For decades, she flew flatwise across the vertical top of our yearly Christmas tree—be it pine, balsam, or spruce.
Some people place a star on their tree—to represent the Star of Bethlehem, I suppose. Others place an angel. Most of the angels, like the stars, are built in vertical format, the better to occupy the top of the tree, which is usually a single evergreen spear, jutting toward the ceiling.
But our poor little angel, I’ve never known her name, was made in such a way she could only lie horizontally. We hung her from the vertical top branch, but she lay sprawled across its middle, resisting all upward tendency.
There is something to be said for the horizontal. When Your New Favorite Writer studied the photographic arts, he learned that horizontal lines and shapes suggest calm, tranquility, rest, repose. If you want to show strength, go for the vertical. For drama, diagonal lines and swirly shapes are great. But horizontal composition speaks of peace.
We stopped buying cut trees at some point a few years ago—maybe the forty-dollar point. Instead, we trimmed our potted Norfolk Island pine for Christmas.
The Norfolk pine lives outdoors in spring, summer, and fall. At the end of all that warmth, we huff and puff and carry the big tub with its delicate little tree indoors. Originating on Norfolk Island, it would never survive a Wisconsin winter.
Norfolk Island, in case you’re wondering, is nowhere near the same-named city in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Rather, it’s an external territory of Australia, located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia. Its namesake pine, Araucaria heterophylla in case you’re interested, is not a true pine but a closer relative of the hoop pine and the monkey-puzzle tree. In other words, a subtropical specimen.
It’s a pretty, willowy plant with short-bristled branches that droop as they get longer. You can’t hang heavy ornaments on it, or the branches will droop more than they already do.
Our little angel, a real lightweight, qualifies for the top of the Norfolk pine. We used to hang her on the upward-pointing spear, just as we did with our cut trees in prior years.
This year, however, is different. The Norfolk pine grew too tall to be brought in through the door. My wife, anticipating this problem, cut off its top in the spring. The little tree, in a touching burst of cooperation, grew replacement branches horizontally. So now, instead of a vertical spike on top, we have a horizontal bed of interlocking branches.
Just the right place for our little angel’s true vocation, which rhymes with fiesta.
Something about that seems to fit the peace message of the season.
Sleep well, sweet angel; and flights of pine boughs loft thee to thy rest.
Detail from Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642. Public Domain.
. . . Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. . . .
—Shakespeare, “The Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It
Young men with beards think they can fix everything for us.
Not long ago, clean-shaven young men thought they could fix everything for us.
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Well, STOP THE PRESSES, Dear Reader, because I’ve got a news bulletin: Everything is not fixed.
They’ve worked at it and worked at it and fought fiercely for their constituents and—guess what?—the only part they left out was the fixing of everything.
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Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be endured.
As to those things that can be fixed, we’ve mostly got to do it ourselves.
To imagine that politicians will fix everything—or would, if not thwarted by opposing, evil, politicians—is arrestingly naïve.
If politicians solved more problems than they create, we’d run out of problems.
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Of course we must have politicians, to divide the spoils among us and administer our public institutions. But Politics holds no key to a New Jerusalem where streets are paved in gold and teardrops never fall.
Here’s the fact of it: We are all in this together, Dear Friend: All broken, jumbled, confused creatures muddling our way through swamps of untoward circumstance.
Swamps of untoward circumstance . . . Paul Klee, The Man of Confusion, 1939. Public Domain.
Each of us gets one life, and it’s altogether imperfect. We are mixed creatures. Our lives are spotted, blotted, their meanings and messages obscure.
Perhaps God could have made us perfect—but at what cost to our souls?
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Beware the temper that looks to some hero to come along and straighten it all out.
Making idols of the prominent, or of the adamant, leads us to loathe our neighbors. Hatred and suspicion of those we live with is the worst form of hell on earth.
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It might be better just to relax.
Resolve to enjoy what life throws at you, pain and pleasure together, weal and woe alike. Do what good you can, when you can. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.
This—right here, right now—is your chance to witness the grand spectacle of human existence from a front-row seat, and it will be over before you know it.
. . . I would put this in verse. Or if I were Shakespeare, I would write it in blank verse and make it comical, tragical, or historical. But I’m not Robert Frost, and I’m certainly not William Shakespeare, so here it is, and you’ll just have to imagine it’s poetic and comical, tragical, or historical:
(Written in Late October)
My dog took me out for a walk around the block on a sunny, windy day with gold leaves flying through the bright blue sky.
The question was in some doubt, as our glorious summer has been hanging on irrationally long. But today, it’s football weather, gorgeous weather, and one feels the stirring of one’s blood as locust and birch betray their year’s-end destinies.
Every year it’s easier to see the autumn as a metaphor for my time of life.
This year I am eighty. It has only now dawned on me that when my time comes, there will be no protocol or ceremony. I’ll just leave. All that pertains to me will dry up and blow away in an instant. I may live on in memories for a few years or decades, but that’s all.
It means I’m radically free.
