I'm Laurence Clayton.
I'm pleased to talk about two of today's
foremost practitioners of the Western
novel, Benjamin Capps
and Elmer Kelton Galton has produced
almost 30 novels about the West,
past and present.
Capps himself has written about a dozen
books, some of them fiction, some of them
history.
Both are remarkable practitioners
of the form and outspoken people
on what makes a good Western
novel. The whole question of what is
a Western has been often debated.
These two men are in a position to answer
that question with a degree of
authenticity and authority.
I think everybody in the Western world,
Junior, you know the way you ask
the big sky and things like that.
He said a survey of the grounds on which
the Western novelist might pitch his tent
includes include.
We don't have a number here to include
the days of exploration.
The days of the fur hunter,
the days of the minor,
the various days of the Indian wars,
the days of the cattlemen,
there's the frontier commerce,
you know, I think strong about Santa Fe
Trail and things like that.
These are the homesteader
days of conversion from Frontier Town
camp to town.
He's an engineer like a railroad engineer
in the days of the cowboy so often told
in mass and so infrequently in truth.
And I would add to the Guthrie's
list here quite a lot,
you know, how about relationships between
Indians and how about the situation of an
Indian owner on a reservation,
which I tried to do myself,
and the
relationship between Indians and
black cavalrymen, Zilberstein and things
like that?
It gets complicated, folks.
There's a whole lot more than
the heroic cowboy right about and still
call it Westerns.
Scootin, I think that's a good point.
Give me your respond to that.
Well, I've almost lost the question now,
but classically,
the Western, you know, is as high as it's
normally thought of the people who are
Western ears. It's normally an action
oriented story with a hero, possibly
a heroine, not always a hero
and a villain. And this is pretty much
the clichéd view of the Western story,
the classic Western story.
And and like I said last night,
I have no quarrel with that one.
I've written something like that, too,
and I appreciate them when they're done
well by people who are really
gifted in that craft and that
art.
And I have no quarrel at all with a good
action Western, but
the Western should be a lot broader than
that. I like a Western that's
grounded in real history, in a real
place, real time, and people
who are affected
by the land their own, the time and the
place and in other words,
the old Hollywood be western.
You know, one Saturday you saw this
town set and that was
the outlaws of
Big Bend Country or something.
Next week you saw the same town set,
the same character, same villain, same
hero.
And this was our of Dakota.
You know, this was a utility West,
those fellows. It was the same story, the
same dialog, everything the same, whether
it was Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming,
whatever, a
really good Western would be grounded in
a specific place and a specific set
of circumstances that were peculiar to
that place.
So that that story couldn't just bodily
be picked up and moved to some other
time, some other place, some other set
of characters.
That to me is the difference between,
say, the formula Western and
a lot of good formula westerns are set
very definitely in a time of life.
But the old classic cliche type Western,
that's the difference to me between that
one and what I would call a serious
Western novel, or as some of the
Western writers like to say, a novel
of the West.
How important is place
in a Western novel?
It depends on the time
and so on. But in many of
them, I think it's very important
because.
I don't know. Me and my buddy were
talking about our grandfathers
who were kind of mustangs, you
know, going out and one of what
they talk about.
We finally decided here.
They talk about the same kind of things
we're talking about right now.
Here they are out there riding horseback.
They went out in west Texas and drove
well, the horse is back in east Texas,
back yards and broken to the plowing
gorgeousness.
Adland searching.
But one thing they decided was both
of us had been flying some
and I mean, you know, in their core
and I said,
but I bet you, you know, you go out to
where you don't take too many people have
looked before and see this
land.
It's bound to have an effect on you kind
of if you know, nobody
ever flown before.
Now you're looking at what it's
like to be left over the Earth or the
Pacific Ocean or something.
And
so I think that the place is
important.
It ties in with the time that
you're talking about very much.
But what about a novel about the
first people who ever try to tell
people about Yellowstone National Park
estrus? Didn't believe there's no
such place.
