Please Stand By

My entry of Friday's Forgotten Book, Friday the Thirteenth Edition, has been delayed due to technical difficulties.  It is as if the dog chewed up our homework.  Please see the other fine entries at this link.

From BREAKING SMITH'S QUARTER HORSE to the Walt Disney movie SMITH!

First, a follow-up to last Wednesday's Western.  This week we watched the movie adaptation of Paul St. Pierre's Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse.  It is vastly inferior to the book, as I suspected it might be.

The movie is retitled Smith! but the protagonist, played by Glenn Ford, is a man who trusts the bureaucracy of the law, much different than the existential Smith of the novel.  In the book, Smith is a natural man, an everyman who sees how things are beyond the political correctness of the times.  In the movie, he urges Jimmy Littleboy to do "the right thing" and turn himself in.  Not so in the book.  The Smith of the book is a bit like Elmore Leonard's Hombre, naturally going his own way and letting others be free to do the same.

The movie turns motivations around and adds noisy melodrama to what is a simple, understated story.  The opening focus of the movie is a father/son relationship in keeping with the YA movies then shown on the Mickey Mouse Club.  Smith's quarter horse is changed into an appaloosa that Chief Dan George's character is breaking for the boy, probably to enhance the Nez Perce connection.  But it then loses all symbolic value in the movie, all sense of a McGuffin.

One of the beautiful things about the book is the relationship between Smith and his wife.  Much of the charming dialog between them was taken out for the movie and replaced with melodramatic fluff.  Glenn Ford could have played it right, but Nancy Olson was miscast as his wife all the way around.

Chief Dan George was a natural for the part of Antoine, and a sun-tanned Warren Oates plays the interpreter Walter Charlie beautifully.  I was surprised to see Jay Silverheels (famous for playing the Lone Ranger's sidekick, Tonto), but he was appropriately cast here.

This movie is a pro-American Indian artifact of its time, issued a little more than a decade from the Eisenhower Administration's policy of seizing American Indian reservations under the ruse of "helping" Indians assimilate into the American mainstream.  Despite the treaties, American Indians were abruptly and systematically forced from the land and dumped into the ghettos of big cities.  The intense political lobbying of a few American Indian leaders, Osage Richard W. Freeman among them, finally got this policy reversed.

The ending of the movie is sugar-coated, in the way of such Disney movies of the time.  But the book is understated, comical, metaphorical, humanist, and well-worth seeking out.

Paul St. Pierre's more recent books have found their way here.  Now in his late eighties, the man is still a whangdoodle, blogging at Amazon on the Royal Wedding and the Ben Laden killing.  I don't always agree with him, but he is always a refreshing, independent  voice to be heard.

I've added him to my list of favorite Contrarians, Mavericks, and Writer's Writers--which includes Wendell Berry, Gene Logston, Cormac McCarthy, Stanley Bing, Lewis H. Lapham, Eric Hoffer, H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Chris Hedges, Owen Ulph, B. Traven, Terry Pratchett, Tom Robbins, Alfredo Vea, and several others.

Paul St. Pierre also makes my list of authors who are spiritual naturalists, always taking potshots at organized dogmatic religion while maintaining a spiritual core coupled with a sense of naturalism. I also added western author Win Blevins to the list after reading his surprising The Rock Child: A Novel Of A Journey.  I'll be reviewing it here soon.

I'm now just finishing up Paul St. Pierre's book of essays, Old Enough To Know Better, which has some very good things in it. I'll be quoting him at length first chance I get.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Sam Toperoff's CRAZY OVER HORSES

Psst, hey, tomorrow is Kentucky Derby Day!

Many forgotten gems are associated with horseracing and even a few are crime novels which involve the Kentucky Derby itself.  My selection today, Sam Toperoff's Crazy Over Horses, is probably the least known entry in the field.

This is a memoir, but it makes free with the facts and instead goes after the truth.  Not a crime novel, though you could say that this is a mystery of sorts, the suspense being in the protagonist's noir search for a system that will allow him to make an easy killing at the races.  It is episodic enough that each chapter can stand alone, but the narrative plot of the book leads the protagonist from grasping addiction to self-control, from a materialistic and controlling frame of mind to a letting go--toward a liberal and spiritual appreciation of horses and of life itself.