Suppose I were busy assembling an empire, and only Tierra del Fuego remained beyond my grasp. Should I die with that region unmastered, or should I manage to complete my world first—no matter. When you’re gone, everything and everyone else keeps going.
That’s how it is. Life is change.
Whatever is important, all I can do is enjoy it now.
My life is equal parts pleasure and delight. There is little of pain or even mild discomfort, so far. I am content, and Fooboo is pleased to drag me around the block.
Tom Huggler’s The Woman She Left Behind is exactly what historical fiction ought to be. A mature novel for the intelligent reader. It’s a powerful story of human desires and connections in a historical setting that’s rendered with loving attention to small details as well as the overall feel of the era. So you read it because you care what happens to the characters, and the history lesson is a valuable added bonus.
It’s early 1862, a critical time in the western theater of the American Civil War. Widowed farm woman Rachel Barnum of south central Michigan gets a telegram that her elder son, Dwight, is ill and languishing in a Union Army hospital camp after fighting at New Madrid, Missouri. Alone, in the sketchy weather of early spring, she sets out in her farm wagon behind a pair of draft horses, headed for Cairo, Illinois—the nearest Army installation to her son’s location.
Her trusted hired man, John Welch, pleads with her not to go: let him, an experienced man, make the trip on her behalf. But Rachel is determined to bring her firstborn, who may be dying, everything a mother’s care can do. She leaves her younger son and two teenage daughters in Welch’s care. A woman alone, driving into a battle zone, she faces bad roads, rudimentary accommodations, uncertain riverboats, and the hazards of war.
Readers will understand the urgency of Rachel’s quest and sympathize with her struggles. Huggler’s sure-handed narrative follows Rachel through frustrating delays and maddening obstructions as she seeks her wounded son.
The story is a fictional interpretation of a very real journey by an actual Michigander named Rachel Barnum. At the end of the fictional narrative is a long, informative author’s note in which Huggler tells about the process of researching Rachel’s story and converting it to a novel. Huggler tells of his own 21st-century journey across the same landscape Rachel traversed more than 150 years ago. It’s a great piece of travel writing appended to a wonderful historical novel. The author’s note alone is worth the price of the book.
Huggler
Tom Huggler is a seasoned writer of nonfiction, former president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, with many books and articles in the woodsy vein to his credit. His first book was a conservation novel for young readers, and now after a long career he returns to fiction with Rachel’s story.
It’s a story everyone should read, a great Christmas gift for any historical fiction reader you may know. Highly recommended by Your New Favorite Writer.
Being the second part of a seven-part series based on Your New Favorite Writer’s recent WWA workshop “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One.”
As mentioned last week, I can’t tell you how to write a great beginning. But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
Engage the reader immediately.
Do not drown the reader in information.
Introduce important characters and plots early.
Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
Shape early action toward later plot points.
This week, let’s look at the first Big Idea: Engage the reader immediately.
Engagement
Sometimes the very first sentence is memorable and therefore remarkable.
Marley was dead: to begin with. —A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
It was love at first sight. —Catch-22, by Joesph Heller
Call me Ishmael. —Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
More commonly, the first sentence is simply the most direct way to start a brief passage, perhaps a page or two, that leads us into a compelling story.
It used to be common practice to start a story slowly and indirectly. Thus, Miguel de Cervantes:
Picasso’s 1955 rendering of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
In a village in la Mancha, whose name I do not care to remember, an hidalgo lived not long ago, one of those who keeps a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, skinny nag and swift greyhound. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and rashers of bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, some squab added on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. . . .
Leisurely, you might say.
Booth Tarkington
Or how about this opening, from Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a popular middle-grade novel in the Misty Eons, when Your New Favorite Writer was a lad:
Version 1.0.0
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog.
A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him . . . .
This kind of opening has gone out of fashion, under the dual impetus of cinematic experiences and the mad pace of modern society.
Lucy Sanna
These days, the Done Thing is to start in medias res. In plain English, start in the middle of things. For example:
The rain came again, harder this time. Charlotte pulled her knit hat tight, pushed up the collar of her gray wool coat, and stared through the chicken wire at the rabbits. Kate’s prize rabbits.
She entered the pen and chose a plump one, furry and warm in her cold hands. Its heart thumped like a tiny sewing machine. Charlotte brought it into the dim barn and stroked its fur until it calmed, trusting. She hesitated a moment—stealing from my own daughter—then picked up the butcher knife.
When she cut the jugular, the sewing machine stopped. . . . —from The Cherry Harvest, by Lucy Sanna
By adopting a deep third-person limited viewpoint and starting the story in the middle of traumatic action, the author engages the reader at a visceral level while also sketching salient traits of the main character—who is, in this case, both cold-blooded and conscience-stricken at the same time.
The technique of starting in medias res may even be used to involve the audience in action that is no part of the story—as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The initial sequence, with Bond electrocuting an antagonist in a bathtub, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Doesn’t matter: The audience is still recovering from the unseemly frying when we cut to a cool and collected Bond entering the office and flirting with Miss Moneypenny.
