Fictionmonger

An Extended Essay - Conclusion

2009-10-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

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.

PERMISSIONS

2009-10-29T08:17:00.001-07:00

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.

An Extended Essay - Part Four

2009-10-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

An Extended Essay - Part Three

2009-10-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

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

An Extended Essay - Part Two

2009-10-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

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

An Extended Essay - Part One

2009-10-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

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

A NOTE ABOUT MY WESTERNS BLOG

2009-10-07T05:25:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-10-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

CROSS-POLLENATION

2009-10-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Occasional visitors to this blog will have noticed repeated mentions here of my love of the Old West and of the long-forgotten writers who used to be widely published and widely read in an earlier American that was in many ways more literate and more interested in our past than we are today. I'm old enough now to feel profoundly nostalgic for that America we've lost owing to the endless distractions technology has inflicted on us, which have reduced our attention spans to nanoseconds and transformed so many of us into texting, cell-phoning, Blackberrying zombies, cutting us off from any form of reflection, much less of meditation on our history. I've made efforts in my writing to break through all that static and put us in touch with our past, and to some extent have been sucessful. But my wish to connect us with our frontier experience has gone unfulfilled; publishers won't touch the Westerns I write, which are inspired by the authors I admired in my youth, many of whom I've mentioned in previous posts on this blog. So I've determined to extract some of those many-times-rejected Westerns from their long sleep in my hard drive and start publishing them in another blog which I call RANGERIDER and which can now be found at www.charlesfpricewesterns.blogspot.com. I hope those of you who follow me here will also check out that site. I also hope some of you will like what you see there. Either way, let me know.

Entertaining Doubts

2009-07-23T05:02:00.000-07:00

I once read in some liner notes on a record jacket—yes, that dates me; it was an LP—saying Johannes Brahms was never sure of the quality of his musical compositions and was in the habit of carrying them around in manuscript to fellow composers asking their opinion of, say, his Op. 45/Ein deutsches Requiem. “Is this any good?” he’d anxiously inquire. That sounds ridiculous today, when his German Requiem is recognized as a masterwork. But I like the story because it speaks to my own uncertainties as a writer.

Typically writers don’t admit to having doubts about their art. We’re supposed to be confident. It’s even OK to be openly proud or even arrogant, especially if we’ve produced a boatload of best-sellers to justify our high opinions of ourselves. But I think most folks who know me will tell you I’m often doubtful about my writing. Why is that? I’ve been published; my books have earned favorable notice and even won some prizes. And best of all, I’ve kept a small but enthusiastic readership. I ought to be content. And confident.

But I’m not. So I thought I’d use this blog to air my doubts in public, not just to help me clarify my own opinion of my work but, more importantly, to let aspiring writers out there know that a five-times-published author can nurse dark misgivings about his work just as they sometimes do.

I think the largest reason for my uncertainty is my deficient literary education. The fact is, I didn’t study literature. History was my major. Elsewhere in this website you’ll find ruminations on my love of history and my long-held desire to write historical fiction. So I came to fiction-writing not by way of literature but by way of history.

That’s not to say I didn’t read any literary fiction. I did. But I read selectively. As a result, there are enormous and embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of high literature. And as is often the case when one is ignorant about something, I’m defensive about my shortcoming. I’m a reverse snob—I tend to act badly if I’m exposed to a literary intellectual or told I should read the latest New York Times Notable Book. Because the truth is, I feel inferior. All too often when someone asks me, “Have you read (insert here the title of the latest book by Colm Toibin or Wendell Berry)?” my answer is a sullen and maybe even belligerent, “No.”

As a result, when in the company of literary figures who are friends of mine but also happen to be giants of serious writing, I feel like plankton at a whale convention. I never dreamed a few years ago I’d be keeping company with the likes of Fred Chappell, Kay Byer, Isabel Zuber, Ron Rash, or John Ehle. Or with less-famed but equally formidable writing talents such as Seabrook Wilkinson and Marlin Barton. Or with the distinguished publisher of my last book, Deric Beil of Savannah. But I do. And all these gifted people and more have been generous enough to count me as one of their own, to rank my work as a worthy part of the literary canon. I suppose they’ve done for me what Brahms’s friends did for him. In one way or another they’ve said, “Yes, Johannes, this work is good.”

