THE KING OF THE COWBOYS AND THE BLOODY WOMAN
If one reads enough about a given subject, one will eventually pass over a divide that separates the casual learner from the specialist. By my freshman year in college, I was a specialist in the history of the Old West. By continual reading and research over the years, I’ve remained one ever since. I’ve developed other interests, in some ways much more significant or, some would say, more legitimate. I became a writer, not of Westerns, but of general historical fiction. Whatever recognition I’ve acquired is that of a historical novelist.
I’ve done lots of research on other periods of the past as fodder for my novels, chiefly 19th-century Southern Appalachia and, more recently, the Revolutionary War in the South and an instance of serial murders the Civil War years in Colorado Territory. But I’ve never lost my edge as a specialist on the Old West; in nonfiction, I’ve kept current on all the scholarship, such as it is (some is pretty slipshod). And I’ve continued to re-read my favorites among the old masters of Western fiction, especially Haycox, LeMay and Lea. The West remains my oldest and, still, my best love.
But it’s the old Old West, not the Westerns of today. With few exceptions, the Westerns now being written and filmed lack the salutary didactic element that helped me and thousands like me grow up and make our way through the ethical snares of the late twentieth century. They tend to be morally empty when they’re not depraved and vicious for viciousness’ sake. Now and then a Western film like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1994 biopic Wyatt Earp will dare to give us a protagonist who, due to the loss of his beloved wife, sinks from a buoyant innocence into a moral twilight that justifies murder; but audiences will shy away in droves from such grim fare. Much more popular was George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone, made the same year about the same man, in which gallons of gratuitous blood gush forth but, oddly, the Roy Rogers-Gene Autry myth of absolute good versus absolute evil is resurrected. Spectacle and excess supplant a life-lesson about the effects of unexamined grief.
Do I write Western fiction myself? I’d love to, and have tried. For years I’ve kept some completed manuscripts stashed away in my hard drive, which I’ve now started posting on a special blog (charlesfpricewesterns.blogspot.com) in hopes someone else out there might enjoy them. But I hesitate, at my age, to waste my time hoping to be commercially published as a writer of Westerns. The market for the kind of Westerns I love disappeared years ago. In the ‘40’s Ernest Haycox could be favorably reviewed in The New York Times. In the ‘50’s, so could Alan LeMay, and Oakley Hall could be nominated for a Pulitzer. There were multiple outlets for Western fiction—magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s; imprints of most major publishing houses. Why? Because the public recognized and read good fiction regardless of genre and publishers catered to that market—which was, by and large, a literate, intelligent, upper-middle-class market. Nowadays the only outlets for fiction are designed for the extremes—either for bottom-feeders or intellectual elites. The great mass of the middle class goes hungry. Interestingly, since I've been posting a Western novel chapter-by-chapter on my Rangerider blog, I've heard, second-hand, that at least one public librarian has hailed the move. Readers in her community, she reports, are so starved for Westerns that they keep checking out and reading the same Zane Grey books over and over.
Literary intellectuals tend to frown on the Western unless another literary intellectual chooses to write one, like Paul West (OK) , Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid) or Bruce Olds (Bucking the Tiger). Westerns written by literary intellectuals tend to be unspeakably bad but draw high praise from the critics who are now our mandarins of literary taste and who insist that good writing must be inscrutably stylized in language and relentlessly obscure, self-regarding and morally clueless. There are the rare and welcome departures from this norm—Pete Dexter’s Deadwood (on which the recent HBO television series was very loosely based) and Ron Hansen’s phenomenal duet The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (made into another fine film that was deep-sixed by the studio as too depressing) and Desperados, to name but two. But in general the mandarins have declared the old-time Western fiction to be a base and trivial form of writing, which, now, it mostly is.
Though I hate to admit it, there was a time when I myself aspired to be a literary intellectual; during that regrettable period in my life I often felt a little guilty about my old abiding love. Even today, burdened as I am by the writer’s curse of self-doubt, I sometimes wonder if it’s a sign I’m in some way illegitimate as a serious novelist. I eagerly look for signs that will validate my fascination with the Old West.
Imagine my joy, then, when I learned the late Shelby Foote had told an interviewer that the only novel he ever saw his mentor William Faulkner reading was Ernest Haycox’s Bugles in the Afternoon. Or when I read that Ernest Hemingway always looked forward to the next story by Haycox in the old Saturday Evening Post. Or, most improbable of all, that Gertrude Stein was also a Haycox fan.
Of course I know there are literary intellectuals who’ll sneer at Hemingway and Stein. But nobody sneers at Faulkner.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
PERMISSIONS
Some followers of my Westerns blog (charlesfpricewesterns.blogspot.com) have asked my permission to print out the chapters of the novel I'm posting there, rather than read the chapters on the computer screen, which can be hard on the eyes. I've given that permission, and am giving it for the essay I'm posting on this blog too. Do print it out if it's easier. And feel free to leave a comment as well. It helps me to know if anybody out there is paying attention.
Monday, October 26, 2009
An Extended Essay - Part Four
THE KING OF THE COWBOYS AND THE BLOODY WOMAN
I’ve often thought the impact of certain kinds of popular culture on my generation would prove a fruitful field of sociological study. We became known, perhaps deservedly, as The Silent Generation, owing to our conservatism, conformity and absence of social consciousness. And it’s not an unfair portrayal. By and large, we were indeed a dull and self-absorbed lot. Likewise our political, social and cultural context. The Eisenhower years, as they were called, were so bland John F. Kennedy successfully ran for president by offering himself as a vigorous change agent who would galvanize a moribund America.