You're drunk, you know,
and and
so on and so on. But but it's not only
Yellowstone National Park, I'm telling
you, left some of those sagebrush flats
in eastern Utah.
And that's places that.
It has some kind of a spiritual effect on
you, which I believe it had with many
Indians, the sense of the nature
and the land and all, there
were no traffic jams, no freeways
or anything, that kind of stuff.
I'm sure it had an effect.
I think people are affected by the land
on which, you know, the land on which
they grow up.
There's no story. I heard a long time ago
somebody asked an old ranchman who had
operated all over the West,
what's the best place you ever?
What's the best place in the country to
Ranchi? And he said, the country
where you grew up and there's no matter
where that might have been, you know
what? Each individual person, because
you're affected by the place where you
grew up that stays with you no matter
where you go.
And I've heard stories in
different parts of the country will have
effects, different effects.
The the Cowboys who work down in
South Texas brush
his relationship to that land was
different from the cowboy who worked out
in the open plains in some
respects. And of course, as you
went west, you were affected by drought,
lack water, but, you know,
all the privations that went with it that
you might not have had in another place.
So that's going to affect your your
personality and your character.
And I have heard that
when the Panhandle first opened up, after
the Indians were removed to the
reservation in the Panhandle, opened up
for for cattle, some
of those first herds that came up out of
south Texas, they were brought up by
cowboys from the South Texas brush
country.
Some of those fellows tried to stay up
there in the panhandle on those open
plains and work on ranches
to which they delivered the cattle.
Some of them and some of them never
could. Some of them were.
So the the open plains,
that country where you could see for
miles, they were used to the
claustrophobia of the brush country and
they never could make the psychological
adjustment. A lot of them just had to go
home. You'd have to say they were
affected by the land you see in anything
you write about them when they
should reflect that.
But in terms of fiction, in the long
run, what doesn't what counts is not
the land itself.
It's the fact of the land on the
characters because the characters are
right matter in the story.
Fictionally speaking, the reader
is interested basically in your
characters. And what happens in the land
is important in from that
standpoint only insofar as it affects
those characters.
The land in itself is not really
the paramount issue.
You know, that's Westerns kind of hard
thing to define everybody's satisfaction
when the time it never rain first
appeared in the Doubleday hardcover
edition, they brought it out as a trade
book, you know, not as the genre book
when the first paperback reprint came
out to go on the newsstands.
Sure enough, although it was set in the
nineteen fifties about a rancher in the
drouth, he was driving a pickup and
and his farmer friend was driving a
tractor and all this, all this modern
stuff, it was went on there
when he came out in the paperback, it
wound up has the spine western
and it was put on the shelf alongside
Louis L'Amour. And in all the
traditional Western writers, it was
classed as a Western because it was set
in Texas, period.
I did not think of it is ever
geographically, they're
not all together.
A lot of the a lot of the Eastern
publishers seem to regard it as a Western
if it's west of the Mississippi, unless
it's in L.A. or San Francisco.
I think it kind of separated out Houston.
Now to Dallas.
Dallas on TV is not considered a Western.
Thank God I didn't have a problem,
not that of the writer, but
that if the reader in their preconceived
ideas and
East Coast people and
some.
New York editors, they're
going to class first up, certain, like if
you asked me if I write Westerns, I have
to know what you mean by this.
Now, I have written some pretty
sharp stuff, but what I have written
seriously,
if you say that a Western
is superficial, it's not a hero
and a villain, and it's
the formula and it's hastily written
and superficial and it's escapism
and few things like that in Hengel
requested.
But, you know, if you
consider that there
were very many, many
important things happen,
that's a frontier move across
western Mississippi or wherever you draw
the line across this continent,
the mixing and mingling of peoples and
all that, why
should not we have historical novels
that tell what happened and try to say
what it did to human beings who were
involved with many different
cultures.
Not only unions, but also the French
and Spanish and English and such as that,
and am I
can't this be recorded?
I think we have a history to write about,
as the Greeks did, or
they enlisted or anybody has ever had.
