Following Where the River Begins
Author’s Notes: Following Where the River Begins
Technically, this little book would be called either “creative non-fiction” or “essay” or even “nature writing.” To me it was an exercise in personal prose.
This kind of prose is best done in steps:
(1) Observe. Really observe. Stare at a leaf until you find two dozen features in it. Listen to a waterfall and write down twenty different sounds it is making. Lie in a quiet clearing and write down all the sounds you can hear.
(2) Make notes. Carry a pocket-size spiral notebook and stub of pencil. Stop whenever you have a thought about your surroundings and jot down a word or two (“green gooseberries” or “flash of bluebird”) that will later remind you of that little moment.
(3) Write your journal. Each evening, take a half hour or so to write out more detailed versions of your daily notes. An example might be “Saw green gooseberries growing wild along an irrigation ditch. It is one of life’s very hard things to do, watching gooseberries ripen and not being tempted to try them until they’re really, really black-red.”
(4) Write your essay. Sift your journal entries for bits that belong together and turn them into an essay.
There you are. Observation to notes, notes to journal, journal to essay.
A publishing company has expressed interest in re-issuing this book as Following Where the River Begins and Other Essays. The “other essays” will be my meditations about water. There’s one essay about windmills and prairie, one about Sandhill Cranes on the Platte River, one about Alaska, and one about my grandfather’s attempts to do dry land farming in eastern Colorado.
Author Notes on Gunfight!
One of the giggles in doing this book was coming up with the title. I had a fantastic editor, one of the best in the university press system, and he had a passion for the topic. I was a writer in tall grass, let me tell you.
He and I talked about a title that would tell people what the book was about. You can just about guess the various dumb-sounding one we came up with. Shootout Stories by Western Writers, Dropping the Hammer, Slap Leather, Six-Gun Debates, Peacemaker Justice—they all sounded like drugstore paperbacks.
I wrote down Gunfight one day and put the ! after it. That was it. We figured everyone would “get it” but book buyers and reviewers and even my own secretary had to ask “is that exclamation mark part of the title, or are you just excited about the book?”
Gunfight! started in a huge error of logic. I knew that the “first” literary gunfight, in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian was short and tame. In Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star” (1947) there are three or four pages of blood and guts in a gunfight. Being an intellectual, I jumped to the conclusion that gunfights in Western literature had become progressively more violent over the years.
Wrong.
But it’s still an interesting collection. I mean, who knew that O. Henry wrote westerns with gunfights in them? Or that “The Tin Star” became the film High Noon? Or that “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” didn’t shoot Liberty Valance? And who ever heard of Hopalong Cassidy drinking in a bar, getting into a shootout, and ending it with his spur smashed into the cheek of his opponent?
Gunfight! didn’t sell enough copies to satisfy the publisher, so it was dropped. My collaborator and I were compiling a sort of sequel, a collection of stories about Western chases—men hunting down men—but since Gunfight! was a financial failure, the chase collection remains in the back of a file drawer. Too bad: there’s some good stuff in it.
Author’s Notes: Prose and Poetry of the American West
Let’s just call it PPAW.
The top-ranking questions I get about this book include:
How long did it take you to compile this textbook?
About six years. My dean gave me a small grant ($500) to do a search for existing anthologies of Western American writing and to research the copyright permission costs involved. That took a year. Another year—I was teaching full time of course—went into selecting the material I wanted, which meant I had to read hundreds of books and stories and poems.
Still teaching a full load, I had to find out who owned the material copyrights (and that is not a simple job!), find out where it was originally published, and then negotiate with the copyright owner on a price. Once I knew what I wanted and how much it cost, I was ready to try to sell it to a publisher.
After that, it took lots of time to write the author biographies, to write the various historical essays, do the bibliography work, establish “correct” texts, etc.
Was it easy to find a publisher?
No. This was going to be a thick, expensive book to produce. So publishers wanted some kind of guarantee that it would sell enough copies to pay back the cost. After lots of search and work, I did manage to get two grants to subsidize the permissions expenses and then the university presses would talk to me.
