Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories

4 Journalism’s Influence on Elmer Kelton’s Fiction

19 4 Journalism’s Influence on Elmer Kelton’s Fiction Steve Kelton I KNEW ELMER KELTON for almost sixty years, exactly a month shy of fifty-eight, to be precise, though the first few of those years are a little sketchy. He was my dad, so with your indulgence, that’s how I will refer to him here. It would feel a bit awkward to call him Elmer, and he always insisted that Mr. Kelton was his father, my grandfather. As far back as I can recall, he worked at a newspaper during the day and at his own typewriter at night. More than once in later years, he expressed regret that perhaps he hadn’t given us kids as much attention as other fathers gave to their children, hammering away at that typewriter from shortly after supper until long after we’d gone to bed. But for us, that was normal; we didn’t know any different, and if we lacked for attention, we were unaware of it. Dad’s day job paid the bills, and all that hammering and clattering at night allowed for a few extras. Only a handful of people have ever become wealthy writing for a newspaper, and Dad didn’t break that mold. From 1948 until well into 1990, he worked full-time, first for the San Angelo Standard-Times, then from 1963 until 1968 for the Sheep & Goat Raiser magazine, and the final twenty-two years for Livestock Weekly. Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories 20 He often said that the two separate careers complemented one another. Writing fiction gave him an outlet for his imagination and allowed him to indulge a need to explore his subject in greater depth than was possible in a straight news format, not to mention the freedom to express opinions. Many if not most of today’s newspaper reporters appear not to have heard of that last limitation, but for Dad it was sacrosanct. His journalistic work, on the other hand, taught him the discipline of deadlines—I doubt he ever missed any—and ingrained a certain discipline in his wordsmithing, as well. His prose never rambled or became self-indulgent, and he seldom used five words where three would do. Perhaps most important were the contacts he made as a reporter, the people he met and the stories he heard. Some of the people he interviewed were old-timers in their own right fifty or sixty years ago and provided living links to the periods and places in which his stories would be set. Others had known such old-timers or recounted family stories passed down through the generations . Together they peopled his novels, at least in bits and pieces, and gave flesh and context to his own extensive study of history. Just as he was careful not to color his “straight” reporting with his own opinions and attitudes, Dad believed that people of other times should not be judged by the opinions and attitudes of today. They may have done, said, and thought things that offend the sensibilities of modern political correctness, but they lived in a different and usually much harsher reality. That reality would gobble up a transplanted modern moralist before he or she could finish wagging a finger. Dad was always careful in his settings; he had been to the places he wrote about. There were no stands of saguaro cactus in his West Texas fiction, just as there were no saguaro cactus in the real West Texas he wrote about. His day job gave him the opportunity to travel to those places as he pursued the stories he wrote for the publications that paid his salary. This was especially true at Livestock Weekly, where stories were seldom assigned, and he had the freedom as well as responsibility to seek out his own material. If he wanted to stand Steve Kelton 21 on the ground where the battle of San Jacinto was fought, he found a story in that vicinity. If he needed to absorb the atmosphere of the last buffalo hunts or the battle of Adobe Walls, there was a feedlot in the Texas Panhandle doing something new or different. All of those experiences found their way into his books at one time or another and gave them the authenticity that readers recognized, appreciated, and trusted. Many of the myriad factual elements that gave his books their flavor were fragmentary and...