I know these writers to be honorable persons who wouldn’t stretch the truth simply to make me feel good. Their dedication to art is too great to allow that sort of compromise. So, as hard as it is for me to do, I have to believe what they say. I suppose Brahms must’ve believed his friends too when they told him the same thing, or he wouldn’t have gone on to perform his music.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting I’m a counterpart of Brahms in the world of letters. But if others believe in me, shouldn’t I be able to believe in myself? I’m going to try that. Those of you out there in the blogosphere who want to be novelists but too often take counsel of your fears, pay heed. You can doubt yourself and still do the work—good work too. Maybe it’s even true that doubt—or maybe humility’s a better word—can make you a truer and more honest writer.

Intimations of Mortality

2009-03-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

Ruth, myself and Preston Russell at the Savannah Book Festival in February.

Ever since I turned 70 last October I’ve been monitoring myself for signs of impending death or disability. No kidding. I’ve always been a hypochondriac, and getting older has only made me worse. Take what happened a couple of weeks ago. One Friday morning I got out of bed, had a peculiar buzzing sensation in the top of my head followed by a loss of balance, and soon afterward suffered a severe onset of vertigo, with all the disagreeable side effects. Convinced I was having a stroke and was experiencing my last few moments of existence, or at least of rational thought, I gazed soulfully up at my wife Ruth while we awaited the arrival of the ambulance, hoping to carry this last image of her beauty with me into the Hereafter, or the nursing home. She smiled nicely for me. Later, as the EMTs were carrying me out to the ambulance, all I could think of was, “Poor Ruth, she doesn’t know how to change the water filter!” Happily, for me at least, the outcome was not death or an accelerated loss of my reasoning powers (they were already failing in any case). I’m on the road to recovery and, as you can see, am back at the computer. If you read this, and it sounds like it was written by a demented rhesus monkey, I hope you’ll let me know. Now I’m off to change the water filter.

Solitaire

2008-11-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

It's often said that writing is a solitary occupation. As a writer, I can confirm that. But once the lonely work of writing is done and the book is published, the writer is no longer alone. Week after week he or she travels from bookseller to bookseller, from library to library, mingling with a great many people and--if he or she is an introvert, as I tend to be--trying hard to seem at ease with everyone and be obliging and cheerful, all the while struggling to overcome the shyness that is the natural concomitant of habitual solitude.

Of course not every writer is such a confirmed loner. Many are supremely comfortable in their public roles. Not me. Around Burnsville I'm known as The Man Who Stays at Home. So as much as I've enjoyed the last five months of touring with my new book, and as kind as everyone has been to me every place I've gone, I have to confess I'm very glad to be at home again, at least for awhile, alone with my wife and my cat and my dog.

That doesn't mean I want to shut myself away from all human contact. I may be a loner but I do enjoy staying in touch with those I care about and who I hope care about me and what I do. That's why I established this website and this blog--I thought it would be a way I could communicate with my readers. Vain hope! Week after week I dutifully check the meter that measures the hits on my website, and guess what? With only a few exceptions, the only people who check my website are my webmaster Britt Kaufmann and myself. I set up this blog a little over a year ago, and since then a total of four people have left messages. One of them was Britt. Speak of solitude! Well, at least it's quiet...

Literary Hunger

2008-07-22T07:42:00.001-07:00

It's been five long years since I toured with a new book, but starting July 4th I set out once more on what Sharyn McCrumb has called the literary migrant worker circuit. After launching Nor the Battle to the Strong on Independence Day at Malaprop's in Asheville, I visited Black Bear Books in Boone, Fireside Books in Forest City, Blue Moon in Spruce Pine, Phillips & Lloyd in Hayesville, The Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, Osondu Books in Waynesville and City Lights in Sylva--independents all, I'm pleased to say.

Those five years have made a difference. I'm older and a little slower and get tired sooner. But on the other hand, I feel more comfortable than ever before, and I think that's mostly because of the warm welcome I've gotten from the good folks who run the stores I've visited and from the readers who've come to meet me and talk about the new book.

