Richard S. Wheeler's Blog, page 7

The Livingston Phenomenon

Almost half a century ago, various novelists and actors discovered the small Montana town of Livingston, north of Yellowstone Park, and settled here. Through the seventies and eighties, and into the nineties, Livingston was a unique locale. That was so long ago that generations have passed that have barely heard of the period and what happened here, and Livingston's reputation has largely faded away.

These people did not arrive all at once, but drifted in and out, finding a camaraderie here that created friendships among people who had little in common. I was among the last to arrive, and least connected to the main interests of others. My own background is pulp and genre fiction, not literature. Even so, I was warmly welcomed by people with larger ambitions and abilities.

Among those who came here and made literary or film careers out of their lives here, one of the earliest was Tom McGuane, from Michigan. He writes comedies of manners, New Yorker short stories, and nonfiction about our trout fishing and country life. His brother-in-law, Jimmy Buffett, visited here and wrote a memorable song, Livingston Saturday Night. Jim Harrison, also from Michigan arrived, and produced fine novels, some of them celebrated abroad. His daughter, Jamie, wrote numerous novels using a fictional Livingston as the setting.

William Hjortsberg showed up, wrote various novels and screenplays and a biography of his friend Richard Brautigan, who also moved here and spent a large part of his later life in Paradise Valley, south of town. Diane Smith arrived, and wrote some fine Viking historical novels. Walter Kirn showed up, and continues to write fiction that is good fodder for Hollywood filmmakers. Doug and Andrea Peacock arrived, and added formidable nonfiction to the literature erupting from this place. Peter Bowen, gifted satirist of the old West, found a home here.

Tim Cahill arrived, and began writing his famed travel and adventure stories for Outside magazine. Maryanne Vollers and her husband Bill Campbell have greatly expanded the nonfiction literary and TV output on Livingston. She has authored or coauthored notable books, including one of Hillary Clinton's, while he has photographed PBS documentaries.

Movie people settled in, including Peter and Becky Fonda, Jeff and Susan Bridges, Margot Kidder, and director Sam Peckinpah. but there were many others, including Warren Oates and Dennis Quaid, who bought Sam Peckinpah's ranch. Harve Presnell made a home in Paradise Valley. Another was Michael Keaton, who bought a ranch nearby. Some stay on. Artist Russell Chatham arrived, produced stunning lithographs, and eventually became not only an artist but a publisher and restaurateur. His Livingston Bar and Grille became a gathering place for authors from all over the world, including Carl Hiaasen, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Matthiessen.

In recent times, Livingston has also attracted musicians and a few rock stars.

For everyone I've named here, there were a dozen more, who showed up occasionally and helped turn Livingston into an absorbing literary town. These people are largely gone now, but a few have made this northern outpost their home. If there is one thing in common about these literary people, it is that they made their entire living from writing. Maybe that is why Livingston has not yet caught the attention of academics.

Sissies and Books

I have become alarmed by the decline of freedom of speech, especially on campuses, and the corresponding rise of sensitivity mandates issuing from administrations. I grew up in a time of robust freedom of speech, which was deemed to be crucial to ascertaining truth and defining desirable goals and values. That freedom has all but vanished in academic settings. The dominant ideal now is not to give offense, not even minor offense, hence the proliferation of rules requiring "trigger warnings" and the prohibition of "microaggressions." There are now academic sensitivity warnings against American classics, such as The Great Gatsby.

I have always regarded freedom of speech to enjoy constitutional protection, within limits well described by Justice Holmes when he said that yelling Fire! in a crowded theater is not protected by the constitution. I have also believed in civility; freedom of speech is most beneficial when those who practice robust debate remain civil and courteous to all opponents as well as allies.

Sad to say, the result of all this overprotection of students from all walks of life is to produce a generation of sissies, people so thin-skinned they can't function in the real world, and are so busy being wounded that their educations are worthless. Whole graduating classes are loaded with sissies, and they are going to have trouble competing with people who grew up in a tougher world, and are better able to handle the rough and tumble of non-academic life.

One of my favorite presidents, Harry Truman, memorably put it this way: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

And if you can't stand to read books that deal with the real world in a real way, then retreat to the nearest convent or monastery and stay there.

Struggling to Read a Novel

On the rare occasions when I tackle what is called a literary novel, it usually goes something like this:

I admire the author's voice, the quality that makes him or her unique. In a good literary novel, that voice is present on every page. But after a few minutes of admiring the voice, my interest wanes.

