freeread.com.au |
Zane Grey’s writing career was in full stride when this
novel was first published in 1929 as a serial in the pages of The American
Magazine. That year saw two other serials,
in The Country Gentleman and Ladies
Home Journal, plus short fiction in Collier’s and McCall’s.
Not much has changed since he found his basic western
formula in his first novel, Heritage of the Desert (1910), reviewed here a while ago. A tenderfoot
arrives in the Southwest, learns the ways of the West, wins the heart of a
western girl, does battle with a nasty villain and his gang, and wins the
approval of his superiors.
Plot. It is 1889 in
open rangeland of Arizona, where cattlemen are being preyed upon by rustlers.
Jim Traft, a young Missourian arrives at the invitation of his uncle, who wants
to build a 100-mile fence to keep his cattle from drifting into the wrong
hands. To put up the fence, Jim is made foreman of his uncle’s toughest group
of cowboys, the Diamond outfit.
His cowboys don’t take kindly to being bossed by a
tenderfoot, and they haze him mercilessly. To show his grit, he challenges them
one by one to a fistfight and, as he beats them, gradually wins their grudging
respect. They are finally just devil-may-care cowboys, not mean-spirited. The
most likable of the lot is Curly Prentiss, who is among the first to befriend
Jim.
The one mean one of the lot is Hackamore Jocelyn. He schemes
to join up with the rustlers, who are led by a young gunman, Arch Dunn, also
known as Slinger Dunn. Jocelyn instigates a plot to kidnap Traft and hold him
for ransom from his rich uncle, then kill him, cut the fence, and run off a
bunch of cattle.
Donkey rider, c1933 |
A young girl provides the story’s complications. Slinger
Dunn has a sweet 16-year-old sister named Molly, who has won the heart of Jim
Traft. He meets her at a fair and, before the day is over, gets a kiss from her
and professes his undying love. From the start, they are star-crossed lovers.
Her brother, who has killed men before, attempts to put Jim
out of the picture, and it’s something of a contest to see which of the two
villains will be first to do the job. Molly defends her lover, throwing herself
twice between Jim and a gun being drawn on him.
In the end, Jim wins her hand, and it is Jocelyn who dies,
shot through the heart by Slinger Dunn. Molly’s brother is a good bad man after
all, and in the closing chapter, Jim is offering him a job, to partner on a
ranch he’s getting from his grateful uncle, and to go after yet another band of
rustlers.
Character. Jim Traft
is a man in the making. Decent and honorable but untested, he gladly assumes
the responsibilities given to him, though the going is far from easy. In his
favor is that he has both brains and brawn. He never loses a fistfight in the
novel, even when one opponent attempts to “rooster” him, i.e. to kick him in
the face with his spurs.
Hospital, Gleeson, Arizona, 1925 |
Never mind that this is hard to believe. Any one of a tough
bunch of cowboys should have been able to beat a tenderfoot to a pulp. Forget
that a tenderfoot would not have been given a foreman’s job over them in the
first place.
In a reflective moment near the end, we find Jim wishing he
could be more like the tough Slinger Dunn, a leader of men who survives several
bullet wounds in a shootout with two gang members. Softening Dunn’s cold
resolve, Jim also aspires to be like Curly Prentiss, a loyal friend with a
playful sense of humor.
Romance. Grey’s heroes fall hopelessly and
head-over-heels in love. It almost undoes them they suffer so forlornly for the
girls of their dreams. As in his first novel, Heritage of the Desert,
the girl has to be rescued from the clutches of a darkly evil man. In this
case, it is Hackamore Jocelyn, who has plans to leave the country with her, by
force if necessary.
In part, it is also social class that comes between them.
Nephew of a well-to-do cattleman, Jim seems far above Molly’s lowly station as
the daughter of a poor settler. But Jim sees in her a natural simplicity,
virtuousness and courage. Despite her “primitive” upbringing, she has the
“instincts” of a lady. Later we discover that she is actually the granddaughter
of Southern stock from Virginia. Her qualities are in the blood.
Horseback riders, Arizona, 1930s |
Grey’s Molly makes an interesting contrast with Owen
Wister’s Molly in The Virginian. From an
established New England family, she is educated and independent. The Virginian
is the “primitive” with natural virtues and courage, which can be traced back
to an upbringing in Virginia.
Wister’s Molly is also a woman, and not a 16-year-old girl.
By comparison, Grey’s hero is practically robbing the cradle. Jim even sees her
as an “adorable child.” In Wister’s Molly, we get the flinty reserve of a woman
objecting to her hero’s lack of education and lapses into frontier violence.
