Fictionmonger

Naked Came the Leaf Peeper

2012-02-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

The above is the intriguing title of a new book you may have already heard about because, within days of its debut, it was already causing a sensation around Western North Carolina. If the title sounds somewhat familiar, that's because it partakes of an irreverent literary genre dating back in recent history to Naked Came the Stranger, a bestselling 1969 collaborative serial novel spoofing America's fascination with sex and co-written by several staffers at Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, which was followed in 1996 by Naked Came the Manatee, a mystery parody similarly composed by a corps of authors.

Our highland home, offering as it does its own array of stereotypes ranging from the engaging to the bizarre, and parody being the mainstay of the previous two novels as well as a sincere form of fond celebration of its topic, co-editors Brian Lee Knopp and his wife Linda Barrett Knopp have persuaded some our region's most talented--and possibly deranged--authors to contribute the twelve 6,000-word chapters that make up the book.

Brian, already acclaimed for his bestselling memoir Mayhem in Mayberry, sets the stage with an initial chapter strewn like a minefield with plot devices each of which succeeding authors pick up and carry on, not only maintaining a compelling and consistent story line but also freely throwing in more and more clever twists and turns so that the book becomes a hilarious unfolding of incident and deepening of character that draws the reader eagerly to the fabulous climax, written by Vanderbilt's Tony Earley, which I guarantee will leave you screaming with helpless laughter.

In between are chapters written by John P. McAfee, Susan Reinhardt, Gene Cheek, Wayne Caldwell, Fred Chappell, Vicki Lane, Tommy Hays, Alan Gratz, Linda Marie Barrett and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, writers known throughout our region for various styles of work but who, this time, have thrown themselves gleefully into a murder-mystery spoof while somehow managing to deploy their individual styles yet maintain a consistent authorial voice throughout.

Yours truly contributed a minor Afterword, but it is the collaboration of the chapter-writers which is the wonder and the mainstay of the book. I venture to predict it will live long. Already it has been praised by the likes of Charles Frazier, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gilbert and Sarah Addison Allen. Get it and read it. And enjoy the belly-laughs!

Buy it or order it from Malaprop's Bookstore and Cafe in Asheville (www.malaprops.com).

MOVING ON

2012-01-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

Those of you who may have been checking this blog since last fall will know it's been a while since I updated it. I apologize for leaving you in the dark for so long. It's not that I've gotten lazy; as a matter of fact, the opposite is true--I've actually been quite busy.

I've completed The Sunshine of Better Fortune, my sequel to Nor the Battle to the Strong; the manuscript is now with my publisher and I'm waiting to hear whether he plans to accept it. These two novels have consumed the better part of the last ten years of my life, so of course I'm anxious to hear his verdict. I continue to await word from the another publisher, whose editors have been considering Season of Terror, my nonfiction account of the Espinosa serial killers in Civil War-era Colorado, for twenty-one months now--a process which has taught me much about the difference between the publishing of fiction and of nonfiction. The latter requires endless peer reviewing, scrupulous editing to root out politically incorrect words and phrases, and of course a careful checking to insure sound scholarship. But I'm hopeful for a good outcome at the end of the frustratingly protracted process.

Nearly simultaneously I also wrote a novel about the Espinosas, a 650-page tome which a Colorado friend will soon be reading for cultural and geographical accuracy and which I hope will also see print someday.

Having done so much authorial heavy lifting, I've been looking around for something less exhaustive but still productive and, at the urging of my wife Ruth and good friend Britt Kaufmann, have decided to try e-publishing. As some of you will know, I've written a number of novels set in the early West--I don't like to call call them Westerns in the genre sense because I've tried to give them the literary heft of serious writing. I actually posted one on this blog some time ago, and some of you may have read that one. But I've been unsuccessful in peddling them to non-genre publishers and, as so many other writers are doing these days, have decided to try e-publishing.

We are in the process of formatting the text and hope soon to launch the e-book. Britt--who has an amazing artistic talent as well as a fine gift for poetry--has even designed an exciting cover, which I'll be sharing with you here when the time is right. Be assured I'll keep you posted on all aspects of our progress.

So stay tuned for fresh developments. And by the way, Happy New Year!

