THOMAS SAVAGE

The Manhattan publishing machine is broken, everyone agrees, and most people think it began when the “gentlemen” who produced books began to think it was a money-making enterprise. Instead of seeking out worthy material in the judgment of judicious and educated people, somehow the criterion slipped over to profit. Maybe it was the Book of the Month Club that convinced everyone that to be au courant, one had to read certain books of interest but possibly not much value. Or at least subscribe to them.

Anyway, one of the phenomena that ballooned in the post WWII era, maybe with the willing collaboration of photo magazines like Life, was celebrity authors. Instead of serious book reviews, the public now sat down to study photos of artists, writers, and movie stars. (Not so much the politicians, since they weren’t that memorable-looking.) Photos of people like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Mailer, et al became our archetypal understanding of what an author “was.” And because it was post WWII during which we had grown used to making our soldiers into heroes and gods, it was the big macho males who caught our fancy. Someone ought to do a scholarly study of author portraits in Life magazine from 1945 to 1955.

I come to these thoughts partly because of an article in the Winter, 2008, issue of “Montana, the Magazine of Western History” about Thomas Savage. They call him the “forgotten novelist” but I think from the content by O. Alan Weilzien that “ignored” might be closer to the truth. Weilzien is an English professor at the Dillon branch of the Montana Higher Education system. Savage was produced by the country near Dillon in the southwest corner of Montana where it abuts Idaho, an area much ignored by the two literary power centers: Missoula and Billings. I don’t know Weilzen. Dillon is considered by some a sort of “normal school” where teachers are prepared, but that might not be any more accurate a characterization than the way we classify writers.

Weilzien says Savage was briefly grouped in one anthology with Dorothy Johnson, Mildred Walker, and Bernard DeVoto. That is to say, dismissed. Maybe Weilzein wants to group Savage with the better known James Welch, Norman Maclean and Ivan Doig, who are supposed to be the pop image of Montana lit. Welch, Doig, Mary Clearman Blew and (with guarded relevance) myself are the same age, born in 1939. Savage was born in 1915, which puts him in the generation of (my personal marker) Bob Scriver, A.B. Guthrie Jr., Norman Maclean, Wallace Stegner, and the mystery writers that the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula loves so dearly. In fact, the Festival did organize a panel for Savage in 2001 when “The Power of the Dog” and “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name” AKA “The Sheep Queen” were re-issued by Little Brown at the urging of an editorial assistant, Emily Salkin Takoudes. When that happens, a writer is supposed to have it made, like marrying the prince, but the author was too old and ill to attend. They always love you when you’re dying.

“The Last Best Place” doesn’t include Savage. “Montana Margins,” the earlier definitive anthology edited by Joseph Kinsey Howard, who was a newspaper man rather than an academic, does. Savage himself felt that his poor sales and lack of public recognition related to the absence of publicity. Annie Proulx (why do we ask Proulx when she’s not from the West?) says his work is too grim. Sue Hart, the literary gatekeeper on the eastern end of Montana, agrees. She likes cheerful writing. Savage defensively believed his books demanded a high level of education. Karl Olson suggests that esp. “The Power of the Dog” is “run through with homoeroticism, but they are contextualized more by homophobia than idealized homsexuality.” Oh, now I “get” Proulx. In fact, she wrote an “analytical afterword” for “The Power of the Dog.”

Savage was married, evidently contentedly, to a fellow writer (female) and had three children. This is a lifestyle choice by some men that evidently confuses people who think that male and female are two different species like sheep and goats. It doesn’t allow for bisexuality or, as one UU minister put it, “omnisexuality.” In the earlier days of Western writing, this mattered. Now it’s a publicity point -- what was a problem is now an asset, suggesting a new audience with money to spend -- well, they DID have money to spend.

From this new point of view all sorts of interesting ideas pop up. Jack Fritscher comments that one of the sources of “leathermen” homomasculinity was that post-WWII hunger for fathers and the idealization of manly soldiers. I don’t know how many teen boys quietly watched the “naked savages” of Fifties Westerns with emotions they admitted only to themselves. I do know how many of the coyote cruisers who deal in Indian artifacts and Western art are gay.

So does it help to say that these days the prince can run off with another prince, get married (in the right jurisdiction) and live happily ever after? Not really. The problem is that one’s personal arrangements and even one’s writing success has very little to do with gender identification. It’s really a game of pinball, pitting one’s ability to form that ball and then send it out into the field of obstacles with enough “body English” to win against a commercially configured field that isn’t even about writing -- it’s about profit, selling, ringing those bells. The phenomenon of the book that everyone owns but no one reads is well-known. In fact, the phenomenon of books no one has read but everyone knows is “great” or “evil” takes up a lot of media space. Also, we want the money stats: how much did it “gross?”

But in the long run it’s the writing that counts. So I went to the “Montana Margins” anthology and read “The First Train’s Coming” by Thomas Savage (better known to his contemporaries, such as Howard, by his stepfather’s name, Brenner), taken from the 1944 novel “The Pass.” Montana formed just as the industrial revolution hit the settlers. The story, as Howard extracted it, juxtaposes the coming of the first train to town with much commotion and optimism, though the underpinnings are creaky, with the kind of bitter blizzard we’ve had a couple of times this year -- devastating as though a bit of outer space had dropped on us. In the midst is a young ranching couple, just trying to survive and dreaming of New York City -- Manhattan, you know. Success.

Savage spent a good part of his life back east, writing about Montana, rather like Doig spending most of his own life in Seattle, writing about Montana. Henry James lived in Europe, writing about New York. Authors are strange creatures, but the real way to know them is to read their books. The rest is transient.