Alternative Methods
There’s no actual Law, Dear Reader, that says you have to start your story in medias res. I do recommend, however, that you start in medias somethingus. For example, here is the way British author J.R.R. Tolkien began his fantasy classic The Hobbit:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it – and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
J.R.R. Tolkien, ca. 1925.
This is masterful technique. Bear in mind, Gentle Reader, that in 1937, when Tolkien sprung this book on an unsuspecting world, nobody had ever heard of a hobbit. It was a brand-new concept.
In fact, most of his readers probably bought the book because the title intrigued them and they wanted to find out what a hobbit was.
So, in his first sentence, Tolkien mentions both a hole in the ground and a hobbit. And then, in the second sentence, he begins to tell the reader about the hole!
“No, no, Mister author! Tell us about the hobbit! We want to know about the hobbit. Never mind the hole.”
But Tolkien procoeeds unperturbed through a long paragraph about the arrangement, layout, and furnishings of the hole. At last he moves on to a little trove of information about hobbits in general, and about the family to which this particular hobbit belongs. And little by little, we find out all we need to know about the hobbit: He is risk-averse, and he’s about to have an adventure.
At this point, Gracious Reader, what choice do you have but to read the rest of the book?
The Hook
It’s what we sometimes call a hook. The hook is that we know Bilbo Baggins is constitutionally averse to adventure, yet the author assures us he is about to have an adventure, like it or not. And the author goes one step further, challenging us to figure out whether the hobbit “gained anything in the end.”
A reader would have to be made of stone to resist that hook.
The hook in the prior example, Wisconsin author Lucy Sanna’s brilliant historical novel The Cherry Harvest, is somewhat different. We are drawn into Charlotte’s world in a very close and compelling way. We experience with her the slaying of a rabbit, along with the guilt that accompanies it. We understand, through the author’s skill at narration, that Charlotte has been forced into this dire situation. The rest of the novel is about the larger situation Charlotte faces and how she handles it.
A Whiff of Death
Besides the general advice to begin in medias res or in medias somethingus, I have one other little suggestion for engaging the reader immediately: Contrive to place a whiff of death somewhere on the first or second page.
Why is that a good idea? We would rather read a story with life-or-death consequences than one with less serious outcomes. We not only need, as Donald Maass suggests, “conflict on every page”; that conflict must have high stakes. Life or death. Nothing less. Otherwise, why are we reading this book?
It may be that the chronology of your story does not allow for an actual death, or even a close brush with death, in the first pages. Never mind. It is enough to include a sentence or phrase that reminds the reader there is such a thing as death. That will be enough.
Lucy Sanna in The Cherry Harvest shows us the actual death of a small animal, foreshadowing very real risks of human death for the human characters in the novel. In Tolkien’s case, it does not suit his purpose to have a death occur in the first pages. But he does use the word “adventure,” which is a code word for “serious risk of death.”
That’s enough. Just something, that’s all you need.
Next week: How to avoid drowning the reader in information.
Last Friday, I had the good fortune to present a workshop titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Word One” at the annual Wisconsin Writers Association Conference, held in Stevens Point.
I say “good fortune” for several reasons:
I got paid.
I heard the sound of my own voice—sweet music to my ears, indeed.
Most of all, I was with 175 friends of the Writing Persuasion—folks who have an itch they can scratch only by setting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. These friends understand one another’s need. About sixty of the 175 attended my breakout session.
Some of my good friends relaxing just before my workshop last Friday.
A lot of people have told me they got something good out of it.
So, why keep it to myself? For readers who did not have the opportunity to attend, I will try to encapsulate a 50-minute talk in the next seven weekly blog posts.
Here goes:
A Bulletproof Beginning
What’s the big deal about a beginning? Why the fuss?
Aristotle, right, argues with Plato (strongly resembling Leonardo da Vinci) in this detail from “The School of Athens” by Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520). Public Domain.
Dear Reader, a philosopher named Aristotle said, about 2,400 years ago, that every story has a beginning . . . a middle . . . and an end. That may seem obvious, but apparently nobody before Aristotle thought to write it down.
And nobody since Aristotle has gone much beyond that simple observation in explaining story structure. If you want to hassle me about Joseph Campbell’s/ Christopher Vogler’s Twelve Stages of the Hero’s Journey, or about Blake Snyder’s Fifteen-Beat “Save the Cat” structure—sure, let’s have that argument someday. But in the meantime, consider:
Of the three parts of a story, the beginning is most important. Why?
Because if your beginning is no good, no reader will experience the joys of the middle and end. They won’t stick around.
More so, if the reader is an agent, editor, or publisher considering your story for publication or film production. Typically, such mandarins want the first ten pages included with a cold query. But that does not mean they will read ten pages.
No. They will read maybe one page. Or maybe just the first paragraph. And if that doesn’t knock their socks off, they’re done. They have a lot of scripts to read. You must earn your way to the second and subsequent pages.
