A Century
of Great Western
Stories
Edited by
John Jakes
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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Introduction
What Happened to the Western?
by John Jakes
I
THIS COLLECTION CELEBRATES a literary form prized and read by millions around the world for more than a hundred years. With the invaluable help of Dr. Martin Greenberg and John Helfers of Tekno-Books, I have gathered together what are generally considered to be the best of the very best Western short stories of the past century. For everyone involved with developing and organizing the project, it has been a labor of love.
I got my start with Westerns via the movies, in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1939. I remember the powerful impression made on a young kid by Dodge City and Stagecoach. I became a writer of Westerns in the 1950s, producing a couple of dozen short stories and novelettes for the pulps, mostly those for Popular Publications (screaming yellow covers—cover paintings illustrating some form of hideous sagebrush peril—nearly every story title ending with an exclam or two!!).
Today you can’t find pulps, let alone a single national magazine that regularly prints Western fiction. A great venue for some of the best disappeared when The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s and the other so-called slicks fell out of favor and profitability after the 1940s. A recent attempt to create a short story magazine using Louis L’Amour’s name on the masthead lasted but a couple of years.
The Western story, clearly, has been ailing for a long time. In a rapidly changing world it has gone the way of parental spanking, presidential candor, marital fidelity, and literate movie dialogue. Some fear it will end up, sooner rather than later, just like the bustle, the buggy whip, the dodo and the passenger pigeon. We’ll explore that question shortly.
I am not a social scientist, but I can point to a day that the Western in all its forms took sick.
II
May 27, 1977, Friday, was the start of a Memorial Day weekend. We were living in Dayton, Ohio, where I buried myself each morning in a remodeled coal cellar, to battle implacable deadlines that unexpected success and skyrocketing sales had imposed on The Kent Family Chronicles.
That Friday night our son Mike went out to a suburban movie palace, with friends or on a date. He came home excited, having seen a largely unheralded science-fiction movie opening that day. He said we had to see it and extracted a promise that we would.
Next afternoon my wife, Rachel, and I set out. Around 4:30, after the curtains parted and the John Williams fanfare blared, there went sliding up the screen the kind of lettering I remembered from Saturday afternoon serials. Previous chapters were always summarized with this slanted lettering: it shrank as it ascended to the top of the frame where it disappeared, big lettering in the meantime continuing to roll up from the bottom. A man I’d never heard of, George Lucas, had remembered those serials, and put a new 70s version on the screen.
Once the slanted text concluded, a deep, almost intestinal rumbling began. And from the top of the frame, against a sea of stars, there appeared the prow of this spaceship descending into the picture, steadily revealed as ever bigger, ever longer—my God, I’d never seen anything so huge, or hugely spectacular, on any screen, not in all my years of traipsing to double features two and three times a week.
Star Wars was by turns flashy and corny, but most of all it was exciting, filled throughout with those visual tricks now shrugged off as “just more special effects.” In 1977 they were truly special, although looking at “Star Wars” many times since, I see the shortcuts resulting from a tight budget. In the Death Star conference room, the ball-caster chairs are the kind found in any office furniture store at the time the picture was shot.
Though we didn’t know it then, Star Wars would change many things. It heralded a flood tide of SF as well as nongenre pictures that depend on special effects of steadily escalating cost and dazzle to attract audiences. Clint Eastwood sardonically says, “Today the star of the picture is the explosion.”
To my mind, Star Wars is a conventional Saturday afternoon cowboy vs. bad men picture decked out with stunning visuals. I didn’t see that at first. For years, devoted moviegoers had thrilled to Technicolor vistas of Western scenery; suddenly we could thrill to Technicolor vistas of starry galaxies and fantastic rocketry. It seemed a completely new game.
But it wasn’t. The Western just changed clothes. Horse opera became space opera. And as old-fashioned Westerns on the screen began to suffer, so too did Westerns on the page.
In fairness, maybe it was time for a sea change. The Western movie formula was just that—trite and too familiar. Same goes for most Western fiction.
The 60s and 70s saw a significant drop-off of interest in subjects traditionally taught in school, among them history. The new, younger audience cared less and less about our common past, including the saga of frontier expansion. Sometimes they hardly knew about it, thanks to bad texts, bad teachers, and de-emphasis on academics in favor of “social behavior,” driver’s ed., et al.
A recent analysis of American college students showed that less than one-third are enrolled in the liberal arts. The rest are taking job-specific, career-oriented courses. Any wonder that the audience for old-style Westerns with their dubious history, quaint lathered horses, endless chases, saloon gunfights, bad men pitching off roof peaks in the final face-off, eroded rapidly when newer, glitzier visions of humanity came along?
