The Mythic West That Matters Now
Popular Old West culture re-examined in Chasing the Sun and True West.
By: Allen Barra 08/25/2009
In his famous 1893 frontier thesis, Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the juncture between the civilization of East and the savagery of the frontier defined America’s image of itself.
That may have been true, but one could argue that for the last 90 years or so the American character has been less defined by the realities of life in the Old West than by the Old West’s reflection in popular culture. That image is the subject of Edward Joseph Beverly’s Chasing the Sun, a veritable encyclopedia of literature of the West, and Michael Barson’s True West (no relation to either this magazine or Sam Shepard’s play), a pictorial history of Western films, TV shows and comics.
Beverly, a retired Army Corps of Engineers officer, has cast a wide net, one that takes in “genre” Westerns from Zane Grey, bona fide literature by Willa Cather and post-modernist fiction by writers such as Ivan Doig. The range is as vast as the country it covers, from the Spanish West (including selected reviews of Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country, set along the Texas-Mexico border) to Alaska (Rex Beach’s enjoyable pot boiler The Spoilers).
You’ll read chapters on every conceivable Western subject. My personal favorites are “The Native Americans,” which resurrects the reputation of Dan Cushman’s hilarious Stay Away, Joe from an Elvis Presley movie, and “Wealth of the West,” which covers books on hunters of gold, silver and other treasures, and takes in the enigmatic B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Venerated authors have written several fine books over the years on the subject of Western fiction—Loren Estleman’s The Wister Trace sits on my shelf next to me as I write this—but nothing so comprehensive and insightful as Chasing the Sun. Beverly is a historian, but he’s also a pretty good critic. Here he is on perhaps three of the greatest classic Westerns (along with Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man) ever written:
Pete Dexter’s Deadwood: “Dexter’s Wild Bill is a doomed and subtly noble man, weary of living up to the legend as others wrote about him...wry humor coupled with a deadly seriousness is a distinguishing characteristic of Dexter’s style.”
True Grit, a cult favorite by Charles Portis: “The pleasure of reading the novel lies in Mattie’s narration and the dialogue. Portis uses late 18th century vernacular, an archaic formal way of speaking found in pioneer diaries that’s humorously out of place when used by Mattie and her rough-hewn companions....”
Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove: “Authenticity makes the novel an important piece of work. When writers use historical characters and back-grounds in their work, they often exaggerate the sensational at the expense of the credible. Lonesome Dove has its exaggerations, but McMurtry maintains a balance in presenting people as they could have been and events as they might have happened.”
The amount of work that went into writing this book is staggering to contemplate, and Beverly’s effort is clearly a labor of love—I don’t detect a musty whiff of the academic anywhere. If it’s colorful and reasonably authentic, Beverly likes it. Elmore Leonard’s “pulp” Hombre is a “thoughtful, absorbing western full of action—a tale of classic confrontation” with “characters sketched quickly but clearly.” Elmer Kelton’s 1980 novel about the Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry, The Wolf and The Buffalo, has been much neglected by so-called serious critics. Beverly, rightly, finds it “A sympathetic picture of two opposing forces locked in a struggle to the death.... With sagacious insight, Kelton recounts the injustice that came with being black in a white man’s army.”
Comments (2)
Agnelli,
Have you joined our Community site? If not, you can join by clicking on the menu tab labeled Community. You may be able to find folks who can help you out.
Also, another article of ours in this same issue discussed Black Horse Westerns, published in England. You may be interested in reading it:
http://www.truewestmagazine.com/stori...
Cheers,
Meghan Saar
Managing Editor
True West Magazine
Dear Mister Barra, I'm writing fron Italy and I'm very interested in the American West (History and novels) since I was a teenager. I've read about one thousand western novels many in your language and I've translated some of them in my language. I've bought the interesting work of Mister Beverly and I think it's very insightful and well researched. Your article is very interesting and I'd like to correspond with some aficionado of western novels and possibly trade for some title that it's difficult for me to find.
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