Wednesday's Western: James Galvin's THE MEADOW

I think I can take almost any passage out of this book and write pages about it.  The resonances are that thick.  Take just a random paragraph, or even a random sentence:

"He never quit from last star to first, proving that the price of independence is slavery."

Or, "By the end he had nothing, as if loss were a fire in which he was purified again and again..."

Or, "The illusion of land ownership creates a cheap workforce in the fields: people who often pay more than they are paid to work, as we say, like slaves.  But, oh, they are rich in the illusions of independence..."

This week's western novel is The Meadow by James Galvin.  Fiction, history, and autobiography are here entwined into the form of a western, a multi-leveled naturalistic work of art.  It was such a pleasure to revisit this masterpiece.

And that's what it is: a masterpiece.  The blurbs on the back of the first edition dustjacket by Jim Harrison, William Kittredge, James Salter, and Marilynne Robinson proclaim it as such.  On one level, it is a western in which the protagonist is spiritual human consciousness carving out a temporary home in a material world.  Nature is beauty experienced and loved even when it is hostile to individual human existence.

The book has not changed since 1993 when it was first published, but I have.  Back then I saw it mainly as existentialist and Hemingwayesque--focusing on the grace-under-pressure of its protagonists, braving the slings and arrows of fortune with stoic courage.

It can still be read that way, but my aged awareness is enhanced.  This time I was able to look deeper into it, past all material existential ego and deeper into the heart of the work, the underlying consciousness of everything.  It is akin to the works of Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the other novels of sacred naturalism discussed by Clark and Max Westbrook.  Not quite as cold as pantheism--as that concept is casually defined--for here nature is embraced by consciousness, and loved unconditionally.

A consciousness grateful for this gift of life that we each have on loan.

The writing in The Meadow is beautiful throughout.  Look at the resonances in the small opening paragraph:

"The real world goes like this:  The Neversummer Mountains like a jumble of broken glass.  Snowfields weep slowly down.  Chambers Lake, ringed by trees, gratefully catches the drip in its tin cup, and gives the mountains their own reflection in return.  This is the real world, indifferent, unburdened."

At first glance, this is a contradictory paragraph.  The author imbues nature with human intent:  snowfields weep, Chambers Lake is grateful and reciprocates for the gift of water with the gift of reflection.  But in the last sentence, the observer declares them indifferent, unburdened.

Readers need not see all the many resonances I see in this paragraph.  For instance, the broken glass.  They don't need to see water as a symbol of spirit nor reflection as a symbol of consciousness.  There is no need to hear in Chambers Lake a resonance of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River."  Nor to hear the word "unburdened" in Faulkner's As-I-Lay-Dying sense.

But confronted with that first paragraph, every reader should ask himself, Who is the observer here?  These things only have intention and meaning, beauty and gratitude and a sense of loss, because there is an observer who gives it to them.  Otherwise they are indeed indifferent and unburdened.  There would be no story without the  observer, the reflections of a human consciousness.

All stories are one, though the individuals within the story see themselves as separate, oblivious to the whole.  My favorite protagonist in here, Lyle, is a reader himself, but he has no patience for William Faulkner.  He says of him, "If that sumbitch wants to tell me a story why don't he start it at the beginning and tell it through to the end?"  Lyle would have no patience for James Gavin's The Meadow either, for the story here is told in episodes featuring different protagonists who lived in the meadow over time, not just the humane and independently-minded Lyle.

And James Galvin's circle of life includes not just humans but extends to coyotes and other living things as well.  There is a very sweet and beautiful passage pp. 5-7 involving birds in the snow.  I hear it in a Kris Kristofferson voice.  I want justice, but I'll settle for some mercy. 

As I say, a superficial reading of this is still a great read.  Readers blessed with the gift of metaphor will see even more in it.  My copy of this (scanned above) is the first American hardcover edition, and I see that it is autographed.  James Galvin's black signature on the title page is abbreviated and looks as stylized as a cattle brand.

Or as the tracks of birds in the snow.

Wednesday's Western: I, TOM HORN by Will Henry

There is an iconic scene in the 1969 movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Paul Newman and Robert Redford keep looking back over their shoulders at the posse they can't seem to shake.  They ask each other, "Who are those guys?"

