was all but inevitable.1 "I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision," he wrote in answer to a question; "he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty" (Stallman, Letters 110). The difficulty with that, he found, was that in keeping close to one's personal honesty (his "supreme ambition") one incurred vexing consequences, for personal honesty to one's impressions insures neither the discovery of truth nor the continuance of personal safety. This idea permeates much of his fiction, notably so the best of his Western stories, wherein Crane turns familiar materials away from a focus on the already stereotypical Western hero to the more interestingly vulnerable, impressionistic outsider who, rather than embodying them, carries around the shining and not-so-shining codes of the West as the intrusive, insistent, [End Page 295] potentially implosive baggage of his emotional life. Perhaps Crane's richest treatment of this occurs in the early Western tale "The Blue Hotel," the chronicle of a loner moving toward self-destruction.2 The Swede's sense of reality in "The Blue Hotel" derives, in the words of the "little silent man from the East" (143), from impressions culled from Western "dime-novels" (152). Indeed, the Swede—possessed—thinks that in Fort Romper "he's right out in the middle" of his dime-novel West, with "shootin' and stabbin' and all" (152). "He thinks," concludes the Easterner, "he's right in the middle of hell" (152). The Swede "knows" that Fort Romper equals West and that West is synonymous with violence, that he is a "Stranger" (as Scully, the hotelkeeper, will later type him), and that as a "Stranger" he is marked to suffer violent pain. When the sources of the Swede's fears become known, the hotelkeeper tries to rout them by denying that Fort Romper is the wild West. "Why, man, we're goin' to have a line of ilictric street-cars in this town next spring," he boasts; "there's a new railroad goin' to be built down from Broken Arm to here. Not to mintion the four churches and the smashin' big brick school-house. Then there's the big factory, too. Why, in two years Romper'll be a met-tro-pol-is" (149-150). These are the signs of civilization. Scully's own Palace Hotel offers evidence that even before the arrival of electric cars and factories, Fort Romper is already a civilized place. It is a refuge for visitors and strangers in which, as Scully maintains, every guest is safe. Collaring potential customers at the railroad station, Scully offers to every one of them, including the "shaky and quick-eyed Swede" (143), the sacred privileges to be enjoyed under his roof. The classical virtue of hospitality having surfaced in Fort Romper, Scully would set up as an avatar of the model hotelkeeper, circa 1895: "The proprietor [of a hotel] has 'all sorts and conditions of men' to deal with; he must know human nature in its varied phases; and he must solve race and class problems with delicate tact. He must have a fair knowledge and conception of trade, and of everything that meets and supplements the wants and desires of mankind" (Hitchcock 155). Scully, who thinks he knows human nature, has an entrepreneurial eye for color: The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush. It stood alone on...

The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero

The Racial Trajectory of the Western Hero

The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology

Journal Article The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology Get access The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology. By Parks Rita. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982. vi + 190 pp. Appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) John H. Lenihan John H. Lenihan Texas A&M University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 15, Issue 3, July 1984, Pages 352–353, https://doi.org/10.2307/968803 Published: 01 July 1984