But like all generalizations, this notion of a static 1950’s is flawed; it ignores the first stirrings of the civil rights and counterculture movements; the Red-baiting and blacklisting that went on, challenging our constitutionally guaranteed liberties; and—more to the point of this essay—the role of certain Western films and literature as teachers of ethics and morality.
Sound silly? Maybe. But consider. Allow me to put myself forward as an example. Yes, the popular culture of the time was mostly innocuous. But some of it wasn’t. Some writers and Hollywood directors were running against the tide. Some were taking the old Western morality play to new levels far more challenging than Roy and Gene had ever explored. And I was paying attention. I was still learning how to be the man I wanted to be by reading and watching Westerns—not the singing-cowboy Westerns but the progeny of films like Blood on the Moon which, I eventually discovered, had been adapted from a novel by Luke Short; and of the likes of Vestal’s Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns with its Bloody Woman. I was learning about life. About the relativity and ambiguity of good and bad, right and wrong.
While much of America was watching Doris Day, Sandra Dee, Debbie Reynolds, Rock Hudson and Howard Keel, I was learning about overcoming race prejudice from the movie Broken Arrow, based on the great novel Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold, the true story of how white frontiersman and former Indian-fighter Tom Jeffords befriended the Apache war chief Cochise, helped arrange a peace treaty with him and married an Apache maiden. A related message about the corrosions of intolerance came from The Searchers and The Unforgiven, films taken from Alan LeMay’s Western novels.
I was learning the truth about courage from They Came to Cordura, another fine motion picture based on a book by Glendon Swarthout, in which a proven coward searching for the meaning of bravery ironically finds courage within himself even as it drains away under pressure in a group of so-called heroes recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor; and from William Wyler’s epic The Big Country, a meditation on courage as an inner assurance that requires no outward show while also exploring the true nature of love and loyalty. James Stewart, whose gritty Westerns like The Naked Spur and The Man from Laramie cast him savagely against his amiable prewar type, showed me that a man may be masculine and yet openly show his feelings, may even weep onscreen. An authentic war hero, Stewart resumed his peacetime film career with a new willingness to explore unblinkingly the heights and depths of human emotion, something I was sure the twenty-five bombing missions he flew over Germany had brought out in him.
High Noon spoke of the vital role duty plays in a civilized society, and showed how courage can rise out of a sense of that duty but must also overcome fear—a fear that needs to be expressed in order to be met and defeated. Oakley Hall’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Western novel Warlock, put on celluloid by director Edward Dmytryk, demonstrated how a desire for security—for law and order—can corrupt both the law-bringer and the town he has been hired to save from outlawry. Henry King’s The Bravados, from another Western novel by Frank O’Rourke, turned a spotlight on the dangers of personal vengeance. Even an unabashed horse opera like The Magnificent Seven could give a lesson in the redemptiveness of compassion; its cynical, disillusioned gunfighters eventually yield up their lives to save a village of Mexican peasants from plundering bandits.
I learned that virtue and evil are not the absolutes Roy and Gene fought against. Good can be bad and bad can be good. Both are in us to be. One can become the other. Life is hard and unjust and ugly, as the young buffalo hunter found when he saw The Bloody Woman. What matters is how one bears up under extreme conditions. Amos Edwards in LeMay’s The Searchers has allowed the unremitting warfare between white settlers and Comanche Indians to poison him with hate beyond recovery; his nephew Martin Pauley, growing up in the same harsh environment, never loses his basic humanity. Amos is like the buffalo hunter, scarred by the misdeeds of his later life, looking back in rueful recognition on The Bloody Woman; Martin is like the same man still young, who turns his back on The Bloody Woman, closes the door of the saloon, goes back to camp and keeps his soul by taking a better path. Neither is perfect because their world, which is our world too, won’t allow perfection. But the distance between them is the distance between grace and its absence. That’s what I learned from the Western. And that’s what I write about now.
NEXT: WESTERNS AS LITERATURE
I’ve often thought the impact of certain kinds of popular culture on my generation would prove a fruitful field of sociological study. We became known, perhaps deservedly, as The Silent Generation, owing to our conservatism, conformity and absence of social consciousness. And it’s not an unfair portrayal. By and large, we were indeed a dull and self-absorbed lot. Likewise our political, social and cultural context. The Eisenhower years, as they were called, were so bland John F. Kennedy successfully ran for president by offering himself as a vigorous change agent who would galvanize a moribund America.
But like all generalizations, this notion of a static 1950’s is flawed; it ignores the first stirrings of the civil rights and counterculture movements; the Red-baiting and blacklisting that went on, challenging our constitutionally guaranteed liberties; and—more to the point of this essay—the role of certain Western films and literature as teachers of ethics and morality.
Sound silly? Maybe. But consider. Allow me to put myself forward as an example. Yes, the popular culture of the time was mostly innocuous. But some of it wasn’t. Some writers and Hollywood directors were running against the tide. Some were taking the old Western morality play to new levels far more challenging than Roy and Gene had ever explored. And I was paying attention. I was still learning how to be the man I wanted to be by reading and watching Westerns—not the singing-cowboy Westerns but the progeny of films like Blood on the Moon which, I eventually discovered, had been adapted from a novel by Luke Short; and of the likes of Vestal’s Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns with its Bloody Woman. I was learning about life. About the relativity and ambiguity of good and bad, right and wrong.
