Back in November 2013 I posted a review of Owen Wister's The Virginian, that seminal Western novel. However, in the light of a recent re-read and also reading Richard Slotkin's chapter on Wister (in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) I have revised that post and present you with this version.
When you call me that, smile!
It is said that Owen Wister (1860 – 1938) heard a deputy sheriff in Wyoming
address that remark to a man who had called him a SOB, and Wister was so struck
by it that he used it to define his hero, the Virginian.
There is something essentially Western, and
essentially true, about the fact that you can use a term of abuse to a man you
like and respect, if you do it with a laugh, that you should never employ to
another man. A slap-on-the-back kind of friendly insult at the bar could become
a shootin’ matter.
The Virginian had a name. He confided it to his
fiancée Molly and to the narrator, his good friend Ogden. Presumably Judge
Henry, his employer, knew it and Molly’s mother must have had it too, for he
wrote to her declaring his love for the girl and he would hardly have signed
the letter Yours, The Virginian. But the rest of us will have to be content
with just calling him the Virginian. It’s maybe just as well. He’s perhaps more
mysterious – and slightly dangerous – like that.
Seminal
Hero is the word, of course. No mere ‘central
character’ he, still less an antihero. Countless early twentieth century female
readers fell in love with him and male ones secretly wished they could be him.
He is tall, handsome, reserved, brave, decent, strong, knowledgeable and funny.
There ain’t a damn thing wrong with him – by the standards of Wister’s day.
There is something wrong with Molly, though.
Miss Molly Stark Wood comes out from Bennington, Vermont to be the schoolmarm
at Medicine Bow, Wyoming Territory, some time in the 1880s. She is a little
conceited and a little coquettish but that’s OK. We don’t mind that. But she is
also a snob. Wister makes her resist the Virginian’s advances for no other
reason than her assumed superiority. The judge’s wife has no patience with her
and tells her husband, “She is not good enough for him”. Molly’s landlady Mrs.
Taylor delivers herself to Molly of the withering "I can't wait, deary.
Since the roughness looks bigger to you than the diamond, you had better go
back to Vermont. I expect you'll find better grammar there, deary." But of
course Molly comes round and the story finishes in connubial bliss. I think
Wister only made her waver to make the Virginian seem even nobler.
Nice edition
The Virginian is
essentially a love story, the tale of true and finally happily consummated love
between the hero and the heroine. At least we assume it is consummated: they
bathe on separate sides of the island in the stream on their honeymoon and have
separate rooms at Aunt Stark’s. Oh yes, I remember now; they had a large
family. Sure, it was consummated. It’s just that writing in 1902, authors
didn’t discuss such things.
It is also a comic novel. Whole chapters are
devoted to humorous episodes, almost interludes, such as Chapter VI about Em’ly
the hen and later the way the Virginian bests Trampas by telling an even taller
story to him and his men, about frog farming, and having it believed. The
narrator, who plays a not insignificant part in the plot also, so is not just
an observer, is a self-confessed tenderfoot, a New Yorker, though he is no
snob. Like Wister, he is fascinated by the frontier life, greatly admiring of
frontier people and their ways, and he visits often, gradually becoming wise in
the ways of the West. Still, the amusing experiences of a green Easterner out
West were excellent comic fodder and became, as with much in The Virginian, a standard trope of the
Western genre.
For the book was in so many ways a pioneer and
a standard-setter. Wister’s daughter, herself to become a noted author, wrote:
. . . For the first time, a
cowboy was a gentleman and a hero, but nobody realized then that the book was
the master design on which thousands of Westerns would be modeled. Its
hero was the first cowboy to capture the public's imagination, and hundreds of
young girls fell in love with him . . . besides being handsome, he was humorous
and human . . . The Virginian himself is the progenitor of the cowboy as folk
figure. Because of him, little boys wear ten-gallon hats and carry toy
pistols. This one novel set the tradition of the West permanently.
We still have Western stories, Western movies, and Western radio and television
drama in which the cowboy hero defends justice and his girl's honor and shoots it
out with the villain . . . It was written as fiction but has become history . .
.
“It was
written as fiction but has become history”: yes, it is part of the curious
process of the Western that fact became myth which then became the fact.
Owen
Wister was born in Philadelphia, son of a well-to-do doctor. He had a
cosmopolitan education in Switzerland and England before going to Harvard where
he was a classmate (and admirer) of Theodore Roosevelt. He wanted to be a
musician and studied for two years at the Paris Conservatory but then entered
the Harvard Law School before practicing as a lawyer in Philadelphia.
Owen Wister (1860 - 1938)
Wister
made many trips to the American West. On an 1893 trip to Yellowstone he met
Frederic Remington, who remained a lifelong friend. Wister started writing in
the 1890s, short pieces mostly, and several of these were later incorporated
into The Virginian. It is significant
that Wister, Roosevelt and Remington, as well as the narrator, Judge Henry and
Molly Stark Wood in The Virginian,
were all upper-class Easterners who went West to seek the ‘strenuous life’ and ‘find
themselves’, or anyway have their prejudices confirmed.