Most of all, the beginning is important because it establishes the conditions under which the rest of the story plays out. The break into Act II, the many twists and turns thereafter, the great change of color and tenor at mid-point, the swiftening action as you move into Act III, the exciting climax and final denouement—all are present in embryo in the beginning of the story. If they’re not, it won’t work.
Studio publicity photo of Billy Wilder and Gloria Swanson on the set of Sunset Boulevard, ca. 1950. Public Domain.
Billy Wilder—the great German-American film genius responsible for Ninotchka,Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Some Like it Hot, and many other classic movies, said, “If you have a problem in the third act, your real problem is in the first act.” If you go back and fix the first act, the third act will work better.
By the way, Gentle Reader, did you ever notice how many lectures, workshops, or articles about story construction for prose fiction rely heavily on movies for their examples? Here’s the reason: Owing to the format and function of film scripts, the screenwriter has nowhere to hide from the need for STRUCTURE.
A seasoned scripter can sit in a darkened movie house, discern the arrival of the Great Change at Midpoint, look at his watch, see that 58 minutes have elapsed, and predict—with dead accuracy—that the film’s total run time will be 116 minutes. It’s really that cut and dried. It’s all about structure.
The beginning is the first great pillar of structure in any story, filmic or otherwise. That’s why it’s important.
As I told my friendly audience last Friday, I cannot tell you how to write a good beginning. It’s your story, you figure it out.
But here are FIVE BIG IDEAS—three Dos and two Donts—that ought to help quite a bit:
Engage the reader immediately.
Do not drown the reader in information.
Introduce important characters and plots early.
Do not let INFORMATION bog down the profluence of the narrative.
Shape early action toward later plot points.
Now, Dear Reader, go ponder these things in your heart. Come back at this time next week, and we will consider Point 1: How to engage the reader immediately.
Does a writer spring full-bodied from the brow of Zeus, like Athena? Does a writer rise painfully from the sawdust of the arena floor, like Eric Hoffer?
Are writers born, or made?
These things have been on my mind lately, perhaps because the Fall Conference of the Wisconsin Writers Association is about to convene in Stevens Point. I am on the program, offering a workshop modestly titled “A Bulletproof Beginning: Five Ways to Anchor Your Story in Urgency from Page One.” I sure hope I know what I’m talking about.
But who are these people I’ll be meeting with? Folks a lot like me, only as different as different can be. You see, we all have our separate concerns and urgencies.
I write about Norwegians, Greg Renz writes about firefighters, Bob Allen writes about fish, and Deb Farris writes about the promptings of the Spirit in the workings of her life.
So you see, we are all the same.
All I know is, writers write.
Louisa May Alcott, the real-life model for Jo March. Public Domain.
We are those who write because we cannot not write.
Some, like Jo March and John-Boy Walton, scribble in notebooks from early childhood and sell their first work as teenagers. Others rumble quietly like dormant volcanoes, then erupt without warning in middle age.
John-Boy with pen in hand. Public Domain.
My friend Greg Renz waited till retirement to novelize the experiences he had been processing over twenty-eight years as a Milwaukee firefighter. In those years, he told some of his stories informally on more than one occasion.
I doubt anybody becomes a writer without a prelude of some kind. What warming-up exercises did Homer go through before composing twenty-seven thousand lines of dactyllic hexameter known as the Iliad and the Odyssey?
A Writer’s Odyssey
I, Your New Favorite Writer, set off on the yellow brick road of Literary Lionhood at age seventy. Notions long marinated in quaint bottles on the dusty shelves of my psyche spilled forth in written words, abruptly made manifest to all the world.
Like Jo, John-Boy, Homer, and Greg, I did not come to this calling completely cold. There was a detective story at the age of eight; a comic strip starring me as a cowboy, complete with sidekick, fighting bad guys; a seventh-grade essay on traffic safety, which won me a $25 savings bond—the first time I was paid for writing; plus news stories and feature articles for my high school paper.
In college, I became a radio thing. In the Air Force, I listened in on Chairman Mao’s flyboys and wrote down what they said—sometimes, even, wrote down what they meant to say.
Back in civilian life, after years of muddled career launches, I managed to burrow into the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs. This is the agency that oversees the state’s National Guard and its Emergency Management division. There, I served the adjutant general as a photographer, writer, and editor.
When it came time to retire—and I was all for retirement—I still wanted to write. Some guys settle down to a life of golf or fishing or public service. I settled down to a last desperate effort to say what was on my mind.
I realized the truths I wanted to tell could best be told by fiction. Some say truth is stranger than fiction, but I think truth is the subject matter of fiction. There is no point in making up a story if it does not express what’s at the heart of the human experience.
I found out it’s not all that easy. I’m still working on it.
I’ve been working on it full time for almost ten years now. In that time, what have I learned?
I have learned you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to make any real money as a novelist. John Steinbeck said, “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” This seems a considerable understatement.
I have learned the Protagonist must protag.
I have learned that no matter what it is you ought to be writing, what you will write is what you are damned well determined to write, and that’s all there is to it.