While much of America was watching Doris Day, Sandra Dee, Debbie Reynolds, Rock Hudson and Howard Keel, I was learning about overcoming race prejudice from the movie Broken Arrow, based on the great novel Blood Brother by Elliott Arnold, the true story of how white frontiersman and former Indian-fighter Tom Jeffords befriended the Apache war chief Cochise, helped arrange a peace treaty with him and married an Apache maiden. A related message about the corrosions of intolerance came from The Searchers and The Unforgiven, films taken from Alan LeMay’s Western novels.
I was learning the truth about courage from They Came to Cordura, another fine motion picture based on a book by Glendon Swarthout, in which a proven coward searching for the meaning of bravery ironically finds courage within himself even as it drains away under pressure in a group of so-called heroes recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor; and from William Wyler’s epic The Big Country, a meditation on courage as an inner assurance that requires no outward show while also exploring the true nature of love and loyalty. James Stewart, whose gritty Westerns like The Naked Spur and The Man from Laramie cast him savagely against his amiable prewar type, showed me that a man may be masculine and yet openly show his feelings, may even weep onscreen. An authentic war hero, Stewart resumed his peacetime film career with a new willingness to explore unblinkingly the heights and depths of human emotion, something I was sure the twenty-five bombing missions he flew over Germany had brought out in him.
High Noon spoke of the vital role duty plays in a civilized society, and showed how courage can rise out of a sense of that duty but must also overcome fear—a fear that needs to be expressed in order to be met and defeated. Oakley Hall’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Western novel Warlock, put on celluloid by director Edward Dmytryk, demonstrated how a desire for security—for law and order—can corrupt both the law-bringer and the town he has been hired to save from outlawry. Henry King’s The Bravados, from another Western novel by Frank O’Rourke, turned a spotlight on the dangers of personal vengeance. Even an unabashed horse opera like The Magnificent Seven could give a lesson in the redemptiveness of compassion; its cynical, disillusioned gunfighters eventually yield up their lives to save a village of Mexican peasants from plundering bandits.
I learned that virtue and evil are not the absolutes Roy and Gene fought against. Good can be bad and bad can be good. Both are in us to be. One can become the other. Life is hard and unjust and ugly, as the young buffalo hunter found when he saw The Bloody Woman. What matters is how one bears up under extreme conditions. Amos Edwards in LeMay’s The Searchers has allowed the unremitting warfare between white settlers and Comanche Indians to poison him with hate beyond recovery; his nephew Martin Pauley, growing up in the same harsh environment, never loses his basic humanity. Amos is like the buffalo hunter, scarred by the misdeeds of his later life, looking back in rueful recognition on The Bloody Woman; Martin is like the same man still young, who turns his back on The Bloody Woman, closes the door of the saloon, goes back to camp and keeps his soul by taking a better path. Neither is perfect because their world, which is our world too, won’t allow perfection. But the distance between them is the distance between grace and its absence. That’s what I learned from the Western. And that’s what I write about now.
NEXT: WESTERNS AS LITERATURE
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
An Extended Essay - Part Three
THE KING OF THE COWBOYS AND THE BLOODY WOMAN
I’m not sure the two were related, but my epiphany of The Bloody Woman roughly coincided with a growing interest in writing. From a very early age, drawing had been my main creative outlet. It was probably no coincidence that the comic books I drew were Westerns. Their hero was a character named Buck Duck, a bizarre conflation of Disney’s Donald Duck and—who else?—Roy Rogers. Buck wore a cowboy hat like Roy’s and carried two six-guns just as Roy did and even wore spurs on his little webbed feet. Strangely, though, Buck Duck hardly ever followed Roy’s wholesome habit of shooting the guns out of the bad guys’ hands; he tended to shoot the bad guys dead, usually multiple times.
Buck’s homicidal tendencies actually predated The Bloody Woman and even Robert Mitchum. They troubled Mother. While she praised my artwork, she was aghast at its bloody content. She’d exclaim, “Oh, Charles, you draw so well! But I wish you’d draw stories about Jesus instead.” But compared to my murderous duck, the meek and lowly Savior didn’t stand a chance.
What’s a puzzle, as I look back, is why Buck Duck was so violent. Maybe he served as a vehicle for vicarious revenge. As a kid I was a gawky, skinny weakling, with no skills in any of the sports and games boys were expected to excel in. My classmates made fun of me. They had a name for me—Grass Chicken. Neither I nor they knew precisely what a grass chicken was, but somehow the term conjured up an image of a scrawny little fowl scampering through the grass that perfectly suited my nerdiness. It’s possible Buck Duck was a surrogate avenger, mowing down my tormentors.
But I suspect there are better answers, or perhaps better questions. Had a vestige of the evil that I knew stalked the outer world somehow wormed its way into our sanctuary of domestic security and insinuated fear into my childish being? Had I known all along that evil couldn’t be kept at bay, even by all the concentrated love there was? Did Buck Duck foreshadow Robert Mitchum, who I would soon come to suspect knew better than Roy—or Jesus, for that matter—how to deal with all that was dangerous in life? After all, what was religion, what was church, what was the Redeemer Himself, but a reminder of the evil we faithful were pledged to fend off? Was Buck Duck my talisman, protecting me from the powers of Satan?
