|
Zane Grey’s West: Longing for the way it never was |
|
|
|
|
Written by MARTY DURLIN, Writers on the Range
|
|
Thursday, 11 September 2008 |
When I was a child and stayed with my grandparents in their house at the top of
a cactus-studded hill, I cherry-picked their library, which ran floor to ceiling
along the entrance hall. I figured Grandpa was the one who read Zane Grey --
half a dozen of Grey’s exotic titles were lined up together on a lower
shelf.
The celebrated author of some 90 books, Grey had brief careers as a dentist and
a baseball player before publishing his first novel in 1903. He’s best known for
his adventure romances set in the American West of the late 19th to early 20th
century. Wildly popular in his heyday in the 1920s and ‘30s, Grey was one of our
first millionaire authors, eclipsing such contemporaries as Sinclair Lewis and
Edith Wharton.
Grey’s life was a lot like one of his books --
rip-roaring, romantic and unlikely. He adored the ladies, and warned his wife
Dolly: “I love to be free. I cannot change my spots ... I shall never lose the
spirit of my interest in women.” Despite his philandering, she nurtured his
writing and was still married to him after 34 years when he died in 1939, at the
age of 67.
Grey was in back in the news recently. The Bureau of Land
Management has bought the one-room cabin that he built by hand on the banks of
Oregon’s Rogue River for designation as a national monument. Rafters can view it
as they tumble past Winkle Bar, where the river is “gentle and reluctant and
sweetly vagrant, as if to lull and deceive, only to bellow sudden rage at the
confines of Blossom Bar, and to prepare itself for a sullen surrender to
treacherous Mule Creek Canyon.” The river is the setting for Grey’s novel, Rogue
River Feud, and received a “wild and scenic” designation in 1962.
As a
10-year-old girl, I particularly loved Grey’s depiction of women. His heroines
like Beryl in Rogue River Feud not only say things like “I love you with every
last drop of my heart’s blood,” but they also out-perform the hero on his own
ground: “Straightway Beryl underwent that strange transformation inevitable to a
true fisherman. She touched some several of Keven’s string of beauties with the
toe of her boot.”
“Under five pounds, Kev. You should have let these
go.”
“What? Why, they’ll weigh six, at least.”
“Ump-umm, my
boy,” she returned, shaking her head. “You can’t see a steelhead right. Your
eyes magnify. It’s the habit of a novice.”
I dwelt on love scenes like
this one, also from Rogue River Feud: “She was as strong and supple as a
panther. A giant could not have held her for long. But this precious moment was
enough for Keven.”
“Beryl! I love you so terribly – it’s killing me,” he
exclaimed huskily.
“All that fierce, hard muscular contraction of her
body relaxed as if by magic. She sagged limp and heavy upon him.”
A
hundred years after Grey’s first book was published, the prose seems
melodramatic. But at least one critic, Kevin S. Blake, calls Grey’s descriptions
of Western landscapes “among the most striking ever written.” Grey has the knack
of combining adventure and romance in the natural beauty of the West -- all
served up in prose bursting with energy and optimism.
Americans today
know Grey by his signature novel, Riders of the Purple Sage, in which Mormons
are the polygamous villains, but there are admirable Mormon characters in his
other novels. Grey also wrote about Indians who were often mistreated by
whites.
When I emerged from the lure of my grandparents’ library 50
years ago and went outside to play, I saw Grand Mesa looming from the north, and
the Gunnison River Valley stretching toward the Black Canyon to the south. I was
at once an adventurer, the prospector who found gold, and the expert fisherwoman
as I played among the cactus and wildflowers, and the black, bubbly volcanic
rock.
In the more confined West of today, I find solace in the evocation
of a time that exists inside my head, thanks to a dentist who became a writer:
“The white clouds sailed to cast their shadows. And the soaring golden eagle
black-barred the sky. Low and far away roared the river. Up to the cool heights
wafted the woody smells, like enchantment in their power. And the past of man
merged in the present, strange and vague to peering eyes, yet strong and
attainable in the scents of the earth.”
Marty Durlin is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She grew up on
Colorado’s western slope and is the online editor for High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado, where she now lives.
 |
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 11 September 2008 )
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed