I was on the hunt for the most western of western images and I discovered westness in
cactus-shaped cookie jars, by God.
In vast space encircled by mountains. (People find this openness either really scary or really refreshing. I recommend bringing a gallon of water per day either way.)
Westness is even at tourist towns with High Noon Hamburgers and narrow-gauge railroad rides up gorges.
At silent ruins.
Even, unfortunately, in genocide, in battles won and wars lost.
Battle of Little Big Horn by Kicking Bear (Mato Wanartaka) c. 1898 Lakota (born c. 1846, unknown; died May 28, 1904, near Manderson, South Dakota) The Southwest Museum
I swept through images of cowboys riding into sunsets and Colorado powwows, faded pics of glassy-eyed miners and grinning Golden Girl of the Pecos snapshots, shots of desolate small-town streets and squint-eyed sheepherders. I pondered and fretted. Do I choose sequin-spangled rodeo/cowboy west or grimly determined Navajo or rancher? Do I look for uranium, or Hollywood royalty, or mansions with mountain lions in their backyards? Vast plains or blighted landscapes? A live buffalo or a hill of whitened skulls?
Let’s see, where was I? Why yes, hip deep in Lorne Greene’s pillow lips circa Bonanza…
Sigh, no. I was in deeply in the wonder that is the Gene Autry Museum (aka the Cowboy Museum) and writing up another draft of the novel. Unlike movie cowboys, who seem to either
a.) multitask–fix barbed wire fences, herd cattle, woo women, and shoot bad guys
or
b.) wreak vengeance in a single-minded fashion, a la Eastwood’s Man With No Name
I can’t rewrite a novel without everything in my life making the Big Pause.
Herewith, no further ado: Cowboys at the Gene Autry Museum who are the REAL DEAL.
First off, 1980s style.
I dunno if these gents listened to Stevie Ray Vaughn, Heart, or George Michael, but even without features, they still rock the lariat.
Next, you have to honor the lawmakers, especially when they were tribal police. Drop that cactus and put your hands in the air.
There’s something about a real-life gal who isn’t afraid to ride the bucking bronco–and win prizes for it. Mabel Strickland, Queen of the Rodeo.
And one of my personal faves, Wild Bill Hickock. His Dead Man’s Hand says everything worth knowing in life–Do not, repeat do NOT sit with your back to the door.
Real cowboys don’t write novels. They’re not that dumb.
A recent trip to the LA’s Autry National Center of the American West, aka the Cowboy Museum, yielded huge Westness moments. I don’t remember much of it–being so transported in ecstasy I wasn’t on the earthly plane–but I know I took a lot of pictures.
What is Westness? It’s the romantic thing that anything West of the Mississippi has, to greater or lesser degree.
For example, the grubby clothing shown worn by 1980s-era ranch hands on the basement level has Westness. The gift shop of the Autry museum, does not, as most of its wares come from another hemisphere. I have none, although I yearn to have it (without having to ride a horse). My relatives from LA, who do many things but neither work on ranches nor wear grubby clothing, have that certain something. Are you born with it? No, otherwise Teddy Roosevelt would’ve stayed the toothy Dude and John Wayne would’ve starred in football movies.
Westness is born, or it can be developed, by you or others, as you will see.
Nice saddle, right. Must be a great cowboy. WRONG!!! This was created for Altman’s 1976 film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians; or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. While not a fantastic movie, it does skewer faux Westness well, at the expense of Buffalo Bill, who was probably not such a bad guy.
Speaking of Buffalo Bill (no, I have no pics of authentic western wear from the great man–like his legend, nobody knows what’s real anymore), one of the originators of white man riseth / red man descendeth–a common western theme–has a script in the museum, addresses as “written for Buffalo Bill.” Jack Crawford, the “Poet Scout,” wrote plays glorifying his deeds and Buffalo Bill’s. His work can be found here. He had been a soldier in the Civil War, but his fame came from making things up. In so doing, he started a whole slew of dreaming/scheming get-rich-quick types, still found out West.
