Richard Prosch, One Against a Gun Horde

A complaint I have about the traditional western is that they are often humorless. They take place in a kill-or-be-killed world where every action taken and every word spoken are typically dead serious. You won’t find this to be true in the cowboy western at its beginnings. Owen Wister found room for humor in his fiction, both humor and comic irony, even while his stories could take up darker turns of plot, like hanging horse thieves, cruelty to animals, and gun duels at sundown.

There is comedy in other western writers of the time, too, notably the Wolfville stories of Alfred Henry Lewis, the fiction of Emerson Hough (Hearts Desire, 1905), Henry Wallace Phillips (Red Saunders, 1902) and B. M. Bower (Chip of the Flying U, 1906). Clarence Mulford, with his Hopalong Cassidy stories even finds fun in the shoot-em-up West, where gunfire and death are the norm on page after page.

Zane Grey did a lot to change all this. I cannot speak for all his many novels, but of the ones I’ve read and reviewed here they were of the dead serious variety, lacking anything that would coax a chuckle from the reader. Melodrama prevails instead. It’s hero versus villain until one of them must die.

A delicate balance

It’s been a week of chemo again, and that means fatigue and mental waywardness—and food tasting like moldy cardboard. Meanwhile, the desert spring has delivered a heat wave—103 degrees on Friday—which leaves us housebound with the AC running. Our thoughts naturally turning to refrigeration, we spend a couple hours cleaning the kitchen refrigerator. After getting it gleaming again, we open the door at odd times just to admire it. There are those who would argue that this is spiritual work. I’m not so sure, but I’m not dismissing the possibility.

On Sunday, Mother’s Day, my wife and I drove over to Morongo Valley, where you can shop for cacti and succulents at a roadside place called the Cactus Mart (the pics here today are from there). It was a windy day, and after wobbling around with the help of a walking stick I used to use for hikes, and losing my sun hat a couple times, I settled in the car again and dozed. My wife came home with four talavera pots, empty since she got them from me at Christmas, now proudly home to handsome spiny specimens of desert life.

The rest of the week, I unofficially declared a moratorium on useful activity and spent two days flat on my back in bed with a copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. And I listened with headphones to Oscar Peterson and a jazz quartet led by a saxophonist more people should know, Dale Fielder.

Before bed in the evening, we watch old episodes of Lord Peter Wimsey and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in Murder Most Foul. And one afternoon I take enjoyment in a 1950s western, dozens of which can be found on youtube.

Westerns, classic crime fiction, and listening to jazz may not sound like coming to terms with a debilitating form of cancer, but I’m learning that everyone finds their own way through the portals of illness. Even while the thoughtful and inspirational words of writers like Barbara Brown Taylor (An Altar in the World) and Philip Simmons (Learning to Fall) cover some of the same ground and cite the same sources, you’re a stranger in your own strange land, without a good map, making much of it up as you go.

Part of that process is sloughing off old selves, and the hold they have on you depends much on what you needed them for in the first place—and for how long. There are old habits you can even identify and understand the history of, but understanding doesn’t free you from them. They stick like glue.

Someone on FB posts a long rant by Anne LaMott this week on the persistence of perfectionism as a habit that rarely serves any useful purpose. And I laugh when she encourages readers to make messes and to scorn the criticism of people who easily find fault. The laughter, I find, is more effective than any effort of will power. After a lifetime of living up to standards borrowed from others—and forgetting they were borrowed, not bought and paid for—I could use some more laughter. The kind that comes from looking in a mirror and saying, “That’s not me at all. What was I thinking?”

Even as I write these weekly installments, my reading of Taylor, Simmons, and others has me questioning whether this journal is just some ego trip. You can’t go on pubic display without wondering what kind of fool you’re making of yourself. And I hear the voices of my upbringing, which praised kids who were “seen and not heard.”

But I’m coming to believe that respectful silence is best reserved for the Deity, before whom I could make a greater effort to just shut up and try listening for a change. For everyone else, I’m trusting that we need each other as humans, and all our talk helps keep us that way. Even as we may be tripping over our egos, the paths we share lead where grace can find us. It’s a delicate balance.