The historical answer is, they were the enforcers hired by the rich and led by the man most renown for "reading sign," the scout Tom Horn.

In January, 1975, Will Henry's novelization of Tom Horn's life appeared in bookstores.  It followed the historical record but did so creatively, aiming for truth rather than fact, in the form of a long lost autobiography which Tom Horn wrote in jail.

It is not a conventional western, as the lines between right and wrong are blurred with moral and legal ambiguities.  What favors the rich wins out, as it usually does--in life if not in conventional westerns. 

On the flap of the first edition dustjacket (scanned below), Will Henry is called "the dean" of western novelists, having already won five Spur Awards, and it proclaims this as his most important novel.

 Listen to the riff of a few opening paragraphs:

"If Jesus himself had of come down and swore for me, they'd have got it struck from the record and bought him a free ticket out of town on the next train.'

"But that's all washed down the river now.  It can't be roped and towed back upstream again.  Yet a man has to try.  He has to set it right if he can.  He has to say how the times were that ended him in the Cheyenne jail.  What the laws were and what they wasn't.  How justice failed.  The way witnesses lied under vow.  How judges turned stone deaf and juries went blind.  And oh how different the rules read when twisted to convict the innocent.  It has to be remembered, always, what happened to the law out there."

"Out there, a man took the law to be as good as his own word.  Which he gave straight-out, with no tangles in the mane or tail of it.  He neither whined nor tucked his rump when lies and libels rode him down.  Nor did he burn over his brands once he put them into the hide of his testimony.  Whatever he done, or said he done, he stood by it.'

"But sometimes a man wouldn't get his entire herd to the railhead the first drive.  Sometimes there was trail going on  past where he believed he had all his cattle safe-loaded on the stock cars.  He didn't see it at the time.  It's afterwards that it comes to him.  Like when the drive crew's been paid off and the dust of their ponies has settled into the prairie twilight south toward Texas.  That's when a man would look the other way, north, to Wyoming, and his eyes would slit down and he would say to himself, and loud soft, "Damn."

"For what he saw up there, God help him, was the rest of his life's track, and it made him shiver hard in the gloom.  He knew that he must tell the truth about that last dark part of the trail...the part John C. Coble had not wanted into the book."

"Well, maybe that story would work for Mr. Coble, but it sounded wrong somewhere.  It had an off ring to it.  Like a horseshoe on a fouled anvil.  Coble's story would run only up to the edge of the real hell that Tom Horn rode into in Wyoming.  It would rear up short and shy off, where the dark part began."

The Steve McQueen movie adaptation was overly long and should have been edited better, yet it certainly had its good scenes and it presented the historical tragedy well.  It is a worthy parable turning on the evil done in the name of goodness.

Wednesday's Western: The Best Western Novels Not Nominated, continued....

Last week, I left off with 1969, the year of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Wild Bunch, which was something of a turning point for the western as it had previously been known in publishing circles.  Conventional westerns of the 1950s, with the simplicity of their white hat/black hat duality, were going out of fashion even among the ardent followers of the genre.  Novels once on the cutting edge became mainstream.  Movies were based on novels which in turn affected the writing of new novels.

The Spur Awards, which had previously ignored more sophisticated westerns such as The Professionals and The Wild Bunch, grudgingly now began to reflect this change and so the literary quality of Spur winners was on the rise.  The best traditional western authors were happy to change, helping to expand the definition of "western novel."  Publishers of conventional westerns saw their sales fall.

In 1970, Clifton Adams won the Spur Award again for the second year in a row with The Last Days of Wolf Garnett, a conventional vengeance western.  Not nominated was Elmore Leonard's excellent western, Valdez Is Coming, which was made into a very fine film the following year.  Not nominated was Tony Hillerman's The Blessing Way, the first in a long series of good ones.

In 1971, the winning western novel was Elmer Kelton's The Day The Cowboys Quit, which I reviewed here (link) some time ago.  This was Kelton's best novel and a break from the Kelton's previous novels and the general standard of Western Novel winners of the past.  Based upon historical events and character-driven, it also dealt with ideas.