Why? I'm not sure. But I'm willing to venture a guess. People who love books these days are hungry for a good, nourishing literary meal, and too often publishers are dishing out a scanty gruel instead. More books are being printed today than ever before, but the books themselves all too often fail to satisfy the serious reader's desire to consume fare of substance.

I don't know if my book measures up to that standard. That's not a judgment I'm entitled to make. But I do know that my intent was to write a book that serious readers can relish. And what's cheered me so, these last few days, is the readers and booksellers I've met seemed to recognize that intent and appreciate it for its own sake. They seemed grateful to get to know a writer and a book that might possibly fill their hunger for a good read as well as help fatten the author's royalty account or fill the bookstore's coffers.

Of course the readers had to take the book home and go through it and decide whether or not it met that expectation. Did it fill them up or leave them hungry? I'm curious. I'd like to know. Writing this blog, I sometimes feel I'm writing to myself, or to the empty air. I long for comments but up to now they've been mighty scarce. So this time I'm asking outright. If you've read Nor the Battle to the Strong, will you post a comment on this blog and let me know whether it fed you well or left you hungry? I look forward to hearing from you, even if you still want dessert--or maybe even another entree.

UNTHANKED ANGELS

2008-06-21T05:06:00.000-07:00

As is more than amply evident from other links on this website, my new novel Nor the Battle to the Strong launches on July Fourth at Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville. Just yesterday I received an early shipment of author's copies of the book, and if I do say so myself, it looks pretty darn good. Once again my publisher, Deric Beil of Savannah, has confirmed his long-held reputation as one of the finest book designers in the business.

Of course it's a delight for any author to handle his or her newest book for the first time--especially after a gestation period as long as this one (seven years from inspiration to publication). Naturally I basked for a while in a pleasurable glow, paging through the actual artifact after such a tiresome and often discouraging wait when the image of the book shimmered distantly in imagination only. But then I scanned the Afterword where I had acknowledged the help of those who had assisted me, and a ghastly realization struck me.

I had neglected to mention two of the people who had done the most for me! First among them is my dear friend and colleague Britt Kaufmann, who poured her incredible array of talents and boundless enthusiasm into designing this website; conceiving the composition of the cover; writing promotional materials without number; and arranging several interviews with me which have appeared, and will appear, in various venues. Nor was this all. A dedicated feminist, pacifist and indifferent student of historical fiction, Britt not only read my novel about the Revolutionary War, she found merit in it and even insisted with her typical passion that it offered important lessons for those like herself who harbor reservations about war. She has photographed me to such advantage that I actually appear presentable on this website, encouraged me when my own confidence flagged, cussed me out when I gave in to doubts and self-pity, and always resolutely believed in the importance of my work. Bear in mind that Britt is a stay-at-home mom with three young children, and also a gifted, oft-published and anthologized poet in her own right. She was busy enough without me. My wife Ruth and I call her our surrogate daughter, a title she tolerates, and we are more fond of her than we can say. But I have served her ill, and I am sorry.

The second person I neglected to thank is Bob Yankle of Burlington, the subject of my last log entry. It was Bob who encouraged me to take photographs with his personal digital camera at a cavalry re-enactment last November at Cowpens, SC and who spent most of the day shooting pictures himself, both of us hoping to capture an image that would suit Britt's book-jacket conception. Bob is a pro and this was the first time I'd ever used a digital camera, so it was sheer dumb luck that I got a shot which ended up on the cover of the novel. It's a credit to Bob's generosity that he assured me mine was the best shot. I may have snapped the picture, but we were both aiming to fulfill Britt's composition, so the final cover image is the result of a completely collaborative effort.

Why did I fail to mention Britt and Bob's help? I have no good answer save that I wrote the acknowledgements at the time of the original submission of the manuscript, years before my friends rendered their invaluable last-minute, pre-publication services. Then, when the galleys arrived a few weeks ago to be proofed--the time when I should've added a paragraph of gratitude--I fixated instead on the technical job of reviewing the typesetting and simply forgot to update my thank-yous.

So, my two unthanked angels, I hope you can forgive me for failing to praise you when and where I should've. My heart is full of love and gratitude for you both, and I assure you I'll try to make up for my omissions as I circulate on tour. People are going to know about what you did for me, I promise.