Roger Malvin's Grandson

NOTES ROGER MALVIN'S GRANDSON Ann Ronald University of Nevada-Reno Most readings ofNathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Roger Malvin's Burial" focus on the man weighed under by guilt, Reuben Bourne. As the obvious center of the narrative, Reuben directs the reader's psychological and intellectual responses in ways that stress either the pathology ofthe tale or else its cultural connections with the past. Whether his acts finally are seen as sinful, innocent, justifiable, or inevitable, Reuben merits the most attention. Of significantly less importance, or so the critics argue, are Reuben's victims. The objects of Reuben's misdeeds—Roger Malvin himself , Dorcas, and her son Cyrus—often are dismissed peremptorily or else denied symbolic weight. Dorcas and Cyrus, in particular, are relegated by most readers to subsidiary roles. To ignore them, however, is to neglect a singular element ofthe theme of the story. "Roger Malvin's Burial" examines more than what it means to be a Puritan, more than the divine retribution ofa vengeful God, more than the abnormal psychology of a man twisted by guilt. It also looks away from the past toward a strangely lit future, one where the pioneer spirit meets a sad demise. This recurrent speculation of Hawthorne's, a question of the fate of the frontier, nowhere manifests itself as directly as in "Roger Malvin's Burial." Especially crucial to that manifestation is Cyrus Bourne and his premature death. The story's introduction to him, however, gives no hint ofhis personal fate but instead stresses his maturepotential. The fifteen-year-old, "beautiful in youth," is not merely an unformed youngster. Already he gives promise of a glorious manhood. He was peculiarly qualified for, and already began to excel in, the wild accomplishments of frontier life. His foot was fleet, his aim true, his apprehension quick, his heart glad and high; and all, who anticipated the return of Indian war, spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future leader in the land.1 He sounds like Daniel Boone. He sounds like a young Natty Bumppo. Indeed , he sounds like the prototypical frontiersman and erstwhile symbol of the wilderness. Cyrus might be a model for the Deerslayer; or Hawk-eye ("that singular compound of quick, vigilant sagacity and of exquisite simplicity that by turn usurped the possession ofhis muscular features"2) might be a model for Cyrus Bourne. At any rate, the son ofReuben Bourne exemplifies the frontier spirit. 72Notes While other readers have noted a resemblance between Cyrus and the Western hero, they see this youngman in the shadow ofhis ancestors, not as the forerunner of a new breed. "Cyrus is the reincarnation of the younger Roger and Reuben—the beautiful young hunter and future warrior," says Agnes MacNeill Donohue. "He is the godlike man of the dream, the Adamic hero made for the uncorrupted Eden. The American Adam cannot survive, so he must die."3 Perhaps because Cyrus is dead, he subsequently rates no more than passing notice from this otherwise perceptive critic. Donohue, preferring to discuss the father, ignores the implications of the son. Diane Naples is equally unwilling to acknowledge Cyrus's role. She persuasively argues that "Reuben and Malvin are personifications of the frontier spirit cast in unheroic terms,"4 but she does not include their offspring in any like category. Even though she devotes a paragraph to Hawthorne's portrayal of the American Adam in this story, she leaves Cyrus completely out ofher analysis ofHawthorne and the frontier. Other critics make equally provocative remarks, only to dismiss them too. "Reuben has . . . projected himself into his son,"5 writes Frederick C. Crews, while Edwin Fussell concentrates on the "compulsive Western return ."6 Both Crews and Fussell immediately return to Reuben, the former mentioning Cyrus only as an adjunct to his father, the latter not regarding Cyrus's importance at all. Yet it is Cyrus who is Hawthorne's subject in the often-quoted passage about the American frontier. It is Cyrus who, fixing his eyes on the future, anticipates "the adventurous pleasures ofthe untrodden forest." Even when the narrator of "Roger Malvin's Burial" moves away from the boy and extrapolates prophetically, it is Cyrus, not Reuben, who triggers the...

Khomeini and Criminal Justice: Notes on Crime and Culture

It requires little imagination to insert a character from the old American Wild West into the imagery of Khomeini's justice, with the exception that this hero would ride into town with a gun instead of pen and ink, and would do his own enforcing. The simplicity and clarity of justice in both images surely tempts the romantics among us. The essential difference between the folklore figure and the Ayatollah Khomeimi, however, is that the western hero depicts the uneducated, raw man of the frontier, bringing an innocence, a freshness to the uncivilized society of the Wild West. He represents, really, a kind of justice-a highly optimistic and benign view of man's nature, yet a nature without God. Khomeini, on the other hand, depicts the opposite: a highly educated man, a man who stands for 1,380 years (or thereabouts) of learning, who represents not human justice, but divine justice. In Khomeini's view, Iranian society is decivilized rather than uncivilized. His people have been corrupted by the wrong laws and values of the United States, whereas those folks in the Wild West had simply been separated from their laws--a situation of no law, rather than the wrong law. How is it that two vastly different roles produce strikingly similar

Some Principles of Question-Design

way of having students, in discussion groups, create their own synthesis. Or we wish students, in groups or independently, to explore a complementary novel free from our intervention. In either case, if we do not provide enough structure in our questions, students may not be able to sustain an analysis on their own, or they may lose the desired focus, or simply lose heart. On the other hand, if the question is too detailed or composed of too many minor tasks, the teacher might as well teach the material more directly, for the teacher's presence will be felt in the overstructured question, and the students' independence will be curtailed. For example, the teacher who assigns, for an essay or group discussion, simple topics like Role of Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge or Western Hero in Shane is likely to find only a few advanced students able to write successful essays or provide leadership in a discussion. Many students are dazed by such open-ended tasks; others take the opportunity to waffle or give opinions at great length with little reference to the text or concern for

