Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 by Christine Bold (review)

458 Shorter Book Reviews 1968) 260-265; Part II Autobiographical Information, Riders on the Earth (Boston· Houghton, 1978) 69-1 I I; Paris Review Interviews: Fifth Series (New York: Penguin. 1981) 21-48; and Warren V. Bush, ed., The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish andMark Van Doren (New York: Dutton, 1964), throughout. 3 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World TheyMade (New York: Simon, 1987). 4 A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933). 5 "The Secret Site." The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed., E.C. Lathem (New York: Holt 1969), 362. ' 6 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I957),5. Christine Bold. Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, I860-1960, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. xx +215 pp. Illus. Selling the Wild West is a serious study of the popular Western novel. Christine Bold, who teaches English at the University of Alberta, has essayed a literary approach to a subject usually handled by cultural historians. Neither her title nor subtitle-Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, I86O-196O-conveys her book's argument: that writers routinely dismissed as hacks exhibited varying degrees of individuality and rebellion by exposing, and even purposely subverting , the formula in which they worked. Bold examines only a handful of writers but advances several strategies to illustrate her point, ranging from biographical data for a writer like Frederick Faust, who was frankly ashamed of what he churned out under the pen-name Max Brand, to authorial inte1jections or asides acknowledging the formulaic contrivances in which writer and reader are alike involved. Most of all, she searches out hidden messages within plots and dialogues suggesting the authors' uneasiness with the formula, and finds that the conflict inherent in the Western-the clash between civilization and wilderness enshrined by James Fenimore Cooper-mirrors their own creative struggles. Resistance to formula by the purveyors of formula is Bold's theme. Chapter One gets at basics: What constitutes the Western formula, and how was it imposed? Bold discusses the actual constraints placed on writers by the dime novel factories and later by the pulp and slick magazine publishers. Since she sees the formula as essentially set by 1860, her first case studies are Owen Wister and Frederic Remington. They witnessed the passing of what they deemed the Wild West in the final decade of the nineteenth century and carried their reactions tothat fact forward into the twentieth, chaffing against the constraints imposed on their W estem subject-matter by Eastern conventions. Bold' s reading of Remington asa writer afraid of the closure of space that had represented Western opportunity is ingenious. She ventures into his painting and sculpture as well, to support her contention that he was trapped by the rigidity of his own artistic structures, and turned to bronze to escape the limitations imposed by canvas, which literally framed space. Her point might be made more effectively by referring to Remington 's struggle to break away from illustration to become a pure painter. Shorter Book Reviews 459 Illustration directly imposed limitations on his artistic creativity, and his resistance to it directly parallels that of writers who asserted individuality within formula. In the end, Remington would still be painting Westerns, but on his own terms. Other case studies follow. Emerson Hough marked the twentieth-century movement into imagination as frontier realities receded. Zane Grey reluctantly accepted his fate as a formulist; Frederick Faust fought it, subtly undermining his own stories to express his distaste for Max Brand Westerns. Ernest Haycock accepted the formulaic nature of his work, but hoped to upgrade standards. More recently, Alan LeMay has made the Western' s conventions his real subject. Jack Schaefer abandoned the clean, formulaic classicism of Shane to write fiction that denied such shapeliness and imposed reality's disorder. Louis L'Amour's overriding concern is to milk every formulaic possibility imaginable in order to maintain his unrivalled popularity and claim a lion's share of the market for Westerns. In a final chapter, Bold examines the anti-Western Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those that thrive on parodying the formula. She notes that there was nothing new...