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Louis L'Amour, who died Sunday, almost managed to make Westerns a respectable form of fiction.
Bookstores respected his sales potential. Most stores devote two racks to Westerns -- one for Louis L'Amour, and one for the other 200 writers. He received a general, almost institutional, respect from the American public: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But in the intellectual community,
the Western
ranks right down there with soap operas and supermarket
tabloids.
If you want evidence, just recall that John F. Kennedy was the darling of the intellectuals. His favorite author was Ian Fleming. The same intellectuals said that Dwight D. Eisenhower was lackluster because when he liked Zane Grey.
To say that one genre of recreational fiction is intellectually acceptable and another is not -- that is sheer bigotry. You find the same literary value, whether the hero is named Bond and boards jets for glittering casinos or is named Lassiter and rides a blind horse through desert canyons.
The cheap pulp western has an honorable ancestry. It starts with the foundation of our literature -- Homer. His Odysseus wanders around the Mediterranean, rather than the prairies, but otherwise, it's the same old story.
You have a resourceful hero with a mission. He's motivated by the desire to get what is rightfully his. Through most of the story, he is greatly concerned with immediate survival, because he gets in all sorts of deadly predicaments. He lives by his weapons and his wits. In a bloody finale, he triumphs.
That formula must have been hoary with age when blind Homer began to tell his tales. But 1600 years later, that didn't stop the Saxons from spinning yarns about Beowulf's battles. More than a millennium after Grendel got it, the formula retains enough allure to make Louis L'Amour one of the best-selling authors of all time.
But I've never understood why Louis L'Amour emerged head-and-shoulders above the other practitioners of the formula. Part of it was that he was simply a better writer than most of the competition. One often got lost in Zane Grey's convoluted prose, especially his paeans to the scenery and the internal musings of his impossibly pure heroines. The dialogue in Max Brand's works lacked all credibility; you couldn't imagine real people talking that way.
Some of that competition was formidable, though. Steve Frazee, who lives down the street from me, turned out Westerns by the dozen during the 1950s and 60s. His novels were leavened with humor and his female characters had depth -- feats L'Amour seldom managed.
Neither Frazee nor certain other masters of the craft -- Will Henry and Luke Short come to mind -- ever cluttered up an engaging, fast-moving story with a long philosophical speech about a man's obligations to his family, his comrades, his society, his country.
But you found one of those eight-page impediments in every Louis L'Amour book. Many of his fans thereby confused him with a philosopher; it is revealing that there is now a published collection of profound quotations from L'Amour. That's where those musings should have gone in the first place, instead of in the middle of the action.
I'm probably wrong about that, though. It may well be that those tedious sermons are what lifted L'Amour out of the herd and made him so prominent. Perhaps that's why Westerns are now starting to draw some of the scholarly attention previously devoted to obscure 16th-century French poets.
My dad always kept a stack of pulp Westerns. I devoured them -- Louis L'Amour was one of my favorites -- until I went off to college and majored in English. There I learned that what I enjoyed wasn't worthwhile literature. I sincerely tried to reform and improve, to take up Montaigne instead of Ernest Haycox.
That effort lasted until I moved off to the mountains and quit caring about what English professors think. I returned to my roots and enjoyed Westerns again. Two years ago, Martha and I began contributing to an adult Western series.
It turns out that writing Westerns is as much fun as reading them. You get paid for indulging your fantasies -- blowing up dams, destroying two-faced tinhorn politicians, riding with the Cheyenne as they massacre some real-estate speculators.
And if Louis L'Amour, in death as he did in life, contributes to making that respectable, so much the better.
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