Along the way, I have assembled enough words in a sufficiently plausible order to get two novels published—with the backing of actual, professional publishers—and am well along on the initial assemblage of words for a third.
These marvels of modern literary science to not fly off the shelves and into the cash register of their own accord. Oh, no, Dear Reader: Each copy must be individually sold by the author in the flesh, at a bookstore or an arts and crafts fair. A few people might purchase them on the Internet, but those people are exceptions.
Go on, be an exception: Buy my books.
But whether you buy them or not, rest assured I will go on writing them.
Here, after undue delays, is the capstone to my series about the Wild West—cowboys mostly imaginary, conjured up in the twentieth century to provide idealized heroes from the nineteenth.
Wyatt Earp at age 39, c. 1887. Public Domain.
Unlike the fictional cowboys I followed as a child, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were real, historical figures. They were authentic Western lawmen. The most cursory reading of their eventful lives will show that their fame was deserved.
Also unlike the fictional cowboys, Earp and Masterson did not cease to exist after the 1870s and 1880s.Both men lived well into the twentieth century, into the era of automobiles and radio and motion pictures. Each, in the new century, tried to package his own image.
Though very different men, they had some things in common. Both were born east of the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War. Too young to become soldiers—though Wyatt tried unsuccessfully to enlist at age thirteen—they were drawn, by circumstance or interest, into the great American West in the years after the Civil War.
Bat Masterson age 26, 1879. Photo by Robert Marr Wright, Public Domain.
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were rough, complicated men with checkered careers. They gambled, operated on both sides of the law, and pursued affairs or common-law marriages with multiple women.
They also excelled at law enforcement in the wildest towns of the frontier—places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone. Each man took part in numerous gunfights and showed himself cool and resourceful under fire. Their lives were hodgepodges of romance, self-interest, irresponsibility, responsibility, and violence.
Bat Masterson (standing) and Wyatt Earp, Dodge City lawmen, 1876. Bat’s hand rests on the butt of his six gun, holstered for cross draw. Courtesy Jack DeMaattos collection. Public Domain.
Earp and Masterson were friends from their time serving together as Dodge City lawmen. They liked and respected each other.
It was remarkable they came through all their adventures unscathed. Masterson did walk with a cane, the result of a pelvic wound in his first gunfight.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, both men drifted into other pursuits—not instead of, but at first in addition to, law enforcement. After the famous 1881 gunfight at O.K. Corral and a flurry of retaliatory raids that followed it, Wyatt met up with Bat Masterson at Albuquerque and both men repaired to Trinidad, Colorado. There, Masterson became, first, a faro dealer in a saloon and later, the town marshal.
Earp soon left Trindad for other challenges. Over the next quarter-century, the footloose Wyatt roamed the west, with his third and final wife Josephine “Sadie” Marcus, blazing his way through law enforcement jobs, saloon ownerships, gambling and sporting interests—he refereed the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey heavyweight championship fight in San Francisco in 1896—and mining ventures, including a flyer in the Klondike gold rush of 1898.
In 1911, when Earp was 63, he and Josephine began living in Los Angeles part-time while also working a mine in the California desert. They continued that pattern of life until his death eighteen years later.
Since he spent time in L.A., Wyatt befriended actors and directors in the nascent Hollywood film industry, serving as an unpaid consultant on several Western films. He became close friends with cowboy actors William S. Hart and Tom Mix and with director John Ford. He exercised a formative influence on the young John Wayne, who met him at Mix’s ranch and by his own admission copied Earp’s walk, talk, and style.
Wyatt wanted his story told on the silver screen. “If the story were exploited on the screen by you,” he wrote to William S. Hart, “it would do much toward setting me right before a public which has always been fed lies about me.” In 1925 he began working with a friend, mining engineer John Flood, on a biography. Unfortunately, Flood was a poor writer, and the project went nowhere.
Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, 1959. Public Domain.
At the time of his death in 1929, Wyatt Earp’s public reputation was smudgy, due partly to his ambiguous role in the gunfight at O.K. Corral and partly to a public perception that as referee in the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey fight, he had thrown the fight to Sharkey by an improper ruling. Only in 1931, with the publication of Stuart N. Lake’s extremely flattering biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, did Earp’s reputation begin to soar. Josephine, by hiding unsavory details about his life, played a part in this redemption.
In 1955, 26 years after his death, Wyatt Earp received the distinction of having his own television show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. According to the show’s theme song, sung by the Ken Darby Singers:
Well, he cleaned up the country, The old Wild West country. He made law and order prevail. And none can deny it, The legend of Wyatt Forever will live on the trail. Oh, Wyatt Earp! Wyatt Earp—brave, courageous, and bold— Long live his fame, and long live his glory, And long may his story be told.
IMDB lists fifteen feature-length films about Wyatt Earp, ten of them made since the debut of the TV show, the other five earlier—but none made before the 1931 Lake biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall.
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Then, what of Bat Masterson?