But, as I say, sometime in the mid-1950’s the desire to tell a story in words rather than in pictures came over me. I scrawled some rudimentary yarns inspired by my other juvenile interests—World War Two fighter pilots, medieval knights on crusade, the Civil War, all themes, please note, having to do with various forms of mayhem—but my favorite topic remained the Old West as informed by The Bloody Woman and my fleeting memory of a lethal Robert Mitchum, which meant that what I wrote tended to up the ante on whatever indwelling fiendishness had spawned Buck Duck.
Inevitably, writing my stories led to more and more reading—I had a natural desire to learn as much as I could in hopes of making what I wrote sound as convincing as possible; and naturally if one is to learn, one must read—reading being the soundest way to master the art and craft of writing.
Up to this point the books I’d read, like Vestal’s, had all been plucked from the shelves of the public library. We lived in the propertyless, nomadic condition thought by the Western North Carolina Methodist Conference to be the properly mendicant condition for a pastor and his family. There was no disposable income for the purchase of books. Mother, a passionate reader, checked out armloads of volumes weekly and consumed them at a pace that would’ve shamed a graduate of an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course.
But I longed to own books. For me it wasn’t sufficient to dwell for a few days in whatever kingdom of the imagination a certain book had invited me into; no, I wanted to experience its delights again and again without the inconvenience of having to return for renewal my priceless vessel of mind-travel or, worse, learn to my dismay that someone else had reserved and would claim it—steal it from me—forcing me to bide my time in tortured impatience till they returned it.
My desire to own, not borrow, books sprang up about the same time I discovered the wonders of cheap paperbacks. By browsing through the wares of the corner drugstore I learned that an abundance of Western fiction was available in such editions, usually selling for as little as twenty-five cents apiece. But here again I encountered a maternal barrier. Mother nursed an unshakable belief that any book bound in paper had to be pornographic. Even to leaf through one at the drugstore would be to wallow in carnal mischief and imperil my soul. Buying one was out of the question.
Having already perused several in defiance of her injunction, I knew her to be mistaken. The books were, by and large, simple morality tales. Good sheriffs and cowboys went up against bad outlaws and bested them. There seemed little to choose between these stories and those of Roy and Gene, save in the paperbacks one got more of a sense of the real time and place of the Old West and, yes, there was some killing—though nowhere near as much as in one of my Buck Duck comic books. One might encounter an occasional “damn” or “hell.” And naturally there was a romance, but always a chaste one.
I was empowered. So strong was my wish to be an owner rather than a lowly borrower, I did the unthinkable: I bought a paperback Western with my lunch money, carried it home to Mother unread and asked her to study it and tell me if she though it sinful. Though I’m sure she must’ve chided me for disobedience, to her everlasting credit she accommodated me; and overnight her bias against paperbacks evaporated. In fact, she became just as addicted to paperbacks as she was to her usual clothbound fare. She read them avidly till the day she died.
How I wish I could remember the title of that book! I’ve ransacked my memory but for the life of me I can’t recover it. I do remember it was published by Pennant Books, an imprint of Bantam, and it cost me a quarter. Its hero was a part-Indian cowboy named Jim Embree and its villain bore the improbable name of Muley. The plot had to do with a range war arising from the greed of Muley the wicked cattle baron. More than that I cannot say. I’m ashamed to confess it. I owe my whole subsequent literary life to that little volume, and I don’t even know the name of its author. Ingratitude, hide thy face!
In this way I was introduced to the fiction of that marvelous but now mostly forgotten generation of Western writers of the‘40’s and ‘50’s that intervened between the romanticists Zane Grey and Max Brand and the facile, shallow, unjustly popular Louis L’Amour—Frank Gruber, Dorothy Johnson, Frank O’Rourke, Paul Wellman, Vardis Fisher, Will Henry, Luke Short, A.B. Guthrie, Alan LeMay, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, Ernest Haycox, Oakley Hall. What a feast of fine writing is there! I also fed my raging hunger with paperback titles by the giants of Western history writing—Vestal, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, Eugene Cunningham, C.L. Sonnischen, Mari Sandoz, Wayne Gard, Glenn Shirley, Dee Brown, and many more.
I retain but a single book original to that period, one of my first few purchases—a 1952 Pennant paperback edition of Stanley Vestal’s Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns. I couldn’t own the hardback edition I’d found that day in the library, but I could own this. It’s worn and shabby now; the glue along its spine has deteriorated; if I open it, it will probably fall apart. The last time I opened it was about nine or ten years ago, when I transcribed the passage about The Bloody Woman into my computer, for safekeeping.
NEXT: WESTERNS AS MORALITY TALES
Monday, October 12, 2009
An Extended Essay - Part Two
THE KING OF THE COWBOYS AND THE BLOODY WOMAN
I was still a Roy Rogers kid when one day in the early ‘50’s I happened on a book in the Greensboro, NC public library called Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns by Stanley Vestal. Today I know the author’s name was actually Walter Stanley Campbell and that he was a professor at the University of Oklahoma. Vestal was the non de plume under which Campbell wrote many fine works of history and biography set in the Old West. But at the time the name meant nothing to me. It was his book that caught my fancy. In it I found the following passage, a story told by a young buffalo hunter who’d walked into a saloon in Dodge City, Kansas one night in the early 1870’s:
"She was the hardest woman I ever saw and I have seen a good many. She was a beautiful woman and had a fine physique and she dressed beautifully. I saw her sitting cross-legged on a corner of the billiard table next to the bar in a big white dress. Two men were standing at the bar; I saw one of them step behind it. At the far end of the saloon there was a wheel of fortune running and thirty or forty people around it, but there was nobody up front but this woman. Just as I opened the door to go in there, the man behind the bar pointed and called the man’s attention to something down there and he turned his head to look. The man behind the bar had his gun in his right hand, put it to the other man’s ear and blew his head off. He never knew what struck him. When he fell she jumped off the table, put the palms of her hands into the blood that was running over the floor, jumped up and down and hollered, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” Then she held her hands up and clapped them in front of her, splattering the blood all over her white dress. He killed him just as I opened the door, and I closed the door and went back to camp and never told anybody I knew anything. I just closed the door and went back to bed. Oh, that was a wicked bitch!"