Strange Fates

2008-04-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

My good friend Bob Yankle of Burlington, NC has sent me a striking photo he snapped of the equestrian statue of Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro. It accompanies this blog. Greene is one of the chief characters in my forthcoming novel Nor the Battle to the Strong. I didn’t know much about him till I began researching the book, and as you’ll see if you read the novel, he quickly became one of my heroes.

During the Revolutionary War, from late 1780 through 1783 Greene was commander of the Southern Continental Army. Guilford Courthouse, fought on March 15, 1781, was his most famous battle. Though he didn’t win, he inflicted such severe losses on his British opponent Lord Cornwallis that His Lordship eventually limped up to Yorktown, Virginia where he surrendered to George Washington. It’s my opinion now that Greene probably had more to do, militarily speaking, with the winning of our independence than any other American officer.

When I was a child my family lived for a time in Greensboro. We used to picnic in a park there called the Battleground. Of course this was the site of the battle but to me it was just a place to go and eat relish sandwiches and drink Cokes. One fixture of the place did command my attention, though. It was the equestrian statue of Greene. I used to stand at the foot of that magnificent monument and admire the handsome figure on his great metal horse. I would read the names of his Southern battles emblazoned on the pedestal: Guilford Courthouse. Hobkirk’s Hill. Ninety-Six. Eutaw Springs. I wondered what those words meant and who the man was who fought in the places bearing such exotic names.

Now I know. And looking back on my boyhood, I marvel at the strangeness of fate. Of course it never occurred to me then that I would grow up and immerse myself in the life of Greene and come to admire him as I’ve seldom admired any leader of my own time—much less that I would live to write a novel about him. I guess all these years later I’m still, in some ways, that same little boy gazing up at that mighty figure on horseback. I’m much obliged to Bob Yankle for reminding me of that. Bob is a Navy veteran, a member of the Alamance Chapter of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, official photographer for the online magazine Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution (www.southerncampaign.org), and one of the finest people I know. Thanks, Bob!

Nor the Battle to the Strong

2008-04-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Anybody who’s checked my website knows I came to writing somewhat late in life, and that over the last thirteen years I’ve published four novels. At first, for a late-blooming beginner, things moved pretty quickly for me, with books coming out in 1996, 1999, 2001 and 2003. Then I pitched into an ambitious project—a historical novel larger in scale and more serious in content than anything I’d tried before. That book took me two years to research and write and another year to sell; then two more years had to pass while it waited its turn on the production line.

Now the time is approaching when it will finally see print. The launch date is July 4, a fitting date for a novel about the American Revolution. It’s called Nor the Battle to the Strong. The jacket cover has been designed. Any day now I’ll be proofing galleys. Soon review copies will be going out. Booksellers have already started to contact me about readings and signings. These are exciting days for any writer, but especially for one who’s nearly seventy, frets about the amount of fruitful time left to him, and has impatiently waited five years to see his next work go into print.

Not that I’ve been idle during that interval. I’ve written four other new novels, re-written two others, am working on a seventh, and have begun a sequel to Nor the Battle. My wife Ruth and I have also co-written a four-act play. We hope all these works can one day join their literary brothers and sisters on the shelves of booksellers and libraries or on the stage. But as anybody familiar with today’s publishing business knows, nothing is quick or easy or predictable. We’ll see what happens and anticipate good things.

Meanwhile, it’s a happy time for us. We’ve got a great publisher who’s turning out a high-quality book and working hard to promote it. We think it’s a good book. We hope you'll read it and like it and tell your friends about it. We think it says something important about our country, not just the America the 18th century but the America of today and tomorrow too. We look forward to taking it on the road. We hope it will make a difference. After all, that's why we write.

Masters of Place

2008-01-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays I finally got around to reading an author whose work a friend has been urging on me for years—Ivan Doig. His memoir This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (1978) evokes his native northern Montana and its people as powerfully does as Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, and that started me thinking about the importance of place in the kind of writing that leaves its imprint on the mind long after the reading experience is over. Place can be a character in memoir, and certainly in fiction, as surely as any person.