Bat spent the 1880s and 1890s dabbling in law enforcement, journalism, dalliance with married women, and the world of prizefighting—not as a fighter but as a second, a timekeeper, and a friend of fighters and promoters.
Eventually, in 1902, he moved to New York City with his wife, Emma.
The day after his arrival, Bat was in trouble, scooped up by New York police who took him for an accomplice of a man they were arresting for bunco. He got the charge dropped but had to pay a ten-dollar fine because of the concealed weapon he was carrying.
A friend got Bat a job as a columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph. His column, “Masterson’s Views on Timely topics,” appeared three times a week from 1903 till his death in 1921. It concerned boxing and other sports-related topics.
Gene Barry plays Bat Masterson on TV, 1958. Public Domain.
Alfred Henry Lewis, the friend who had gotten him the job, also published a fictionalized biography of Bat called The Sunset Trail. He encouraged Bat to write sketches about his adventures, which Lewis published in Human Life magazine. In the same magazine, Masterson provided biogaphical studies of several famed gunfighters, men he had known—Ben Thompson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, Doc Holliday, and Bill Tilghman. Other, similar articles were to follow, but Masterson apparently tired of the exercise, and Lewis wrapped up the series with his own article, “The King of the Gun-players: William Barclay Masterson.”
Lewis introduced Bat to President Theodore Roosevelt, who took an immediate liking to him. TR got him appointed deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of New York, with a respectable $2,000 annual salary (equivalent to about $70,000 today). He admonished the former frontier roughneck: “You must be careful not to gamble or do anything while a public officer which might afford opportunity to your enemies and my critics to say that your appointment was improper. I wish you to show this letter to Alfred Henry Lewis and go over the matter with him.” The president was on guard against Masterson’s known propensity to go off the rails. Bat kept the deputy marshal’s job until 1909, when Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, relieved him of that responsibility.
Bat continued writing his boxing column in the Telegraph. He was prominent in the crowd at the Johnson-Willard fight in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, serving as timekeeper or possibly as one of Jess Willard’s seconds.
Bat Masterson circa 1911 in New York City. Public Domain.
He died of a heart attack in 1921, at age 67, while sitting at his desk working on his column for the Telegraph. About five hundred people attended his funeral. Attendees included writer Damon Runyon, a friend, who delivered the following eulogy: “He was a 100 percent, 22-karat real man. Bat was a good hater and a wonderful friend. He was always stretching out his hand to some down-and-outer. He had a great sense of humor and a marvelous fund of reminiscence, and was one of the most entertaining companions we have ever known. There are only too few men in the world like Bat Masterson and his death is a genuine loss.”
The epitaph on his tombstone at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City says, “Loved by Everyone.”
Eleven years after Bat’s death, Damon Runyon published a collection of his distinctive New York influenced short stories under the title Guys and Dolls. The stories were later adapted into a hit Broadway musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows. The central character of the stories, and of the musical, was a high-rolling gambler from Colorado named “Sky Masterson.”
And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
Dear Reader: Last week I promised you the final part of my 5-part series on the Old West. I am afraid I will have to ask you to be patient for another week. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this look back at some of the earliest memories of an old man. This post was originally published November 5, 2019.
Daddy’s friend Clark drove standing up. That’s the first thing I noticed. “That’s how milk trucks are,” he explained. “You have to drive standing up.” I was still amazed at this when we arrived at the circus.
There in the gathering darkness: a big tent on a dusty lot. We sat high up and saw people called “acrobats” fly through the air and drop into a big, bouncy net. And there came a little car that drove around the three circus rings and dropped off clowns, one by one—at least a dozen of them. The little truck, by some magic, seemed to to have an inexhaustible supply of clowns.
Clark drove the milk truck but did not own it. He was not a regular milkman. He was a college student like Daddy. He drove an early morning milk route for extra cash and could use the truck in off hours.
It was 1949; I was four. We lived in The Units—three or four rows of jerry-built shacks on the campus of Knox College. Each unit, one of three connected side by side, had a kitchen, a bath, a small livingroom, and two small bedrooms. Each unit housed a mommy, a daddy, and one or two very young children.
The occupants were families of war veterans attending college on the newly-enacted GI Bill. We moved in when I was three months old, in September 1945, and left in June 1949, not long after Daddy took me to the circus.
Special Bond
The families who lived in The Units shared a special bond and a certain kind of outlook. The men were college students, the women housewives. They were all, on average, four or more years older than the typical entering freshman. They were householders, married, with young children. The usual campus hijinks of the era held no charm for them. They had their own hijinks.
They were more serious men, you see, having just fought a war. Yet, like all students everywhere, they sometimes put studies on the back burner, accepting lower grades as a reasonable price for the rich social life of The Units. That social life included beer, cigarettes, the needs of their toddlers, and late-night bridge games.