I was about fifteen when I read this. Fifteen in 1952 was not fifteen today—what was shocking then would hardly turn a hair now. Though I’m ashamed to admit it, at the time I was even more immature than most males in my age cohort, who had long since moved on from cowboy stars to sports and hot cars (what in hell was a Hemmi?) and incessant talk about which girls would let you feel them up. Thanks to the well-meant vigilance of my parents against all things possibly sinful, I guess I was a case of arrested development. Instead of swimming in testosterone, I still dreamt of meeting Roy Rogers and riding Trigger.
Most boys my age hardly ever read anything they weren’t compelled to, so I don’t know how they might’ve reacted. But I was a shameless bookworm, an innocent, yes; but still, not unaccustomed to some of what passed for violence in the historical fiction of the time. And as I will confess presently, I was not without my own somewhat disturbing dark side. But that passage in Vestal’s book riveted me. It struck me as both inconceivable—nothing like that had ever appeared in a Roy Rogers movie—and as truthful in a way no written words had ever been before. I instantly recognized in its plain language, its vividness and its incongruities the very stuff of reality.
In the years since, I have read that passage over many a time. I even incorporated it into the novel I'm presently running on my Rangerider blog. The more I've considered it, the more the buffalo hunter’s story has come to have a powerful symbolism for me. It fuses the separate strong but contradictory elements that went to make up the Old West. There is the spontaneous, almost casual nature of the killing itself, showing how cheap human life could be in a society so freely armed and so often drunk on bad whisky. The Bloody Woman adds a ghastly touch; some profound depravity is present—not only present but tolerated as a feature that is consonant with the environment. Her behavior suggests a degradation not so much original in her as resonating from the conditions of her existence. Yet the witness—as much an innocent as I was when I read his account—shares none of this harshness. His simple rectitude and his horror cast a mood of touching melancholy over the event he describes. And yet, in telling his tale he’s recalling that very innocence, now long lost, in tones coarsened by his own experience since: “She was the hardest woman I ever saw and I have seen a good many.” In the time that has passed since that night, he has become what he beheld.
Violence, debasement and artless innocence are coexisting, shaping the times and being shaped by them in some strange reciprocal process. All that is needed to perfect the symbolism is an explicit mention of the grand and terrible open spaces that surround the event and, yes, nourish it. Yet one senses their presence nonetheless because the incident seems to play itself out in an awful moral silence that must be at least an echo of the physical emptiness of the plains that encircle it.
Beside this one story, all the best of Roy Rogers’ adventures dwindled into a comical triviality. It brought to mind my baleful memory of that trailer for Blood on the Moon; the buffalo hunter’s tale confirmed the dark surmise the Mitchum film had awakened in me, that there was another, more savage West. It changed me; it set me on a path I follow still. But on second thought, maybe it only deepened an original darkness. Maybe it only set a name to a trait that already marked me.
NEXT: THE ADVENT OF BUCK DUCK
Friday, October 9, 2009
An Extended Essay - Part One
THE KING OF THE COWBOYS AND THE BLOODY WOMAN
I was a Roy Rogers kid. In those days—the mid-1940’s—you were either a Roy Rogers kid or a Gene Autry kid. At a certain point you had to choose. It was a rite of passage of sorts; in some important way it marked the crossing of the threshold from childhood to boyhood, which in turn was the first step toward becoming the man you knew you would have to be one day. The choice wasn’t an easy one because it was for keeps; once you made up your mind, you had to stick with your choice. There was no backing out or changing your preference. No Roy kid ever became an Autry kid, and no Gene kid would ever think of going over to Roy. You had to hold true to your choice.
That choice said a lot about what you held dear and who you hoped to become. Even at that age—roughly five or six—you sensed the decision was what you would later call an ethical one. It had to do with different styles of goodness. With subtle differences, both cowboy stars stood for right action. Gene’s virtue was a bit austere; he wore plain outfits and carried a single unostentatious gun, and rode his dark workmanlike horse Champion. Roy was all flash and dazzle and glamour; he used a pair of nickel-plated pistols with stag handles, wore fancy shirts and fringe, had that silver-mounted saddle and rode that wonderful palomino. Virtue could be sensible or it could be flamboyant. I went for the glitz.
In one sense it was an innocent time to be a boy. While we were cautioned against talking to strangers, basically we ran free. We didn’t know what a pedophile was. Not that they didn’t exist; it was just that nobody talked about them, at least not in our hearing. Preschool and kindergarten were foreign concepts for kids in my social class; first grade lay in the distant future. Life was a feast of unsupervised play—play we mostly invented owing to the shortage of toys and the absence of television and video games.
