The new true West

The western isn't undergoing a resurgence, because interest in the West has never waned. But its suddenly high profile does follow a remarkable proliferation of fiction on the West that somehow has managed to go unnoticed by the Eastern literary establishment. In fact, it's been largely unnoticed by literary critics anywhere. In the series of lectures published as "An Introduction to American Literature" (1967), Jorge Luis Borges wrote: "Compared to the 'poesia gauchesca'" -- or poetry inspired by the exploits of the gauchos in his native Argentina -- "The North American Western is a tardy and subordinate genre." Tardy and subordinate, Borges meant, compared to the western movies of Hollywood.

It's a curious and never satisfactorily explained fact that for most of the 20th century, America's writing about its own frontier lagged behind (usually by a decade or so) the path already trodden by movie westerns. In the first 60-odd years after the closing of the frontier -- if we want to use the date of 1893 chosen by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his landmark thesis "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" -- there was very little work that rose far above the level of regional interests. In fact, except for "Roughing It" by Mark Twain -- new journalism before "new journalism" -- and a handful of stories by Bret Harte, the Old West produced precious little in the way of true literature for about half a century from 1870, when it was at its wildest, to around 1920. (Some would argue a case for Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian," which produced an iconographic figure when Gary Cooper played the title role in the popular film version. However, the book's reputation doesn't survive a reading through its stilted prose and late Victorian morality.)

In the wake of the popularity of movie westerns came the western pulps, most notably those of Zane Grey and then Louis L'Amour, who has been identified many times as the most popular living writer in the world. L'Amour, in particular, has his champions, but no critical sleight of hand can turn L'Amour's simplistic fictions into literature. Better writers like Jack Schaefer, who wrote "Shane" and "Monte Walsh," never quite succeeded in escaping the pulp corral either: Their books are too steeped in the lore of the movie western to stand on their own as literature. Even Schaefer's admirable "Shane" (1951), which is a darker and more complex work than George Stevens' film, reads as if it was inspired more by three decades of western movies than by the real frontier West.

Not that there haven't been exceptions, but they are always mavericks rather than trailblazers. Wallace Stegner, born in 1909, established a solid reputation as a writer of fiction and nonfiction as well as that of staunch environmentalist. But it wasn't until he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, 35 years after his first published novel, that he began to garner real critical appreciation. (He died in an auto accident in 1993.) The painfully slow arc of Stegner's career probably illustrates the problem with most serious writers on the West: There isn't enough of an audience in their own environment to support them, and it takes a long time for the nation's literary nerve centers to find out about them.

This is even more the case in the curious career of an even greater writer: Willa Cather. Cather, born in Virginia in 1873 and raised in Nebraska, fought her way out of the spell of Henry James -- the worst possible influence for a writer who aspires to write about the West. (In the words of Larry McMurtry, "Prose  must accord with the land. A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest needs to be as clean as a bleached bone and as well-spaced as trees on the llano. The elements will dominate here, and a spare, elemental language, with now and then a touch of elegance, will suffice. We could probably use Mark Twain, but I doubt we're yet civilized enough to need a Henry James.")

She didn't attract major attention until "O Pioneers!" which was published in 1913 when she was already 40 years old. For the next 34 years, until her death in 1947, no one wrote with more compassion and insight about the Great Plains and its people. Though she found a substantial readership that she has maintained to this day, the West was of no urgent interest to her friends and colleagues in the New York literary circles. However, her contemporaries knew how good she was. William Faulkner paid her homage, and when Sinclair Lewis rejected the Nobel Prize in 1926, he raised eyebrows by saying that Cather should have won it. So many disparate groups have embraced her -- surely she is the only writer to be claimed by political conservatives, lesbians and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas -- that she has always seemed outside of literary fashion. Though all of her greatest work, including "O Pioneers!" "My Antonia," "The Professor's House," and "Death Comes for the Archbishop," is set in the Southwest, I've met few western journalists or novelists who have ever read her.

"How many centuries of settled urban experience," Larry McMurtry asks rhetorically in "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," "does it take to produce a Proust or a Virginia Woolf?" I don't know, but, aside from Willa Cather, whose novels of the West were as isolated in American literature of that period as McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," it took us about four generations to produce the great novels of the American frontier. Though the fact escaped the attention of critics, virtually all of the finest novels about the legendary West have been written between 1964, when Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man" was published, and now.

Next page: Jack Crabb "was either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions"