This beautiful panoramic photo is by Diana Volk. And I know, I should NOT put down my books on their faces like this!
In the Fifties, which have become pretty much invisible years to many people, my family traveled a lot -- economy-style in a folding tent trailer except for one trip to the east coast when we stayed in “auto camps” as motels were then called. We ate cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and for supper we’d stop in some small town on a blue highway (that’s the only kind there was in those days) and have either hamburgers or hot beef sandwiches at the local cafe. My dad had trouble taking his foot off the gas, so sometimes we ate in places that were more bar than cafe, because that’s all that was open after seven pm. We traveled mostly in the rural West.
I was between eight and twelve in those years, old enough to observe and even introspect, but without any very powerful ways to interpret what we saw: small town, ranch and farm people struggling to keep their families together and fed, men drinking to numb their trauma, women frustrated by boredom, and what would now be called poverty though we didn’t think of it that way then. None of the glitz and sheen that even the smallest towns flaunt now, but on the other hand, not near so many boarded up buildings and deserted streets. If there was a bar, it always had a red neon martini glass with a green neon olive. The Korean and Cold Wars gripped us, teaching that conformity and group identification offered the only safety.
In those years Robert Roripaugh was there in Wyoming, knowing the people and their stories, which he kept in his heart until he was adult enough to spin them into poetry (he was the poet laureate of Wyoming from 1995 through 2002) and fiction, both short stories and novels (“A Fever for Living” and “Honor Thy Father.” After service in Japan, post-war, he returned with his wife, Yoshiko, to the University of Wyoming where for thirty-five years he taught creative writing and Western American Literature. He has worked hard to serve and develop Wyoming literature through workshops and seminars around the state.
Reading Roripaugh’s stories is a little like reading Richard Ford, who writes about Montana and lives here sometimes but is not really from the state, or Raymond Carver, who turns out not to have intended to be famous for minimalism after all. (Evidently it was a style imposed by his editor, Gordon Lish, whether or not that was a good thing.) They are not exciting romantic Zane Grey epics.
But they are not like the indigenous writers who are best known at present: Ivan Doig is much more inclined to gentle humor and lapidary prose. Mark Spragg, a Wyoming native, is quite a bit younger, which shows in his stories. Roripaugh is often described as “grounded in reality.” But maybe that’s not the most interesting thing about this collection of short stories.
These stories include some of his earlier works as well as recent stories: each has head-notes that let us know the source of the story and its fate through many rewrites. This anthology amounts to a "story" about being a conscientious writer not inclined to be Hemingway or Kerouac. Perhaps the most important lesson of all is how willing Roripaugh has been to accept advice and criticism while never losing his own core of integrity and conviction about what he was writing. He says frankly that the best way to become a writer is to read and read and read. Clearly a good story is not ruined by rewriting, though rewriting to make his stories shorter tended to paradoxically end up making them longer! Still -- often better. This is about the actual writing -- not “being” a famous personality.
It’s clear that Roripaugh’s a Westerner when he writes about Native Americans, taking for granted what they are and understanding what they are up against. One remarkable story is simply a set of faux “compositions” written by an Indian girl and supposedly turned in as assignments for the course he taught. It’s easy to see what’s coming -- esp. if you know this territory -- which doesn’t lessen the impact when it does happen. He tells stories quietly and a bit on the slant, so it’s possible that Easterners wouldn’t be able to absorb what just happened under their noses. But the notorious Gordon Lish, then an editor at Knopf, recommended the story for a Pushcart Prize in 1981.
Though Roripaugh is well known by the Western Writers of America and has received awards from the Cowboy Hall of Fame, he is not on the Manhattan radar and that may have been an advantage. He’s had the place and opportunity to “grow” his stories quietly. Most of them were begun in the era of the TV Westerns, a time when writers were feeling around for a new moral center between war and passivity, and to find a new balance between the epic inflations of early outlaws and the grinding reality of day-to-day survival in the droughty West. “The Legend of Billy Jenks” puts the Billy-the-Kid kind of myth-making over against a mere delinquent who gets pushed out to the margins and then cut off at the knees, so to speak.
In small conformity-based Western towns, there is a special fascination for the young in the different, rebellious, un-containable, renegade outlaw. Differing in degree and kind of exceptionalism, from young woman carrying Indian blood to old man trapper living primitively, they interest a thoughtful young man who writes. Stories tend to be about them, trying to explain or come to terms with their lives.
A second common theme is that of the relationship of father and son as father tries to teach what he knows. “Morning Flight,” the most recent story, seems to be one of those accounts where little happens except that the boy shoots his first duck. There’s no fuss about killing birds. Rather there’s a confusing web of war/sex/death/competence for a boy, even one with a protective and guiding father. It is the accuracy and justice of observation that makes the story real, rather like Walter van Tilburg Clark or Wallace Stegner.
I often puzzle about how there can be so many first-rate writers, especially locally, who produce such fine work without much fuss or hoopla while at the same time the media and even the academics spend all their energy re-examining the same dozen latest stars who have already been analyzed a dozen times. When someone like Roripaugh quietly offers examples from his life work, we’re fools not to reflect closely on what he says.
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