Out Where the Sense of Place Is a Sense of Motion

It is exhilarating to me, 60 years after I graduated from a Western university and 45 years after I made the decision to come back West to live and work, to see the country beyond the 100th meridian finally taking its place as a respected and self-respecting part of the literary world.

I used to yearn for the day when the West would have not only writers but all the infrastructure of the literary life--a book-publishing industry, a range of literary and critical magazines, good bookstores, a reviewing corps not enslaved by foreign and eastern opinion, support organizations such as PEN, an alert reading public, and all the rest.

As a writer from the West, I had already discovered how it felt to be misinterpreted. Even well-intentioned people who wanted to praise me often saw in me, or expected from me, things that I was not prepared to deliver, and misread things that I was prepared to deliver. Now and then I used to put on my armor and break a lance against the windmill of the cowboy myth that dominated not only much Western writing but almost all outside judgment of Western writing. We rode under the shadow of the big hat. As they used to say of Reagan, we were big hat, no cows. Nothing could convince them in New York or Massachusetts that there was anything of literary interest in the West except cowboys.

If we took a count now, we would probably find that there are actually more writers in the West than cowboys; and even the cowboys annually gather in Elko to read their poems to one another. Some of those, at least, are real cowboys such as I knew when I was young--hired men on horseback with hands so callused that they would hardly close, whose celebrated independence amounted to little more than the right to quit one bone-breaking, underpaid job for another just as bad. Real cowboys have more brutality and less chivalry in them than the literary kind. Some of them have been subverted by their own propaganda and believe their own myth. Others, I am sure, are trying to do what any real writer is trying to do: render the texture and tensions of their own life, their own occupation, their own place. Their trouble is that if they write with honesty about exploitation, insecurity, hard work, injuries and cows, none of which make even a walk-on appearance in “The Virginian” and most of the horse operas it has spawned, they will find a smaller and less-enthusiastic audience than if they had written about crooked sheriffs and six-guns. I have myself written only two cowboy stories in a long life. Both of them are grim little epics of work, weather and cows, with no six-guns, no sheriffs, no dance-hall girls, no walkdowns, not even a saloon.

I felt from the beginning that there was a great deal about the West in which I had grown up that was not getting into literature, or not finding responsive readers if it did. Like most of my fellows in the 1930s and 1940s, I was a sort of regionalist. People in provincial or unfashionable places are made to feel a sort of colonial complex, and one response to that feeling of inferiority is an indignant assertion of superiority.

But local puffery is not the way to achieve stature. You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the indifferent or contemptuous to pay attention and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur. My anguish is potentially as valid as that of Oedipus; my love may be as tragically romantic as Tristan’s; my bond with the Earth may have as lasting a significance as Wordsworth’s; my work, even if it is with cows, may have as much dignity as honest work anywhere. If a writer is good enough and takes his gift seriously enough, he ought to be able to see as far into the universe or into the human mind from a California promontory or a Montana mountain as Faulkner could from a hunting camp in Mississippi, or Mark Twain from a Mississippi River raft, or Melville from the deck of the Pequod.

Though it has had notable writers since Gold Rush days, the West has never until very recently developed the support structures of a literary life. Neither has it ever produced a group of writers homogeneous enough to be called a school. Why should it have been asked to? It is too various for that. How do you find a unity among the Pacific Northwest woods, the Great Basin deserts, the Rocky Mountains, the high plains, the Mormon plateau country, the Hispanic-and-Indian Southwest, and the conurbation of the California littoral? What kind of school can you discern in writers as various as Ivan Doig, Frank Waters, Scott Momaday, Ed Abbey, Tom McGuane, Larry McMurtry, Joan Didion and Maxine Hong Kingston?

California is a separate problem, hardly a part of the West at all. As one anthology recently put it, it is west of the West. But there are a few common characteristics in Western writing and Western life. For one thing, the whole West, including California, is arid country, and aridity enforces space, which in turn enforces mobility. In an oasis civilization, especially one that has been periodically raided for its extractive resources, you don’t find the degree of settled community life that you would find in New England, the South, or the Middle West. Space does something to the vision: It makes the country itself, for lack of human coagulations and illusions of human importance, into something formidable and ever-present, and it tends to make humans as migratory as antelope. Their--our--literature reflects that necessity. Look at any novel or book that strikes you as somehow Western in its feel--”Roughing It,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Big Sky,” “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “On the Road,” “The Way to Rainy Mountain”--and you will likely find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but about desire. Whether the formula is the upper-crust one--get in, get rich, get out--or the lower-crust one--rush in, go bust, move on--there is a common thread of seeking, generally unsatisfied.

