The Western Story

DESPITE ITS ANCIENT and international antecedents, the short story is concededto be both the youngest and most American of major literary forms. The "western story,"as a particular variation on that form, has been among the most popular in literary history, a haven for readers trapped in an increasingly urban and complex world. As Jack Schaefer noted in 1955, "while not all western stories are escape fiction, the overpowering majority of them are."

Throughout the twentieth century, however, as Schaefer further recognized, some gifted writers of short fiction have abjured the compelling formula of "code Westerns" and sought to produce significant literature set in the West. Until the recent past, however, they were often trapped by readers' assumptions. In the three decades since Schaefer's observation, the post–World War II generation has emerged, a generation that has deepened and broadened the ranges of subject and technique. There are, in effect, two traditions of western stories, one popular and commercial, the other literary and less commercial. Both can be traced to the early nineteenth century.

The initial systematic examination of the short story is conceded to be an article by Brander Matthews, "Short-Story," which appeared in The Saturday Review of July 5, 1884. Matthews pointed out that the new form was not merely brief fiction, but brief fiction of a particular type. "The difference between a Novel and a Novelette is one of length only . . . . But the difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference in kind," he wrote. "A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its unity of im-pression."He also gave credit to Edgar Allan Poe: "by his precept and by his practice [he] had revealed the possibilities of the short-story and [he] had known what it ought to be."

Poe had, in an 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales published in Graham's Magazine, contrasted the characteristics of the novel with those of the tale, noting that the latter could be read at a single sitting, thus achieving "the immense force derived from totality." He suggested, further, that skillful writers seek "a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out" of a tale. Matthews was correct in asserting that Poe did not formulate a system for evaluating stories, but Poe nonetheless did clearly offer the first significant attempt to define the developing genre, and his definition is essentially as old as the form and may have been a significant factor in its development.

Poe, himself, Robert Marler has convincingly argued, wrote tales, not short stories. The former were products of romantic imaginations, so they emphasized the supernatural over the natural; moreover, their characters tended to be stylized, sometimes archetypal figures, not infrequently allegorical in intent, while figures in short stories tend to be recognizably human first, then perhaps symbolic. Another major distinction, as William Peden explains, is that "the short story, brief and unwinking, tends to ask questions rather than suggest answers, to show rather than to attempt to solve."

Popular tales being published in America during the mid-nineteenth century had, Marler argues, degenerated into formulaic, romantic, often stereotypical patterns in which characters showed no internal life and were frequently employed to illustrate popular ideals and values; they had, in fact, taken on many of the characteristics that popular western stories in this century displayed, and that is no coincidence, since most code Western short fiction is not a variety of short story but of the simpler tale. The short story was the product of not mere literary experimentation, but of a realistic, often painful recognition of the individual's place in an increasingly urban, industrialized world. It represents, that is, a literary birth of modern consciousness.

The more complex form emerged in the eighteen fifties, when Herman Melville, who had produced tales ("The Bell Tower"), moved beyond that form in concept and style to produce short stories ("Bartleby the Scrivener"). Marler points out "that the critical commentary of the three masters of short fiction (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) describes a smooth transition from the tale to the short story." Melville, with his almost contemporary theory of fiction–he sought to create a readable surface for his stories that would conceal deeper, more important meanings–and with his recognition of encroaching dehumanism in the modern world "stands at a crossroads in the history of American fiction." It has continued to be a busy intersection in western writing, as writers have traveled both the West-thatnever-was and its fictive evocations, and the harsher reality of many contemporary short stories. The difference between the tales of B. M. Bower or Clarence E. Mulford or Charles Alden Seltzer and the stories of Dorothy Johnson or Walter Van Tilburg Clark or Raymond Carver illustrates this contrast.