Roosevelt,
Remington and Wister were of course racialists who believed in a ‘natural
aristocracy’ of virile men (and very rarely women) who would rise to the top
and become the ruling class. They would then have the right to use violence to
remain there. Roosevelt moderated these beliefs a little, at least during his
political career, because you need votes. Remington was the nastiest racist of
them; he clearly loathed and despised Indians, Blacks, Jews, anyone in fact he deemed to be ‘beneath’ him – the ‘lesser breeds’. Wister in his writings posed as the
reasonable ‘philosopher’ of the racialist school of thought, justifying it (he
thought) and even contradicting the Declaration of Independence’s assertion
that “all men are created equal.” He has his hero say, “Equality is a great big
bluff and it’s easily called.” Wister thought that the great cattle ranches of
Wyoming might prove the context for the emergence (or anyway revival) of a new,
and superior, American racial type.
The Virginian, Wister’s only Western novel, was published in
1902 and was an immediate hit, being reprinted fourteen times in
eight months. It became the archetypal literary Western. Wister adapted it for
the stage soon afterwards and the first movie version appeared in 1914,
directed by Cecil B DeMille and starring Dustin Farnum, who had appeared in the
title role in the play. There was another silent version in 1923 (with Russell
Simpson as Trampas!) By the time the famous 1929
talkie was made, with Gary Cooper
as the Virginian, the book had already sold 1.6m copies and had become, with
Zane Grey’s Riders
of the Purple Sage (1912), the premier Western novel.
I really like the book, for its leisurely pace and
slow action, its wry humor verging on the cynical but never being that, and its
breezy approach. It is much less 1900s-‘literary’ than, say, Zane Grey’s work,
and contains a good deal less purple (sage) prose. True, the speech of the
Westerners is rendered on the page in (for these days) far too hokey a way, but
you do get used to that. I don’t know what was gained by writing Yu or pillo for you or pillow. The pronunciation is the same.
It just becomes irritating – and risks being patronizing. But stylistically
speaking most of The Virginian is
pretty modern.
Medicine Bow, WY in 1910. Not a great metropolis. Still isn't! I went there. Well, you gotta. You can leave the 80 from Laramie to Rawlins and take the high road to Medicine Bow. Nice town, I'm sure, but well, New York it ain't...
The characterization is strong and you get to know the
principal characters well, the Virginian and Molly, of course, but also the
villain Trampas, Shorty, the judge and his wife, the Taylors, Steve, Honey, Lin
and the other drovers. Monte the horse. Trampas, Spanish for cheating, or
snares, and containing an element of tramp
(considered the most worthless social type) is a good name for the villain, the
very kind of man Wister and his fellow-travelers believed must not triumph, for
they are low and unmanly types. And ever since James Fenimore Cooper, Virginians
had been identified as the Americans closest in type to the old British
nobility – the novel’s Virginian is a new kind of American aristocrat.
From a Western point of view, much of the action is
fairly inconsequential but certain chapters stand out, XXVI for example, when
the odious rancher Balaam brutalizes the sweet horse Pedro and he and the
Virginian are attacked by Indians (interestingly, there’s a captivity-narrative
reversal when the hero is wounded by Indians and it’s the heroine who rescues
him). Or Chapter 30, the somber account of the lynching.
Murder by a mob is such a heinous crime that it is
almost impossible to make any character in a novel or movie even remotely
sympathetic when he carries it out. It is a major problem that all movie
versions of The Virginian have.
Wister does his best by making the victim (one of the victims anyway) forgive
the leader of the lynchers, and by laying out the usual excuse that where there
was no enforcement of law, people may take it into their hands. Even the judge
attempts to justify the practice, to Molly, and draws a rather sophistical
distinction between the peremptory hanging on suspicion of cattle thieves in
Wyoming (acceptable) with the strangulation by a white mob of Negroes in the
South (unacceptable).
According to Judge Henry in the story, 'acceptable'.
Accused horse thief lynched, Oregon, c 1900.
Wister, in his arguments justifying lynching, essentially
takes vigilantism (vigilantes claimed a natural and democratic right to
violence to redress wrongs in the absence of law and order) into an assertion
of race and class privilege. The big ranchers were superior to the small ones
and entitled to use force to stay that way. It is a view that is hard to
justify today – if it ever was justifiable. In many ways, though, Wister’s
version of the Johnson County War is an apologia for the Wyoming Stock Growers
Association’s actions, and Wister was definitely a WSGA partisan.