Think of Hemingway’s Spain in Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Or Cormac McCarthy’s Texas/New Mexico/Mexico border country in Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. Place doesn’t even have to be real to take on a forcible, memorable identity—witness Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The fabulous Latin American republics of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch pulse with life as surely as does Joyce’s actual Dublin in Ulysses. Peter Taylor’s Tennessee, as it existed only a few years ago but in a wholly different age from ours, is as exquisitely preserved as in insect in amber in works like A Summons to Memphis and The Oracle at Stoneleigh Court. So is the quality of the New England light in everything John Cheever wrote.

Even genre writers—maybe particularly genre writers, of times past—were masters of place. One recalls Ernest Haycox’s rain-soaked, mist-shrouded Oregon; Alan LeMay’s parched Texas plains; Walter Van Tillburg Clark’s springtime Sierra Nevadas in The Ox-Bow Incident. We here in Western North Carolina have our own conjurers of our majestic highlands: John Ehle, Isabel Zuber, Ron Rash, Charles Frazier.

I used to do some teaching, and the thing that struck me most in the writing of so many of my students was an almost total absence of a sense of place. Instead, their writing was glib, clever, with-it and, well, superficial. Stories occurred in a vacuum, as if their characters lived and moved in some eerie, hermetically-sealed realm where there was no weather, no scenery, so smell, no texture or flavor. It was as if the out-of-doors—the natural world—had been banished and nothing remained but self-examination.

I fret that in this age of iPods, portable DVD players, MP3’s, and cell phones that can do everything but have sex, we are all getting locked into our own private cocoons and are losing touch, perhaps for all time, with the very environment whose degradation we bemoan.

A Class Act

2007-12-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Some of you may know that my 2003 novel Where the Water-Dogs Laughed was fortunate to be shortlisted for next year's Together We Read (TWR) selection. TWR is the very fine regionwide program that promotes reading and the love of fine writing throughout Western North Carolina. On December 2 the winning book was announced. It is Robert Morgan's highly-acclaimed Boone, a life-and-times biography of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone, who if course is closely identified with our section of the state.

I applaud this choice. Robert Morgan is not only one of our very best writers (he's a poet as well as a novelist and biographer), he's a great and modest gentleman--a rare species these days when more than a few recognized authors have allowed celebrity to corrode their manners. One day I was interviewing Ron Rash, the award-winning and famously self-effacing writer who teaches at Western Carolina, and I asked him why he wears his fame so lightly. His reply? "We're fortunate in North Carolina to have a whole generation of writers who came before us, who show us how to behave." The names he mentioned as examples were Robert Morgan, John Ehle, Fred Chappell and Lee Smith, this past year's TWR winner.

I couldn't agree more. Congratulations, Mr. Morgan, and thanks for being the class act you are.

The Passing of a Giant

2007-11-12T07:24:00.000-08:00

Those of you who’ve read my interview with Lacey Presnell elsewhere on this site will know of my admiration for the late Norman Mailer. I was saddened this past weekend, while attending a conference in South Carolina, to learn of the death of this colossus of American letters in New York at the age of 84.

One of the last of the great postwar generation of literary figures now unjustly fallen into near-obscurity, Mailer more than any other writer had shaped my literary sensibilities in the 1960’s. It will always be a cherished memory for me that his life and mine once touched, however briefly.

After the publication of my first novel I decided to quit my day job and become a full-time writer. This perhaps irrational act seemed to me a leap of literary faith not unlike some of Norman Mailer’s more improbable experiments, like The Prisoner of Sex or Marilyn or Why Are We in Vietnam? So a couple of years after settling in Burnsville, I wrote him a shameless mash note:

“Dear Mr. Mailer,

“For the past few weeks I have been feasting on the delights of your anthology The Time of Our Time, and in doing so I find I have been traveling again much of the emotional terrain of my own life from my early twenties, when I made the rich discovery of your work, right through till now; and I have also come to see how much of that terrain you laid out for me. In a powerful way, without knowing, you set the terms of the most worthwhile passages of my youth. Yet we are strangers. The recollection of this paradox of intimacy and distance lingers very near me as I read.

