From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction by C. L. Sonnichsen (review)

FROM HOPALONG TO HUD: THOUGHTS ON WESTERN FICTION BY C. L. SONNICHSEN (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1978. 201 pages, $9.95.) In this lively discourse on Western Fiction C. L. Sonnichsen brings together nine previously published essays, spanning thirty-five years, with two new pieces. The result is a sometimes scholarly, sometimes curmudgeonly glance at this century's literary responses to the West. To his credit Sonnichsen is interested in both lower-case westerns—formulaic pulp fiction—and upper-case serious Westerns. When he adopts the tone of detached commentator, his insights are unfailingly fresh. Thus he sheds light on the sharecropper in fiction, bringing to our attention minor but interesting works by Dorothy Scarborough, Ruth Cross, and John Watson. Or he shows how Owen Wister's idealized gentleman cowboy is, statistically anyway, an aberration. From Hopalong Cassidy to Hud Bannon, the cowboy hero has been more often scamp than courtier. Similarly, chapters on the Wyatt Earp legend and the contrasting treatment of Apaches in serious and popular fiction are valuable contributions. When the literature touches too closely upon the hedonistic present, however, Sonnichsen is less useful because he appears at times to be a shade too genteel to be a reliable guide. I have less quarrel with his quite remarkable demonstrations of sadistic violence as purveyed in badly written pulp novels than I do with his uneasiness in the presence of explicit sexual passages in novels by such writers as Larry McMurtry, Tom Mayer, and William Eastlake. Perhaps the writer he is most unfair to is McMurtry, whom he seems to regard as little more than a rank pornographer. The "Tribe of Larry" as he calls those influenced by McMurtry, are not to be trusted either. Thus John Irsfeld's fine novel, Little Kingdoms, is dismissed with a remark that greatly misrepresents the quality and intentions of that novel: "There is also some good killing and raping in Irsfeld's second novel Little Kingdoms (1976)" (p. 36). Even when Sonnischen is most irritatingly genteel or clumsily unfunny in his attempts to cope with Literary Dirt, he is scarcely ever boring. Also, his book is a mine of titles, providing many new leads to works promising both high and low pleasures. The book is not entirely free of factual errors: Philip French does not teach at the University of Texas, and John Cawelti is not a sociologist. But these are small matters in a book so lustily written. DON GRAHAM •DON GRAHAM received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 197 1 . He is the author of The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context (U. of Missouri, 1978), and co-editor of Western Movies (U. of New Mexico Press, May, 1979), plus numerous articles in scholarly and critical journals. 76VOL. 33, NO. 2 (SPRING 1979) ...