Grey gives us a simple, uneducated girl who worships his hero and considers
herself unworthy of him. Big difference.
Storytelling. The
parts of the novel that ring true are Grey’s descriptions of the western
landscape. You know that he’s seen what he is talking about, and these brief
passages approach the quality of travel writing. Where you’d like more clarity
is in the geography of the story itself. It takes careful reading and rereading
to get a mental picture that connects all the places mentioned, including the
location of the drift fence.
In his physical descriptions of the young cowboys, he is
more precise:
Lithe-bodied, long of limb and
bow-legged, with small round hips and wide shoulders, lean and sharp of face,
bronzed and sunburnt, with expressionless eyes like gimlets they certainly
belonged to a striking and unique class.
Like other Grey novels, the plot is rambling and loosely
connected. He relies over much on overheard conversations to advance plot
points, and there is a great deal of needless repetition. The characters speak
in a drawl that wearies after many pages. Besides the use of “aboot,” which
makes them sound Canadian, there’s “heah,” “haid,” “daid,” “thet,” “shore,”
“idee,” “cuss,” “wuss,” “shet,” “jest,” and so on. One result is that there’s
little perceivable difference among the characters.
Arizona gas pump, 1937 |
Most of the story is predictable and moves slowly. It takes
a long time to set up the action that excites much of the second half of the
novel. Then, in the last two chapters, with life-and-death conflicts resolved,
Grey takes his characters turkey hunting of all things. The bride-to-be
demonstrates her skill at turkey calling.
Grey’s narration leans toward melodrama, and humor is rare.
One comic surprise in the novel is the discovery that the camp cook, assumed to
be dumb, actually speaks when he wants to. But while Grey’s cowboys joke
around, josh each other, and fall about laughing, none of that spirit enlivens
the story itself. An exception is a wry remark made late in the novel when
Slinger throws a punch at Jim.
Horses snorted and jumped. The
crowd let out a whoop. Fights were mostly as common as meals in the Cibeque and
infinitely more amusing.
Not exactly a knee-slapper of a wisecrack, it still shows
Grey in a rare moment of levity.
Wrapping up. After its serialized appearance in The American Magazine in 1929, The
Drift Fence and its sequel, The Hashknife Outfit, were
published by Harper & Brothers in 1933. The novel was adapted to film in
1936 with Buster Crabbe and Katherine DeMille as Slinger Dunn and his sister,
Molly.
The Drift Fence is
currently available online at freeread.com.au and at amazon, Barnes&Noble, and
AbeBooks. For more of Friday’s Forgotten Books, click on over to Patti Abbott’s blog.
Sources:
Photo credits:
Wikimedia Commons
Magazine cover, FictionMags Index
Coming up: Dell Munger, The Wind Before the Dawn (1912)
Haven't read this one. I've only read a couple of Grey's books. Although I enjoyed them at some level, the flaws and the "datedness" of the story really echo to me and it's hard to get past.
ReplyDeleteCharles, I'm still waiting to find a Grey novel I really like.
DeleteI find his stuff a little tough to get through-have not read this one. Props to you for reading so much from the old classic western writers.
ReplyDeleteI have to admit that Grey is about the hardest early western writer to get into. His skills as a storyteller were often limited.
DeleteThis was one of a handful Grey novels I liked better out of the ones I've read. The beginning of the romance is a little ridiculous, yes, but I liked the characters and found the story interesting enough.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about the overuse of heavy dialect—that's one of the most irritating things about Grey. You can be interested in what a character is actually saying, but frustrated by all of those phonetically-spelled-out words getting in the way, so to speak.
Grey isn't the only offender. Cowboy westerns of the early decades seem determined to be phonetically faithful.
DeleteI don't think I've ever seen this title. Nice work. I just read a bio piece on Grey in an old True West (April '69) more entertaining than any of his fiction, though I always had a soft spot for TO THE LAST MAN.
ReplyDeleteRichard, his biography has been recommended: Thomas H. Pauly, ZANE GREY, U of Illinois Press, 2005.
DeleteThis is a fine review of a book I read so long ago I'd forgotten its contents. A grand-niece of Grey thought it was one of his better novels, and sad to say, she's right.
ReplyDeleteIt was your recommendation, Richard, that got me to read it. And glad to have done so. If someone is studying the history of the genre, they have to come to terms with Grey. He enjoyed an immense popularity. To the extent that readers help create a genre, there needs to be a way to account for that.
DeleteI agree with your comment about coming to terms with Grey. You can't just toss off writers like Grey or Haycox. Or L'Amour. You can prefer not to read them, but I think understanding their popularity only comes from spending some time with them.
Delete