Not nominated was Dee Brown's non-fiction Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, first published in January, it went through 13 reprintings by October, 1971, and was selected by bookclubs across the land, a sign of the social consciousness of the times.

In 1972, the Spur Award went to Lewis B. Patten for A Killing In Kiowa, a reactionary tribute to the old guard (or perhaps given as something of a lifetime achievement award).  Patten was long a hacker of standard and sometimes pulpy westerns, turning out over 90 books under several names.  At least this one was a passable adult western.  To judge by the others I've seen, he wrote mostly YA novels or simple-minded variations of cliched revenge tales, "shit-kicking" action yarns with stock characters.  The best thing that you can say about them is that they were loyal to the old conventions.  Some of his tales, such as Gene Autry and the Ghost Riders (1957), will last long as artifacts.

Western movies led western books in innovations that year with Joe Kidd, Jeremiah Johnson, and Ulzana's Raid, among many others.  The naturalism of Vardis Fisher's Mountain Man brought to film was refreshing, and there was an interesting true story behind Elmore Leonard's Joe Kidd.  

In 1973, Elmer Kelton won again with The Time It Never Rained, another character-driven novel involving ranch economics and the independent western attitude vs. bureaucratic policies.  Ideas and realized characters were becoming more important than happy endings--or so it seemed.   Among those not nominated was Clair Huffaker's epic,  The Cowboy and the Cossack, which I reviewed here (link) a while back.  Also not nominated that year was Tony Hillerman's cross-genre western/mystery, Dance Hall of the Dead, but his day would come.

(to be continued....)

Wednesday's Western: The Spur Awards, The Best Western Novels, Year By Year

The Spur Awards, presented by the Western Writers of America, can be seen at this link.

I have not yet read this year's winners.  I hadn't heard of last year's winners before the Spur Awards were announced, yet Robert Flynn's Echoes of Glory and Robert Olmstead's Far Bright Star were both read later and found to be excellent.  Echoes of Glory is not to be missed.

The categories of the Spur Awards have changed over the years with the times.  Politics and contemporary events always have their effects on such things.  Arguments arose over the definition of a "western novel," prompting the creation of additional sub-categories.

I noticed that all three nominees of this year's Best Long Western Novel were women.  This year's winner, Lucia St. Clair Robson (Last Train From Cuernavaca), is a veteran of the Peace Corps and long a western novelist.  See her site at this link.

Over the years, the influence of women authors on the western novel has not been ignored.  Lucia Moore won the first Best Historical Western Award back in 1953, the first year the Spurs were given.

In later decades, the definition of "western novel" has expanded, and cross-genre novels have been considered.  The Best Long Western Novel Award of 2008 went to Aryn Kyle's The God of Animals, a western which is at the same time a literary novel, a mystery, and a coming-of-age story.  This year, Elmore Leonard's Justified was nominated for best western drama, even though it is set in contemporary eastern Kentucky.

I thought I might take the time to look at the best western novels never nominated for a Spur Award.  Let's start in 1953, when the winner was Lawman by Wayne D. Overholser under one of his pen names, Lee Leighton.  But not nominated was Louis L'Amour's Hondo, his best novel by far and made into the John Wayne film.  Unfortunately, Louis L'Amour, having made a name for himself, was later given awards for some mediocre novels.

The winner in 1954 was The Violent Land by Wayne D. Overholser, making it two years in a row for this author of conventional westerns.  The best westerns published that year were not nominated--they include Fredrick Manfred's excellent Lord Grizzly, a novelization of the historical adventures of Hugh Glass; that now classic western, The Searchers, by Alan LeMay, later adapted into the John Huston film; and yet another greatly influentional work, Dorothy M. Johnson's Indian Country, from which came A Man Called Horse and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

It was a good year for westerns.
   
In 1956, the winner was High Gun by Leslie Ernenwein, a conventional western in keeping with the times.  Not nominated was Edward Abby's Brave Cowboy, later made into the excellent Burt Lancaster film.

