Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories

8 Reading Instead of Roping, Writing Instead of Ranching, and Qualifying for Walrus Hunter: Humor in Elmer Kelton

93 8 Reading Instead of Roping, Writing Instead of Ranching, and Qualifying for Walrus Hunter: Humor in Elmer Kelton Bob J. Frye Out of all the adversity over the years has come one thing that has always struck me about ranchers and farmers. That is their ability to laugh at their problems. When things are the roughest, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel except perhaps an oncoming train, most of them manage to keep a touch of humor. (My Kind of Heroes 20–21). I take pains to make my settings authentic. Some of you may read Louis L’Amour. He’s a nice fellow, and in the backs of his books he has this little piece that says, in effect, ‘If I use a spring in my story, that spring exists, I have been there, I have tasted the water, and the water is good.’ When I was researching The Wolf and the Buffalo a few years ago, I started the story on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River. Not to be out done, I went to the Double Mountain Fork, and surely enough, it was there. I tasted the water, and the water was gyppy as hell. (“Address to Friends of the Library Symposium” 10) ELMER KELTON HAS CERTAINLY come a long way. From being totally ignored in Larry McMurty’s influential essay “Ever a Bride- Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories 94 groom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature” in the Texas Observer in 1981, to being voted the greatest Western writer of all time by Western Writers of America in 1995, Kelton has garnered uncommon respect and admiration, including seven WWA Spur Awards for the best Western novel of the year along with the career Saddleman Award and four Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Tom Pilkington has asserted that “Elmer Kelton is without question one of the three or four best writers Texas has produced” (Houston Chronicle 21 June 2007). It is important to note that when McMurtry’s essay was reprinted in 1989 in Craig Clifford and Tom Pilkington’s collection Range Wars: Heated Debates, Sober Reflections, and Other Assessments of Texas Writing, McMurtry added in a thoughtful postscript to the reprinted essay: “I have a few regrets. One is the omission of Elmer Kelton. I should have read him then, but I didn’t. I’m just now reading him. If it’s any consolation to Elmer, I’m just getting around to Goethe, too” (40). While Fifty Western Writers (1982) includes a thoughtful critical/biographical article on Kelton by Dorys Grover, A Literary History of the American West (1987) includes only three brief references to Kelton; Updating the Literary West ten years later contains Kenneth Davis’s informative chapter on Kelton but the bibliography provides no secondary sources on him. Fortunately, Davis’s insightful chapter is complemented by the work of Judy Alter, Patrick Bennett, Lawrence Clayton, Terence Dalrymple, Fred Erisman, Joe Holley, Jim Lee, Joyce Roach, Lewis Toland, and others who have taken Kelton’s writings seriously and illuminated his themes, traditions, and artful craft. What is it that has accounted for Kelton’s extraordinary success, especially in recent years? In a word, authenticity. Davis has noted not only Kelton’s being a “meticulous researcher” but also how his long journalistic experience with the San Angelo Standard-Times and the Livestock Weekly enabled him to use a spare style “full of carefully chosen details which help create verisimilitude and give the reader an accurate vision of the West” (ULW 581). Couple these two Kelton qualities with his personal experiences detailed Bob J. Frye 95 in his recent memoir, Sandhills Boy: The Winding Trail of a Texas Writer (2007), describing his growing up on the McElroy and Lea ranches in West Texas where he was immersed in the realities that actual cowboys daily face and Kelton’s willingness to depict these experiences candidly and faithfully—well, then you can see why his readers treasure Kelton’s reality over myth, his fiction informed and shaped by actuality over what he calls in his 1980 interview with Bennett the common tendency “to over-romanticize the old-timecowboy period” (197). The best single study of Kelton’s working in the tradition of the Western yet providing a realistic, authentic depiction of the West is Fred Erisman’s “Elmer Kelton’s ‘Other’ West...