“Only the eternal nothing of Space”: Richard Hugo’s West

MICHAEL ALLEN University of Mississippi "Only the eternal nothing of Space": Richard Hugo's West Any understanding of Richard Hugo's West must begin back in the 1890s when three easterners invented the West that has played such an important part in American culture in this century. The West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen ''''ister grew out of the expansive energies of easterners who made, consciously or unconsciously , a myth of American toughness overcoming the vast potentialities of the West's natural resources. Owen Wister wanted his novel, The Virginian (1902), to become a national fable, uniting North and South, East and West; what he created was the figure of male hero who would have few feelings, few human connections and few needs; who would do his job in the wilderness successfully and make that wilderness accessible to eastern expansion. Since Wister, the popular understanding of the West as a region has always been tied to that male hero: the tough man and the vast landscapes are as inseparable as cowboy and horse. It was perhaps, as G. Edward White maintains,' merely an expression of popular temperament that Wister gave voice to; whatever the root cause, the making of the myth bears Wister's name. His Virginian has given us generations of men who have feared feelings, who have been quick to fear aliens of whatever color and to deny their need for human contact -Th IG. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: lIa e West of Frederick Remington, Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (New ven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 73. 26 Western American Literature for fear of being less than masculine; who have valued the physical above the emotional, the big above the necessary, the tough above the humane. Richard Hugo, taking a similar tough-guy stance and living in a similar landscape as the Virginian, has given us, in The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), a poetry which works against this myth of the West and the western hero. Unlike Wister, Remington and Roosevelt, Hugo is a born westerner who owes nothing to eastern sion or that eastern establishment from which the three makers of West came: nothing, perhaps, except his childhood poverty during the Depression. Where Wister and his friends found beautiful solitude and toughness, Hugo takes that same landscape and expresses the need for human community, for the necessary presence of human feelings to keep a man sane and whole. He has seen the remains of those expansionist energies which Roosevelt and Wister applauded and he has seen as hardly heroic: Cries of gold or men about to hang trail off where the brewery failed on West Main. Greedy fingernails ripped the ground up inch by inch down the gulch until the hope of gold ran out and men began to pimp. Gold is where you find it in the groin. ("Helena, Where Homes Go Mad") 2 If Hugo had seen that early Wyoming settlement of Medicine Bow, from which the Virginian rides off into the mountains, he would have far more of the bottles and tin cans outside the saloons. That trash part of the human presence, indicative of human needs and dreams of the people who lived there. For Hugo, the West is a dream that does belong to those who would - and do - exploit its land; the dreams the West are those failed hopes of the poor and the greedy and the who came there to find a better life. To Hugo, the American dream is not the unlimited possibilities of expansion but the ache of need. His landscape, vast and rugged as it still is, is a place where a possibilities are limited by that ruggedness and its associated weathers and winds that beat against human enterprise and make those connections between people that much more important. 2Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (New York: 1973), p. 10. Subsequent quotation from this book are followed by page references. Michael Allen 27 In Montana then, Richard Hugo's West is born, big and "thick as a fist / or blunt instrument" where "long roads weave and curve / red veins of rage" ("A Map of Montana...

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

Reviews 243 among the Caweltians, Jones chooses to act upon Cawelti’s suggestion that aesthetic, as well as purely cultural, considerations might be worth explor­ ing. “Changes in the character of the Western hero,” Jones tells us, “re­ sulted from the complex interplay of several aesthetic and socio-psychological dynamics which, in the last analysis, remain inextricably inter­ woven.” (p. 117) One hopes that scholars will follow Jones’ lead. If they do, we will soon have a deeper and more balanced appreciation for popu­ lar literature than the American Studies tradition has yet given us. One hopes, too, that Jones’ book will launch a movement to study, preserve, and make more accessible the dime novels that still exist. Paper­ back reprints of a few outstanding or representative examples of the genre, like Philip Durham’suseful — but lonely— editions of Seth Jones and Deadwood Dick on Deck (1966) would be most welcome. GARY TOPPING, Utah State Historical Society The Last Good Kiss. By James Crumley. (New York: Random House, 1978. 259 pages, $8.95.) Although nobody has investigated the genealogical niceties in detail, it is pretty generally agreed that westerns and thrillers have family in com­ mon. The relationship may not be conjugal or parental, but the two are at least kissing cousins. They are also both commonly assumed to wear the bar sinister of polite letters, to be the sort of kinfolk that are fine in their place, but that you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry. Some­ thing like this could (and doubtless will) be said of The Last Good Kiss which, if read unsympathetically, can easily be dismissed as yet another whodunit, genus private eye, species missing person. Ostensibly this novel asks the question of what has happened to the long-missing Betty Sue Flowers and of whether the narrator, private detective Sughrue, will find out. To the latter point the experienced reader will be apt to answer “Yes” even before he picks the novel up; to the former, the jaded reader will probably respond “Who cares?” These reactions, however understandable, will be unfortunate, for The Last Good Kiss, like most good westerns and thrillers, is an impressive example of the philosophical novel of adventure, a morganatic literary child whose roots are distinguished but whose dark and comely branches have been literarily disinherited. Crumley’s book, though tightly plotted and filled with its share of titillating adventures in the world of porno movies, lusty (and lustful) ladies, fast cars, and hard liquor, is finally much more than a clever exercise in suspense. The real question posed by the novel 244 Western American Literature is not whodunit, but why they done it, and why they are so anxious to find out what it was they done. Aiding Sughrue in his search are Trahearne, an alcoholic author, Trahearne’s past and present wives, Betty Sue’s mother, and a marvelous beer-drinking bulldog named Fireball Roberts, all of whom (with the possible exception of Fireball) have different reasons for discov­ ering what has happened to Betty Sue. The revelation is in the best tradi­ tion of the novel of suspense — perfectly appropriate within the logic of the story, yet applying a new dimension of meaning to the “why” of the adventures. Crumley’s is a first-rate story, written with delicacy and taste. It con­ cerns itself hardly at all with sex and violence for their own sakes, a point which is all the more remarkable in a novel depending for much of its plot upon the nuances of behavior within the porno film industry. The nar­ rator Sughrue, on one level just another “tough guy” detective, is from a more profound perspective an implausible Everyman: not one who, like Parson Weem’s doubtless exemplary but unbelievable Washington, cannot tell a lie, Sughrue descends from a line of heroes with an integrity remini­ scent of Beowulf’s— he has not sworn many oaths falsely. Finally, one should mention Fireball, the kind of dog that people who love dogs love. He too is an unpromising bastard: he owns no kinship with Old Dog Tray or Old Shep. His unacknowledged father is Lion, who brings down the great bear in Faulkner...