In 1957, Elmore Kelton won his first Spur Award with Buffalo Wagons, far below the quality of his best novels as he himself would later say.  Not nominated was Donald Hamilton's best western novel, The Big Country, which was then made into a fine film starring Gregory Peck.

In 1958, Noel Loomis won with a fine western, Short Cut To Red River--not to be confused with Bordon Chase's Red River, upon which the 1948 John Wayne film is based.  Not nominated was Oakley Hall's Warlock, one of the finest western novels ever written.  It was made into a fine film, but you should read the novel.

In 1960, Will C. Brown's The Nameless Breed won, but the best western novel of the year wasn't nominated.  That novel, John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, experienced a well deserved surge of acclaim after being rediscovered and republished by the NYRB.  It too is one of the finest westerns of any year.

Westerns would also be influenced by the 1960 film, The Magnificent Seven,  which was based upon Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

The winner in 1961 was The Honyocker by Giles Lutz, which I haven't seen.  Not nominated was Elmore Leonard's classic western, Hombre, later made into a fine Paul Newman movie.  Also not nominated was Larry McMurtry's excellent Horseman, Pass By.

The winner in 1963 was Leigh Brackett's Follow The Free Wind.  I haven't read that one, but my favorite from that year is the un-nominated Monte Walsh by Jack Schaefer, later made into the Lee Marvin movie.

The winner in 1964 was Benjamin Capps' fine trail drive novel, The Trail To Ogallala.  Not nominated for an award that year was Frank O'Rourke's excellent novel, A Mule For The Marquesa, later made into an outstanding film and retitled The Professionals, starring Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster.  Also not nominated was Thomas Berger's classic, Little Big Man.

The winner in 1965 was Benjamin Capps' fine western, Sam Chance, making it two years in a row for him.  Not nominated was Vardis Fisher's now classic Mountain Man, upon which the 1972 Robert Redford film was based.

The winner in 1966 was My Brother John by Herbert R. Purdum.  Not nominated and now my favorite western novel from that year was Paul St. Pierre's Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse.  

The winner in 1968 was Louis L'Amour's Down the Long Hills, but the book that should have been nominated was Charles Portis's True Grit.  The Coen Brothers movie of it won the Spur Award, in a tie, for Best Western Drama in 2011.

The winner in 1969 was Tragg's Choice by Clifton Adams, author of many fine conventional westerns.  Benjamin Capps won again for Best Historical Western, and Wayne D. Overhoulser  and Lewis Patten won again for Best Juvenile Fiction.  Repeat winners and good ole boys from the club, it seems.  Not that they weren't good at what they did.

But what made the year 1969 remarkable for westerns was the publication of The Wild Bunch.  Brian Fox did the novelization, but the movie script was written by Roy Sickner and Walon Green, and amended by Sam Peckinpah.

(to be continued. . .)

Wednesday's Western: THE DAY THE COWBOYS QUIT by Elmer Kelton

My copy of this western treasure is not the first edition, though it shares the same dustjacket illustration.  It is the TCU hardcover reprint with the new introduction by Elmer Kelton.  He then wrote:

"When The Day the Cowboys Quit was first published in 1971, one critic declared that it was out of character for cowboys to strike and that therefore the novel was a transparent attempt to place modern-day labor-management problems in the context of a western."


Not so, Kelton wrote:  the novel is based on historical incidents, including the actual cowboy strike, and more generally upon the inroads that  laissez faire capitalism made upon the individual freedoms of the historical cowboy.

Traditionally men joined up with an outfit on a handshake agreement, were loyal to it and in turn earned the trust of those who ran it.  Cowboys owned their own horses and tack, were allowed to run their own stock in the company remuda, with the hope of one day having their own spreads.  Such men partnered up to larger outfits, and they drove their cattle together to markets.  "Howdy, partner," was more than just a catch-phrase.


The western cattle industry prospered to the point that it attracted rich easterners, who bought up the bigger ranches.  "The elevated status of the cowboy was not recognized by many of the newcomers, who saw him as no different from their employees in a shoe factory or a cotton mill.  They began imposing rules of employment which took away freedoms and privileges the cowboy had regarded almost as a birthright."