But paradoxically it was also a time when we knew the world outside the safe cocoon of our neighborhood was very dangerous. We had come to consciousness when a global war was raging and every freedom was at stake. Now fears of communism and the atom bomb were spreading. The police action in Korea was at hand. We knew evil stalked abroad. But my parents assured me that most people had good in them and good would conquer evil in the end. Thus I had to try to be good and find the good in others, so the maximum amount of good in the world could be brought to bear on the evil and defeat it.
Roy and Gene were examples of the power of goodness that we kids could reliably follow. They always licked the bad guys, and if they sometimes had to knock the bad guys down to subdue them, they never, ever killed them; the worst they would do was shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand—evidently a trick every cowboy star had mastered. Their only flaw was that they sang. I always cringed when they sang because I thought it made them sissified. But they usually did more riding and fighting and shooting than singing, so I grudgingly tolerated the occasional ballad.
To be fair, I should mention there was a second rank of Western movie heroes a kid could also emulate during the 40’s and into the early 50’s. Rex Allen, who wore his pistols reversed and had a beautiful black horse with a white mane and tail called Koko. William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy, dressed head-to-boot in black yet belying his somber garb with his booming laugh and grandfatherly silver hair—Hoppy’s was the first hazy image I ever saw on a television screen, galloping soundlessly through the electronic snow on his white horse Topper. There was Tex Ritter. Johnny Mack Brown. Sunset Carson. Wild Bill Elliott. Jimmy Wakeley. Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. Tim Holt. Lash LaRue.
As I grew a few years older, the Western stars tailored especially for television ascended—the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, Bill Williams as Kit Carson, Guy Madison as Wild Bill Hickok. And thanks to TV I also got to watch the recycled exploits of an older generation of Saturday-matinee cowboy stars like Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Col. Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Buster Crabbe and Hoot Gibson. Quaint and crude were those old-time Westerns, mostly without music except for the main title, and in their stillness you heard the grunts of the running horses and the hollow beat of their hooves and the hiss of the sand they kicked into the sagebrush; and some peculiar feature about the speed of the film or perhaps the operation of the cathode ray tube made the wheels of stagecoaches and buckboards seem to roll backwards in a primitive and charming way.
But none of these second-level stars had the compelling allure of Roy and Gene. Bob Steele and his ilk were optional. You could like or dislike any of them without jeopardizing your primary preference. They too were good guys—with the possible exception of LaRue, whose form-fitted black shirt and menacing bullwhip were sufficiently ambiguous to suggest the perverse—a suggestion lost on us, in our near total innocence. Otherwise, virtue was the order of the day in “B”-Western Hollywood.
Of course far beyond my ken during this same period, some mainstream films were offering darker visions of the Western. Directors like William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and John Ford were making gritty, relatively realistic adult films like Stagecoach, The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, Winchester ’73. But if you were a closely supervised kid, as I was, you had scant chance to sample the heavier fare. Back then most “B” Westerns were filmed in black and white—Roy, who sometimes made movies in Technicolor, was a spectacular exception—yet I was eventually to learn there was a subtle, almost spiritual difference between the black and white of the matinee “B” movie, which seemed innocuous, and that of the more serious Western, which somehow took on an air of the sinister.
I was too naïve to know that the difference I noted was the difference between cheap movies ground out by journeyman directors in a few days and films crafted over months by talented artists, directors and cinematographers, who carefully framed and lit each scene. Grim and forbidding was the look of these movies. Mothers—at least my Methodist-minister’s-wife mother—had a practiced eye for noting the difference when viewing theatrical trailers. All films having that air of dark menace were ruled off limits to me.
But as is true of anything we are told is bad for us, the movies our parents condemned tantalized us even as we obediently steered clear of them. Once when I was ten years old I happened to see a trailer (we called them previews) for a Western called Blood on the Moon. Mother, who was with me, must’ve been appalled. Not only was the title itself lurid and unseemly, Blood on the Moon was bathed in that telltale maleficent murk, and it starred Robert Mitchum, in Mother’s view a very shady character indeed owing to his recent, infamous marijuana bust. So on three grounds the movie clearly fell beyond the pale; I was not to see it.
Yet how riveting was my fragmentary glimpse! The black magic was not so much in the action itself—staples like cattle stampedes and shootouts; instead, it permeated the very essence of the preview. I saw quick cuts of scenes at night or in rain. A darksome, brooding light dwelled in the corners of rooms sketching all else only partially or in dim outline, leaving deep pits of shadow everywhere, in which peril seemed to lurk. Then there was Mitchum himself—big-shouldered, sleepy-eyed, stubble-chinned, moving with that gliding grace of his, deadly as a coiled snake, his hair long and lank and possibly greasy. A far cry indeed from the well-groomed King of the Cowboys.
I had caught a grim glimmer of a West far different from that of the singing cowboys who shot the guns out of the hands of the villains. What I didn’t know was that this was the era of film noir and that Blood on the Moon was of a piece with contemporary cinematic fashion. For me it spoke of the evil I already distantly knew was loose in the world, but from which my parents had wished to shield me by pointing me toward positive role models like Roy and Gene. It hinted at how deep and terrible that evil was. And because I’d been so protected, perhaps subconsciously I began to suspect, even to fear, that when I grew up I might not be equipped to deal with it as effectively as Robert Mitchum, who either brutally beat up or simply killed the bad guys; that instead, when I came face to face with it, maybe imitating Roy and Gene—trying to knock the
bad guys unconscious after a short roughhouse, or to shoot the guns out of their hands—wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Forty-odd years later, never having forgotten that fleeting glimpse of the other West, I finally bought a video of Blood on the Moon and watched it for the first time. It is, of course, a minor classic, directed by the great Robert Wise. And while it has its moments of goofiness, and while virtue does triumph in the end, and while Mitchum’s Jim Garry is clearly a good guy, at times both the film and the character Mitchum plays take some disturbing turns, as in a violent fistfight between Mitchum and Robert Preston, staged in a darkened roadhouse saloon. The sequence has a primal viciousness that remains unsettling even by today’s standards. Think what strong medicine it was for 1948! Had I seen Blood on the Moon at age ten, I might’ve grown up sooner.