The family next door, with whom we shared a wall, was Bud and Helen Steele and their daughter Heather. Helen and Bud played bridge with Mommy and Daddy most nights in their place or ours. When the visiting couple got the contract, the one who was dummy got up and ran next door to check on the ostensibly sleeping child. Bud, whose name was Virgil, was a wiry man with a ready smile, from a family that farmed just south of Galesburg. Helen was a fresh-faced and friendly young woman from Saskatchewan. I don’t know how they managed to find each other, but they made a great match. They remained fast friends with our family long after The Units and until their dying days. My younger sister and I still keep in touch with Heather and her siblings, Hugh and Linelle.
Diversions and Hijinks
One of the men in The Units sought to beautify the little patch of green grass in front of his place by planting two or three sapling trees. Several of his colleagues, by dark of night, dug up the trees and, perhaps inspired by the beer, re-planted them upside-down.
Life was likewise fun for us tots. A small pack of us roamed The Units, outdoors in almost any weather, older ones picking on younger ones. In summer the iceman came twice a week. Our iceboxes had to be replenished with large blocks of ice, which were slid into the upper compartment to cool the meat, butter, eggs, and milk in the lower compartment. The iceman used black wrought-iron tongs to lug these ice blocks into our kitchens. We kids waited beside the iceman’s idling truck until he came out, tongs empty, to get another ice-cake. Then the boldest of us, Dale Price, begged ice chips from the iceman. He gave us each a two- or three-inch sliver of ice to hold in our hands, very cold under the hot sun. You had to brush dirt and sawdust off the ice chip. Then you sucked on it for as long as you could stand, dropped it, and ran off to play another game.
It may not sound like much, Gentle Reader; but for us it was a treat.
One time Dale Price drank turpentine from an old Campbell’s soup can my mommy had left on the back stoop, midway through a furniture painting project. Dale was rushed to the hospital to get his stomach pumped out. “Darn that Dale Price,” Mommy said. “Always getting into things.”
Galesburg was a railroad town, astride two great lines: The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Units stood across South Cherry Street from the main line of the CB&Q. I clearly remember standing in our front yard on a bright morning, watching a fast train zoom by, pulled by a chugging black steam locomotive, perhaps a 4-8-4 “Northern,” a long cone of white smoke streaming out behind it. At night, I lay in my crib beside Teddy, my bear and best friend, and listened to the imponderable chug, roll, and bump of iron thunder as switch engines sorted and grouped railcars in the nearby Burlington yards.
Mrs. Grable’s School
Life went on. Daddy had a part-time job taking the Galesburg Register-Mail to the outlying district of Bushnell in the afternoons. The GI Bill provided tuition, subsistence, books and supplies, equipment, and counseling services for veterans in college; but daily expenses, beyond “subsistence,” could be tight. When I was three, Mommy got a part-time job as a secretary in an auto parts company, and I began attending a nursery school, “Mrs. Grable’s.”
Mrs. Grable had a large house with a big backyard and lots of toys and crayons. One or two other old ladies helped her wrangle kids. She had maybe a dozen of us. She picked us in the morning in her DeSoto Suburban—a big car with jump seats and room enough for the whole dozen of us. Later in the day she drove around The Units and dropped us off one by one, like circus clowns alighting from a mystery vehicle every afternoon at three.
James Fennimore Cooper, c. 1850. Photo by Matthew Brady. Public Domain.
Long before Marshal Matt Dillon strode the dusty streets of Dodge City; before Hoppy, Roy, and Gene rode the range; before Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson twirled their lassoes; before William S. Hart oozed western authenticity; before The Great Train Robbery was committed to celluloid—in fact, before movies could be produced and radio waves modulated—there were writers singing the praises, and hyping the romance, of the American West.
James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) may have been the first novelist to glamorize the West in his Leatherstocking Tales, which featured rugged frontier scout Natty Bumppo. The Deerslayer and his Native American friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, held sway in the forests of New York State. But in those days, as mentioned previously, the West was in the East. At least The Prairie—the last novel in the series, in story chronology—takes the aged Pathfinder all the way to the vast plains beyond the Mississippi.
Ned Buntline, c. 1886. Photo by Sarony, New York. Public Domain.
After Cooper, the next notable writer to euhemerize the West was Edward Zane Carroll Judson Sr. (1821-1886), a heavy drinker who went about the country giving temperance lectures, a raffish troublemaker who barely escaped the noose in more jurisdictions than one. Seeking sensational material to publish about Wild Bill Hickok, who had driven him off at gunpoint, Judson on the rebound met William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. The two gregarious men became friends, and Judson’s career as “Ned Buntline,” writer of western stories, was launched.
He published a serial novel, Buffalo Bill: King of the Border Men, in the New York Weekly beginning in 1869. That became the basis for two plays about the great man, one of which—written by Buntline—starred Cody as himself, with appearing Buntline in a supporting role. For several years, the great Cody shot buffalo for the railroad in summer and portrayed himself on stage in winter. This was Buffalo Bill’s introduction to show biz. If you want to know where that led, rent or borrow a copy of Annie Get Your Gun.
Emma Ghent Curtis, author of The Administratrix, c. 1894. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.