They denied cowboys the right to own their own stock, including the owning of their own horses.  No longer could the cowboy ride off seeking a better deal elsewhere, for he rode the company horse and if he should quit, he was stranded and afoot--dependent upon the company for his transportation, and thus for his next meal.


The value in the traditional cowboy arrangement was that a man took pride in his horsemanship; he did a better job breaking and training his own horses to work the cattle, and thus took more pride in his work.  All of that now disappeared with the poor choice of stock the company insisted upon.  The western code of trust between owner and employee vanished, and cowboys were treated as chattel, as numbers on a ledger.  Although those who worship laissez faire do so giving lip service to freedom for all, just the opposite is the goal.  What they really want is control.

Americans admire the western rugged individualist and the maverick small businessman on the screen or in novels; but in real life, laissez faire capitalism encourages big business to collude and stamp them out, to destroy them at every turn.


This was Elmer Kelton's first literary western and the first to appear in hardcover.  His characters are well drawn, and his dialog is superb.  All of his previous westerns were shoot-em-ups, higher quality than most maybe, but still written to the same pulp formula.  His later novels were of finer stuff, and I'll be writing about them some wednesday soon.

Wednesday's Western: THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE by Dorothy M. Johnson

INDIAN COUNTRY, by Dorothy M. Johnson, first edition hardcover, published by Ballantine Books, New York, 1953.  Jack Schaefer, the author of SHANE,  wrote the introduction in the original hardcover.  A. B. Guthrie, Jr., author of THE BIG SKY and the script adaptation for SHANE, wrote the introduction to Steve Smith's biography of Johnson.

At first, it might seem unlikely that Dorothy M. Johnson had the background to write such influential western stories, but write them she did.  They were creative and original and several of them became the basis for fine movies.  In my opinion, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Paramount Centennial Collection) was easily the best of them.

 Reading her short story today (after seeing the 1962 film many times over the years), you are keenly aware of the many fine scenes that were added later for the movie.  For instance, there is the scene in the diner, where Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) trips Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), making him drop the steak.  Valance and his toadies erupt in laughter, and Valance stands over Ranse threatening him, telling to pick it up, Dude.  The moment is stretched out in tension, and then Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) stands up and says, "That was my steak, Valance.  You pick it up."

Thus the tension is ratcheted tighter as Valance and Doniphon appear about to draw on each other.  One of the toadies tries to pick up the steak for him, but Doniphon quickly reaches out with a kick and his boot catches him in the teeth, knocking him out.

The tension is finally broken up by Stoddard who picks up the steak ranting about the stupidity of men trying to kill each other for no reason.  The scene works beautifully, but it is not in Johnson's original story.

Yet the basic story is there, the motif of brute force versus the law, the dark side of freedom being the liberty to do violence.  A play on words evident at the first showing of the movie, long ago when black and white movies were usually minor films--and even those fast disappearing.  Back then the Gene Pitney song was popular, the meaning of the title and the main surprise in the film evident in the lyrics, examined in retrospect.

The cast of the movie was extraordinary.  Besides the strong trinity of Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Lee Marvin, engaging performances were also given by Edmond O'Brien as the alcoholic newspaperman, Vera Miles as the torn romantic love interest, and Andy Devine as the comic relief--the baffoonery of the local law.  Even Liberty Valance's toadies were played by fine western actors--Strother Martin (The Wild Bunch) and Lee Van Clief (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Johnson's two collections of short stories are still very good reads.  She was an influential female pioneer of the literary western.  It's surprising that she is not more celebrated today.

Wednesday's Western: The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker

Mulling over both Casablanca and Vertigo, in light of what Wendy Lesser pointed out:  that the audience sees more there than what is on the screen.  In a different context, this is true of Casablanca as well, for many of those in the 1942 audience must have already seen Bogart as Sam Spade in 1941's The Maltese Falcon.  So when, early on in Casablanca, Peter Lorre begins a conversation with Bogart, saying "I know you hate me," the audience isn't told what for exactly, but those who have seen The Maltese Falcon must automatically think back to Peter Lorre's lowlife character there.