But I didn’t. Safe from prolonged exposure to Robert Mitchum, I remained a Roy kid. I read his comic books, watched his television shows, went to his movies. I wanted desperately to meet him. I wanted to ride Trigger. Instead, I had to settle for peering down from a cheap seat at the local coliseum where a spotlit, barely visible but very real Gene Autry strummed and sang. After the show I stole backstage in hopes of ferreting out Gene himself (second choice is better than none) where, frustrated in that design, I contended myself by patting Champion’s satiny rump and acquiring the autograph of Johnny Bond, an Autry hanger-on of modest repute.
But Autry was not Roy, and Johnny Bond notwithstanding, I wanted Roy’s showy virtue, I longed in vain for two cap pistols like Roy’s flashy Colts—my parents were against guns, even imitation ones. I couldn’t even have a Red Ryder BB rifle. I went through boyhood wholly unarmed. And I wanted to be armed. I continued to worship Roy but I had glimpsed the other side; and I would never forget it.
NEXT: THE BLOODY WOMAN
I was a Roy Rogers kid. In those days—the mid-1940’s—you were either a Roy Rogers kid or a Gene Autry kid. At a certain point you had to choose. It was a rite of passage of sorts; in some important way it marked the crossing of the threshold from childhood to boyhood, which in turn was the first step toward becoming the man you knew you would have to be one day. The choice wasn’t an easy one because it was for keeps; once you made up your mind, you had to stick with your choice. There was no backing out or changing your preference. No Roy kid ever became an Autry kid, and no Gene kid would ever think of going over to Roy. You had to hold true to your choice.
That choice said a lot about what you held dear and who you hoped to become. Even at that age—roughly five or six—you sensed the decision was what you would later call an ethical one. It had to do with different styles of goodness. With subtle differences, both cowboy stars stood for right action. Gene’s virtue was a bit austere; he wore plain outfits and carried a single unostentatious gun, and rode his dark workmanlike horse Champion. Roy was all flash and dazzle and glamour; he used a pair of nickel-plated pistols with stag handles, wore fancy shirts and fringe, had that silver-mounted saddle and rode that wonderful palomino. Virtue could be sensible or it could be flamboyant. I went for the glitz.
In one sense it was an innocent time to be a boy. While we were cautioned against talking to strangers, basically we ran free. We didn’t know what a pedophile was. Not that they didn’t exist; it was just that nobody talked about them, at least not in our hearing. Preschool and kindergarten were foreign concepts for kids in my social class; first grade lay in the distant future. Life was a feast of unsupervised play—play we mostly invented owing to the shortage of toys and the absence of television and video games.
But paradoxically it was also a time when we knew the world outside the safe cocoon of our neighborhood was very dangerous. We had come to consciousness when a global war was raging and every freedom was at stake. Now fears of communism and the atom bomb were spreading. The police action in Korea was at hand. We knew evil stalked abroad. But my parents assured me that most people had good in them and good would conquer evil in the end. Thus I had to try to be good and find the good in others, so the maximum amount of good in the world could be brought to bear on the evil and defeat it.
Roy and Gene were examples of the power of goodness that we kids could reliably follow. They always licked the bad guys, and if they sometimes had to knock the bad guys down to subdue them, they never, ever killed them; the worst they would do was shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand—evidently a trick every cowboy star had mastered. Their only flaw was that they sang. I always cringed when they sang because I thought it made them sissified. But they usually did more riding and fighting and shooting than singing, so I grudgingly tolerated the occasional ballad.
To be fair, I should mention there was a second rank of Western movie heroes a kid could also emulate during the 40’s and into the early 50’s. Rex Allen, who wore his pistols reversed and had a beautiful black horse with a white mane and tail called Koko. William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy, dressed head-to-boot in black yet belying his somber garb with his booming laugh and grandfatherly silver hair—Hoppy’s was the first hazy image I ever saw on a television screen, galloping soundlessly through the electronic snow on his white horse Topper. There was Tex Ritter. Johnny Mack Brown. Sunset Carson. Wild Bill Elliott. Jimmy Wakeley. Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. Tim Holt. Lash LaRue.
As I grew a few years older, the Western stars tailored especially for television ascended—the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid, Bill Williams as Kit Carson, Guy Madison as Wild Bill Hickok. And thanks to TV I also got to watch the recycled exploits of an older generation of Saturday-matinee cowboy stars like Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Col. Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Buster Crabbe and Hoot Gibson. Quaint and crude were those old-time Westerns, mostly without music except for the main title, and in their stillness you heard the grunts of the running horses and the hollow beat of their hooves and the hiss of the sand they kicked into the sagebrush; and some peculiar feature about the speed of the film or perhaps the operation of the cathode ray tube made the wheels of stagecoaches and buckboards seem to roll backwards in a primitive and charming way.