Interesting side note: I sent a proposal for PPAW to a very large textbook producer back east and got the reply that “We don’t publish regional literature.” I sent back an answer in which I included two things. One was the observation that they had published Henry David Thoreau, the man who had never been anywhere and even bragged that he had “traveled widely in Concord.”
The other was an outline map of the U.S. on which I had drawn a circle. The edges of the circle included the Pacific Ocean, the Missouri River, the Mexican Border, and the top of Northwest Territory, Canada. Inside the circle I wrote “Some ‘region’!!”
Where did the idea for Western literary periods come from?
Late night and too much coffee. Each time I found a writer I liked, I wrote the name and birth date and titles on a 3x5 card and pinned it on the wall. Late one evening I was trying to make certain I hadn’t missed any decades of writing—since this was a historical anthology—and I lined up all these seventy or eighty cards in ten year bunches, by birth date. Where there were gaps, I left gaps on the wall.
What happened was that I was suddenly looking at groups of writers who all seemed to have similar approaches to the West. The earliest of them seemed to be just emerging as Westerners, just coming into the country, so I called it the Emergence Period.
The next batch of writers were clearly creating myths. Myths of cowboys, Indians, mountain men, plains pioneers, jackass miners, explorers, you name it. I called this the Mythopoeic Period, “poeia” meaning “to create.”
Next came writers who took the old myths but put new spin on them. Some like Guthrie took the old mountain man and gave him a modern set of psychological problems. Or some like Shaefer took the gunfighter and made him a kind of social evolution statement. So I called that the “Neo-mythic” period.
Last came the “New West” or “neo-Western” writers like Ed Abbey and Dorothy Johnson and Ivan Doig and Scott Momaday who responded to a changing West by writing about the inner life of Westerners, the personal side of being an author out here.
Are there plans for a second edition of PPAW?
Not by me. The problem is the amount of terrific literature that has been published since 1990. A second volume would be needed just to include a fair representation of writers who are women, Native American, Hispanic, Asian, Black, etc. not to mention the just plain good writers.
And there would be the cost problem. Publishing costs have gone up, but copyright permissions would be astronomical. Back in 1990 I could negotiate with an author or the agent and get a piece for as little as $200. Some gave me material for free. Today most writers would want close to $1,000 for permission to reprint one story. An anthology of twenty or thirty additional writers could end up costing a publisher $30,000 including printing and all.
I would love to see some young faculty member somewhere pick up the idea, though, and either re-edit PPAW or do a new anthology. It makes an effective textbook.
Who is your favorite author out of the fifty selections in the anthology?
I wish I had an answer for this one. Somebody—it may have been my wife—asked Frank Waters which of his own books he liked the best, and his answer was “the one I’m working on at the moment.” I wish I had something like that to say.
For personality and grit and good everyday writing, I’d choose Dorothy Johnson. She wrote “The Hanging Tree” and “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “A Man Called Horse” and was one of the funniest storytellers who ever left my sides aching from laughter.
For insights, philosophy, “depth” I guess I’d choose Frank Waters, who wrote The Man Who Killed the Deer. A close runner-up would be Loren Eiseley, the Nebraska bone hunter who wrote The Immense Journey.
Fred Manfred, Elmer Kelton, Willa Cather, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Wallace Stegner, Mari Sandoz, James Welch, Denise Chavez, Rudolfo Anaya, A.B. Guthrie Jr., Owen Wister—my bookshelf of “favorite” authors goes on and on.
How would you go about it if you wanted to study Western American literature and get a real overview of it?
Easy question, hard answer. Find yourself A Literary History of the American West and Updating the Literary West, both sponsored by the Western Literature Association and published by Texas Christian University Press. As soon as you’ve read and digested both of those books, get back to me and I’ll tell you what to do next.
It’s a big, big West out there and there are thousands of big writers who have measured up to it.
Author’s Notes: Shane
DID SHANE HAVE A GUN?