The day could come, I guess, when I can even tolerate the querulous yapping of the three dogs next door while I’m writing this. And I’m wondering what that would be like. But for the time being, I will be happy to just finish this paragraph and then lie down with maybe another book to pass the afternoon, while waiting for the side effects of the meds to wear off in the coming days. A call yesterday reminds me that I have another MRI scheduled for early next month. And so life goes on.

Previously: Dark side of the moon

Glossary of frontier fiction: S(saccatone – settlement)

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

saccatone = a wiry grass native to the southwest US and Mexico, used in making brushes and paper (from Spanish zacatón). “He had come down through a little gully that led into the flat and was loping his pony through the deep saccatone grass toward the cabin.” Charles Alden Seltzer, The Two-Gun Man.

sagamore = a chief of a North American tribe or confederation. “The most venerable sagamore of the tribe remembered that the old squaw was regarded as the only living relic of an age of by-gone majesty.” G. Frank Lydston, Poker Jim, Gentleman.

Salal

salal = a small evergreen shrub of the heath family found on the Pacific coast of North America and bearing edible grape-sized dark purple berries. “At that moment, Colonel, pushing through a tangle of salal, stumbled to his knees.” Ada Woodruff Anderson, The Heart of the Red Firs.

saleratus = sodium bicarbonate (or sometimes potassium bicarbonate) as the main ingredient of baking powder. “It is not to be expected that a guest should put up with wheat coffee and biscuits yellow-streaked with saleratus for longer than that.” O. Henry, Heart of the West.

“Sally in Our Alley” = a song by English composer Henry Carey (1693-1743), popular in America in the 18th century. “When the miners called for more, she sang them of ‘Barbara Allen’ and ‘Sally in Our Alley.’” Dennis H. Stovall, The Gold Bug Story Book. Listen to the lyrics here.

salmon twine = a strong linen or cotton twine used in the manufacture of salmon nets. “There was nothing for him to do but to stop long enough to make a good job of it, which he did by chopping out a piece of ash, whittling down a couple of thin but tough strips, and splicing the break securely with the strong ‘salmon twine’ that he always carried.” Charles G. D. Roberts, The Backwoodsmen.

salt-hoss = horsemeat preserved in salt. “I takes grub with Crawfish that same day; good chuck, too; mainly sheep-meat, salt-hoss, an’ bakin’-powder biscuit.” Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953)

I’m tempted to write this as a review of a western novel. There are so many threads of connection with the themes of earlier frontier fiction. It even has a county sheriff in it. Set in Los Angeles, circa 1950, it echoes a frequent complaint about the West, that its promise has been betrayed by a get-rich-quick mentality and the hedonistic, materialistic culture it fosters.

Private investigator Philip Marlowe is the last of a dying breed, living by a code of conduct that has him making personal sacrifices for people he respects and unwilling to charge them a fee for his services. Like Monte Walsh, the aging cowboy in Jack Schaeffer’s novel of the same name, he refuses to yield to the forces of change, which have meant the death of a way of life based on honorable values.

Plot. One of those values is the trust to be placed in another man’s friendship, which means doing an unusual favor, no questions asked. Which is how the novel begins, as Marlowe agrees to drive an acquaintance, Terry Lennox, to catch a plane in Tijuana.

Before long, Marlowe becomes far too intimately embroiled in a murder, as the body of Mrs. Lennox turns up quite gruesomely dead. And soon, for reasons he will eventually discover, he is being retained by a book publisher to babysit a novelist, Roger Wade, whose heavy drinking is preventing him from completing the draft of his next bestseller.

Los Angeles, c1950

Character. Bumping up against the rich and powerful, whether a wealthy owner of a newspaper or racketeers with intimidating thugs to do their dirty work, Marlowe is constantly the object of scorn for his lowly profession and his relative poverty. Whether from cops or thugs, which are hard to tell apart, he rarely gets any respect. Before we are long into the novel, he’s doing jail time, as he refuses to cooperate with police efforts to locate Lennox.

Questioned about his ethics, which seem to keep him broke and never far enough out of trouble, he explains to a friendly cop, “I’m a romantic, Bernie. I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter. You don’t make a dime that way.”

Border River (1954)

Of his more than 90 films over a long career, Joel McCrea was an established cowboy star of the 1940s and 1950s, appearing in numerous westerns like this one. Usually an affable but thoughtful presence on screen, he rarely departed from his established persona as a decent, likable, honorable man. We find him portraying such characters in two of his better-known westerns, The Virginian (1946) and Four Faces West (1948), both based on popular and well-written novels.