These characters play to a commonly held type, wavering between a universal mythic archetype and a politically motivated and fashionable stereotype.  Audiences want their opinions verified, but every time movies are cast to type, they reinforce the fiction that such typing is always true and necessary.

Humphrey Bogart was two inches shorter than Ingrid Bergman, who said that they always had him stand on something when the two of them were to be filmed face-to-face, to give the illusion that he was the taller of the two.  Such things are done to conform to typecasting. 

The pulp westerns often fell into genre cliche relying on type, with a preponderance of thinly drawn characterizations.  As political fashions have evolved, fewer and fewer stereotypes have appeared in mainstream westerns, fiction reflecting the times.

Which brings to mind a western which is remarkable for its use of type:  Clair Huffaker's 1973 novel, The Cowboy and the Cossack.  The plot works both with cliche and alternatively very much outside of it.  The plot is a marvelous work of original imagination concerning a cattle drive across Russia.  But the main characters could have stepped out of the television show, Rawhide, or any of several books about cattle drives, for instance Benjamin Capps' The Trail to Ogallala (Texas Tradition Series) or We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher.

The Spur Awards of 1973 do not mention The Cowboys and the Cossacks, either in the main category or the YA category.  Elmer Kelton's best novel, The Time It Never Rained, won that year.  Several of Clair Huffaker's westerns were made into interesting movies--including the cattle-drive movie, Cowboy, which starred Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon, and The War Wagon starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas--among others.    The fact is, although Clair Huffaker wrote a number of fine westerns, he never did win the Spur Award.  

I'm not sure how many people read Clair Huffaker's book in hardcover, but the first edition, illustrated by Brad Holland, is a treasure to behold.  I first read it right after it came out.  It seemed to get good reviews everywhere, and if a movie had been made from it back in 1973, it would have had just the right edge of political correctness.  Made now, it might seem too politically correct, too corny--or too YA maybe.

It is a hell of a tale, though, and the opening scene, in which the cowboys herd the cattle from ship to shore, is one of the best in western cattle-drive lit, anywhere.  It is not a deep novel, but the first-person narrator is a cowboy poet whose western voice is clean-cut and comfortable.

Wednesday's Western: Elmore Leonard's HOMBRE

Hombre by Elmore Leonard.  My copy, scanned above, is the first printing of the hardcover Armchair Detective Library edition, published in December, 1989.

Dustjacket:  A snakeskin appears wrapped fore and aft against the black of both front and rear covers.  Against the skin, the author's name is high on the front cover in black.  The title is in a eclectic mixed western font on the bottom half, the capital "H" protruding into the blackness in a blocked blood red.  The standard western accoutrements are overlaid on a board in the middle: two guns in holsters, silver spurs, saddle and saddle blanket, but sideways rather than at a normal angle.

A great dustjacket resonating with the text, suggesting a nonconformist naturalism and the blood of darkness.  Below the title in small print: "Selected by the Western Writers of America as one of the 25 best westerns of all time."

Indeed it was, and still is, though it is quick read, a rather short novel with lots of dialogue.  It would make a fine play.  The print in this edition is large and easy to read, yet it only runs to 190 pages.  In the introduction, written thirty years later, Leonard says that he finished it in 1959, that it was then rejected by publishers for two years before Ballantine bought it for 1250 pounds and brought the book out in 1961.

"Five years later 20th Century Fox acquired screen rights and in 1967 Paul Neuman appeared as the taciturn hero no one understands.  It was Richard Boone who came up to the assay shack with the white flag tied to his Winchester, and Neuman who asked him, "How are you going to get down that hill?"

After decades of institutionalized racism, Hombre seemed a very relevant novel in the sixties.  The novel was not only a reaction to the conformist and cliched television westerns of the fifties, it plays today as a constant argument weighing the relative values of altruism and individualism, civics and existentialism.

The movie follows the book, though the book is told in the first person by an everyman who observes for us all.  Leonard doesn't stop short of showing the hypocrisy and corruption in the human condition, yet the ending has an abiding faith in the law as a vehicle that can make things right--or at least better.

He might change a word here or a word there if he were writing it anew today.  Still, even after fifty-two years, the book stands as a small masterpiece.