“I have often been asked how my characters differ from the traditional, larger-than-life heroes of the mythical West,” Mr. Kelton said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News in 2007. “ ‘Those,’ I reply, ‘are seven feet tall and invincible. My characters are 5-8 and nervous.’ ”
Elmer Kelton died August 22 in Texas, after a long and profitable career of a western writer’s western writer. He didn’t have the populist appeal of Louis L’Amour–Kelton’s writing apparently being a little more, um, literary–but he had the kudos of his comrades: in 1995, the Western Writers of America voted him the greatest western writer of all time. (whew!)
His prose is stark and detailed, the way a West Texas landscape appears in the hard morning light. I prefer my heroes seven feet tall, but I can’t deny Kelton’s ability to develop characters that just happened to be cowboys or ranchers or oil men. And after reading an excellent obit in today’s New York Times (click here to read it) I am even more impressed. The man worked for a living–first as a ranch hand and then as a reporter and editor, so when did he write his sixty-odd books? (no excuses permitted anymore, you writers out there) He wrote them in his spare time.
And the song sung as he was laid to rest? “Happy Trails.” Naturally.
The book cover above is from my collection. (Have I told you yet that I have almost three hundred of these beauties? Oh, yeah? Well, lemme tell you again.) It’s a well-loved copy of a book, perhaps a serviceman’s, that was printed during wartime “in accordance with the government’s regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials.” It also has the phrase ”Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas” opposite the title page, which I find kinda creepy given the aggressive and ultimately very flawed trajectories of recent military endeavors. Elmer Kelton, a master of truthiness, would hate the ridonkulousness of the title. Singing Guns was written by Max Brand, who unlike Elmer Kelton, was neither a Westerner nor a cowboy.
You ever go through life thinking you should’ve written that novel/filmed that movie/accepted that job/kissed that girl or guy/said yes when someone asked you to strip in front of a camera/handed that demo CD to that music exec/said hello to Paul Newman/told your best friend you love him or her/changed careers/hugged your kid/WRITTEN THAT NOVEL?
Well, don’t go through life whining about it. Just do it.
So I wrote a novel. Hence the absence. It has a western theme, so I wasn’t totally AWOL.
Anyway, lucky me, I’ll be writing another draft, but I’m glad that my life questions can center around things like shoulda said hi to Paul Newman.
In honor of a completed draft and one more step along the great dusty trails of life, here is one of my favorite covers, which, not coincidentally, reminds me of a cowboy fact-one more out of the grand total of 51:
Cowboys move.
Call it fiddle-footed restlessness or the search for whatever is over the horizon.
Call it late for dinner.
Call it Cowboy Fact 16: Cowboys can’t stay put.
This moody cover is in the style of H. L. Hoffman, an illustrator who worked for Popular Library in the forties. I don’t know much about him, alas. The cover illustration is reproduced as a line drawing on the title page, common for the time.
Eugene Cunningham, the author, wrote in a laconic drawl, but his dedication speaks to the sentimental fool in every cowpoke:
To Mary Carolyn
Who didn’t get to ride in the Rodeo
Parade that time–this book is
affectionately dedicated, as a
poor substitue for that
ride she missed, by
its and her
author
awww.
Cowboy Fact 15: Cowboys miss what they have left behind.
We have Daniel Boone’s ADHD to thank for the western two-thirds of the United States. June 7 is a day that lives in glorious Disney colors or one that lives in infamy, depending on whether you were not or were a Native American.
On June 7, 1769, Daniel Boone crested a summit in the Appalachians and looked down upon the present-day Kentucky.
Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below.
Because of these words, how many raccoon-tail hats have been sold in the continental United States alone?
How many people were uprooted and massacred? How many people left home and family to search for beaver pelts, gold, uranium, the silver screen? How many people tried their hand at homesteading, ranching, cowboying, mining, teaching, farming, oil rigging, acting, tricking, gambling, computing, green jobbing…?