People are usually interested in how I met Jack Schaefer. It came about because I criticized his hero’s gun! Unlike the character in the film, Shane in the novel apparently isn’t wearing a gun when he rides into Starrett’s place. “This Shane never carried a gun,” writes young Bob, “and that was a peculiar thing because he had a gun.”
Bob, being a kid, pokes around in Shane’s stuff and finds a gun inside Shane’s saddle-roll. He describes it as “a single-action Colt, the same model as the Regular Army issue. This being the summer of 1889, I assume it was a Peacemaker sort of Colt.
Well, later in the novel after the gunfight, Schaefer writes that “he broke out the cylinder of the gun and reloaded it.”
Jack Schaefer came to Colorado State University as a guest lecturer one semester and when we’d been introduced I brought up this point, that the Colt single actions of the 1800s had loading gates and that it was pretty difficult to “break out the cylinder” and you sure wouldn’t want to take out a Peacemaker cylinder in the middle of a gunfight. This led into a discussion of whether such tiny details had any significance in Western literature.
Jack later phoned to ask me another gun question. He was writing a story with an old Remington .22 pump in it and he seemed to recall that this gun ejected its empty cartridges downward out of the bottom of the receiver. But he wasn’t sure. I told him I’d owned one of those and it was true. I still remember the sensation of a hot brass cartridge dropping from the gun straight down the sleeve of my flannel shirt, a thing that happened more than once.
A couple of years after the Critical Edition of Shane came out, Jack and I were having a friendly drink in the living room of his home in Santa Fe and this old argument came up about Shane’s revolver. Jack got up and came back with a .45 revolver, so I figured he was going to resolve the question by shooting me. But he handed it to me and said “that’s the gun I had on my desk when I was writing Shane.”
It turned out to be a 1915 Regular Army Colt, the double-action model with its cylinder mounted on a hinge so it could break out for reloading. As long as we knew each other, this business of Shane using a gun that hadn’t yet been invented remained a running joke between us.
Jack Schaefer never pretended to know everything about guns and horses and cattle and such details as go into many pulp westerns. But he knew his mythology and he knew his history and he certainly knew how to write simple and powerful prose.
WHAT THE H__LL HAPPENED TO THE CUSS WORDS?
I wanted this edition of Shane to feature the original authorized wording of the first edition, which meant we were going to have to take apart a first edition and photocopy it. The publisher didn’t want to destroy an expensive first edition—worth around $500 in those days—and said that a second edition would do just as well.
I said it wouldn’t, and to prove my point set out to show that the first and second editions might look the same but might not be the same. And sure enough, I found nineteen differences. Stranger yet, they were deliberate changes that somebody had made in order to remove the words “damn” and “hell” from the novel.
Just by pure luck, I discovered that the man who did it was still working at Houghton Mifflin. I phoned him and asked if he was the one who censored Shane and he admitted to doing it. He said it was for an edition—the 1954 edition—intended for high school libraries. What he didn’t know until I told him was that he’d missed two instances of “damned” and “damn it all.”
So in this critical edition the damns and hells are back in. What I still don’t know, though, is whether the cuss words appear in all the foreign language versions of Shane. That would include Japanese, German, Portugese, Chinese, Sanskrit and a dozen other languages. Heck, maybe some of them don’t even have cuss words in their vocabulary.
THE SIGNED EDITIONS
Shane: The Critical Edition was published in hardcover as well as paperback. I took a boxful of them down to Santa Fe for Jack Schaefer to autograph, and so far as I know he autographed only two or three dozen copies of the book. People may have brought others for him to sign, but I doubt that there are more than a hundred signed copies out there.
More interesting to collectors of signed editions is this: Jack and I both signed a dozen copies of Shane: The Critical Edition and today I have one and I know three other people who own them. I’ve no idea where those other eight rare copies went. I don’t even remember if they were hardbound or paperback.
Even more rare are the three hardbound copies autographed by various people who contributed to the volume. I have one of these and don’t know where the other two are. They are signed by Jack Schaefer, me, Charles Rankin (who wrote the history background essay in the book), Michael Marsden, Fred Erisman, Gerald Haslam (Schaefer’s biographer) and James Folsom.