HONORING NATHANAEL GREENE - PART TWO

2011-08-29T05:37:00.000-07:00

When I began my project to write a Revolutionary War novel my intention was a rather narrow one--to wite a partly factual, partly imagined account of the activities of a maternal ancestor, James Johnson, in that conflict. I had learned of Johnson's service through some materials on family history that my mother had gathered many years before. I supplemented this information by obtaining Johnson's pension records from the National Archives and from them I learned of his service in the Continental Army under Nathanael Greene in the South from late 1781 to early 1783.

I realized that in order to understand my ancestor's experiences I also had to learn about Greene's campaigns during that time, which until recently had been among the least known of the war. Accordingly, I read the relevant volumes of The Papers of Major General Nathanael Greene (University of North Carolina Press) and a number of primary and secondary accounts dealing with his operations in North and South Carolina and Georgia.

I came away from my research profoundly impressed by Greene both as a man and as a commander. He was not just a fine strategist who was, amazingly, self-taught in military science; in mental acuity ahd subtlety of thought and expression he was also one of the most considerable intellectuals of his time. He could, and did, correspond as an equal with the foremost men of Enlightenment America--Thomas Paine the polemecist; educator and Presbyterian divine John Witherspoon; Thomas Jefferson; John Adams; of course George Washington--and in the process showed himself a writer and thinker of remarkable style, wit and penetrating originality.

To illustrate, I'd like to quote from two of his letters, the first demostrating his mischievous wit and and another, his more serious side. On July 18, 1781 at the High Hills of Santee in South Carolina, Greene wrote this delightful passage in a letter to his friend and business partner Jeremiah Wadsworth, in reference to his masterful Fabian strategy during the Guilford Courthouse campaign:

"I had a letter sometime since from Mr John Trumbull wherein he asserts that with all my talents for Warr, I am deficient in the great Art of making a timely retreat. I hope I have convinced the World to the contrary, for there are few Generals that has run oftener, or more lustily than I have done, But I have taken care not to run too farr; and commonly have run as fast forward as backward, to convince our enemy that we were like a Crab, that could run either way."

The next passage, written on March 26, 1781, a few days after the battle of Guilford Courthouse to the Quakers of the New Garden Monthly Meeting, expresses his view of their faith, which had once been his:

"I was born and educated in the profession and principles of your Society; and am perfectly acquainted with your religious sentiments and general good conduct as citizens. I am also sensible from the prejudices of many belonging to other religious societies, and the misconduct of a few of your own, that you are generally considered as enemies to the independence of America. I entertain other sentiments, both of your priciples and wishes. I respect you as a people, and shall always be ready to protect you from every violence and oppression which the confusion of the times afford but too many instances of. Do not be deceived. This is no religious dispute. The contest is for political liberty, without which cannot be enjoyed the free exrecise of your religion."

In making the acquaintance of this remarkable man, the feelings I had were perhaps best described by the General's grandson, G.W. Greene, who in 1871 published a biography of his illustrious forebear and quoted on its title page these lines of Homer, from Book Four of The Iliad:

"After this manner said they, who had seen him toiling; but I ne'er

Met him myself, nor saw him; men say he was greater than others."

Toil Greene did. Few have toiled harder, been more scantily rewarded or more undeservedly neglected. Until quite recently history had all but misplaced him. Only in the last decade have we seen something of a resurgence of his popularity, thanks to the complete publication of his papers and two new biographies. Yet a fair case can be made than it was he, more than any other field commander, who won the War of the Revolution. It's certain that he saved the Southern States from British dominion. As all this came clear to me, Greene began to claim a larger and larger share of the story I wished to tell, though I could not at first see how I could include him, the commanding general, in a book whose other chief character was my ancestor James Johnson, a Scottish immigrant, runaway indentured servant and obscure private of dragoons.

As is so often the case in my writing, it was my wife whose insight resolved my dilemma. The story, Ruth said, should be equally Johnson's and Greene's, the General's point of view giving the reader a top-down perspective on the war as an exercise in command; Johnson's, a bottom-up look at the same war as seen by the ordinary and usually uncomprehending soldier in the ranks. So the first novel--and its sequel when I am able to complete it, hopefully later this year--owe their forms to Ruth. If they succeed in their purposes, the credit is hers. If they do not, the fault is mine for failing to capture the pattern she so clearly saw.

I want to speak now about what a good friend of mine describes as Greene's Forgotten Years. If he is remembered at all, Greene is known for his remarkable campaign in the spring of 1781 culminating in the battle of Guilford Courthouse. His later campaigns--the ones in South Carolina cited on the pedestal of his monument in Greensboro and so mysterious to me as a boy--are not so well known, even though his last, the bitter struggle at Eutaw Springs, was in fact the bloodiest battle of the Revolution for the numbers engaged.