Washington Irving's sketches were also important components in the development of short fiction in the American West, for many modern writers employ variations of that form to recreate regional experiences; the Texas sketches of Elroy Bode, for example, or the "stories" of Chester Seltzer (Amado Muro) are obvious examples. In The SketchBook (1819–20), which included "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving built a link between eighteenth-century essayists and the short story tradition that was to follow. "I consider a story merely a frame on which to stretch the materials," Irving explained, mentioning also "the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life" and "the half-concealed vein of humor that is often playing through the whole. . . ." By emphasizing setting, scene, and atmosphere in his work, Irving set the stage for local color writing and the tendency to stress description that would dominate the western story as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Two other nineteenth-century factors were important in the development of the western story. Most obvious was the recognition and employment of elements of oral literature–particularly the tall tale–by gifted writers. The stories of Bret Harte and Mark Twain brought together elements of native humor and western regionalism in a manner that Irving had only hinted was possible. Harte himself believed folk humor was the single most important element in the emerging short fiction of his time: Crude at first, it received a literary polish in the press, but its dominant quality remained. It was concise and condensed, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant, or a miracle of understatement. . . . It gave a new interest to slang. . . . It was the parent of the American short story.

The second factor was less evident but nonetheless vital: American publishing. Ian Reid explains that the absence of international copyright regulations led to a proliferation in America of cheap reprints from overseas. As a result, "American publishers were seldom keen to sponsor work by local novelists. . . . The short story, on the other hand, could find a ready public through the gift annuals and periodicals" of the time. The commercial story, cradle of the popular "code" Western, was born as a consequence.

By the turn of the century, then, five traditions had emerged, not mutually exclusive–indeed, frequently blended–yet each individually important: the oral yarn, the sketch, the tale, the short story, and that compendium of subject and style that has come to be called the commercial or popular story. It was the merging of these forms with the unique and frequently fantasized subjects offered by the Great West that led to the western story or, more accurately, western stories, for two traditions evolved.

An awareness of the West and its literary potential had evolved even before the maturation of the short story. Irving and James Fenimore Cooper are generally conceded to be the first major writers to recognize and effectively employ western settings and subjects. In 1832 Irving wrote his Western Journals after a journey to the frontier. He followed with A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). Even more important were Cooper's Leatherstocking novels, the first (The Pioneers) appearing in 1823, the fifth and last (The Deerslayer) in 1841; James K. Folsom has convincingly argued that Cooper captured the epic scope and mythic power of frontier experiences. Ironically, myth–in the popular sense–came to be the range of commercial Westerns a century later. In any case, the West as literary material was established by mid-century, as were the pressures of urbanization and industrialization which created both audience and attitude.

In the sixty-plus years following the publication of Cooper's final Leatherstocking novel, two other major events presaged modern western stories. First, following the Civil War, was the development of the popular western hero in dime novels, a figure that seems to have extended little altered from Natty Bumppo to Rooster Cogburn; indeed, most of the original versions bore a striking resemblance to Leatherstocking, a hunter and trapper. Observes Henry Nash Smith: "the persona created by the writers of popular fiction was so accurate an expression of the demands of the popular imagination that it proved powerful enough to shape an actual man in its own image."

Second, Owen Wister published The Virginian in 1902; a large, relatively sophisticated audience read it and altered, however slightly, the image of the western hero, adding gentility to temper the preexistent toughness, courage and cleverness, but the centrality of that epic figure, by now transformed into the cowboy rather than the trapper, was undisturbed. What is more, the audience itself broadened; Wister's West was acceptable.

During the three decades that followed, a gifted cadre of writers emerged. Some, like Zane Grey and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), wrote and further defined the commercial story. Others, such as William MacLeod Raine and Steward Edward White, worked most effectively with variations on the oral tradition combined with aspects of both the literary and commercial short stories. Still others–Eugene Manlove Rhodes is the classic example here–continue to confound critics who cannot decide whether they were major writers or merely gifted commercial authors.

A surprising number of writers from that period had lived on or near the frontier. Rhodes had been a working cowboy, as had W. C. Tuttle, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and James B. Hendryx. Willa Cather knew first hand the rigors of life on the plains; so did Hamlin Garland. Jack London had been an oyster pirate. As Harry E. Maule notes, these writers and others of their generation, "conscientious craftsmen all, some of them artists, were above all natural story tellers and for the most part wrote out of experience and direct observation."

It was during this period that popular literature merged with a new medium, motion pictures, to solidify the stereotypical western story, the horse opera. It might be fairly stated that while one school of writers explored the possibilities of the "code Western" with its constant setting, melodramatic characters, and rich appeal to popular myth, history and nostalgia, another sought to write fiction that reflected the complexity and drama of human existence in a western setting. Of course, many writers have done both, but among the more distinguished modern practitioners of the former have been Frederick Faust (Max Brand), Henry Wilson Allen (Will Henry), Frederick D. Glidden (Luke Short), Ernest Haycox, and Louis L'Amour, while William Saroyan, Jarvis Thurston, William Eastlake, Johnson, Clark, and Schaefer have been among the celebrated writers in the latter tradition.

