Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories

5 “Hang and Rattle”: Change and Endurance inThe Time It Never Rained

33 5 “Hang and Rattle”: Change and Endurance in The Time It Never Rained Ruth McAdams ELMER KELTON SETS The Time It Never Rained in the country he knows best during the famous drought that burned up West Texas from 1950 to 1957. Those were seven remarkable years, but there is no doubt that Kelton’s part of Texas has always been dry country. As he says in Living and Writing in West Texas, drought is “a steady boarder who may stray for a little while but always comes home for supper.” The rains, which bring temporary prosperity, he likens to “a flirtatious stranger who occasionally waves but never pauses long enough for a first-name acquaintanceship” (32). Of course Kelton knows that sometimes rains come, even during a drought. But occasional rains during a drought only torment the ranchers. These rains never last long enough to soak into the ground but instead merely bounce off the impenetrable soil like water droplets on a hot griddle. Therefore, “moisture from one [rainfall] seldom remains until the next” (Kelton, Introduction to The Time It Never Rained x). Kelton knew the 1950–1957 drought—or “drouth” as he calls it in the novel—firsthand: “As a farm and ranch reporter I covered that drought day after day for seven years. I ran out of new ways to say, ‘It’s still dry out there’” (Kelton, Sandhills Boy 205). Once his editor at the San Angelo Standard-Times even suggested, in an attempt at finding a fresh angle for the drought, that Kelton “go to Fairmount Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories 34 Cemetery and ask the grave diggers how far it was down to wet dirt” (Sandhills Boy 200). Elmer Kelton says his prolonged assignment as a journalist made it possible to write The Time It Never Rained (http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/08/elmer-kelton-rip/). The drought ended in January of 1957, shortly after President Dwight D. Eisenhower toured blighted West Texas, causing residents to rejoice in what they took to calling the “nice Republican rains” (Sandhills Boy 206). Kelton began work on the novel shortly after. By this time he had already achieved modest success in the pulp western market, so he sent the novel to his agent, sure it would find a home. It did not. Labeling the work “a nice little agrarian novel” his agent and several publishers’ readers did not react favorably (Sandhills Boy 206). He completely rewrote the novel. His agent and editors were still not interested, so he tucked the manuscript away in a drawer, never forgetting his “aborted drought novel” (Sandhills Boy 207). Time passed, and after critical acceptance of his first “literary” novel, The Day the Cowboys Quit in 1971, he completely rewrote The Time It Never Rained for a third time, starting from page one. This time it worked, and one of his greatest sources of pride is that “Doubleday published it unedited—‘No one ever changed a word,’ he says” (Anne Dingus, Texas Monthly, Dec. 1995). First published in 1973, the book garnered a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, as well as critical acclaim, culminating in Jon Tuska’s 1982 declaration that it is “‘One of the dozen or so best novels written by an American in this century’” (Pilkington, Afterword to Time 377). Kelton himself considers The Time It Never Rained the favorite of his works. In an interview with Gary Kent in Conversations With Texas Writers, he explains why: “It was more personal to me because in a sense it was more of a reporting job than it was fiction, although I fictionalized the characters. Just about everything that happens in that book, it happened to people I knew about. Very little of the consequences of the drought in that book was not real to Ruth McAdams 35 me; in other words, I’d seen it happen to someone” (198). In spite of many other novels, and countless articles, speeches, and other publications , the novel remains what Kelton called his “signature work. After more than twenty years, I am more often than not introduced as the author of that book, though I have written many others since” (Sandhills Boy 207). The situation in The Time It Never Rained is of course the drought and the price it exacts from its...