Even less understood are his months of arduous service in the South from January 1782 through July 1783. Though major combat operations were over, Greene still had to arrange for the conquest of Georgia. Few Americans know that he sent a small contingent of troops into Georgia under the command of Brigadier General "Mad Anthony" Wayne; or that Wayne, in a seven-month campaign, defeated a coalition of British, Hessian and Loyalist troops as well as allied Creek and Cherokee Indians (I might mention that James Johnson was a part of this force). Ironically, we think of Wayne as a hero of the Northern War but his service to the South has largely gone unrecognized, as has the knowledge that he operated under the command of Nathanael Greene.

Greene also involved himself deeply in statecraft, working hard as the war wound down to reconcile Patriots and Loyalists who, in the Southern states, had been at each others' throats in a frightful internal struggle ever since the outbreak of war. It is thanks to Greene that when the war did end, these contending parties were able largely to compose their differences.

Sickness and want if every kind afflicted Greene's army during these last grueling months of the war as everyone waited for peace to be concluded. Under the Articles of Confederation there was no mechanism to compel the states to furnish money or supplies to the Continental Army, and after Yorktown Greene's army struggled on without pay or adequate food, clothing or necessary equipments. During this trying period Greene had to contend with several mutinies and with at least one plot on his life. I'm sorry to say that one of the mutinies involved the First Regiment of Continental Light Dragoons--Greene's cavalry force--and that one of the mutineers was my ancestor, James Johnson.

When there was no national source for supplying his army, Greene arranged for a private contractor to do so, with the understanding that the contractor would be reimbursed by the Congress. But this did not happen and, in order to keep his army supplied, Greene pledged his own resources. Regrettably, the contractor turned out to be an unscrupulous scoundrel, misspent the money and then died, leaving Greene holding a debt that plagued him for the rest of his days. Not until many years after his death was his widow finally reimbursed by Congress. Cruelly, the mutiny in which my ancestor participated was brought on, in part, by the unfounded suspicion that Greene, while his army starved, had enriched himself by lining his pockets with money intended to supply the troops.

But the country never paid Greene his salary as a Major General of the Continental Army, nor did he realize any profit from his arrangement with the contractor. The Southern States, in gratitude for his services but also impoverished by war, did give him some confiscated Loyalist plantations, the largest at Mulberry grove in Georgia.

So at war's end Greene, whose Quaker teachings condemned human slavery, had to scrape up enough money to purchase slave labor to work his rice fields in hopes of providing for his wife and five children. We do not know what inner conflict this may have caused him. Sadly, despite all his toils and this compromise of his early principles, he never managed to make Mulberry Grove pay, and he died of sunstroke after visiting a neighbor's plantation one hot summer's day in 1786. He was forty-four years of age.

He did not live to write his memoirs and make himself famous, as did his troublesome former subordinate "Light Horse Harry" Lee. He did not live to serve his country further, in Congress or perhaps even as President of the United States, though he was certainly qualified to have done so. And because he did not live, he and his works--and the contribution of the South to the winning of independence--have been largely ignored.

So, to return to my earlier theme, victory in the Revolution and liberty for the United States were the South's gifts to the thirteen colonies struggling to become a nation. Those gifts deserve to be remembered, especially by Southerners who should know their own history better than they do. We have allowed the Civil War to stand like an impenetrable wall across the Southern memory. But if we can climb that wall and look eighty years farther into the past, we will see glory.

We should honor that glory and we should also honor the great patriot Nathanael Greene--the former Quaker from Rhode Island--who led us to achieve it.

HONORING NATHANAEL GREENE

2011-08-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that in 2008 I published a historical novel, Nor the Battle to the Strong, based in part on the service of Major General Nathanael Greene, commander of the Southern Continental Army during the last years of the American Revolution, and that I'm now working on its sequel, The Sunshine of Better Fortune. Recently I was privileged to address the Nathanael Greene Chapter of the Sons of the Revolution in Atlanta, GA. I chose the topic "Nathanael Greene: The Forgotten Years." Some of the material in the speech has appeared before in this space and others, but I attempted to weave that material into a broader and more comprehensive whole. I thought it might be of interest here. Part One of the text follows:

When I was a child, my family lived for a time in Greensboro, North Carolina. We used to picnic in a public park there called the Battleground. Of course this was the site of the battle of Guilford Courthouse during the American Revolution, but to me it was jusy a place to eat relish sandwiches and drink Cokes and, later, to play softball. It was also memorable as the place where I hit the one and only home run of my life.