Popular Westerns, with their many variations, benefited from the development of two twentieth-century versions of dime novels: pulp magazines and the twenty-five-cent paperbacks, both of which provided writers with ready markets and an arena for apprenticeships. Slick magazines– Colliers, Saturday Evening Post and Argosy, among others–also published Westerns, with writers such as Rhodes, Schaefer, and Johnson featured; it is no coincidence that those three work in the tradition of the literary Western, a tradition that has grown in importance since World War II.

Louis L'Amour, the most successful modern writer of commercial Westerns, has over his thirty-plus years of publishing increasingly deepened his products, moving away from formulaic presentations. He explains, "My intention has always been to tell stories of the frontier, the sort of stories I heard when growing up"; that is, L'Amour has added elements of the oral tradition to commercial roots–which include components of the sketch, the tale and the story–as his work has matured. In fact, literary Westerns have created an awareness of complexity and of formal variations that have elevated the level of popular Westerns and moved the finest commercial practitioners toward more original, perhaps more significant work, blurring boundaries between the two. Observes Henry Wilson Allen, "Everybody suddenly wants to be the Boris Pasternak of the Purple Sage." It must also be pointed out that the large numbers of older, formula western stories continue to be reprinted, so their appeal appears little diminished.

Wallace Stegner has written of the dilemma of western writers who feel trapped by a history that may be more popular fantasy than reality; he observes that "you don't choose between the past and the present, you try to find the connections, you try to make the one serve the other." Michael Marsden and Jack Nachbar have suggested that one reason the popular Western has endured is that writers like Haycox, Faust, and L'Amour "are really telling versions of one, long epic tale unfolded over an extended period of time through the efforts of a number of skilled storytellers."

The popular western story remains just that, popular. But it has changed. More accurately, it has been changed by the persistence of literary storytellers who have rejected formulas and insisted upon bringing the variations of modern writing to western materials in their continuing quest for truth. If the "code" Western has been a vehicle for escape, the literary story has been a vehicle for exploration. As the two traditions move together, it is the literary Western–progeny of the classic short story and the modern consciousness that produced it–that dominates and deepens the western story.

GERALD W. HASLAM, Sonoma State University

Selected Bibliography

Durham, Philip, and Everett Jones, editors. The Western Story: Fact, Fiction, and Myth. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. This anthology divides its contents into three sections: Fact, Fiction, and Myth, an interesting if not entirely successful approach.

Elder, Gary, editor. The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction. Los Cerrillos, N.M.: San Marcos Press, 1975. Controversial, revisionist collection which seeks to expand both subjects and styles. Contains interesting, if over-written, introduction.

Henry, Will. Will Henry's West. Edited by Dale L. Walker. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1984. Along with a generous sampling of Henry's fiction, this volume contains a revealing introduction.

Kopp, Karl, and Jane Kopp, editors. Southwest: Towards the Twenty-First Century. Corrales, N.M.: Red Earth Press, 1981. Among the finest of revisionist anthologies. Valuable introductory essay.

Marler, Robert. "From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850's." American Literature 46 (May 1974): 154–57. Traces the pivotal development of the short story as a unique form, suggesting that Herman Melville is the key figure.

Maule, Harry E., editor. Great Tales of the American West. New York: The Modern Library, 1945. This collection contains most of the best magazine writers from the first half of this century, plus Maule's own revealing introductory essay. A classic anthology.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper and Row, 1923. Classic study of the most American of literary genres. Surveys earlier scholarship.

Schaefer, Jack, editor. Out West. London: Transworld Publishers, 1959. This two-volume collection features two insightful Editor's Notes. Volume One contains the original 1955 note, while the second volume has an updated version.

Taylor, J. Golden, editor. Great Western Short Stories. Palo Alto: American West Publishing Company, 1967. This comprehensive anthology is enlivened by Taylor's chapter introductions, and also includes Wallace Stegner's "History, Myth, and the Western Writer."

West, Ray B., Jr. Short Story in America 1900–1950. Freeport, N.Y. : Books for Libraries Press, 1968. A valuable survey by a distinguished western editor. Summarizes much earlier scholarship.