So I read more, this time enjoying the complexity of the characters. In real life, characters are complicated and contradictory and hard to fathom, and the literary novelist, always seeking truth, is often able to capture these things. But after a while, my interest in them wanes.

So I read the literary novel to look for the truths about our social order buried in it. Truths and insights are what separate literary fiction from popular fiction, so I pay attention, wanting to understand the author's philosophy, approach to living, beliefs, and humor. But after a while this pales, and I turn to something else, usually the elegance of language employed by the author, the adroit phrase, the simile, the metaphor, the delicious play on words. But after a while, these pale on me.

In fact the darned literary novel is dead in the water because nothing much happens. What was missing all along was story. In literary fiction, story is a crime. We don't want to see page-turning tension or drama in a literary novel. We want insights and lofty understandings.

So I turn to popular fiction, where story is paramount, and we want tension, page-turning drama, and an eagerness to see what disaster will strike next. But the characters are so thin it is hard to believe they are real, and the drama is so pervasive that there is no meaning. Life is unexamined. I grow bored. The story is there, in spades, but Scotch taped together, so I give up on popular fiction too, and turn to other things.

Mostly now I read nonfiction, biography and history. Those do capture my attention and admiration.

Hall of Fame

I received a package today from Western Writers of America. Within it was a handsome plaque bearing witness to my induction into the group's Hall of Fame. The McCracken Library, at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, will house the Hall of Fame and maintain an exhibit.

This year the group expanded the definition of the honor beyond contributions to the literature of the American West. Honorees may have contributed to film, music, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Included was a booklet prepared for the induction, and I found myself, by an alphabetical happenstance, to be on the same page as John Wayne. I did not ever imagine in a long lifetime that I would be on any page with John Wayne. John Ford and Clint Eastwood were also honored for their contributions to western films.

All those who had won lifetime achievement awards from the organization were included this year in the Hall of Fame. Among them were Edward Abbey, Max Evans, Dee Brown, Tony Hillerman, John Jakes, Elmore Leonard, Dale Walker, and many other worthies, all of whom have made contributions far more substantial than my own.

Change for Westerns

When I began writing western fiction, decades ago, I gradually discovered that the genre was deeply imbued by southern traditions and beliefs. Most of the writers were southern. Most wrote stories in which the protagonists were from the South, and were ex-Confederate soldiers, and angry at everything that lay behind them in the East. The genre was European-only. The conflict was personal, and not informed by ideals, and settled only one issue: Who would be the Top Dog?

There was little overt racism, but plenty of covert hostility toward Indians, and non-Europeans, who were all in the pathway of expanding white civilization. The idea of a literature promoting or favoring the historic occupiers of the western lands was so beyond the thinking of western novelists that Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee came as a shock. How could there even be another side, opposing the racially preordained expansion of English-speaking civilization? (Stories about non-English-speaking Europeans were just as rare. Ever see a Western novel about, say, Norwegian or Czech immigrants?)

But these were lesser peculiarities compared to the deep infusion of Confederate values into the western story. I have discussed this elsewhere, and won't rehash it here. I continued to write what I considered more traditional western stories, usually involving the building of a new civilization. The recent re-examination of the Confederacy, wrought by the alleged brutal murder of South Carolina blacks by a young racist, has brought to light just how deeply this racism still slumbers across the South, and for me, how deeply it infuses the mass-market paperbacks that are alleged to be Westerns. Most of these employ house or franchise author names, and I have never been told the names of their authors, but it is easy to see they are southern, or southern sympathizers, and that the Westerns they write are intended for southern, racist, white males.

I have moved steadily away from gunman fiction, preferring historical novels set in the West, or mining stories with a minimum of violence, stories that include the whole broad ethnicity of the frontier West.

What I am hoping is that the recent exposure of barely concealed racism in the South, that affects so much Western fiction, will begin a process of change that will root out the Southern "hero" once and for all. Western heroes, like mystery heroes, should courageously wrestle against disorder and lawlessness that threaten settlers, and not be a part of the problem in their own right. In mystery fiction, the detective's object is to restore safety and security and bring the criminal to justice. I am hoping that the Western hero will start to do the same, instead of using his anger and rebellious feelings to turn the West into a wasteland. A large branch of western fiction has been corrupted by the unreconciled South. But some good change is on the horizon.