One fixture of the place did command my attention, though. It was the great equestrian statue of Greene that stands on the spot where the General stood as he directed the battle. I used to linger at the foot of that magnificent monument and admire the handsome figure in his great metal horse. I would read the names of his Southern engagements 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, of course, I know. And looking back on my boyhood, I marvel at the strangeness of fate. It never occurred to me then that I would grow up and in late middle age I would 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 two novels 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.

Back then, in about 1951, I, like most Southern-born males of my generation--indeed, like many Americans still--knew very little about the Revolutionary War. For me the watershed event of the collective history of the South was The Civil War, or what we were then wont to call The War between the States. For most of my life I studies that war and found in it my heroes such as Robert E. lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart.

My own Confederate credentials, I discovered, were impeccable. My paternal great-great grandfather served throughout the conflict in the 39th Georgia Volunteers, an outfit recruited in Gilmer County, GA, and was wounded in the battle of Bentonville in Eastern North Carolina in March 1865. My great-great uncles, from Clay County in Western North Carolina, also served, two in the 39th North Carolina State Troops amd the third in the 65th North Carolina Cavalry; briefly, at Chickamauga, this ancestor was under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Two of my forebears gave their lives in that war and another, suffering from what we would now call post-traumnatic stress disorder, was so severely disabled that in later life he had to be committed to an insane asylum, where he died.

A vigorous debate flourishes to this day over the purpose and meaning of the war those men fought. But however one construes these issues, during this Sesquicentennial of The Civil War, it seems to me impossible to regard that struggle as anything but an immense tragedy, especially for the South.

Please don't misunderstand me. My respect for my Confederate ancestors is so great that I devoted my first four novels to their lives and the lives of their families during and after The Civil War. But what I realized when I came to write about Nathanael Greene was that we Southerners too often disregard the American Revolution--the only successful, enduring national revolution in world history that has continued to grow and flourish over time by re-inventing, re-interpreting and striving always to perfect the essential values laid down by its Founders.

And the fact is that the South won the War of the American Revolution. In my opinion it is that achievement which represents our finest and most positive contribution to American history. It was that belief, confirmed by long and intense study, that led me to write Nor the Battle to the Strong. I hope it won't diminish the seriousness of my theory if I confess that my wife Ruth devised a promotional handout when the book debuted in 2009 poking a bit of fun at the persisting (and competing) popularity of Civil War fiction. Its title was, "Why Not Read about the War the South Won?"

If the claim sounds extreme, pause and consider the history. The Revolutionary War stalemated in the North after the French alliance and the battle of Monmouth. The British then unveiled their Southern Strategy, believing Loyalist support in the region and alliances with Native Americans would help them reclaim Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. Success in the South would then allow them either to sweep northward on a tide of victory and defeat George Washington or, under less propitious circumstances, approach the peace table and at least hold the Southern colonies for England.

This strategy succeeded admirably at first with the fall of Savannah and then of Charleston, the conquest of South Carolina and the defeat of General Gates' American army at Camden. But then, owing to incessant attacks by Southern partisan leaders like Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Clarke and Davie, together with the battlefield victories of the Overmountain Men at Kings Mountain and Daniel Morgan at The Cowpens, fortune began to turn against Cornwallis.

The decisive event of the Southern War was Washington's appointment of Nathanael Greene to the command vacated by Gates. Greene, a Rhode Island-born ex-Quaker, self-taught in military affairs, proved an adroit and wily strategist. So thoroughly did he outmaneuver and exhaust the army of Cornwallis in North Carolina that--though the Earl won the engagement at Guilford Courthouse--his force was virtually incapacitated and he chose, rather than try conclusions again with Greene, to limp off to Wilmington to lick his wounds. Eventually he marched north into Virginia to meet his fate at Yorktown in October 1781.

Americans are generally taught that ther surrender of Cornwallis ended the Revolution. We know this is untrue; Greene's Southern army, suffering defeat after defeat in places like Ninety-Six, Hobkirk's Hill and, debatably, Eutaw Springs, still, by stubborn perseverance and in the face of terrible want, during late 1781, all of 1782 and through the spring of 1783, succeded in winning back the Southern states and penning up the British in Charleston and Savannah, where they languished until their government concluded a peace based on American independence. It is this latter story that I tell in my forthcoming sequel The Sunshine of Better Fortune.