Changes in distribution and marketing patterns for mass-market books played a part in downsizing the availability of Western fiction. Tom Doherty, president and publisher of the house bringing you this book, is a man of long experience in popular fiction. Tom observes, “The Western was always strongest in its mass-market format so, more than most publishing categories, it was hurt by radical restructuring of the wholesale and rack jobber distribution systems across North America. It was also hurt by the decline of the mall bookstore, but it seems unlikely that wholesale consolidation will go much further … and the latest credible forecast of consumer book spending predicts a compound yearly increase of five percent over the next five years [2000–2005]… . People who could cross the Rockies in covered wagons should be able to find a way to deal with the problems of book distribution.”
In spite of adverse trends in publishing, there are still traditional Western novels to read and enjoy. I regularly see paperback Westerns from major trade houses in wire spinners at convenience stores, K-Marts, and similar outlets.
At the same time, smaller presses are publishing nonformula novels by talented new writers. Quite interesting changes have taken place in these novels. No longer are they written entirely by men, or women hiding behind male pseudonyms. Increa
sing numbers of women are writing about the West from the long-ignored feminist viewpoint. Whether this will reinvigorate the genre, as some claim, remains a question.
No longer do all Westerns reflect a macho, all-white-and-all-right view of Western history. No longer are Native Americans exclusively villains, fiendishly fighting to stem the red, white, and blue tide of Manifest Destiny (a.k.a. land-grabbing). No longer are minority characters either nonexistent or burlesqued. No longer are novels dealing with the Western experience confined to the relatively few years from the close of the Civil War to the opening of the twentieth century. Writers range freely throughout our history, and even into prehistory. One major distributor of paperbacks created a new category, “Americana,” to encompass some of these new, evolving approaches to the Western. All to the good.
But friend, if you’re looking to read new Westerns in a shorter form—a three thousand- or five thousand-word story, for instance—you might as well forget it.
In its effort to list markets for short stories, the bulletin of Western Writers of America leaves me depressed. You can submit your story to low-pay/no-pay publications such as (I’m making these up, but they’re representative) Bit & Bridle Tales or Wyoming Feed & Seed Journal, but that’s about it. Any contemporary writer looking to make even lunch money from Western stories had better lope to a fast-food outlet for a part-time job.
It’s sad, because, as this collection sets out to establish, there lies behind us a whole century of wonderful, compelling Western short stories. Yes, some of them are steeped in the outdated techniques and mores of their time, but what fiction isn’t? These stories carry, if not in all cases a deep love of the Western land and heritage that inspired them, then certainly a profound interest.
Thinking about this introduction, however, it struck me that instead of dwelling exclusively on the past, I could more profitably look ahead, trying to glimpse the future of Western fiction in the next hundred years. Personally I suspected the outlook was bleak, but I didn’t want to rely on my own opinion.
I asked half a dozen outstanding writers of Westerns for their views, with surprisingly affirmative results.
III
My first respondent was the former president of Western Writers of America, Dale Walker. Dale is a friend, and a writer of excellent nonfiction about the West. He writes occasional fiction, too. And he has keen eyes:
“The old Western story—that scion of Buntline and Beadle, the pulps and 50,000-word ‘paperback original,’ ten percent myth and ninety percent horse apple—is dead and has been, Louis L’Amour reprints notwithstanding, for at least a decade. But the passing of the old formulaic Western does not translate to the death of the story of the Old American West. Nobody is writing ‘Westerns’ now, nor will they in the twenty-first century, but there will always be literature inspired by our greatest national experience, the westward movement.”
Miles Hood Swarthout, a screenwriter of note and the son of author Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist et al.) sounded a similar note:
“Old warhorses like the stories about Custer, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, the Earps and the James boys, the cattle drives, the Oregon Trail migration, and the Gold Rush have just been done to death. Time for a change!”
Loren Estleman is one of the best and most original writers of contemporary Westerns. Loren’s the president elect of Western Writers of America, and outspoken:
“The ‘traditional Western’ is hackery, pure and simple; none of the authentic classics can be so categorized, and the Max Brands and Frank Grubers who typified it are responsible for the form’s subliterary status …”1
Loren continues, “The death of the so-called ‘traditional Western’ is not mourned by serious artists, who realize that none of the great Westerns were traditional, and that to cast off the chains of the pulp past is to open the horizon.”