Buntline wrote other western-themed dime novels, none as successful as his early promotion of Buffalo Bill. Judson (Buntline) died of congestive heart failure in 1886, having briefly been one of the wealthiest authors in the country.
Owen Wister, c. 1903. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.
Meanwhile, Emma Ghent Curtis (1860-1918), a Hoosier transplanted to Colorado, was writing The Administratrix. Published in 1889, it was the first real cowboy novel, outside of the dime-novel tradition. Its protagonist is a woman who falls in love with a cowboy and then cross-dresses as a cowboy in order to find his murderer. Though Curtis may be fairly said to have invented the genre—wouldn’t you know?—it’s a man who gets all the credit.
Poster for the Broadway production of The Virginian by Wister and Kirke La Shelle, 1903. Public Domain.
Philadelphian Owen Wister (1860-1938) penned a novel of the West and got it published in 1902 as The Virginian. Unlike Curtis’s obscure novel, The Virginian sold 200,000 copies in the first year. It’s credited with establishing many now-familiar tropes including the cowboy hero, the innocent schoolmarm, and the devious villain. Wister became “the father of Western fiction.” The Virginian was made into a successful stage play and has been the basis of five movies and a TV show. The original novel has sold 1.5 million copies to date.
Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey. Harper & Brothers. Fair use.
In Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, a dentist, former minor league baseball player, and aspiring author named Zane Grey (1872-1939) read The Virginian, studied its style and structure, and decided to try his hand at a Western novel. After western adventures including a hunting trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he got the feel of the West and taught himself to be a convincing Western writer. His novel The Last of the Plainsmen was rejected by Harper & Brothers but serialized by Outing magazine. The next one, The Heritage of the Desert, was published by Harper and became a best-seller. Two years later he produced Riders of the Purple Sage, his most successful book and one of the most successful Western novels in history.
Grey died in 1939 at age 67, the author of more than ninety books, most of them Westerns, and one of America’s first millionaire authors.
“Hopalong Takes Command,” an illustration by artist Frank Schoonover for a 1905 Hopalong Cassidy story, in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Another who deserves mention is Clarence E. Mulford (1883-1956). In 1904, Mulford created the cowboy character Hopalong Cassidy. In a series of short stories and 28 novels from then until 1941, Mulford sketched Cassidy’s adventures, elaborating a “detailed and authentic world filled with characters drawn from his extensive library research” (Wikipedia).
Mulford sold film rights to Hollywood producer Harry Sherman, who made a popular series of Hopalong Cassidy films. On the silver screen, Cassidy’s character was changed from a profane, rough-hewn cowpuncher to the rather genteel, upstanding, hero portrayed by actor William Boyd and idolized by millions of us kids in the 1950s. (I even bought Hopalong Cassidy Cookies. They were delicious.)
Louis L’Amour in 1970. Photo by Thomas J. Kravitz, Los Angeles Times. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0
If Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford were prolific, the next great Western author was superabundant. Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) wrote 89 novels, fourteen short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction. Almost all of them Westerns. His novels really began to sell around 1950. Just at that time, when he was still a hungry writer, L’Amour actually wrote four new Hopalong Cassidy novels, under a pseudonym, under contract for people who were planning a series of books and magazine stories to capitalize on Hoppy’s new-found fame.
Poster for Hondo, a movie based on a Louis L’Amour short story, “The Gift of Cochise,” novelized by L’Amour upon the film’s release. Fair use.
L’Amour’s version of Hopalong Cassidy was inspired by Mulford’s original roughneck, but the editors softened the character to comport with his new Hollywood identity. L’Amour disclaimed authorship of those four books forever after.
Your New Favorite Author’s long-time friend Bill Martinez, who worked for Bantam Books when L’Amour was under contract to them, escorted the celebrated author on elaborate book tours. He was a nice man, Bill told me, but on tour he needed someone to protect him and carve out down time, especially since he was ill at that stage of his life.
Poster for Lonesome Dove, based on the novel by McMurtry. Fair use.
And just when we might have thought all possible changes had been rung on the Western literary canon, along comes Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). McMurtry was a writer for all seasons, producing a large body of work in several genres and types, but much of it was Western fiction. The most famous book is probably McMurtry’s epic 1985 cowboy novel Lonesome Dove. The book, about retired Texas Rangers who own a cattle company and go on a cattle drive, won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a four-part TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. Because of the era when it was written, Lonesome Dove dealt with adult issues including sex, violence, and betrayal in a more forthright way. Most people who have read Lonesome Dove—or, for that matter, any of McMurtry’s other major works—acknowledge him to be a master storyteller.
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Your New Favorite Writer is well aware, Dear Reader, that there have been Westerns written and filmed since Larry McMurtry. But I think it’s amazingly advanced of me to work in Lonesome Dove, what with its being post-1957 and all.
Perhaps you’ll be relieved to learn this installment concludes our little colloquium on Westerns—except that there is one curious post-script to scribe, or footnote to note, about a couple of larger-than-life characters who bridged the span of time, having one boot firmly in the Old West and the other in what we may think of as modern-day America.