How to Spot a Bad Western

High-body-count westerns involve a lot of slaughter but also shield the reader from the true consequences of all that bloodshed. Here are some of the attributes:

Cannon Fodder: The thirty or forty people slated to croak in one of these novels are not depicted as real human beings. That is to keep readers from sympathizing with the doomed, or being revolted by the amount of murder on the pages. So these characters barely have names. They are Charlie or Buzz or Red, but are not described. They have no spouses or children or parents or history or dreams or tender feelings. They are not in love. No loving spouse weeps at the side of these fallen men. We wouldn't know one from another. When a bullet fells them, a reader scarcely notices.

Wounds: In violent westerns, people are rarely wounded. The reader is never exposed to the suffering and cruelty of bad wounds. So we never see a character die in agony, slowly, weeping, desperate, in excruciating pain, sobbing for help. They are simply shot and vanish from the story and the reader never is exposed to the effects of the bullets. Miraculously, no bullet ever strikes a man's private parts, or renders him incompetent, or steals his speech from him or permanently blinds him. The authors of these stories steer the readers' eyes elsewhere.

Lingering Death: Likewise, readers who devour all this violence are carefully shielded from lingering death. In violent westerns, almost all dying in immediate. No one lies in his blankets for hours or days or weeks or more, while life drains away from him and hope flees. Readers are shielded from the reality of long, bitter, brutal, painful dying. That is to protect readers from understanding the true nature of the genre fiction they are devouring.

Absurdity: A favorite example, which I read a few years ago, opens this way. Two Wyoming ranchers, looking for "action" (gunfights) in Texas happen upon a large bunch of horsemen chasing a wagon filled with women. The two ranchers whip out their carbines and attack the dozen or so armed horsemen, eventually killing them all. Then they wander among the dead. Wonder of wonders, they know all these Texans, and name all the badmen. Then they abandon the bodies and their saddled horses, and go chase the wagon and woo the women. The novel goes downhill from there, reaching depths of absurdity I've never seen in print before or since. As always, the protagonists survive virtually unscathed, so they can be stuffed into another series novel. The ludicrous scene swiftly vanishes into the next absurdity.

Moral Equivalence: In violent westerns, there is no moral or ethical difference between the heroes and their adversaries. They think and act alike. No one is more ethical or higher-minded than the others. No one dreams of a settled, civilized world. That prevents the reader from taking sides, and allows a reader to absorb the bloodbath without any allegiance to anyone in the novel. Once again, the author's real purpose is to shield the reader from the consequences of the violence portrayed in the novel.

Lack of Plot: There is only one underlying plot to these gunman westerns: Who will be standing at the end? Or what killer bunch will outlast the other killer bunch? The whole drama lies in the fighting, and there is no nuance that might lead a reader away from the riveting slaughter.

Next time you see a violent western in the mass-market racks, look for these attributes. They are all part of the formula.

Does Fiction Teach?

Whenever dark days afflict our republic, and these come along frequently now, I find myself wondering whether the western story is somehow culpable. I suspect it is, but don't really know.

Mysteries are violent, but the violence is directed at curbing violence, catching killers, and restoring good order. So there is a rationale, a moral or ethical underpinning, that steers crime fiction and mysteries away from celebrating violence.

But that is not true of modern western fiction, some of which clearly celebrates violence for its own sake, and makes a hero of the Top Dog. The violence of western gunmen, these days, is rarely directed toward ending injustice, rescuing the weak, restoring peace, or bringing comfort to the disadvantaged. The underlying purpose of some westerns is to glamorize the violent hero.

The question remains, does this violence embedded in certain mass-market stories, have an effect on some readers, inciting them to violence, or at least allowing them to justify whatever violence they are contemplating in their private lives? I don't know the answer. No one knows. I suspect that some unstable readers discover in violent westerns a legitimizing fantasy that nurtures their own violent conduct and sometimes triggers it.

In previous incarnations of the Western, the hero resorted to violence reluctantly, as a last resort. Put bluntly, Shane hated his own profession.

I have long since ceased to write novels of that sort, high-body-count stories, and if violence crops up in my novels, it is minimal and there because I am pursuing historical realities. I particularly avoid glamorizing violence, writing anything that an impressionable young person might employ as a rationale for murder.

Scumbag Westerns

This is an appropriate moment to return to one of the things that troubles me most about modern western fiction. What I call the gunman western isn't about the frontier, or settling the West at all. The plots of these stories boil down to one question: who will be the last man standing? Or the last gang standing? They are called westerns by their publishers, whose cover designers slap a western hat on an armed man, and sell the novels to distributors and the public as western fiction.

