SEASON’S READINGS : Stepson of the Golden West : Who’s buying the square-jawed books about the West? Easterners looking for myth? Or Westerners themselves, homesick for childhood stories?

Olivia: There lies your way, due west.

Viola: Then westward-ho!

“Twelfth Night”

Why do people in the South sing, “I wish I was in Dixie”? Aren’t they already? I ask this question not because I intend to answer it, but to underscore my ignorance of the South.

I’m not from the South or the East, and were I the famed only-known inhabitant of the North Pole, I wouldn’t pick my busy season to write about it. No, like many of you, I’m a Westerner.

What does the word conjure? Likely a man. On horseback, just as likely. Spare of speech. Sure of step, and keen of aspect. Broad of back, and hard of jaw. Eye of newt, and toe of just a minute here.

Whose West is this? Not mine, nor anyone’s I know. It’s the Cowboy West of a hundred years ago and 3,000 miles away, of dime novels and B Westerns, and what, beggin’ your pardon ma’am, is it doing in my head?

I’m supposed to know better. I was born here. I catch myself saying lately, sounding like some nativist Wilsonista when all I really mean is, I am a son of the urban West. My home is here. The only wide open spaces I miss are the unmetered ones. Growing up I played cops and robbers, not cowboys and Indians. I rode bicycles, not ponies--except at Ponyland, where patient colts gave skittish children slow, swaying rides until one morning the Beverly Center up and landed on them. (A friend told me once that these ponies narrowly escaped the mall and fled into the Santa Monica mountains to thrive there even today--a rumor I need far too much ever to investigate.)

Begin again. That’s what the West is for, isn’t it--new beginnings, second chances? About me now lie several new gift books about the West. Two of them have horsemen on their covers. Another shows a man in a checked shirt riding a wild-eyed bull. A fourth cover reproduces Roy Rogers, hands folded across his silver saddle, eyes fixed lonesomely on some distant point beyond the camera. Maybe he’s pining for Dale, his co-author on yet another new book, their joint autobiography.

Does America really need two books about the King of the Cowboys this holiday season? Who’s buying them? Easterners looking to confirm their misapprehensions of the West? Or Westerners themselves, trying to deny the new West they live in?

In all likelihood, buyers of books about Roy Rogers and his West break down along generational lines, not geographic ones. They’re nostalgic for their childhoods, something I can certainly understand. But nobody’s writing gift books about my childhood, and frankly I’m starting to feel a little left out.

This year’s Western gift book harvest divides into two main stacks. Books about the Old West, and books about TV about the Old West. About the New West, the citified West, hardly a chirp.

The best of this winter’s Western book crop, and unfortunately the most expensive, is The West: A Treasury of Art and Literature. It’s a roughly chronological coffee-table roundup of writing, painting and photography about the region, and the selection is, with few exceptions, wise and well informed. You knew Twain and Cather and Ed “West Minister” Abbey would make the cut, and maybe you hoped for Leslie Marmon Silko and Larry McMurtry (both included), but Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Richard Francis Burton (even if he is mysteriously defrocked to Richard F. Burton) are definitely gravy.

Editors T. H. and Joan Watkins conclude their chrestomathy with a section called, promisingly, “Living in the New West,” and cap that section and the book with a Wallace Stegner essay so good it makes me want to spit.

It begins, “There are thousands more federal employees in the West than there are cowboys--more bookkeepers, aircraft and electronics workers, auto mechanics, printers, fry cooks. There may be more writers. Nevertheless, when most Americans east of the Missouri hear the word ‘West’ they think “cowboy.’ ”

Well, yes. Hell, yes. That’s the kind of passage you hesitate to quote because it makes everything on either side of it look like nougat. But what do the Watkinses pick to share the “Living in the New West” section with it?

Try excerpts from “Cowboys Are My Weakness” and “Riding the White Horse Home.”

Try “The Trail Home” and “Going Back to Bisbee.”

Try “Blue Desert” and “The Solace of Open Spaces” and “Greetings from Wisdom, Montana.”

Meet the New West, same as the Old West.

There is a Mecca in the West. In California, in fact. My atlas places it just northwest of the Salton Sea. This surprises me, since I’ve visited the area more than once, and don’t remember it. Maybe Mecca is like that.

There’s another one in the Midwest. Mecca, just north of Terre Haute, if you can believe it. The same Terre Haute where a journalist named Soule once printed a piece of advice he paraphrased from Shakespeare’s Christmas play, only to have it taken up by another newspaperman, name of Greeley.

There must be others on the map, but between the names, like the sodbuster West I try to disavow. Try praying away from Mecca, just try. So let the cowboy Westerners go on misleading the rest of the world, and let the world go on misreading us. Whether Westward-ho signifies the wagonmaster’s cry, or a supermarket, there are more Wests than one Westerner can ever encompass. Nobody ever writes about your home just how you want them to. I see that now.

A sense of place can’t take the place of sense.*

THE WEST: A Treasury of Art and Literature, edited by T.H. Watkins and Joan Parker Watkins

(Hugh Lauter Levin Associates: $75)

*

And Keep In Mind:

HAPPY TRAILS: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans with Jane and Michael Stern

(Simon & Schuster: $23.50; 256 pp . )

WAY OUT WEST by Jane and Michael Stern

(HarperCollins: $35; 400 pp.)

ROY ROGERS: KING OF THE COWBOYS by Georgia Morris and Mark Pollard

(HarperCollins: $24.95; 144 pp . )

RODEO by Louise L. Serpa

notes by Larry McMurtry

(Aperture: $35; 88 pp.)

OUTCASTS by Ruth Mellinkoff

(University of California Press: $195 the pair; Vol. I, 352 pp.; Vol. II, 465 pp.)

REFLECTING: A PRARIE TOWN by Drake Hokanson

(University of Iowa Press: $34.95; 320 pp.)

COWBOYS AND IMAGES: The Watercolors of William Matthews, foreword by William Kittredge

(Chronicle: $40; 136 pp.)