Being asked “why he had left that dear Kentucke, which he had discovered and won from the wild Indian, for the wilderness of Missouri,” [Boone's] memorable reply betrays the leading feature of his character, the primum mobile of the man: “Too crowded! too crowded! I want elbow-room!”
Primum mobile–referring to the outer sphere of the geocentric universe, and that which imparts movement to other spheres. The networks had theirs. The 1964-70 “Daniel Boone” series chose Fess Parker because of “… Parker’s everyman appeal — a poor man’s Gregory Peck for the TV airwaves.”
Daniel Boone’s restlessness tipped the balance so that Europeans spilled across the Midwest and the Plains and the Mountain states to the Pacific, crossing the waters to take Hawaii and Guam.
And bringing me to my primum mobile, from pre-rye and western writing, Boone’s Farm “flavored malt beverage.”
Usually an Easterner, but it can be used to call anyone obviously unready for the West–such as if a person is wearing street shoes, too-fancy clothes, or unable to ride a horse or track game or make coffee in a tin can. A dude is usually mocked mercilessly (seeThe Virginian, by Owen Wister). A dude, however, can rise above his dudeness (seeTheodore Roosevelt) and in fact, may bring other virtues to the word (seeThe Big Lebowski).
Legends of America also describes it as originally, a word that means a boil on a tenderfoot’s backside, gotten after riding in a saddle all day for the first time. (I will now call any pimple I get “dude.”)
An example of how to use “dude” in a sentence:
Savvy Westerners don’t walk through a clump of chollo cactus, much less ride through on an ATV. This dude should’ve ridden a horse–they can be smarter than their riders.
The cover of Denis Johnson’s new novel Nobody Move screams KITSCHPULPNOIR with red and yellow letters and bullet holes spangling the jacket.
Famously serialized in Playboy, the story has plenty to like, or plenty to dislike, depending on how cooked you like your femme fatales, gun-toting heavies, and convoluted plots. I take mine hard as nails, so I count myself a fan.
Nobody Move is set in the American West, but it’s not the Pioneer West, the Cowboy West, Deadwood West, or even Polanski’s Chinatown West, although that comes close. It’s set in a nowhere-ville around Bakersfield, California, a locale that is promptly forgotten the moment you’ve driven through it. He’s too good a writer to write for the sake of convenience (he’s probably very familiar with the Interstate highways of California). His choice is unusual.
Ever since Chandler, noir is as soaked in California sun as it is in New York City smog. It would be fair to assume that the action would take place in the seediness of Los Angeles, or even Las Vegas’s garishness. Instead, the protagonists linger at the Feather River and drive toward the Mojave desert and past swaths of agribusiness crops. They shoot each other at rest stops, hide in culverts below a highway, and hole up in a ramshackle restaurant/camp in the mountains, the kind usually frequented by transient bikers. It is not a West made glamorous by the Coen Brothers or Tarantino. He chose a West that is forgettable. He chose brilliantly.
Both Western films and novels usually begin with a view of the land, an Alpha* that, at the story arc’s end, is matched by an Omega, an end that is a beginning.
Owen Wister describes The Virginian’s vista as a “land without evil, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis.” Shane begins with a sweep of Edenic mountains, which is broken by the entrance of a rider, Shane himself. At the end of Westerns, the rider disappears again into the vista, or breaks from it, sinking into the world of civilization, leaving the wilderness as vast and unsullied as before.
The majestic and stark land of the West is code for the asceticism of the Western hero: Be hard. Be awe-inspiring. Be rugged. Within the arms of this landscape, he becomes even more heroic, and he knows it. He is devoted to the power of the land, and desires this power. This is the real romance of the Western.
The authors and directors of the genre understand this: Ford’s Monument Valley and Zane Grey’s Colorado River are as iconic as their stars. Their camera or words on a page travel over bluffs and along wide rivers, tracking the hero’s progress through the landscape and providing an almost tactile sensation of experience, which viewers and readers crave. The land is everything, both the “destination and the way.”
What is the land of Nobody Move?