These stories are properly called Southerns. Their protagonists are usually ex-Confederate soldiers, and the stories are set in Texas and the southwest, occasionally in a border state. They are not set in the North or northwest, such as the Dakotas, Montana or Idaho. And their protagonists are not former Union soldiers, who entered the war to hold the Union together and set the slaves free. By contrast, the ex-Confederate protagonists entered the war to defend the buying and selling of other human beings, and to legitimize the practice in the Confederacy. They may have fought valiantly, but for an evil cause that remains a sinister underground current of thought even now.

These Southerns are not about settlement or establishing civilization or social norms in a new land. Southerns are marked by nihilism; there is no moral or ethical difference between the protagonists and their adversaries. They are equally rotten. They are equally angry and equally defeated and frustrated. These losers play their own game. Whoever survives to the end of the novel is the winner.

These Southerns sell enormously well in the South, but elsewhere in the country they are rarely even on the mass-market racks. They are highly profitable, which is why they are published, even though they are often repugnant to everything this nation stands for. I strongly defend the constitutional right of publishers to publish whatever they wish, but I find myself wishing that these publishers and the authors who write scumbag western fiction would find something better to do with their talents.

Fine Historical Novels

Carol Buchanan has written three historical novels about an episode early in Montana's history that continues to evoke controversy, largely because the accounts that have come down to us are confused, contradictory, and sometimes absurd.

Ms Buchanan writes about Alder Gulch, where bountiful placer gold drew miners during the Civil War, mostly Confederates even though the place was in the Northwest. There was no law governing these mobs; Congress, busy with the war, hadn't established the legal structure of the Territory of Idaho, and later Montana. The Idaho "sheriff," Henry Plummer, operated with minimal authority, and was soon commanding a band of road agents, who robbed and killed those entering or leaving the remote district. A group of vigilantes, mostly Masons, restored order, hanging known highwaymen, and turned over the administration of justice to popularly acclaimed but still extralegal courts while awaiting the arrival of legitimate officers of the territory. Unlike most vigilantes, these were rigorously committed to justice, and they largely disbanded as soon as order was restored. But the whole episode remains controversial and vexed.

Ms. Buchanan, who has a doctoral degree in English literature from SUNY and lives in Whitefish, Montana, set out to write some serious fiction about this complex crisis. In interviews she said that her doctoral work didn't really prepare her to become a novelist, and she took MFA courses and attended workshops to learn the art. The result paid off. Her first novel, God's Thunderbolt, won a Spur Award, and her second, Gold Under Ice, was a finalist. She writes seriously, paying attention to her art while unfolding the story of the Montana vigilantes and the hanging of Henry Plummer. Her characters are nuanced, complex, governed by their beliefs or ideologies, and vivid.

I've been reading her fine third novel, The Devil in the Bottle, about Joseph Slade, the selfsame Slade of the Overland who caught Mark Twain's interest, now living in Virginia City, a model citizen when sober, and a vicious and cruel wretch when drunk, which is most of the time. The dilemma is, how do you control a man who is tearing the town apart, wrecking businesses, wounding people, and terrorizing citizens? There are no jails; you can't simply lock him away.

The vigilantes briefly reconstituted themselves to defend the mining district, and their sole option was to hang him though he had committed no capital crime. They could not banish him because he refused to leave. This, in Ms Buchanan's able hands, turns into an absorbing novel, a first-rank novel I can recommend to anyone.

She is working on a fourth novel, also connected to events in Virginia City in the 1860s. These rich and beautifully wrought stories are just the works needed to invigorate interest in the early West, and record complex frontier life for posterity. I wish her every success.

Love Poem

Years ago, my wife, Sue, handed me a poem by John Frederick Nims (1914-1999). She offered no explanation; she didn't need one. As soon as I read the poem, I knew exactly why she gave it to me. Now and then I reprint it here, just to let people know how very fortunate I was, and am. And all the toys of the world have broken.



Love Poem


My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,

At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,

Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,

And have no cunning with any soft thing


Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:

The refugee uncertain at the door

You make at home; deftly you steady

The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.


Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,

Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime

Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—

Misfit in any space. And never on time.


A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only

With words and people and love you move at ease;

In traffic of wit expertly maneuver

And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.


Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,

Your lipstick grinning on our coat,

So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven

Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.


Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—

I will study wry music for your sake.

For should your hands drop white and empty

All the toys of the world would break.