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In cowboy jargon “to go west of everything,” means to die—a euphemism that was probably borrowed from Indians, for whom to travel the three-day road was to take the westward journey walked by the dying. Jane Tompkins, in her little jewel of a book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992), examines the exposure of Americans to the Western genre. Tompkins contends that from 1900 to 1975 a large portion of the adolescent male population spent Saturday afternoon at the movies watching Westerns, concluding that in the afternoon kids saw Roy Rogers , Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy—while on Saturday night many of their parents saw John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, and any number of Sam Peckinpah’s heroes and villains in slightly more sophisticated versions of the Western genre. Although Tompkins does not explore the transposition of Westerns from movie to television, it is interesting to note that ¤ve of the most popular and long-running early TV series were Westerns: Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel,Bonanza,The Ri®eman, and The Virginian. Among the conventions of the Western novel and ¤lm that have come to de¤ne what makes a man a man in American popular culture, Jane Tompkins ranks linguistic choice ¤rst, a priority that Hemingway recognized early he shared with Owen Wister, the writer on whose work The Virginian was based.1 Tompkins’s list continues: (1) language devoid of abstraction or emotion, (2) centrality of landscape, (3) importance of horses & cattle, 10 West of Everything The High Cost of Making Men in Islands in the Stream Rose Marie Burwell (4) unquestioning commitment to a goal, and (5) acceptance of the reckoning or entrapment that dispenses death. How well most of us know, even without having consciously internalized it, that the Western is laden with codes of conduct, standards of judgment, and habits of perception that shape our sense of the world and govern our behavior. Westerns play to a Wild West of the psyche in the same way that the West functions as a symbol of freedom that offers an escape from life lived in a world of social entanglements and meaningless proscriptions, the world that Hemingway ®ed in 1939 and of which he wrote to Maxwell Perkins soon after: It’s so much more fun living here than in Key West that it’s pitiful. You see the bridges put KW all on the bum. You couldn’t shoot anymore. The government took over all the Keys and put bird wardens on them. . . . If you did a good day’s work (a miracle with people bothering all the time, with people always comeing to swim in the pool and you hearing every word they said . . . ) there was nothing to do except go down to Mr. Josie’s place and drink. . . . (28 January 1940) Inherent in Hemingway’s complaints about what drove him from Key West is rati¤cation of another comfortably and deceptively simple element of the vision offered by the Western—the assumption that reality is material and that the spheres of women and men are easy to separate, for certainly it is a woman who issues the invitation for noisy socializing around the pool while the writer tries to work. The Western gives little space to the life of women; her world is repetitious, unexciting, exhausting , and often painful—if she is a good woman. It is ¤lled with bearing and raising children, with making do, with entertaining the preacher. Religion, books, and ideas are abstractions that belong in the world of women—if they have a place at all—for they interfere with the work of men. Not that the work of men is easy or painless, but it has at center a clearly de¤ned goal—which, when it is accomplished, stays accomplished. Men’s work is always recognizable because it is so easily presented in action-¤lled material images. How easy it is for the devoted viewer of western movies, projected at twenty-four frames per second, or the reader 158 rose marie burwell of its plot-driven and page-bound counterpart to ignore that a crucial element of men’s work is, if not more dangerous than women’s, dangerous in ways dif¤cult to render in material images. The heroic male ¤gure who offers vicarious satisfaction to viewers and readers of both sexes is dominated by his need to dominate, and the code he embodies both elevates and...

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