The actual hanging takes place ‘off stage’, as it
were: the narrator remains in the stable and hears about it later. This,
probably, was to soften the blow and make the grisly event slightly more
palatable to Eastern readers. At least Wister had the courage to deal with the
matter; he could easily have simply not mentioned it, or not have his hero lead
the unappointed executioners, but lynching was widespread enough in the West,
and in Wyoming cattle lands in particular, for the issue to be a difficult one
to skip over. The fact remains that it was a disgusting and appalling act, and
the ‘cheerful’ banter on the eve of the murder is unintentionally chilling. Lynching
appeared all too often in later Western movies, often done casually and/or with
laughing murderers. However ‘B’ or formulaic the picture, I am never less than
revolted.
The other truly Western chapter is, of course, the
penultimate one (the last chapter is devoted to a honeymoon, a bucolic idyll
described, unfortunately, in terms so saccharine that your stomach will be
upset), concerning the final confrontation with Trampas. Here we have the
classic Western showdown. How many pulp novels have we read that contain such a
fight, and how many Western movies have we seen! But this was the original, the
archetype. Trampas really does say, “I’ll give you till sundown to
leave town!” The actual shooting is done rapidly, almost again ‘off stage’ in a
way. It is described from the Virginian’s point of view, in a blur; he does not
really shoot consciously. Hollywood made up for that, of course, with far more
dramatic versions! But what is most interesting, to me, is the conversation
between the Virginian and Molly before the gunfight occurs.
Showdown
From one standpoint, you have a rather silly Eastern dame with
no understanding of the ways of the West who emotionally blackmails her lover
in order to deflect him from the decent and noble action that he must
undertake. Molly is appalled by the coming confrontation and gives the
Virginian an ultimatum: renounce or she will not marry him. But the thing is,
she’s right. She’s not right by the standards of the Virginian, or Owen Wister
or 90% of the readers of the book, but she’s right. Such a duel is an
outrageous, brutal, premeditated affair that in civilized countries or parts of
countries would be illegal, it is cold-blooded and it is even essentially
childish. We must use firearms against each other because he called me a coward
or told me to get out of town or whatever. These are boys talking. Why would a
sensitive, intelligent girl want
to marry a man like that, a killer?
Molly (Mary Brian) pleads with the Virginian in the 1929 talkie,
the best ever film version of The Virginian
Of course, she relents. And she is made weaker by
that, and her opposition comes to seem willful and girlish. She has to give way
to the virility and domination of the hero. But she was right!
That’s what I think, anyway. And I speak as a lifelong
lover of Westerns. I hugely enjoy those Main Street showdowns, and cheer for
the hero and say good riddance as the villain falls to the dust. But that
doesn’t mean it’s right. Lucky it’s only a film. Or a book.
Many people have watched Marshal Kane’s Quaker wife
deploy very similar arguments in High
Noon, and may have thought that scene original. But Gary Cooper as Kane
had used very similar words when arguing with Molly in the 1929 The Virginian.
The fence symbolizes the closing of the West.
The Fall of the Cowboy by Wister's friend Frederic Remington, 1895.
Another interesting aspect of the novel The Virginian, interesting to Western
lovers anyway, is the fact that in what was essentially the very first ‘proper’
Western novel, before even the first narrative Western movie had been made (The
Great Train Robbery of 1903), the notion of ‘the end of the West’ was
already there. We are used to Western movies of the 1960s and 70s describing
the decline of the old West as ‘civilization’ encroached on the freedom and
wildness of the frontier. Think of Ride
the High Country or The
Shootist or even The
Magnificent Seven. In all of them and many more it is sunset, the old
ways are disappearing, there’s no place for a cow puncher any more – and still
less for a gunfighter. Railroads, telephones, automobiles, churches and
temperance societies have done for all that. But, we think, earlier Westerns had
no such melancholy thoughts: they were all about manifest destiny, fighting the
Indians, creating an exciting new world, pushing back the frontier. Those
silent movies, the 1930s talkies, the 40s and 50s big-budget Westerns were far
more sure of themselves and unquestioning about what was right. They
were positive and self-confident. They looked to the future with hope.
Well, maybe, but on page 77 of The Virginian we already have this:
…they came
upon the schoolhouse, roofed and ready for the first native Wyoming crop. It
symbolized the dawn of a neighborhood, and it brought a change into the
wilderness air. The feel of it struck cold upon the free spirits of the
cow-punchers, and they told each other that, what with women and children and
wire fences, this country would not long be a country for men.
Wister was writing at the turn of the century, when
‘the West’ was already gone and Eastern nostalgia about it was in full swing. Frederick
Jackson Turner had delivered his famous paper on the closing of the Frontier
in 1893. That ‘end of the West’ notion was embedded in the Western myth right
from its inception.
Well, you have to read it, dear old e-pard. It’s one
of those essential rites of passage for any Western fan. But my guess is that
you will actually rather enjoy it.