(End of Part One; Part Two will appear in my next blog posting.)

Independence Day

2011-07-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

During the week surrounding this Fourth of July I've been pleased to join with a number of other authors who've written about the American Revolution in submitting posts to the blog of Suzanne Adair, a popular author of historical fiction set in the Revolutionary period. My post and those of my colleagues may be found at www.suzannadair.typepad.com. Readers have responded to our posts with comments, some of which reflect astonishment that the South's contribution to the winning of our liberty is not more widely recognized--a fact which was the subject of my particular post. But a couple have, regrettably, reflected an unfortunate blind spot that I fear afflicts many Americans in these days of imperfect teaching of American history. They misread "Revolutionary War" as "Civil War." Now certainly there are many Southerners who still vow that what is generally called our Civil War was in fact the Second War of Independence for the South. But the misreading I refer to is of another stripe--it is simply the result of the sorry state of American education. I lament that our schools are turning out graduates who can't tell the difference between the war to win our national independence from Great Britain and our war between the states over the issues of slavery and disunion, even when the distinction is made for them, as it was in my post. I do not necessarily blame those on whom the distinction is lost; I blame the teachers and the education system that have failed to make the distinction clear. When will we in America ever come to understand the value of a quality education, one that teaches our children to respect and understand history? Those of you who know my work or have heard me speak know how strong my feelings on this topic are. How can a nation go forward in perfecting its values if it has no knowledge of how those values came to be or what they mean? Nowadays our political discourse is riddled with inaccurate references to supposed events of our national past that are said to have shaped us. Even when these inaccuracies are exposed, they are glibly explained away and we as citizens shrug our shoulders and excuse them. Isn't it time we acquainted ourselves with the real history of the United States? Isn't it time we retooled our education system so it teaches us the truth about how our values were formed and refined and perfected over time?

THE SUNSHINE OF BETTER FORTUNE

2011-06-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

After pledging, in my last post of October 2010, to do a better job of updating my blog, I have--obviously--failed to peform as advertised. The reasons are several, but the chief one is that I've been working very hard to complete the sequel to Nor the Battle to the Strong, my 2008 novel about the American Revolution in the South.

Its working title is The Sunshine of Better Fortune, a phrase taken from Major General Nathanael Greene's parting address to his army in the spring of 1783. When Green used those words, he was looking toward a bright future for the American nation he and his army had just helped to establish. But while he had won his war, he had also lost both his personal wealth and, to some extent, the good regard of his heretofore faithful soldiers. He was looking from a deep darkness into the light of hope.

The story of the last year and a half of the Revolutionary War in the South is both grim and inspiring; I won't spoil the novel by divulging details here, but suffice it to say, Greene and his men, and their women, were tested to their limits by severe trials both on the battlefield and off. Yet despite these difficulties, it was also a time when men and women could find love or recover a lost love; share the unique bond that unites those who fight for their lives and for a cause; and be satisfied that they had struggled successfully to attain a high and worthy purpose.

I've found that story so compelling that I've devoted all my energies to it for these past several months. The story is so large and so important that I've often doubted my ability to do it justice. But in spite of everything I've kept steadily at it, till I've reached the point when I can just catch a glimmer of its ending; thus I've told myself I'll complete it by summer's end or by early fall at the latest. Then of course I'll have to try to get it published--no mean achievement given the current economic environment.

Now, the other reason I've allowed my blog to languish for almost eight months is that I find myself a singularly uninteresting person; thus, it's difficult for me to write about myself. I'm mainly just an old guy sitting at a computer and doing little else but research. So rather than bore you with a recital of personal trivia, I thought I'd patch in below an excerpt from my manuscript of The Sunshine of Better Fortune:

Day broke, and at mid-morning one of Major Call’s dragoons came pounding into camp bearing word that Lady Greene’s conveyance had passed the vedette line at Goose Creek Bridge and was fast approaching.