The Dime Novel Western by Daryl Jones

242 Western American Literature Chapter four’s “Characters” are as bizarre a cast of characters as any town could ever assemble, including (besides an astonishing collection of Flynns and Gormans) two non-irishmen with fantastic histories. There is Buster Copeland, son of the local milliner, who returns from the Orient to insert an exotic blade between his father’s fifth and sixth ribs — and won acquittal for the act. And Norwegian Henry Kolbo, who was the local movie projectionist while a Kenmare high school student, went on to amass several million dollars before he died in a 707 crash on Mt. Fuji in 1967. The Morrow book is anything but a sober-sided account of life on the North Dakota frontier. There is not a drab scene or a dull passage in the book. The actual texture of the prose is more surrealistic than realistic, as the adventures and anecdotes of these “poor, bigotted, and quarrelsome” Irish are revealed to us. The book is packed with characters and episodes that come at us with bewildering speed and variety. But it is the Irish who give the book its distinctive flavor. CLARENCE A. GLASRUD, Moorhead State University The Dime Novel Western. By Daryl Jones. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowl­ ing Green University Popular Press, 1978. 186 pages, $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper.) If it is true, as Daryl Jones says, that the dime novels that remain today are physically deteriorating, difficult of access, and too much ne­ glected by scholars, then his little book should mend that situation. It is to be highly recommended as a sensible, straightforward, and comprehensive survey. Jones’ organizational scheme is a bit prosaic, perhaps, but serviceable. The heart of the book is the chapters that consider the settings, the types of heroes and heroines, and the plots. Within those general topics, Jones strongly emphasizes the chronological development that occurred as the dime novel kept pace with changing cultural forces and aesthetic fashions. The complexity that his attention to chronological development produces is perhaps the strongest feature of the book, and it exposes the superficial generalizations most of us are wont to make regarding the dime novel. Methodologically, Jones stands firmly in the American Studies tradition of Henry Nash Smith and John Cawelti, which deals with popular litera­ ture by identifying genre conventions and explaining their appeal by cor­ relating them to contemporary or universal cultural anxieties. But Jones’ book contains a whiff of rebellion against that tradition. Almost alone Reviews 243 among the Caweltians, Jones chooses to act upon Cawelti’s suggestion that aesthetic, as well as purely cultural, considerations might be worth explor­ ing. “Changes in the character of the Western hero,” Jones tells us, “re­ sulted from the complex interplay of several aesthetic and socio-psychological dynamics which, in the last analysis, remain inextricably inter­ woven.” (p. 117) One hopes that scholars will follow Jones’ lead. If they do, we will soon have a deeper and more balanced appreciation for popu­ lar literature than the American Studies tradition has yet given us. One hopes, too, that Jones’ book will launch a movement to study, preserve, and make more accessible the dime novels that still exist. Paper­ back reprints of a few outstanding or representative examples of the genre, like Philip Durham’suseful — but lonely— editions of Seth Jones and Deadwood Dick on Deck (1966) would be most welcome. GARY TOPPING, Utah State Historical Society The Last Good Kiss. By James Crumley. (New York: Random House, 1978. 259 pages, $8.95.) Although nobody has investigated the genealogical niceties in detail, it is pretty generally agreed that westerns and thrillers have family in com­ mon. The relationship may not be conjugal or parental, but the two are at least kissing cousins. They are also both commonly assumed to wear the bar sinister of polite letters, to be the sort of kinfolk that are fine in their place, but that you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry. Some­ thing like this could (and doubtless will) be said of The Last Good Kiss which, if read unsympathetically, can easily be dismissed as yet another whodunit, genus private eye, species missing person. Ostensibly this novel asks the question...