“I suppose I am one of those young men of the 1950's David Denby wrote about in his recent piece in The New Yorker, who were smothering in the doldrums of that time till you burst on the scene with Advertisements for Myself. The vigor of the book electrified me. I had cherished a somewhat half-hearted notion to be a writer; Advertisements showed me how far I was from that goal but at the same time was so exhilarating that it inspired me to try actually crossing the space. Although it took me many years to make the trip, it is not too much to say that over that period you gave me much of what I needed to grasp the prize, for each new work of yours showed me how dear was the goal and how poor my skill, yet also fired my ambition to get better and better and then to try as greatly as you had tried.

“On a deeper level you offered me the worthy notion that despite your great talent and fame we were human together. If I had failed to be master of all that confronted me, so at times had you. Occasionally, pursuing some earnest endeavor, we both ended by making fools of ourselves. We both longed to be heroes and often fell short of that. But you succeeded often enough that I had that example to encourage me, even as your blunders made us - in my mind - complicit, and gave me comfort when I missed the mark.

“In those years when I was young I sensed that the weather of my soul and yours was the same. All your insights, enthusiasms, vendettas, triumphs, misadventures - all that matchless prose - resonated in me; I wanted you to be as great as we both knew you could be, and I wanted the world to acknowledge it. And conversely, whatever new crisis arose in my life or the life of the times, you were always there offering up something that usually made comprehensible to me what had been only perplexing or woeful before. And always you enriched my world, gave me pleasure when for much of the time my pleasures were few.

“Let me end by saying that two years ago, at the age fifty-eight, I saw my first book published at last - Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War (Academy Chicago, 1996). It was a modest effort but in general was kindly reviewed and could, I suppose, be counted a mild success. With Hiwassee I finally closed that distance between what I wanted to give and what I had to offer; and upon reflection I've come to think it was the encouragement of your example, more than anything else, that led me over. I have completed a second novel, to be published next spring, and am working now on a third. Each, I believe, has been better than the last.

“And I think whatever merit the books may possess comes in part from my having dared big risks to write them. Which calls to mind something you often used to say, reflecting on Hemingway, about the importance of bravery in the making of a writer. Never before had I thought myself large enough to be so brave - security was my god. But after Hiwassee I quit a 35-year career of working for what you would call the corporation in Washington, DC and elsewhere; withdrew to a home in a remote section of my native North Carolina mountains; and began to write full-time. In every way but one, the move looked like madness. I am consuming my substance and have no income of any significance: I swing to and fro over the abyss. Yet my work goes deeper and deeper, and I have come to see that the work is what I'm here for, that everything in my life before now was just a preparation for it. And I know that the very dangers that dog me are what sweeten the work most. So I am content that I have been brave enough at last.

“Long life to you, Mr. Mailer! May you go on and on forever. Thank you for showing me the way.”

Needless to say, I did not expect an answer. Yet a few weeks later I found in my mailbox this hand-addressed letter, postmarked Brooklyn Heights, NY:

“Dear Charles F. Price,

“This is to thank you for your warm and generous letter and to wish you good luck on the brave decision you’ve made to withdraw to the North Carolina mountains and enter the sometimes awesome world of writing as a full-time occupation. Let me wish you a Merry Christmas and the best of luck.

“Yours,
Norman Mailer”

I had read that Mailer, despite his reputation for ferocity, was unfailingly gracious to aspiring writers. His letter proved the truth of the rumor.

Swollen with self-importance, certain that Norm and I were now on intimate terms, I later sent him a copy of my second novel, suitably inscribed. A year or so afterward a friend of mine saw it up for sale on E-Bay. So Norm and I weren’t to be literary confidants after all. But that didn’t matter to me. For one moment in time he had given me and my work an exclusive thought, and that was more than enough.

First Thoughts

2007-11-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

Setting up my new website has been a hoot, and I need to doff my sombrero to Britt Kaufmann, who designed it so elegantly. Also check out her own site, brittkaufmann.com. She’s a fine poet as you’ll find, and I’m proud to call her my friend and colleague.

Now that my site’s up, she’s been after me to write a blog for it, but because I’m seldom comfortable talking about myself—which is what most bloggers seem so eager to do—I was unsure whether to attempt it.

