ARE WESTERNS GUT-SHOT?

Richard S. Wheeler

I’m going to tease Richard Wheeler.  I don’t know how he’ll take it.  If you don’t know him, he’s a writer who has actually made a living at writing, mostly Westerns, for decades.  Sometimes people tell him he’s come to the end, but then he usually figures out some way to go on.  He’s got enough money stashed to retire and claims he will when he gets old, but he’s only eighty, looking dapper in his blazer and lace-up shoes.

In his last blog post he said he had finally realized, “I am bourgeois and a middlebrow.”  This caused me to laugh out loud, not because I disagree, but because that’s such a bourgeois and middlebrow thing to worry about, really concepts from decades ago, but Wheeler IS a bit of a fossil.  He notes: “But for some reason, middlebrow had acquired a stigma, mostly having to do with lack of intellectual courage or some other inadequacy.”  This is also true enough, but only in the college towns or the Artsy ones like Livingston.  In Valier they are proud to be middlebrow town burghers.  And, actually, that’s who has always loved Wheeler’s books.  The guy who runs the laundromat in Cut Bank is still wanting to talk about Wheeler's historical novel about the 19^th century earthquake in San Francisco. “Aftershocks.”

Here’s a list of Wheeler’s books.  http://www.fictiondb.com/author/richard-s-wheeler~30698.htm

Richard again:  “Academia doesn't know what to do about western fiction. English department critics tend to ignore the field, or condemn it, or contend it is too trivial to bother with, or that it romanticizes genocidal invasion of tribal lands. Mostly, the professors simply ignore the whole area. Ask them to name western novelists at the top of the field and they can't. Nor can they name titles. Or list books they have read.”

Cormac McCarthy

[This is not quite true.  Many are besotted with Cormac McCarthy.]

“Ask them what mysteries they have read, or the top authors in that field, or the top books and authors in science fiction, and you are likely to get some answers from them.  

“On the other hand, western literature is the only American genre that has won Pulitzer prizes, in fact three of them, which says a great deal about the importance and the quality of the field. The Pulitzer committee has given the prize to A. B. Guthrie, Jr., for The Way West; to Robert Lewis Taylor for The Travels of Jamie McPheeters; and to Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove. That record is unique. It is not matched by the mystery genre, or romance, or science fiction.”

Robert Lewis Taylor

Now I have to stop and comment again.  I looked up an online list of Pulitzers and see that Wheeler missed some Westerns:

Conrad Richter:  “The Town”

Wallace Stegner:  “Angle of Repose”

N. Scott Momaday:  “House Made of Dawn”

John Steinbeck:  “Grapes of Wrath”

Oliver La Farge:  “Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story”

A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

I’ve never heard of Robert Lewis Taylor.  I’ve had living conversations with Guthrie and, of course, would love to talk to McMurtry.  Richter and Stegner are classic definers of the West.  La Farge, an upper class anthropologist, is certainly an appealing writer even for kids.  N. Scott Momaday is as Indian as Indians can be, a great big embracing sort of person.  These are not people I would consider snobbish or difficult.  The only fault I see with them is that they are all male, though they all write with sympathy and insight about women.

N. Scott Momaday

It’s true that the fashion for a while -- maybe particularly for women and specifically for Indian women -- has been to write AGAINST the legends of the West which include abuse of females, often lethal.  Once the Pandora’s box of French post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial theory gets opened, we should probably ALL run for our lives.

Wheeler says:  “I suspect most English professors simply wish the field would vanish. It is largely historical and romantic, and celebrates an earlier conception of what America is about, and is less significant than contemporary stories about relationships and the perpetually wounded human animal. . . .”

“Highbrow writing is largely dull or beyond my comprehension, and lowbrow writing is a bore, so here I am, lost in the vast middle of the literary and cultural world.”

I think the problem is in the category set-up.  Maybe by “Westerns” he means tales about cowboys and the formation of frontier towns.  He likes to write about the fur-trade and mining.  I don’t think he has quite realized that “class is the new racism.”  Everyone’s “brow” has shattered into a hundred levels and kinds.  More than that there are dozens of delivery systems, each requiring a different sort of writing -- and I count images as writing.  We’ve about given up trying to make gender binary, so that’s a whole spectrum to explore, and I’m not talking about porn.  

What I see among the English professors is them hiding among the political shrubbery which comes perilously close to pandering to whomever uses “Rate my Professor.”  Students run the classes.  And professors are supposed to be “hot.”  At least three red peppers.

I don’t get the “perpetually wounded human animal.”  Maybe if the word order were changed around:  “perpetually wounding animal human,” meaning aggression from the dark subconscious brain lashing out defensively against the Other and then wondering what s/he has done.

There’s another Western writer (though he isn’t known much) from the stalwart Rope and Wire platform (www.ropeandwire.com)  who accepts the same terms for Westerns that Wheeler does.  That’s Tom Sheehan. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TomSheehan  I left Rope and Wire when I turned out to be too sexy, but Sheehan doesn’t mind.  He’s another corporation guy with a writing private life -- not particularly brow-ish one way or the other.  Military core.  He just keeps turnin’ ‘em out.

Tom Sheehan

Westerns in film seem to be drifting back away from mockery and silliness.  I liked “The Homesman” most recently and “Sweetgrass” maybe just MOST.  (It’s a documentary.)  “Slow West” is almost here -- the preview clip looks a little tongue in cheek.  “Jimmy P” and “Winter in the Blood” are the best “real” Indian tales yet.  Solid literary roots.  And streaming, too !!  “Longmire” is close to reincarnating “Gunsmoke.”

Of course, all of prairiemary is Western.  You can’t get more Western than the East Slope of the Rockies almost at the 49^th Parallel.  I deliberately go genre jumping.

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“The rifleman stood in the wind, knowing he couldn’t be accurate -- mostly just make a big noise that might carry.  His hickory shirt stuck to his back but he was glad for suspenders that spared him from hitching up his jeans.  He didn’t want to move much because he didn’t want to attract the attention of a man driving way too fast on a gravel road.  It might be possible to shoot him if he got close enough.”

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“Cutting.  Wasn’t that the old Blackfeet way that women grieved for a lost warrior?  But surely not with a razor blade -- surely with a big wide knife sharpened with a stone, carefully and slowly, getting exactly the right slant to the edge.  She wished for a razor blade.  She had no knife.  Just grief.  Endless grief.”

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“I hated it when my big brother decided to play keepaway.  This time he had my best pants in his hand and was whirling them over his head.  It was no use getting mad and going after him.  Just then the steer I’d been grooming for the fair spotted the whirling and decided to play.  He took my brother from the back, pitching him on his face in a mud puddle.  Luckily, the pants flew clear when the bully tried to catch himself.  I put ‘em on and took off with my steer behind me.  Both of us were enjoying ourselves.”

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“Gravity was telling him he was lying on his back.  Nice not to be regaining consciousness without his face in the dirt.  Now, what was that smell?  Pretty strong.  Don’t tell.  Oh, he got it.  Sagebrush.  Why can’t he see?  Oh, he got that, too.  It’s night.  How did he get here?  Now, that’s gonna take some time.  That’s when he saw it glowing.”

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That last is a swipe at writing a Horror Western which is what “Bone Tomahawk” is supposed to be.  Just released.  How I loved that kid who showed up in Heart Butte once, sat in the front of the classroom and called, “Let’s all write Westerns!”  Opening his spiral notebook, already half-filled, he got right to it.

http://gravetapping.blogspot.com/  Nice interview with Wheeler.