That was the thunderbolt. It mattered not that she had been long expected, three interminable months upon the road, delayed first in Philadelphia and next at Mount Vernon, Petersburg, the Moravian Towns, Salisbury, and finally at the High Hills. Now she was here. It seemed a miracle, or a phantasm. Excitement stabbed him so sharply that he feared his heart might burst; he did momentarily lose his breath, and perhaps, he feared, the power of speech. But then he heard himself call for his horse with his old battlefield roar and a startled Peters scampered obediently off to fetch a saddled Cruger. With the same exuberance he summoned Pendleton and Morris; Caty knew them from his letters, would be pleased to see them in his company.

A sudden inspiration set him rummaging in his trunk; he sought and found the cockade given him by a friend when he left West Point to take up the Southern command; it was the only bright thing remaining to him—perhaps its bit of color would relieve, to a degree, the spectacle of dilapidation he knew he would present when Caty saw him. He fixed the silly thing to his hat, a whimsy of the sort common to him in easier times but now so rare as to seem peculiar. Pendleton and Morris stared disbelieving when they came, but Greene did not mind; on this one occasion he would permit himself a felicity. Five minutes more found them galloping toward Goose Creek, accompanied by a swiftly summoned sergeant’s guard of dragoons.

They had made about twelve miles when, at noon, the path straightened and ran on before them to the very verge of sight, diminishing to a thread; and upon that thread, just before it lost itself in the surrounding wilderness, Greene spied an atom of movement. “There!” he cried. “There she is!” He struck spurs to Cruger and the gelding sprang into a run.

Greene leaned forward into Cruger’s flying mane. The speck in the distance grew, took shape, became a coach and four; behind it, riders—dragoons by their dress—in a column of twos. Then details emerged: the body of the coach, once green but weathered now to a mud-dimmed olive; a sour-faced driver on his perch hauling at the reins, a footman on the rear dickey box turning round to peer at him; then, thank God! faces in the near-side windows, first Burnet’s squint at the quarter-light, then, in the door-light…Caty.

He flung a hand high in greeting; she gave back a timid, unsure gesture, a flutter of her fingers, withdrawn as quickly as given, and he realized with a plunge of despair that she did not know him. Sobered, he slowed to a trot as her escort—Third Dragoons by their white coats, probably from the Continental camp at the High Hills—advanced on him with drawn sabers, their lieutenant demanding to know his business.

His anger surged. “I’m General Greene,” he bellowed. The lieutenant paled, drew aside with a salute, mumbled an apology. Greene ignored him, spurred alongside the coach, bent eagerly to the door-light. And saw Caty. In a black tricorne trimmed with yellow, ruffled neckwear, a riding habit of purple velvet, a multitude of golden buttons, lace at her wrists. Beauty that stole the breath.

Her eyes just now were a luminous violet in the light of day but would be black as jet when passion came; he suddenly remembered that. But under the beauty she was pale, worn. Which was she—surpassingly lovely or jaded, reduced? She looked up at him oddly, inquiringly, as if trying to believe that he was actually her husband and she was actually herself, that they were the same two who had wooed and wed and made children together and once had known how to laugh and dance and make love and walk hand-in-hand under golden-red maples in the Rhode Island autumn. He knew he had changed in the two years of their separation but he had not expected her to change too. He had expected to see what he remembered—his vivacious child-bride, his wild girl from Block Island, lit from within by laughter and mischief. Now her fire was dimmer. A wound opened in him that he feared might never again close. They had lost so much. They had lost a part of each other’s lives, a prize beyond value that could never be recovered. War had consumed it. All they would have of each other now was the remnant that the war had left them. He reached down and they clasped hands and suddenly he burst into tears. But Caty did not weep. She smiled and spoke his name with the old tenderness. Her almond-shaped cat’s-eyes brightened. She said, “That’s a pretty cockade you’ve got in your hat.”
He choked on tears and then on laughter. “I fear,” he said, “it’s my only possession to escape the mold and rot—including my poor self.”

“We’re no longer what we were,” she admitted. “But then, look what we are.”

“What’s that?”

“Lovers,” she smiled. “Man and wife, come together after too long a time apart. And the very best of friends.”

He stepped down, unwilling to release her hand, Pendleton and Morris and the sergeant’s guard trotting up all unnoticed. He spoke vaguely to Burnet. The Major, who had somehow left the coach without his knowing, took Cruger’s reins. Next a strange lady came forth—fortyish, shapeless in a billowing pelisse, a calash on her head and features hidden by a traveling mask of stiffened silk—this must be Mrs. Kingston, hired by Caty in Philadelphia as a traveling companion, to keep malicious tongues from wagging; Pendleton helped the duenna into the dickey box. Then Caty’s strong hand drew him up. He was inside the coach. She was in his arms. Her fullness. Her warmth. Her smell. Her mouth upon his. And at last her tears too. He tasted their salt. “You were with me,” he told her. “Even when I tried to shut you out.”