But looking through the materials for the site, I couldn’t help waxing nostalgic about my first piece of historical fiction to be published, and decided to set down a few thoughts on the subject, which I might as well share with you as my inaugural experiment in blogging.

It’s now thirteen years since I wrote Hiwassee. After so long a passage of time it’s impossible even to recreate in imagination, much less entirely recover, my state of mind at the time I wrote it. I was a different person then, living an entirely different kind of life. If I leaf through Hiwassee today, it gives off an air of alien quaintness, not as if an earlier version of myself had written it but as if a complete stranger had done so.

He’s a stranger I like, though. I admire his simplicity of phrasing, the directness of his storytelling, his obvious care for his characters and, above all, his sense of mission. He’s telling a story no one else has yet told, at least not in fiction, and it’s a story he passionately believes should be told if readers are to gain purchase on anything like the essence, if not the actual truth, of the past.

His book came out in 1996, a year before Charles Frazier covered much the same historical ground in a far more masterful way in Cold Mountain. Frazier showed him how far he had yet to go on the road to becoming a finished novelist. But in 1996 that hadn’t happened yet. Hiwassee was the best he could do, and he was proud of having done his best, and his book—which he’d considered more of an adventure story than a serious piece of writing—had astonished him by garnering unanimous critical praise as respectable literary fiction. Prominent people in the literary world to whom he’d looked as icons wrote favorable blurbs; critics spoke of him as if he were not just a good journeyman writer but a gifted one. It was quite a year! But as I say, Cold Mountain gave him a rude wake-up call.

He’s a better and deeper writer now, though he still has lots to learn. But that first little book of his has an earnestness, an honesty, and an evident quality of good intent that I find endearing. He’s done his homework; he knows his subject front-to-back; and he understands his purpose, which is to portray the tragedy of the Civil War. He’s no partisan—though his chief characters are Confederate in sympathy, they’re human beings first and last. They’re moved not by politics or by their views on slavery or secession but by love of home. They are trying to save home. They are trying to save each other.

The villains of the piece are a motley crowd of bushwhackers motivated by no allegiance save to greed. They are stock bad guys out of central casting, except for two, one named Liver and Lights, who murders a halfwit; after the killing the victim’s little terrier improbably adopts him, and when the dog is lost later on, Liver and Lights weeps inconsolably. Another exception is their leader, the vicious Bridgeman, who can kill and torture without thought but also longs to possess the good character of the mountain farmers he despoils and sometimes falls victim to self-pity and self-doubt.

Here I see the seed of my later work. Rarely are my villains evil through-and-through. Always they exhibit traits that make them recognizably human—Bridgeman’s insecurity in the face of real virtue; Nahum Bellamy’s genuine zeal for equal rights for the newly emancipated slaves in Freedom’s Altar; Webb Darling’s amused, disillusioned self-awareness in The Cock’s Spur; G.G.M. Weatherby’s love for his daughter in Where the Water-Dogs Laughed. The writer of Hiwassee believed, as I continue to believe, that there is always good in evil and evil in good, and that to think otherwise is a dangerous delusion. To believe that a person who does evil is an other—a monster, a madman, an inhuman being—conveniently distances him from the rest of us, from the people who are, by definition, incapable of committing despicable acts. Yet history is crowded with examples to the contrary. We need to know what is in us to do.

The same holds true for the “good” people in the story. Judge Madison Curtis, in order to save his wife Sarah from torture—and to save what remains of his worldly possessions—misdirects the bushwhackers to a neighbor family, who are massacred. That he feels guilt and tries to ameliorate the harm he’s done doesn’t change the fact that he’s been the cause of the massacre. Yet he has always thought himself—and in fact is—a virtuous man. A virtuous man who has done an evil thing, in hopes of saving home, in hopes of saving his family.

It’s that idea of the ambivalent nature of good and evil that I’m proudest of when I read Hiwassee today. It’s a cautionary tale for all time. The fellow who wrote that book wasn’t trying obsessively to rebuild the past for its own sake, like a ship in a bottle; he was trying to make the past relevant to us in our time. He’s a teacher, showing us that the past needn’t be dead, that it can be a living lesson about the choices the world forces us to make, and that very often none of the choices offered us are fair.