Western Culture

Timothy Sandefur

exan novelist Elmer Kelton was named the “best western author of all time” by the Western Writers of America in 1995, yet he never achieved the fame enjoyed by such writers as Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy. That’s unfortunate, because unlike McCarthy—who portrays the west as a nihilistic maelstrom of violence—or McMurtry—whose novels express what Douglas Jeffrey calls a persistent “disillusion with the life of his forebears” (CRB, Spring 2007)—Kelton unashamedly revered the merits of previous generations.
He was conscious of this difference. “Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter,” Kelton once told an interviewer. “If you write out of love for your subject matter they’ll dismiss you.” He certainly loved and celebrated his subject: the character—the bravery, individualism, stubbornness, love, and good humor—that built the American west. His best books, such as The Time it Never Rained (1973), The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971), and Good Old Boys (1978), used the genre’s traditional elements to express a vision, not just of the frontier experience, but of the human condition.
Kelton based his stories on fact, and his writing often displays a surprising literary sophistication, for instance with Cloudy in the West (1997), his homage to Huckleberry Finn. Yet he never merely chronicled events or reprised other novelists’ ideas, and his books contain none of the cynicism or moral ambiguity prized by literary elites. Instead, he consistently did his characters the justice of respecting their consciences. They inhabit a complex world, but those complexities don’t warp the principles of morality.
Good Old Boys, for example, tells the story of Hewey Calloway, an aging (38) cowboy whose brother Walter has given up the saddle for the dreary labor of farming. Dirt-poor, Walter and his wife remind Hewey that at least they own their land, and can leave a legacy to their sons, unlike the unmarried and propertyless Hewey. Hewey rebuffs them, too enamored of his free, itinerant life to settle down. But when Walter is injured, Hewey must substitute for him, and toil behind the plow to save the farm from foreclosure.
This premise enables Kelton to tell a universal story about the tension every young bachelor feels between his sweet independence and the knowledge that the longer he avoids stable family life, the more he risks loneliness and oblivion. It’s a simple device, but that simplicity and Kelton’s smooth, laconic prose, play well in the spare Texas setting. Kelton weaves his characters’ conflicting desires and the weightiness of his themes with a sense of humor that makes the novel at once elegiac and comic.

Moral Choices

While honoring the steadfastness and moral clarity he considered essential to survival on the plains, Kelton’s mature writing also avoided the clichés that plague western fiction. The heroes of most such romances, he wrote, “are seven feet tall and invincible. My characters are five-eight and nervous.” His novels rarely contain gunfights, and are populated by people who, like Hewey, don’t carry weapons. Nor are their opponents black-hatted caricatures; they are just as likely to be moved by laziness or misguided good intentions as by malice. There are no villains at all in Slaughter (1992), which is told from the alternating perspectives of cowboy Jeff Layne and Comanche chief Crow Feather, both hunting for the last large buffalo herd. Their clash climaxes with a dramatic and accurate account of the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls. Kelton is scrupulously fair to both sides.

It’s not that Kelton’s writing refused to take sides, but that he followed Aristotle’s dictum that all actions aim at some perceived good. Thus he strove to convey the hopes and fears of people living in a harsh environment, who come into conflict more often by error, lack of foresight, or what Aristotle called “incontinence”—the weakness of character that causes people to fall short of their own values—than by greed or racism. This made his characters more sympathetic, and his stories more tragic and compelling, than melodramatic dime-novel westerns or their socially conscious modern counterparts. “In simple black-hat/white-hat stories, the reader knows exactly where his sympathies lie,” Kelton said. “But what if he cares something for both?”
Nor are his characters victims of circumstance. On the contrary, choices matter in Kelton’s west, which is populated—with few exceptions—by people seeking to do their duty as they understand it in the face of costly dilemmas. Nowhere is that clearer than in his masterpiece, The Time it Never Rained. The main character, Charlie Flagg, is determined to hold on to his ranch despite a seven-year drought that drives him into near-bankruptcy. Time and again he refuses government aid, insisting on his independence. But the book is not focused on politics; Kelton is more interested in his character’s gumption. “I just don’t believe in askin’ somebody else to pay my way,” Flagg tells a reporter who interviews him.

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It was my great pleasure to get to know Elmer Kelton and my great honor to present him with The Rounders Award at the Governor's Mansion in Santa Fe.