WHAT ABOUT BUD?
Some reviewers thought that I should have included a longer essay by novelist A.B. “Bud” Guthrie in the book, since it was Guthrie who wrote the screen play for the movie Shane. (Guthrie’s the author of The Big Sky, The Way West and other classic western novels.)
It did occur to me to have such an essay in the book so I sent a letter off to Guthrie, whom I had never met, asking if he’d honor us with an essay about Schaefer’s accomplishments and Schaefer’s greatness as a writer and about what a terrific book and film Shane really was.
There was no reply for a long time. Then one day I was talking with Jack Schaefer and mentioned that I’d asked “Bud” Guthrie to write an essay for the novel. And of course that was when I learned that the two writers had had a falling out and there was a lot of bad feeling between them. Jack was pretty amused by the fact that I’d asked one of his arch-rivals to praise the book. I never did find out what went wrong between them, but I’m guessing it had to do with the film script.
Guthrie was a gentleman about it. He sent me a short letter telling how he got the job of writing the screenplay. In it he says “I’ll just add that I admired his prose and the flowing movement he effected.” Then he goes on to mention the screenplay and says “I hope nothing I did has bothered Shaefer.”
Author’s Notes – A Title to Murder
I didn’t think anything could be as fun as going to Scotland to research The Tobermory Manuscript, but doing the background work for A Title to Murder was every bit as interesting. Even more rewarding was having my son, Robert, return with me to Alliance to take photographs and do sketches for the book. There are a half dozen of his drawings in the various chapters, ranging from the picture of the “haunted” house and the drawing of “Horse” (Professor McIntyre’s ancient Dodge pickup) to scenes from the bar where our hero hangs out.
Some people have sneered at Nebraska’s Carhenge, calling it an eyesore and a junkyard posing as art. (Or was that a work of art posing as a junkyard?) I had seen it and walked through it several times, but one cold, windy day when the northern gales were whipping up the sand and making the loose sheets of metal bang and hammer I discovered my next murder site. I didn’t even have to imagine it being cold and lonely and battered by wind, not that day!
I came home and did some research on Stonehenge. And when I returned to Alliance I took along my tape measure. Carhenge IS a full-scale replica of Stonehenge. The cars are the same size as the stones. The diameter of the inner circle and the outer circle is the same. The compass placements are the same. One other thing is the same: you can’t get any information about who built it. Somebody did, obviously. It took time and muscle and talent to hoist those cars into place and weld them there. But in Alliance you will search in vain for the “who” and the “why.” Some people know, but they ain’t tellin’.
Writing the book also entailed some very pleasurable reading. My hero, Professor McIntyre, teaches a course he created: Novels Named For Women. So before I could do my own, I had to kick back with a cup of tea (okay, sometimes a glass of single malt) and re-read Moll Flanders, Clarissa, Madame Bovary, Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Daisy Miller, Emma and My Antonia. Oh, and let’s not forget Lolita.
One last anecdote, to illustrate the kinds of adventure a novelist might run into. As I said, my son Robert and I were in Alliance to re-visit the Carhenge setting and so he could make some sketches. He’s an excellent sketch artist, the kind who can never resist whipping out his pad and pencil whenever he sees something interesting.
On the night in question, he and I set out in search of a cold beer. We found a small local tavern, the kind my Minden, Nebraska friend Stan Smith used to call a “blue collar” place. And Stan was not talking about Arrow Shirts in pastel colors. The people in this bar were working people—farmers, ranchers, men from the Burlington repair shops, construction men, and a few women who were also in the 8-to-5 class. I was content to sit and be quiet and sip my cold beer, but Robert had to haul out a pad and start sketching people. “Here we go,” I thought. “The egghead professor and the hippie artist, about to get thrown out of a bar in Alliance.”
But I had misjudged. As they gathered around to see how he had drawn them, every one of those guys grinned and told him how good he was at it. They didn’t go so far as to buy us any beer, but they were as friendly as friendly can be. So I put them in the book that way. My professorial hero may be a figment of my imagination, but the people he meets are real.