The least sanguine of all my respondents is one of the most talented writers of this generation, Elmore Leonard. His clean, powerful prose and remarkable evocation of character, often grim, just as often funny, have made him, deservedly, a literary star as well as a popular success.2 Dutch Leonard wrote me only a few days after receiving a glowing advance review for his collection of Western stories, The Tonto Woman. The review said it “might even revive the moribund Western literary genre,” to which the author replied to me, “I really don’t see it happening. Did Lonesome Dove revive the market? A Western now and then might take off, but I don’t see one book or even a few reviving the genre.”
The more confident response was Loren Estleman’s:
“I don’t agree that the Western is in any sort of danger and as president-elect of WWA I’m making it my first order of business to persuade Western writers to stop spreading prophecies of doom… . People take you at your own evaluation.”
Writing of past sins, celluloid variety, Loren sounded a note similar to that in his comment about prose writers. After referring to the overwhelming success of Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, and Lonesome Dove, he said, “A bunch of hack directors killed the spark by dumping on us the same old clichés in Bad Girls, Lightning Jack, and The Quick and the Dead… . What I find interesting is that Wyatt Earp was considered a big enough disappointment to end the Western, while Waterworld and The Postman, bigger disasters both, did not stop Hollywood from filming science fiction.”3
Judy Alter, a Texan, has written distinguished fiction and nonfiction about Western women. “I think there will always be a market for innovative approaches to Western material,” she said, citing as examples Cormac McCarthy and Tony Hillerman.
Richard S. Wheeler has won awards for his Western fiction, and written and edited admirable works of American history. He admits the Western has its problems, but is not daunted by them:
“Urbanization, technology, and increasing distance from the frontier period may operate against the genre. But Westerns were really not about the frontier; they were about character. They taught several generations of Americans the virtues that set us apart here in the New World, and equipped each of us to cope. From Westerns we learned about courage, bravery, loyalty, and optimism … . Critics of the genre condemn it for just that reason: it supplies standards and ideals the critics don’t like… . There is a profound thirst for stories that have admirable heroes we all want to emulate.”4
Then what kind of books and stories will be written? What kind of pictures shot? Miles Hood Swarthout gave an interesting answer:
“As we approach the millennium, another important transition period in America’s rather short history, I think you’ll find that the most thoughtful writers … may also be exploring the transitional periods of our past two centuries.”
Miles cites as examples of works that explore what he calls transitional eras Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (end of the Civil War); the film Sommersby (ditto); The Good Old Boys (traditional cowboy facing the onslaught of change, in both Elmer Kelton’s novel and the film directed by Tommy Lee Jones); and The Shootist, for which Miles cowrote the screenplay, from his father’s novel about the end of an era, and of the life of one of the last gunfighters—ironically, the end of the life of a Western icon, too: it was John Wayne’s last movie.
“The best writers,” he concludes, “will be more effectively mining the nooks and crannies of the Western myth … the transitional periods in the conquering and settling of the American West—the cracks and historical crevices hiding lesser-known characters and events whose mostly true stories cry out to be told.”
Richard Wheeler sees the more familiar West continuing to exert a strong hold on readers:
“The pessimistic historical revisionists have one thing wrong. Westering people brimmed with optimism and joy, and their high spirits and laughter dissolved their tribulations. The mythic Western catches that. ‘Realistic’ literature about the West usually doesn’t.
“There is ongoing demand for historical Westerns, and I expect … big, serious novels
that realistically portray our frontier life, and explore the human condition, will continue to sell. There is so much Western history that has never appeared in novels that the future of this sort of work seems boundless.”
To which Loren Estleman adds, “The American Western has risen after its death more times than Wile E. Coyote… . The truth is that the Western cannot by its very nature be defeated… . General acceptance of the Western as our nation’s only unique contribution to world literature is just around a very close corner.”
Tom Doherty concludes, “No category trends steadily upward, but those of value do not disappear. The Western is fundamental to the understanding of the men and women who opened and won a continent. They farmed and fought and built a nation destined to become the richest and most powerful on earth. They were a diverse people and, as a people, made mistakes, but most of us share a real pride in what they accomplished. There is value in telling their story, and many who wish to hear.”
IV
So there you are. Heartening words.
Maybe it’s necessary to mourn the passing of the much-loved “traditional” Western story, novel, and film—driven to the grave not only by Mr. Lucas and his clever colleagues, but by triteness and bad writing. Maybe we must say adios to the past by celebrating it in a collection like this one, then move on to some of those new vistas described for us by some very talented writers. If we’re at all convinced by their arguments, we should look forward eagerly to the new directions and new techniques of presentation.
And maybe if all those good predictions come true, another hundred years from now another team of editors may put together another celebratory anthology, and show us how the Western short story went on, thriving in ways we can’t possibly imagine at this moment.
I’ve but one regret: that I won’t be around to read it, and cheer.
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