Lindbergh’s congressman father, whom the New York Times tagged the “Gopher Bolshevik,” was a fierce critic of Wall Street, Woodrow Wilson, and the war machine. Charles Lindbergh Sr. was a progenitor of a vigorous Minnesota antiwar tradition that found expression in men such as Senators Henrik Shipstead and Eugene McCarthy before degenerating into the boring Cold War social democracy of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale or the Republican polenta of Pawlenty.
Bob Dylan is very much in the Lindbergh-McCarthy tradition, as Norwegian academic Tor Egil Forland explained in a 1992 Journal of American Studies paper titled “Bringing It All Back Home or Another Side of Bob Dylan: Midwestern Isolationist.” But then Dylan is sixty-nine, and old enough to remember when the people of his place looked askance at empire. There were giants in the earth in those days.
When the Masters of War (“even Jesus would never forgive what you do”) requested the presence of American sons at the blood orgies of 1917, 1941, 1950, and 1964, it was the Upper Midwest, with its Non-Partisan Leagues and retro-Progressives and Sons of the Wild Jackass, that brayed “No!” Where are their offspring? I don’t mean to be impertinent or importunate, Dakotas and Minnesota and Wisconsin, but we look to you for La Follettes and Nyes and McGoverns and you give us Al Franken and Ron Johnson?
Turn off the goddam television, would you please, and turn on Wisconsin!
Feingold had his flaws but he was the only member of the Senate with the guts to vote against the Patriot Act; as Jesse Walker of Reason writes, he also “voted against TARP, was decent on the Second Amendment, and was one of the rare liberals to reach out to the Tea Parties instead of demonizing them.” He was neither red nor blue—each a scoundrel hue.
Senator Feingold quoted Dylan in his concession speech: “My heart is not weary/It’s light and it’s free/I have nothing but affection for those who have sailed with me.” Dylan closed our concert with “Ballad of a Thin Man,” rasping, “Something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?”
I’m no more perceptive than Mr. Jones, but one thing is all too clear: the Upper Midwest, historic home of the American peace movement, has come down with an awfully bad case of laryngitis. And it’s gettin’ dark—too dark to see.
Elmer Kelton: The Art of Cowboying
The American Enterprise, 2006
Elmer Kelton was voted “Great Western Writer of All Time” by the Western Writers of America, a daunting title to work under, though he bears it modestly. There is, after all, that modifying adjective: Western.
Kelton, who turned eighty in April, has his academic champions, but he acknowledges that “the Western field is a literary ghetto. Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter. If you write out of love for your subject matter they’ll dismiss you.”
Elmer Kelton loves his subject matter. He was born to it, after all. And if the Western is a ghetto, it is a remarkably rich ghetto populated by the likes of Edward Abbey (The Brave Cowboy), Jack Schaefer (Shane), Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), and other novelists whose mortal sin, it seems, is setting their tales in open spaces rather than in the confines of the faculty lounge or city tenement. Elmer Kelton has an utter mastery of his subject; a distinctive, even arresting, point of view; and a narrative talent honed by writing for the Western pulps. His best work, The Time It Never Rained (1973), can be read as character study, regional literature, and philosophical novel: find me a navel-gazing New Yorker writer of the last thirty years who has squeezed out a single book as rich, layered, and unsettling.
Following a lunch of—what else?—thick steaks, I spoke with Elmer Kelton in his study in the home he and his wife built half a century ago in the ranching town of San Angelo, Texas. His library overspills with books on Texas, cattle, and the West; his musical tastes run to Bob Wills, Roy Acuff, Willie Nelson, and Bill Monroe. He reels off the original lineup of the Sons of the Pioneers.
His father, a ranch foreman named Buck Kelton, came from a line of cowboys; his mother, Bea, was a schoolteacher whose male relatives worked as roustabouts in the oil fields. “In an oil-patch town like Crane,” where he attended school, recalls Kelton, “a boy who excelled in English and won spelling bees was automatically suspect.”
I ask about his youthful cowboying skills. “Pretty inept,” Kelton says with a smile. “My three younger brothers were all better cowboys than I was. I got lost a lot—turns out I was nearsighted. We’d go out to gather cattle and if they were 100 yards away I’d miss ‘em. Dad told me pretty early I’d better find some other way to make a living.”
Being a novelist was not exactly what Dad had in mind. When Elmer, as a senior in high school, told Buck Kelton that he wanted to write, the old cowboy replied, “That’s the way it is with you kids nowadays—you all want to make a living without having to work for it.”
Buck relented. Elmer went on to the University of Texas and a career as a journalist and novelist. He made his first story sale in 1947 to the pulp magazine Ranch Romances; fifty-nine years later, his corpus has grown to forty-five novels. Although Elmer never knew if his father read any of his books, Buck did “help me with details” on matters from windmill-raising to the proper way to castrate a colt. (“I’d held a rope but never did use the knife.”)
Like most writers, young Elmer was a listener, not a talker. “Cowboys, especially in the days before television, were pretty good storytellers. As a kid I loved to sit around and listen to them talk. I soaked it up like a sponge.”
Kelton is no typewriter cowboy rhapsodizing over the purple sage in purple prose; he knows whereof he writes. He spent fifteen years on the farm-and-livestock beat for the San Angelo Standard-Times, followed by stints as an editor at Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine and Livestock Weekly, “the Bible of the ranch business.” As TCU director of ranch management John Merrill has said, “In terms of birth, upbringing, and everyday involvement, he is the real thing and has been all his life.”
Kelton’s West is not Hollywood’s West: his cowboys are as distant from John Wayne as they are from Brokeback Mountain. He writes from inside the life of a ranch, with a brand of realism redolent of cedar brush and live oak, prickly pear and jackrabbits. He had a ravenous appetite for Westerns as a child, absorbing everything from Zane Grey to Roy Rogers, but “I knew the difference between fantasy and the reality I saw around me all the time. The reality was muddy and bloody and hot and cold. I wanted to write about cowboy life as I saw it to be.”
Kelton’s is a generous spirit; his cowboys, Mexicans, ranchers, Indians, and frontiersmen are depicted sympathetically, humanely, without ideological blinkers or idealization. His work contains moments of beauty and depth that remove it from the fetters of genre, as when the Pat Garrett-like shootist in The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971) helps to build a fence to protect the grave of a man he has lynched.
With The Day the Cowboys Quit, Kelton, in the words of his academic exegete Judy Alter, began to “use the western setting as a vehicle for studying mankind, rather than as an end in itself,” in novels that “are characterized thematically by the moral complexities wrought in men’s lives by change and stylistically by a narrative voice that speaks clearly of West Texas.”
This gunfire-free novel is about a strike, of all un-Texan things, and is based on an 1883 incident in which cowboys in the Lone Star state’s Canadian River country rode off their jobs. You might expect a morality play featuring sinister avaricious ranchers versus brave-hearted ranch hands, but that’s not Kelton’s way. His characters are not galloping cliches. The most bullying rancher makes a compelling defense of his position. And given that Kelton dedicates the book
