The new true West

Since the time of the Vietnam War, the old and new West have provided the subject matter for many of America's leading writers, including Sam Shepard, Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass and, more recently, Sherman Alexie, who is dragging palefaces kicking, screaming and laughing into seeing the West from an Indian perspective -- it seems as if we didn't "win" the West after all. With one slim short story, merely one among many others just as good, Annie Proulx has irrevocably altered our vision of the cowboy.

My reading list for Modern Western Novel 101 would include Charles Portis' "True Grit" (1968); Michael Ondaatje's collection of "left-handed poems," "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" (1970); Ron Hansen's novel of the Dalton Gang, "Desperados" (1979) and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (1983), which has just been made into the most anticipated western film of the year starring Brad Pitt; Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic "Blood Meridian" (1985); Pete Dexter's elegiac twilight-of-the-god novel of Wild Bill Hickok's last days, "Deadwood" (1986); N. Scott Momadays "The Ancient Child," which juxtaposes the legend of a young Kiowa boy with the legend of Billy the Kid; Robert Coover's phantasmagorical "Ghost Town" (1998); Philip Kimball's sweet, sad and savage "Liar's Moon" (1999); and Bruce Olds' bracing postmodernist portrait of Doc Holliday, "Bucking the Tiger" (2001).

A second, hardly less worthy, list could be made from E.L. Doctorow's "Welcome to Hard Times," an amusingly nasty revisionist take on the pulp western; Susan Dodd's heart-rending novel of Jesse James' mother, "Mamaw" (1988); Daniel Woodrell's 1987 "Woe to Live On" (which Ang Lee made into the film "Ride With the Devil"); and David Thomsons witty and original "Silver Light," which straddles the lines between western fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of a real-life and movie frontiersman and which was wrongly dismissed by some critics after its 1990 publication -- including, I must now admit, myself.

Of course, Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" belongs at the head of that class; the only problem is in deciding which of his other westerns belong there with it. McMurtry is the lone eagle (or lonesome dove?) of American letters, unclassifiable even though much of his enormous reading public regards him as the leading exponent of the traditional western genre he has helped to subvert. He has mocked his own status -- he reportedly once wore a T-shirt with the legend "Minor Regional Novelist" emblazoned across the chest, but through his novels, screenplays and essays he has probably shaped more people's vision of the American West than any man since John Ford. McMurtrys West, though, is infinitely more expansive and inclusive than Ford's. One hesitates to call McMurtry's vision revisionist if only because his visions tend to feel more authentic than the visions he is supposed to be revising.

"Lonesome Dove," which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, is, maybe, the second best western ever written (more on this in a moment) as well as the basis for the hugely influential 1989 miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. But its unrelenting non-romantic vision turns most of the comforting clichés of the western on their heads. In "Lonesome Dove," its prequel "Comanche Moon" (1997), and sequel "Streets of Laredo" (1993), "Anything for Billy" (1988), "Buffalo Girls" (1990) and, most recently, "Telegraph Days," about a womans rise from telegraph operator in a small Southwestern town to Hollywood scriptwriter, McMurtry has achieved the amazing feat of demythicizing the Old West while presenting a version of it that is more enthralling than the original. Despite McMurtry's enormous success in film and television, this alchemy has, for the last 30-odd years, generally eluded Hollywood.

As for that best western: The lodestone for the modern western novel, by consensus, is Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man," acknowledged by many critics, Pauline Kael among them, as a major novel in any genre. Its protagonist and narrator, the 111-year old Jack Crabb, tells his life story to Ralph Fielding Snell, "a man of letters," who concludes that Crabb "was either the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportions." There is plenty of ammunition for either conclusion: Having been kidnapped by Indians as a boy (he says) and spending his entire life moving back and forth between the two cultures, Jack meets nearly every famous character of the Old West, from Wyatt Earp to Wild Bill Hickok (whose murder in Deadwood Jack witnesses) to Sitting Bull and Gen. Custer. In the end, Jack becomes the only survivor of the battle of the "Little Big Horn." He makes no apologies for the incredulity of his tale: If you don't believe him "you can go to hell."

The book's appeal traces to two main currents: one, it's a tall tale in the great American tradition of Mark Twain, and, second, it's hip, modern and funny and anticipates appreciation and understanding of a vanished Indian culture by decades -- I know of no other novel by a white man that has such a favorable reputation among Indian intellectuals from Vine Deloria Jr. to Sherman Alexie. Unlike nearly every other white character in fiction or film, Jack never tries to judge Indians or explain them: "Indians simply never understood whites, and vice versa," he concludes. Sometimes his white chauvinism pops through. After arguing with one of his Indian relatives on the greatness of the Human Beings (as the Cheyenne refer to themselves), Jack looses his temper: "Whenever I ran into their arrogance it served only to remind me I was basically white. The greatest folk on earth! Christ, they wouldn't had them iron knives if Columbus hadnt hit these shores. And who brought them the pony in the first place?" Compared to the soggy piety of most white writers' accounts of native cultures, Crabb's crusty skepticism must strike most American Indians as refreshing.

Dismissively reviewed by the New York Times and ignored by most others upon publication, "Little Big Man" has metamorphosed into a classic, largely due to word of mouth, reputation among such luminaries as Henry Miller and, most notably, Ralph Ellison, who championed it to other National Book Award judges. (They said no; westerns need not apply.) It was reportedly one of Janis Joplins favorite books. John Cheever told Berger that on his visit to the USSR he noticed, "Everyone at the University of Moscow was reading 'Little Big Man' in the seventies and eighties." Marlon Brando was the first to want to make a film from it, but couldn't get the backing following the disaster of "Mutiny on the Bounty." Arthur Penn eventually brought it to the screen in 1970, but as a Vietnam-era allegory that gives off just a faint echo of the novel's resonance. The novel, reissued last year by Delta, is timeless, as is the 1999 sequel, "The Return of Little Big Man," which expands Jack's adventures to include the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and the Wounded Knee massacre. Sadly, "The Return of Little Big Man" is currently out of print, though easily available from online booksellers. An energetic filmmaker looking for a fresh new subject for an epic western could do a lot worse than giving both books the screen treatment they deserve.

Ultimately, though, as Larry McMurtry observed some time ago in his essay "Cowboys, Movies, Myths, & Cadillacs": "The Western is not a responsible genre. Within the last 25-years, the writers of the West have done more with the mythic materials than the filmmakers have done, though unfortunately the work of most Western writers reaches only a limited audience and has only a limited impact. The film, if only because of its distribution and the power it achieves through pure repetition, continues to carry the myth to the mass audience."

As McMurtry's and Diana Ossana's script for "Brokeback Mountain" has helped to prove, there is no longer "the myth" to be distributed but a vast prairie full of myths. There are so many classic stories of the western frontier that haven't begun to be told yet, from the legendary black cowboy and bulldogger, Bill Pickett; to the California gold rush bandit Joaquin Murrietta, whose life and death were the subject of a book-length poem by no less a poet than Pablo Neruda; to Lottie Dano, the female Doc Holliday who lost her aristocratic Southern past and survived as a career gambler in the roughest mining and cattle towns of the West. Perhaps some daring and shameless filmmaker will even try to film the fabled gay porno novel from the 1960s, "Song of the Loon," about the ultimate forbidden love -- gay cowboy and gay Indian -- thus shattering the racial and sexual barriers of two great mythologies. (I even have a title they can use: "Brokeback Arrow".) The sky is the limit, and that western sky is awful big.

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