In some films, he was called upon to portray admirably regarded men from Old West history: William Cody in Buffalo Bill (1944), Wyatt Earp in Wichita (1955), Sam Houston in The First Texan (1956), and Bat Masterson in The Gunfight at Dodge City (1959).

Occasionally, we find him playing against type, as in Fort Massacre (1958), where he portrays a military officer with what seems to be a case of battle fatigue affecting his judgment. Border River is another example—and an interesting one—where he and five other men have robbed a bank in Denver of $2 million in gold bullion to buy guns for the Confederacy in the last year of the Civil War.

Claiming to hold to an idealism that keeps him loyal to the South, he turns in a performance as a man willing to lie, cheat, and betray the trust of others to complete his mission. And he remains undeterred, though others all tell him the Rebellion is a lost cause and arming Confederate soldiers will only extend the war long enough for more of them to be killed.

Joel McRae, Yvonne De Carlo

Plot. We first meet McCrea as he crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico, pursued by troops of Union soldiers. Shot off his horse, he is pulled from the river by soldados under the command of a self-styled Mexican general (Pedro Amandaríz) in rebellion himself in the revolution against Maximillian.

He has laid claim to a chunk of land on the Mexico side of the border and declared it a zona libre, where outlaws, fugitives, and men with business to transact are free to come and go as long as they pay for protection. The general, we learn, takes 20% of any commercial transaction, legal or otherwise, and stands to profit handsomely from an exchange of $2 million for guns.

He also has taken a proprietary interest in the owner of a gambling saloon (Yvonne De Carlo), who doesn’t welcome his attentions. She’s a tough-minded realist and has long given up any pretense of holding to political ideals. She has lost a father and a brother in the revolution. All she hopes to gain at this point in her life is money. If she had $2 million, she tells McCrea  she would go to Europe and buy a castle.

Pinkerton en français

Swiss blogger Christoph Roos likes to remind me of the fascination that the Old West and westerns hold for folks on his side of the Atlantic. Recently he sent me this cover from a French graphic novel series featuring the Pinkerton detective agency. The work is the brainchild of Remí Guerin (story) and Damour (design).

In the first of them, published last year, the story is told of the effort to track down and capture the James gang. The novel seems to adhere to history, though based on familiar material as we know it from the movies (the assault by Pinkerton agents on the James family home to the killing of Jesse by Bob Ford).

This year saw publication of the second series, Dossier Abraham Lincoln, which gives an account of Allan Pinkerton’s successful attempt to foil an assassination plot against Lincoln before he takes office as the newly elected president. Known as the Baltimore Plot, the Guerin-Damour treatment of it is described by one reviewer as a cleverly conceived play on historical fact.

For sample pages from Dossier Jesse James, go here. (Click on the cover to open.)

Further reading:

Blog reviews

Pinkerton: dossier Jesse James

Pinkerton: dossier Abraham Lincoln

Coming up: Joel McRae, Border River (1954)

Dark side of the moon

Sunrise shower over Joshua Tree foothills

Cancer has this way of calling for clarity (black and white, if possible) about subjects you’ve been content with keeping in a mental muddle. Before that, the last decades of life (and one likes to think of them in the plural) have you concerned with hoping your retirement savings hold out, that politicians don’t axe Social Security and Medicare, and that years of regular habits, a healthy diet, and exercise will pay off. Look at a copy of the AARP Bulletin and the main issues appear right there on the cover.

On another level, if you’re me, you hope when the end comes, your life will add up to something, despite all the wrong turns, setbacks, and false starts along the way. Which is another way of expecting to look back and find some meaning in it all. With cancer, however, the issues become life and death ones. Both the quality and quantity of the time remaining jump in importance. So do more ultimate questions that are hard to put into words because you’re not used to asking them—avoiding them if possible.

The difference now is that you’re like a combat veteran whose experience on the battlefield makes you a stranger to anyone who hasn’t been there, too. While you welcome the prayers and good wishes of others, knowing it would be churlish and ungrateful not to, you grant credibility to anyone whose life journey has routed them through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Meanwhile, the consolations of standard brand religion and moral philosophy pretty much fail to gain purchase in the bedrock of you.