“I know,” she answered. “And you were with me.”

A CHANGE OF VENUE

2010-10-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

In my last post I mentioned that in writing Blood Offerings and Season of Terror, my fiction/nonfiction pairing about the murderous Espinosas of Civil War-era Colorado, I was feeling a strong tug westward and hoped to find a way to relocate to that fascinating and beautiful region, which is the original home of my wife Ruth.

In the time since, however, that goal has seemed to go glimmering thanks to the stubbornly bad economy. Consequently I've reconsidered my options and have come to the conclusion I should just stay put here in Western North Carolina for the foreseeable future and turn my energies back to a project I abandoned two years ago--a sequel to my Revolutionary War novel Nor the Battle to the Strong.

Back in 2008 I stopped working on this project--a book which I call The Sunshine of Better Fortune--because my fancy was captured by the sinister Espinosas. Now that they're out of my system, I'm eager to find out what happens to my 18th-century lovers, James Johnson and Agnes Baker, and to my favorite Revolutionary General, Nathaniel Greene, as well as to numerous other characters new and old who will, I hope, tell readers the fascinating untold story of how America's freedom was ultimately won, not at Yorktown in 1781 as the school books would have us believe but around Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia as late as 1783. I've resumed work on the sequel, which ran 200-odd pages when I quit on it two years back--and so far I'm feeling pretty good about the direction the writing is taking.

I'm doing this while shopping the Espinosa manuscripts around, so in case you're wondering, I still haven't given up on my Colorado serial killers.

By the way, I have to thank my publicist Britt Kaufmann for updating my website which, as those of you who may have checked it in the last year or so know, I have allowed to languish pretty much unattended. I pledge to do better in the future.

WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

2010-05-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

It was October of 2009 when I last posted to this blog. There are several reasons for the long hiatus. First, I was busy completing my novel Blood Offerings, an account of a spate of serial killings committed in Colorado Territory in 1863 by the Espinosas, two Hispanic brothers and their nephew who set out to examinate all Anglos. After finishing the novel I surfaced from my customary submerged-from-the-world compositional state, looked around and realized that the market for serious fiction had just about gone belly-up while I was otherwise engaged. So I took another look at the base material of the novel and realized it might also make absorbing fare for a nonfiction treatment. I decided to try my hand as a straight historian--something I've always secretly wanted to be . That piece of work is done now. It's called Season of Terror: The Espinosas in Central Colorado, March-October 1863.

Not everyone who knows my work will necessarily agree with my characterization of my fiction as"serious." Historical novels, no matter how solemn, tend to give off a faint odor of literary illegitimacy which the delicate nostrils of the intelligentsia cannot fail to sniff. Still less will a historical novel set the the 19th-century American West be likely to gain acceptance by those who judge books not by their content but by what is perceived to be their genre. So Blood Offerings, easily mistaken as a "Western," may never see the light of day.

But I have hopes for Season of Terror for, behold, it is topical. The Espinosas may have been madmen or simply homicidal criminals, but they were also religious fanatics who had come to hate what they saw as the godless, greed-infected, racist and imperialist nature of the Americans who had conquered their New Mexico homeland in 1846 and set about imposing Protestant Anglo ways on a 300-year-old Hispanic culture, disrespecting their Roman Catholic faith in the process. They became what we would call terrorists in the jihadist mode, and operating in true terroristic ways, striking at random from secret in order to spread the maximum amount of panic. They killed at least 32 Americans and perhaps more, before they were shot down in their turn, one by a civilian posse and the other two by a rugged old-time mountain man named Tom Tobin, a good friend of the legendary Kit Carson.

Not only does this story offer some constructive cautionary lessons about how terrorism can be incited, it also shows how terrorism can cause the terrorized to set aside their own customary values the better and faster to find and extinguish the terrorists. In the Espinosas' case, two innocent men were lynched and several more tortured by terrified Anglos determined to put an end to their intolerable fear. I think the story has some resonance for today. Anyway, that's what I've been up to lately. I'm shopping Season of Terror around to publishers now; Blood Offerings is fast asleep in my flash drive.

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.