FROM THE DAYS of the first innocent sensations in Beadle's Dime Novel
series, on through Zane Grey's mass production and up to any present-day
newsstand's crowded shelf of _Ace High_ and _Flaming Guns_ magazines,
the Southwest, along with all the rest of the West, has been represented
in a fictional output quantitatively stupendous. Most of it has betrayed
rather than revealed life, though not with the contemptible contempt
for both audience and subject that characterizes most of Hollywood's
pictures on the same times, people, and places. Certain historical
aspects of the fictional betrayal of the West may be found in E. Douglas
Branch's _The Cowboy and His Interpreters_, in _The House of Beadle
and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels_, by Albert Johannsen in two
magnificent volumes, and in Jay Monaghan's _The Great Rascal: The Life
and Adventures of Ned Buntline_ Buntline having been perhaps the most
prolific of all Wild West fictionists.
Some "Westerns" have a kind of validity. If a serious reader went
through the hundreds of titles produced by William McLeod Raine, Dane
Coolidge, Eugene Cunningham,. B. M. Bower, the late Ernest Haycox,
and other manufacturers of range novels who have known their West at
firsthand, he would find, spottedly, a surprising amount of truth about
land and men, a fluency in genuine cowboy lingo, and a respect for the
code of conduct. Yet even these novels have added to the difficulty
that serious writing in the Western field has in getting a hearing on
literary, rather than merely Western, grounds. Any writer of Westerns
must, like all other creators, be judged on his own intellectual
development. "The Western and Ernest Haycox," by James Fargo, in
_Prairie Schooner_, XXVI (Summer, 1952) has something on this subject.
Actualities in the Southwest seem to have stifled fictional creation.
No historical novel dealing with Texas history has achieved the drama of
the fall of the Alamo or the drawing of the black beans, has presented
a character with half the reality of Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, or Sallie
Skull, or has captured the flavor inherent in the talk on many a ranch
gallery.
Historical fiction dealing with early day Texas is, however, distinctly
maturing. As a dramatization of Jim Bowie and the bowie knife, _The Iron
Mistress_, by Paul Wellman (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1951),
is the best novel published so far dealing with a figure of the Texas
revolution. In _Divine Average_ (Little, Brown, Boston, 1952), Elithe
Hamilton Kirkland weaves from her seasoned knowledge of life and from
"realities of those violent years in Texas history between 1838 and
1858" a story of human destiny. She reveals the essential nature of
Range Templeton more distinctly, more mordantly, than history
has revealed the essential nature of Sam Houston or any of his
contemporaries. The wife and daughter of Range Templeton are the most
plausible women in any historical novel of Texas that I have read. The
created world here is more real than the actual.
Among the early tale-tellers of the Southwest are Jeremiah Clemens, who
wrote _Mustang Gray_, Mollie E. Moore Davis, of plantation tradition,
Mayne Reid, who dared convey real information in his romances, Charles
W. Webber, a naturalist, and T. B. Thorpe, creator of "The Big Bear of
Arkansas."
Fiction that appeared before World War I can hardly be called modern.
No fiction is likely to appear, however, that will do better by certain
types of western character and certain stages of development in western
society than that produced by Bret Harte, with his gamblers; stage
drivers, and mining camps; O. Henry with his "Heart of the West" types;
Alfred Henry Lewis with his "Wolfville" anecdotes and characters; Owen
Wister, whose _Virginian_ remains the classic of cowboy novels without
cows; and Andy Adams, whose _Log of a Cowboy_ will be read as long as
people want a narrative of cowboys sweating with herds.
The authors listed below are in alphabetical order. Those who seem to me
to have a chance to survive are not exactly in that order.
FRANK APPLEGATE (died 1932) wrote only two books, _Native Tales of New
Mexico_ and _Indian Stories from the Pueblos_, but as a delighted and
delightful teller of folk tales his place is secure.
MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her
novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in _One-Smoke Stories_
(her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably _Lost
Borders_ and _The Flock_, do not recede with time.
While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her
_Death Comes for the Archbishop_ (1927), which is made out of New
Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the
Southwest but one of the finest of America.
Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington
Comfort's _Apache_ (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive
piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.
If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this
chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the folk tales in
_Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver_, and _Tongues of the
Monte_, also for some of his animal tales in _The Voice of the Coyote_,
outlaw and maverick narratives in _The Longhorns_, and "The Pacing White
Steed of the Prairies" and other horse stories in _The Mustangs_.
The characters in Harvey Fergusson's _Wolf Song_ (1927) are the Mountain
Men of Kit Carson's time, and the city of their soul is rollicky Taos.
It is a lusty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson's _The Blood
of the Conquerors_ (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican
and Anglo-American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a
native. _Grant of Kingdom_ (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of
character, and historical values.
FRED GIPSON'S _Hound-Dog Man_ and _The Home Place_ lack the critical
attitude toward life present in great fiction but they are as honest and
tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.
FRANK GOODWYN'S _The Magic of Limping John_ (New York, 1944, OP) is a
coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in
the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in the
telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over
imagination or sufficiently stressed the art of writing.
PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in _The Return of the Weed_ (short
stories), _Far from Cibola_, and other fiction coped with modern life in
the past-haunted New Mexico.
OLIVER LAFARGE'S _Laughing Boy_ (1929) grew out of the author's
ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He achieves character.
TOM LEA'S _The Brave Bulls_ (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of
the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear of Death for its dominant
theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge
of Courage_. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful
in its power. _The Wonderful Country_ (1952), a historical novel of the
frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more complexities
of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea's
drawings and paintings, with which both books are illustrated.
_Sundown_, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than
_Laughing Boy_ into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage) and his
people. Its translation of the "long, long thoughts" of the boy and then
of "shades of the prison house" closing down upon him is superb writing.
The "shades of the prison house" come from oil, with all of the world's
coarse thumbs that go with oil.
GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S _Hold Autumn in Your Hand_ (1941) incarnates
a Texas farm hand too poor "to flag a gut-wagon," but with the good
nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. _Walls Rise Up_
(1939) is a kind of _Crock of Gold_, both whimsical and earthy, laid on
the Brazos River.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A.
E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited: _Flowering Judas_
(1930, enlarged 1935); _Pale Horse, Pale Rider_ (1939), _The Leaning
Tower_ (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the
psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases
sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to
cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America
today is her peer in subtlety.
EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels--distinguished
by intricate plots and bright dialogue--had appeared in the _Saturday
Evening Post_. His finest story is "Paso Por Aqui," published in the
volume entitled _Once in the Saddle_ (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a
canyon--on which he ranched--named for him in New Mexico, was an artist;
at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is the
only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biography--_The
Hired Man on Horseback_, by May D. Rhodes, his wife. See under "Range
Life."
CONRAD RICHTER'S _The Sea of Grass_ (1937) is a kind of prose poem,
beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the grass, is perhaps
the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far
achieved.
DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S _The Wind_ (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of
commerce and other boosters in West Texas--a tribute to its realism.
_The Grapes of Wrath_, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word
in the American language. Although dated by the Great Depression, its
humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels
produced by America in the first half of the twentieth century.
JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote _Fix
Bayonets_ (1926), followed by _Jeb Stuart_ (1930). A native Texan, he
followed the southern tradition rather than the western. _Lone Star
Preacher_ (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of
Confederate fighting men woven into fictional form.
In _High John the Conqueror_ (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys
real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos
bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come
to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action,
without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.