But none of these second-level stars had the compelling allure of Roy and Gene. Bob Steele and his ilk were optional. You could like or dislike any of them without jeopardizing your primary preference. They too were good guys—with the possible exception of LaRue, whose form-fitted black shirt and menacing bullwhip were sufficiently ambiguous to suggest the perverse—a suggestion lost on us, in our near total innocence. Otherwise, virtue was the order of the day in “B”-Western Hollywood.
Of course far beyond my ken during this same period, some mainstream films were offering darker visions of the Western. Directors like William Wellman, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and John Ford were making gritty, relatively realistic adult films like Stagecoach, The Ox-Bow Incident, Red River, Winchester ’73. But if you were a closely supervised kid, as I was, you had scant chance to sample the heavier fare. Back then most “B” Westerns were filmed in black and white—Roy, who sometimes made movies in Technicolor, was a spectacular exception—yet I was eventually to learn there was a subtle, almost spiritual difference between the black and white of the matinee “B” movie, which seemed innocuous, and that of the more serious Western, which somehow took on an air of the sinister.
I was too naïve to know that the difference I noted was the difference between cheap movies ground out by journeyman directors in a few days and films crafted over months by talented artists, directors and cinematographers, who carefully framed and lit each scene. Grim and forbidding was the look of these movies. Mothers—at least my Methodist-minister’s-wife mother—had a practiced eye for noting the difference when viewing theatrical trailers. All films having that air of dark menace were ruled off limits to me.
But as is true of anything we are told is bad for us, the movies our parents condemned tantalized us even as we obediently steered clear of them. Once when I was ten years old I happened to see a trailer (we called them previews) for a Western called Blood on the Moon. Mother, who was with me, must’ve been appalled. Not only was the title itself lurid and unseemly, Blood on the Moon was bathed in that telltale maleficent murk, and it starred Robert Mitchum, in Mother’s view a very shady character indeed owing to his recent, infamous marijuana bust. So on three grounds the movie clearly fell beyond the pale; I was not to see it.
Yet how riveting was my fragmentary glimpse! The black magic was not so much in the action itself—staples like cattle stampedes and shootouts; instead, it permeated the very essence of the preview. I saw quick cuts of scenes at night or in rain. A darksome, brooding light dwelled in the corners of rooms sketching all else only partially or in dim outline, leaving deep pits of shadow everywhere, in which peril seemed to lurk. Then there was Mitchum himself—big-shouldered, sleepy-eyed, stubble-chinned, moving with that gliding grace of his, deadly as a coiled snake, his hair long and lank and possibly greasy. A far cry indeed from the well-groomed King of the Cowboys.
I had caught a grim glimmer of a West far different from that of the singing cowboys who shot the guns out of the hands of the villains. What I didn’t know was that this was the era of film noir and that Blood on the Moon was of a piece with contemporary cinematic fashion. For me it spoke of the evil I already distantly knew was loose in the world, but from which my parents had wished to shield me by pointing me toward positive role models like Roy and Gene. It hinted at how deep and terrible that evil was. And because I’d been so protected, perhaps subconsciously I began to suspect, even to fear, that when I grew up I might not be equipped to deal with it as effectively as Robert Mitchum, who either brutally beat up or simply killed the bad guys; that instead, when I came face to face with it, maybe imitating Roy and Gene—trying to knock the
bad guys unconscious after a short roughhouse, or to shoot the guns out of their hands—wouldn’t be nearly enough.
Forty-odd years later, never having forgotten that fleeting glimpse of the other West, I finally bought a video of Blood on the Moon and watched it for the first time. It is, of course, a minor classic, directed by the great Robert Wise. And while it has its moments of goofiness, and while virtue does triumph in the end, and while Mitchum’s Jim Garry is clearly a good guy, at times both the film and the character Mitchum plays take some disturbing turns, as in a violent fistfight between Mitchum and Robert Preston, staged in a darkened roadhouse saloon. The sequence has a primal viciousness that remains unsettling even by today’s standards. Think what strong medicine it was for 1948! Had I seen Blood on the Moon at age ten, I might’ve grown up sooner.
But I didn’t. Safe from prolonged exposure to Robert Mitchum, I remained a Roy kid. I read his comic books, watched his television shows, went to his movies. I wanted desperately to meet him. I wanted to ride Trigger. Instead, I had to settle for peering down from a cheap seat at the local coliseum where a spotlit, barely visible but very real Gene Autry strummed and sang. After the show I stole backstage in hopes of ferreting out Gene himself (second choice is better than none) where, frustrated in that design, I contended myself by patting Champion’s satiny rump and acquiring the autograph of Johnny Bond, an Autry hanger-on of modest repute.
But Autry was not Roy, and Johnny Bond notwithstanding, I wanted Roy’s showy virtue, I longed in vain for two cap pistols like Roy’s flashy Colts—my parents were against guns, even imitation ones. I couldn’t even have a Red Ryder BB rifle. I went through boyhood wholly unarmed. And I wanted to be armed. I continued to worship Roy but I had glimpsed the other side; and I would never forget it.
NEXT: THE BLOODY WOMAN
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A NOTE ABOUT MY WESTERNS BLOG
For those of you who have been following my new blog of Western writings (www.charlesfpricewesterns.blogspot.com), I intend to post a new chapter of the current work weekly, usually on Saturdays. While the Saturday posting date may vary due to travel, vacations, etc., I will always update weekly, barring emergencies. I appreciate the interest shown so far in my offerings, and thank those of you who have sent messages of support. If you're checking in for the first time, previous postings of the current work can be found by scrolling down the site. Thank you!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