It’s a region where fields are laced with pesticides. Where waters are siphoned off to fill the swimming pools of Los Angeles. Where gold mines spew poison. Where empty tract homes wait blankly for bankrupt owners to return. If anyone actually gazes at the landscape, it is only to toss an empty Coke can out the car window. It’s a “through place”–not a destination. It’s a commodity or a product, to be used and tossed when it is spent. His land is code for the throw-away manner Jimmy Luntz, Gambol, Anita Desilvera, and Juarez talk, have sex, drink, and die, and for their hard little nuggets of desperation and want that they discover and hoard.
In Johnson’s world, human beings have used up their Eden.
The protagonists neither seek to become “one with the West,” nor strive to differentiate themselves from it. The desert, the riverbank, the mountain roads are present only to be used and manipulated by humans. There is little tactile experience for the reader–the land passes by as removed as if the reader is riding in an air-conditioned car.
The river, a potent symbol is mentioned early and often, and appears and reappears at nodal points in the story. However, it is ghostly and blurred–more like the River Acheron, for which the ancient Greek souls needed a guide to cross into Hades, than a physical (and wet) presence.
There is one moment when the land appears fully with scent, color, and sensation–the horrific and darkly funny burial scene. Two characters wrestle a bloody corpse into the ground and are marked with its gore and mud. The only time that a human being becomes one with the land is when that character–one of the more humane ones–must be literally forced into it, dead.
What is brilliant about Johnson’s choice is how he continues the genre’s movement away from the idyllic frontier of early westerns, and the recent troubled and tragic landscapes of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.
His land is not the End All and Be All. It is not the snake that troubled Eden. His is a land that is spent and used, forgotten and kicked aside. It is a vacuum of moral indifference and blighted progress. And like the landscape in all good Westerns, it is code to what we are as human beings–what we came from, what we are, and what we desire to be. Ouch.
…OK, I can’t end like that! That realization won’t keep me from rereading Nobody Move. It’s dark and fast-paced and noir to the core. And you get a kind of a riding-off-into=the-sunset bit, except without the sunset.
*I am indebted to Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.
The wash of wind. The flat land stretching to the mountains. Sunset.
Heavy work week. Nephew in trouble and I can’t do anything about it. No time to write. Barely keeping relationships intact. And then I dream. I dream of:
Rugged individualism takes you far, especially if you’re a misanthrope. For the rest of us, it’s helpful to be nice to the neighbors, to let in the ConEd man to check the meter, and to obey street signs.
What has gotten my goat since Day One of Politics with the Sore-Loser Republican Party is how unobservant they seem to be. I know about having to use one-liners that make a statement at the expense of nuance (see Exhibit A: the first line of the post) but how is it possible that so many ultra-conservatives use the power of the Cowboy myth so poorly? The daily comparisons to Americans and cowboys have diminished, but many Republicans and conservative pundits are still compelled to evoke sweeping open spaces where your spirit can blow free (I want to know: does it get as tangled as hair does? Cuz that sux).
That open space is still the West of the imagination, because it seems that ultra-conservatives can only think in terms of the past, and the frontier of the late 1800s (you know the one–in which many native Americans were bullied, cheated, and killed to get their land?) And the hero of that open space is the cowboy. Not the common cowhand but the uncommon gunfighter. And not Billy the Kid but celluloid gunslingers, who have really great lines and are lit from attractive angles.
My whole take is that what keeps getting referred to is a fictive device kind of region, not the real down-and-dirty and totally awesome and scary and fantastic Western states. And lo, I find a smooth-shaven white man who can not only talk the political talk, but has also seen his western movies and actually observed.
May 4th was my birthday (yippie-yi-ki-yay!) and the day when David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, described what many classic westerns portray, and it isn’t the shoot-from-the-hip crap. For a full read, click here.
Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity.
But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.
For example, in Ford’s 1946 movie, “My Darling Clementine,” Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.
The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.
God bless those who can refer to the themes of My Darling Clementine. Maybe we are a bunch of cowboys. In the best possible way.
