RBPs LAST WRITTEN WORK was the introduction to Penguins 2010 publication of Owen Wisters THE VIRGINIAN, finished very shortly before he died and well worth reading. Virginian Intro By Robert B. Parker We miss the west, more perhaps than we fully understand. People in Phoenix, Arizona, probably miss it as badly as people in Portland, Maine. We miss the west when we are in the west. For we are not in the west that we miss; the one we miss is a myth. We linger over the myth. We re-imagine it; live our lives by its standards; aspire to be of that place and people; form policy, love and die by the myth. It is the myth of America and it is embodied, almost always in a man with a gun. We are not alone in this. Most cultures have at the heart of their national mythology the image of a man with a weapon. A killer of other men. It is, I think, less because such a man can impose his will on others, and more because he can maintain the clarity of himself. Robert Warshaw writes in, The Westerner: What he defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image – in fact his honor. This is what makes him invulnerable. When the gangster is killed, his whole life is shown to have been a mistake, but the image the Westerner seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat as in victory: he fights not for advantage and not for the right, but to state what he is, and he must live in a world which permits that. The world of the Virginian is of course the mythic American west, where, with each reiteration of the frontier expanding west, the opportunity to be whatever you might wish to be is amplified by circumstance, and guided by a Protestant religious heritage which urged that every man be his own priest. The nation itself stood, it thought, for independence, and the argument between Trampas and the Virginian is after all quite simply, dont tread on me. The development of Trampas as a suitable adversary for the Virginian is not the novels greatest virtue, but Trampas is sufficient to make clear that the freedom to be who you are does not guarantee heroism. Rather, Trampas serves to remind us that goodness is only possible if you could have chosen evil. Felix Culpa! Wister was not the first person to understand, or maybe, better, intuit, these things. Certainly Fenimore Cooper understood the nature of the American hero. His noble bumpkin Natty Bumppo seems to have established the form. Twain gives us the American Hero without a gun. Scott Fitzgerald shows us the baleful hopelessness at the heart of the dream. Faulkner has shown us how it went astray. Hemingway has sown us what it cost. But it was Wister, and the success of THE VIRGINIAN that established the man with a gun as a cowboy. And it is the cowboy, the man with a gun, in all his manifestations, who has lingered longest and deepest in the American imagination, and echoes of Wisters novel appear in surprising places: Of the death of his friend Steve, the Virginian says, well he took dying as naturally as he took living. Like a man should. Like I hope to. In his last movie, THE MISFITS, Clark gable says, Dyings as natural as living. The man whos too afraid to die is too afraid to live. Surely the central tension in HIGH NOON, between the eastern woman and the western man over the need for a gunfight can be seen as replication of the central tension(and its resolution) in final part of THE VIRGINIAN. And Jack Schaefers fine novel, MONTE WALSH is in its form, very much like THE VIRGINIAN. THE VIRGINIAN is nothing more than a portrait of the American Hero in all his natural grandeur. He is not good because he lives in the west. But the West is where he is able to make his heroism manifest. The novel is a loose cluster of individual vignettes held together by the over arching love story, and the gathering undercurrent of the show down with Trampas. The vignettes dramatize not only the nature of the hero, but his environment. And the American west in the 19th century, seems a place of laconic wisdom. The people understood the way things were and accepted them as part of the western condition. As befits an unregulated culture, these are proletariat people, who have learned life by living it, hands on, at the very edge of civilization. They know from experience (like Huck Finn), not books (Tom Sawyers source). None of these things make a perfect novel, and THE VIRGINIAN is, in fact, less than perfect. There is a kind of amateurism about him (Cooper was like this, too), as if he never really thought himself a professional writer, as if hed never entirely learned his craft. Wister never quite got the first person narrative voice. Many scenes in THE VIRGINIAN take place out of the narrators purview. Long after James taught us how crucially point of view could influence meaning, Wister paid it no heed. He didnt develop Trampas in enough complexity to make him a worthy adversary for The Virginian. He didnt develop Steve in enough density to make him a worthy friend, or to make his death what it should have been. It is also puzzling that he locates so many of his most dramatic moments, like Steves death, off camera. Despite the fact that Twain had already shown us in HUCKLEBERRY FINN how much could be done with the American vernacular, Wister still writes in that 19th century schoolroom English, that very likely, no one ever spoke. For the first time I noticed a man looking on from the high gate of the corral. At that moment, he climbed down, moving like a tiger, smooth and easy, as if muscles flowed beneath his skin. Eek! But some of this is probably revisionism. Addressing the fact that writers of his time knew so much more than writers of a previous time, Eliot said, yes, and they are what we know. The American western, and hence, perhaps, the American soul (if there is such a thing), might well be different had Owen Wister not written, THE VIRGINIAN. It is a book to be read in order to understand your culture, maybe yourself. You should know THE VIRGINIAN, the way you should know books like THE GREAT GATSBY, or HUCKLEBERRY FINN, or John Wayne, or baseball, or Doonesbury. One should know as one should know Jackie Robinson, say, or Amelia Earhardt, or Bill Maher, or Louis Armstrong. Regardless of their official ranking, they bore very deeply into the American experience. I doubt that Owen Wister had any such penetrative aspirations when he was writing THE VIRGINIAN. Most writers, once they start, aspire to finish. But whatever he sought, he wrote a pretty good book. It has moved sturdily along through the generations. And the generations are better for it. Me too.
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 19:06:55 +0000
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