The prose is understated, and the inferences and nuances linger long after you have finished the book.  Younger readers might find it educational or at least a cautionary tale, while older readers might see more humor in it.  Ever wonder what the parallax view is?  The protagonist tells us:

"Unless you stand right on the finish line, you simply can't tell with the naked eye which horse has won in a tight finish.  A natural phenomenon called "parallax" makes it seem as though the outside horse is ahead if you're watching from a position up the stretch.  If you're standing beyond the finish line, it looks like the horse on the rail."

In the old days, sharpies and touts would position themselves in the stretch and make side bets with patrons about which horse had just won in a tight finish.  Just one of many cons routinely encountered at race tracks back in the sixties, when this book was first published.

And, if you've looking for horseracing crime novels, I also recommend Jon L. Breen's Listen for the Click and Triple Crown, Stephen Dobyn's Saratoga series (especially the later novels), William Murray's Tip On A Dead Crab and the rest of his series, and Robert Reeves' Doubting Thomas.   

  

Wednesday's Western: BREAKING SMITH'S QUARTER HORSE by Paul St. Pierre

A little known classic, you might say.  The first edition of Paul St. Pierre's Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse , published by the Ryerson Press, printed and bound in Canada, 1966, was written from his play after the Walt Disney movie appeared in 1965.

I have not yet seen the movie, but I can't help thinking that the book has to be far superior due to its gift of understated humor--something that would be hard to duplicate on film, despite the excellent cast of Glenn Ford, Chief Dan George (in his first movie, before Little Big Man and The Outlaw Josey Wales), Carol Olson, and Dean Jagger.

Paul St. Pierre continued the stories of the characters in Smith And Other Events, which deservedly won a Spur Award.  But if you have not yet read Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, you are missing something extraordinary, not much of a horse story but an adult literary novel somehow lost over in the YA section of the library, an original and humorous humanist story which still rings true.

THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY by James Jones

May is a green month, the emerald month, the month of spring growth, the month of becoming.  James Jones' novel, The Merry Month of May, is a timepiece set in the calendar events of May, 1968, a time of youthful exuberance and social change, with the politics of sex and violence played out against the student revolt in Paris, France during that tumultuous year.

It is a complicated novel, a novel of spiritual evolution, filled to the brim with lush literary and philosophical nuances that you might not grasp at first reading, unless you have also read Steven R. Carter's excellent study, James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master.   I discussed this a couple of months ago in a blog on the trinity in literature.

Last week novelist Bill Crider selected James Jones' A Touch of Danger for his Forgotten Book Friday review (link).  A fine review, but you should know that it too is structured in accord with James Jones' spiritual ideas of the transcendent.  The protagonist, Lobo, is a lone wolf, an animal man who, at age fifty, is struggling with his long-denied connections to the rest of humanity.

In the scene where Lobo meets the murderer, it is wolf meeting wolf, despite the civilized trappings which disguise them.  The clues are in the wording of the descriptions.

The first edition of A Touch of Danger provided a detailed map of the island on the frontispiece.  The epigraph is a quote of Achilles from Homer's Iliad, wishing that gall would vanish from men's minds.  Which is to say, ego.

Jones explained his philosophy to Carter.  He saw the spiritual evolution of man as going from animal man to mental man to spiritual man, with a diminishing of ego at each stage.  You can also think of this trinity as id-dominated, ego-dominated, and spiritually-dominated.  Or, as I detailed in an earlier blog, in numerous other ways.  These things are universals and can be seen in all of the author's many books including his justly famous war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle.

In his novels, Jones was more interested in the big issues, the human universals, than in the local politics of the day.  Frank McShane, in his excellent biography of Jones, says that he was rereading Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus during the writing of Whistle.  I suspect that Conrad's novel was also in part the inspiration for the narcissistic character of Samantha in The Merry Month of May.  It is clear that he was not a racist, yet he used her race as a symbol of the Other, as Conrad did originally.

I'd also like to recommend Kaylie Jones' Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir.  Long an accomplished author herself, in this book she discusses her memories of the literary figures which passed through her father's house.

Wednesday's Western: The First Gothic Western: JACK LONG or SHOT IN THE EYE by C. W. Webber

The first gothic western was published in February, 1845, as Jack Long, or Shot In The Eye by C. Wilkins Eimi--and a bit later, in a different format, under the author's real name, Charles Wilkins Webber.  It was highly praised by Edgar Allan Poe, who compared it favorably with Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction.  The author prefaces the story by saying that it is a true tale, that he was there in Texas during the time.

The use of alternative titles was already something of a standard for western narratives written by engaging liars, something parodied well by Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West.  Texas historian C. L. Sonnichsen researched and wrote about the historical details behind the Regulator War, and it seems that the story could be roughly true.

Webber's yarn opens during that time of the Regulators, when Texas ranchers employed mercenary lawmen to keep order.  Unfortunately, some of the Regulators abuse their power for nefarious ends and severely beat the protagonist, leaving him for dead.  After a time, Jack Long reappears in the form of a primitive wild man, and one by one he hunts the Regulators down, shooting their eyes out with miraculous shots, often at long range.

Webber infuses his story with gothic images and legendary nuances, with suggestions of both naturalism and supernaturalism.  Only when his vengeance has been "consummated" can the protagonist return to his wife and children and his peaceful pastoral existence.  The core of this story would later become a standard of the genre, in a large number of westerns such as Max Brand's The Rancher's Revenge.

Western pulps are often looked upon with distaste by more sophisticated readers, and with good reason.  With some notable exceptions, the pulps were written to formula, and that formula usually dispensed "justice" in the form of a violent comeuppance.  Personalities were usually neglected in favor of interchangeable stock characters, at once adhering to and reinforcing stereotypes.   Usually a good guy/bad guy duality was artificially drawn and the plot manipulated with coincidence and melodrama, the white hats predictably prevailing.  Yet some very good books have been written using imaginative variations of the formula, in parody or parable.

Pre-dating the pulps were the western narratives, biased Davy Crockett-styled yarns told in the form of often flowery history and embellished autobiography.  Both Chamberlain and Webber wrote this kind of narrative.

Although Jack Long, or Shot In The Eye is a delightful find, many of Webber's other books are not only hard to find, they are hard to read, though interesting for the historical puzzles they present.  Much more interesting is the history of the man himself as naturalist, theological and medical expert, soldier, author, editor, and as a character in his own books.

Was Charles Wilkins Webber the model for Samuel Chamberlain's Judge Holden?  Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden is based upon Samuel Chamberlain's quasi-historical memoir which includes a narrative of an 1849 scalp-hunting expedition with a man he calls Judge Holden, scientist, naturalist, and yarn-spinner, whose existence can't be verified in the census--nor so far in any other historical document.

Chamberlain says that Holden was wanted under another name for an outrage he had committed on a young girl in the Indian territories, suggesting that Holden had at least one alias.  We know that Webber wrote under different names, including Charles Winterfield and C. Wilkins Emmi.  The 1849 scalping expedition described by Samuel Chamberlain may not exactly jibe with the 1849 southwestern expedition undertaken by Webber, but we have far too little evidence to go on.  Much of Chamberlain's narrative is factual--collaborated with other historical documents--but like Webber's narratives, it often falls into dubious melodrama.    

Webber was said to have been friends with John James Audubon and his sons, and with that other naturalist/explorer, Alfred Jacob Miller, whose illustrations of pastoral American Indian life were published in Webber's books on naturalism, auctioned off at this link.

The Wikipedia link for Webber is here, but more can be found at this link from the Dictionary of Literary Biography.  And there is my own truncated list of sources related to Webber and the other filibusters at Amazon, here.

All of the internet sketches seem to have their source in the Cyclopedia of American Literature available at this link at Google Books.  Written back when such histories were notoriously unreliable, it still contains what may be valuable clues, an autographed sketch of Charles Wilkins Webber, and information on his association with Audubon.

But I'd like to see some primary documentation, some collaborating documentation.  What was his wife's maiden name?  On which of his trips to the Rocky Mountains did he meet Audubon?  And in what years?  Webber was 36 when he was killed.  That would make him 30 in 1849, and just 19 or 20 when he rode with Jack Coffee Hays and the Texas Rangers.

I first ran into Webber decades ago when I was researching filibuster Capt. Jack Allen, who raised a couple of companies in Louisville, Kentucky in 1855 for the set purpose of joining William Walker in his conquest of Nicaragua.  One of the local contemporary newspapers carried an editorial description lauding one of Allen's officers.  Charles Winterfield stopped by the newspaper office to chat, a very large man, and "every inch a hero."  An acclaimed author, naturalist, and scholar.

Later I found a roster of the two companies leaving Louisville by steamboat for New Orleans.  Some of the men were convicted murderers let off by the courts under the condition that they join the filibusters.  I was puzzled because there was no man named Winterfield on the list.  In a deposition in a Jefferson County (Ky) Circuit Court case, another man on the expedition referred to Winterfield as "Winterfield or Holden as he is called."

Researching contemporary records, I compiled mini-biographies of the Kentuckians in this expedition by each name, but a couple of decades passed before I realized that Webber and Winterfield were the same man.  Was he also Chamberlain's Judge Holden?

Webber also seems to have been affiliated with Holden's Dollar Magazine, briefly discussed by Pulitzer Prize winning author Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene, p. 226, who says that the mysterious publisher Holden went west and died in California, causing the magazine to fold.  Well, when did he go west and how did he die?

I went to Google Answers when the beta model came out, and I presented the mystery of the identity of Holden/Webber at large to researchers and reference librarians as an open question there.  No one has come up with anything that I hadn't already seen, but one researcher insisted that if Webber got married in Boston in 1849, he could not have been on a western expedition in 1849.  Furthermore, the Cyclopedia info says that the Comanches ran off the horses at Corpus Cristi and Webber never made it past Washington--therefore Holden was a fiction, case closed.

Well, it is not as simple as that.  Holden may yet have be found, under another name.

An historical fact, once stumbled upon, has to be walked around and looked at from all sides.  If I had a plane ticket and unlimited time, I would go find that marriage certificate, note the witnesses, the presiding magistrate, and the time of the marriage.  Then I would search all of the contemporary newspapers looking for a notice of the ceremony.  Marriage records are usually reliable, but sometimes the marriage has taken place earlier and recorded much later.

A basic name search through the back issues of the New York Times might be productive.  I don't think that has been done.  Clues might pop up anywhere.

Then again, if I had another plane ticket, I might thoroughly search the filibuster records that are down in the special collections at Tulane University, as well as any extant New Orleans records and newspapers for the time that Jack Allen's filibusters were there.  According to the little biographical information that we have, Webber met his artist/naturalist wife in New York.  Did they travel together before they were married?

Webber himself is a character in his western narrative, Old Hicks: The Indian Guide.  Is his wife the woman on the expedition, Emily L'Enville, with whom he falls in love?  His wife was an artist/naturalist and contributed sketches to his works in the manner of Alfred Jacob Miller and John James Audubon.  She outlived him and was involved in the reprinting of his books.  I've no doubt that there is more information on her than I have yet seen.

In Nicaragua, Charles Wilkins Webber, under whatever name he was going by, took a handful of Kentucky volunteers on a mission behind enemy lines at the Battle of Rivas.  All were said to have been shot down, but we know some who survived.  On page one of the Louisville Daily Courier, September 20, 1859, it was revealed that Ned Parker and a few other survivors had returned to Louisville via different routes.  Parker said that he escaped and made his way alone into Costa Rica and then into Mexico.

I'll post more on the works of C. W. Webber later. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: THE APRIL ROBIN MURDERS by Craig Rice and Ed McBain

After Craig Rice died, Ed McBain finished her novel about actress April Robin and the murders that take place at her haunted house.  To me, the cover on the first edition (and bookclub edition) always seemed right.  A busy screwball novel with Hollywood jokes scattered about, a period piece and a murder mystery completely in the style of Craig Rice's other murder/comedies.

I like the cover art on the above edition too, but some of the covers on the other editions took the screwball out and sold it as a harder work, as sex and murder.

The book pushes the morals of the 1950s, something a bit foreign to readers today, yet Craig's writing is infused with an understated whimsy that is timeless.  It's there if you can see it.  McBain certainly could.

April can be the cruelest month, yet it is the month of rebirth.  Historians conjecture that Jesus Christ was born in the spring, the church authorities deciding much later to move his birthdate to coincide with the solstice holiday already in place and thus reverse birth and rebirth.  It is out of this controversy that April Fool's day was born, although it can also be seen as the month of the Great White Rabbit of Native American lore, the celtic pooka and the modern Easter bunny.  Which reminds me, we might go see the matinee of the movie Hop, which opens today, April Fool's Day.

My list of April-related works is at this link.

You should read Jeffrey Marks' biography of Craig Rice, Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of Screwball Mystery.