The country is a very prominent actor in much Western writing. It is big and impressive; it is often empty; it is unforgiving; it is fragile. Mobility puts us in touch with it directly, without too much human interference. That characteristic is as apparent in California writing as in the writing of any part of the West. A few years ago, David Rains Wallace, a gifted nature writer, wrote the text for a book called “The Wilder Shore,” with photographs by Morley Baer. The whole burden of that text is how important the physical landscape is in the work of almost all California writers: Jack London, Frank Norris, Steinbeck, Jeffers, Mary Austin, Joan Didion. That single fact of our preoccupation with landscape is enough to make us unintelligible or beneath notice to critical opinion schooled in one or anther variety of abstract expressionism. Try to write “The Big Sky” about New Jersey.

So Western literature differs from much other American literature in the fact that so much of it happens outdoors. It also differs in that the influence of Europe’s ideas, Europe’s fashions, Europe’s history is much fainter. Whether the writer of a Western book comes from Denver or Palm Springs, Missoula or Santa Fe, San Francisco or Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, his book will probably be remote, in spirit as well as in miles, from Europe. Long ago, Emerson declared that we have listened too long to the courtly voice of Europe. Out West, his warning has finally been taken. That too makes most books true to Western experience and the Western mind-set more or less opaque to critics whose training has come undiluted from across the Atlantic.

Western literature, especially that written in the inland West, is closer to the outdoors and big space, closer to the aggressive American Dream, closer too to the native inhabitants of the continent, who survive in greater numbers, and with more societal and cultural integrity, west of the hundredth meridian. Descendants of Pocahontas, or King Philip, or Billy Bowlegs, or Tecumseh, would speak to us now from a long, muted, defeated distance; but Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and other Western Indians speak from the present, from the very battlefields of cultures.

And there are other voices in Western literature that do not speak with authority to the East because they stir no recent memories and open no recent wounds.

Nearly 130 years ago, William Gilpin, the first territorial governor of Colorado, made a Fourth of July speech to the Fenian Society on the bank of Cherry Creek, where Denver now stands. Most of his speech was an egregious and misleading boosting of Western opportunities, but one thing he said was prophetic. “Asia,” he said, “is found, and has become our neighbor.” Fifty years or so ago, the historian Garrett Mattingly remarked to Bernard DeVoto that all American history is history in transition from an Atlantic to a Pacific phase. If they were alive today, both Gilpin and Mattingly could congratulate themselves as prophets. In the last generation or two, even our wars have gone Asian, along with much of our trade, some of our religious searchings and a lot of our apprehension.

Since the West leans toward the Pacific Basin, writers west of the Continental Divide, when they are engaging the universe instead of the local scene, inevitably reflect a different--I was about to say, orientation: a different history, a different emphasis and expectation, a different ethnic mix, a different culture.

It has been hard for the rest of the country to realize that the West incorporates not only cowboy and Indian fantasies but also the Hispanic Southwest, whose beginnings antedate Plymouth Rock by 80 years. The Grand Canyon was discovered by whites before the Mississippi was. And the Far East has been coming east to meet us and fuse with us for a long time now. Maxine Hong Kingston’s “TripMaster Monkey” is not conceivable as a book written in any place but San Francisco. In his cockeyed 1960s way, Wittman Ah Sing, a fifth-generation Chinese American, is as American a character as Huckleberry Finn, and he could have happened only where he happened.

New regions do grow up and acquire their mature voices, and we should never be shamefaced about writing from our own base. I am not talking about method. A lot of experimentation goes on in the matter of method, and in the end, we find and use what we like and what we can handle and what fits our material. It is that material, the depth and breadth of our understanding of whatever piece of human trouble is under our microscope, that really matters, and it may take a generation or two to train readers for that.

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured or observed at close range. That is why Ken Kesey’s advice in a recent New York Times Magazine article, “Write what you don’t know,” strikes me as balderdash. That is the way to produce unknowing and unfeeling books, the way to send with a dead key, the way to convince ourselves and perhaps others that antic motions in a void, a meaningless mugging and hoofing, are what literature is supposed to be. I think, on the contrary, that at its best, it is a bolt of lightning from me to you, a flash of recognition and feeling within the context of a shared culture.

The West doesn’t need good writers. It has them. It could use a little more confidence in itself, and one way for that to come about is for it to breed up some critics capable, by experience or intuition, of evaluating Western literature in the terms of Western life. So far, I can’t think of a critic who has read Western books “in the same spirit as its author writ,” and judged them according to their intentions.

Such critics will come. I can remember when every book by William Faulkner, including all five of his greatest, was greeted with incredulous laughter and ribald contempt by the smart reviewers of the New Yorker. As Faulkner himself might have said, they mought of kilt him but they didn’t whup him. All it took to establish Faulkner’s eminence was the books themselves, some applause from abroad, a little time for his peculiar variety of genius to sink in, and one perceptive and authoritative critic, Malcolm Cowley.

While we await the day, we can settle back and enjoy the books that Western writers are bringing us.