And we're close to it also.
The strong white haired hero is often
a stark and flat figure in popular
Western fiction, but both Caps
and Kelton have strong feelings
about characterization and
how to develop those characters to be
real and complex people in their fiction.
We had a bit of a discussion earlier
about whether a particular character
in one of minicamps books, Sam Chance,
is really a hero or not.
So I thought this evening we would begin
by, you know, maybe
you'd read men. Would you like to start
off on why Sam Chance is or is not
a hero? And what a world hero
who has not read the book
is a big rancher.
And we all know that there are a lot of
problems between townspeople and ranchers
and so-called Nestor's and big ranchers.
And the story is pretty much from the
start to finish after Sam Chancer
gets out the Confederate Army until he is
a big rancher in the West
to own up
to his death in 1922.
But
he did a lot of bad things in my own
opinion.
I believe this, that
any character is more interesting if
he has some witness.
And some evil,
not a whole lot.
We haven't got anybody any of it.
You're the Lone Ranger
and he's not really all that interesting.
You know, the very tragic
heroes had a fatal weakness.
And I think that this is true.
One of the biggest weaknesses of Sam
Chancellor, I say he's not a thorough
hero, is he did not
understand his wife's problem.
And she told him one time it
seemed like she didn't just look out the
window and wait for
him to come back and things
like that. And she died of old age in her
40s and
she was not the proper person
for that particular
situation. They put her and she didn't
belong there.
I've got another story where the
little girl
got out. She's got to live in the dugout
and she's carried her kind of issues out
there. And she begins to unwrap
the paper around him and some of the best
in this case, she
smashes all the rest of them against the
rock.
Now, you know, some of these gals, they
don't like to give up
trying to do issues with these little
flowers on it and such, you said.
But so this is one of the things
I would say against Sam Chance.
And there are others.
I think he was narrow minded and so on.
But why do you call
him a hero or not? He accomplished a
whole lot and he's a big part of the
history. So
let's give his story
right.
You want to come in?
Well, he can be a heroic
figure, but still not only
with, you know, not be without fault.
All right.
I've been asked a lot of times to to
contrast my stories with Louis Lamour.
And I usually say that Louis
character stands seven feet tall in their
invincible minor five feet, eight
nervous,
which, you know, I
like to use characters who do have some
weaknesses and flaws and vulnerability.
If they're involved, if they're
invincible, you can't really worry about
them. You know, you can't get that
concerned about them.
You know, in the end, they have to win
if they have some weaknesses, if they're
able to make mistakes and
suffer for their mistakes.
And in the case of Huey Calloway and the
good old boys, make everybody around them
suffer for their mistakes, you know, then
you can get a little more concerned about
those people.
They can still they can be heroic
figures, but they don't stand seven feet
tall and they're certainly not at
all invincible.
You know, I have
known some of these old men, these when I
was just a little boy, there were still
some of those old men.
They were old men, but they were still
around from the early days.
I knew one or two of them, you know, who
went back to the open range trailer date.
And I was very small.
None of them looked like John Wayne.
They were heroic figures to me, but they
were just men with all the
strength and all the weaknesses of all
the rest of us.
And that's the kind of characters I like
to write about, because you can
get concerned about them as characters.
You can get involved with them.
And I think a lot of the reader interest
is most of the reader interest is
is how involved the reader can get with
those characters
and asking an
actress a question just to
help yourself.
And if you see
any comparison when
you're a protagonist in a time never ran
one year old son of a gun along
with all these horrible
characteristics.
Yeah, he was. And I had a I had a lady.
And a lot of people tell me, you know,
what a heroic and strong character
you did have a lady a year or two
ago challenge me.
She said she didn't see him as any hero
at all.
She had to be married.
Yeah, she she said look what he
did to his wife and his son.
He for the sake of his stubborn pride,
he made them suffer, you
know, given the loss of the part
of the police, you know, in all of
this, he made
them suffer for his pride.
So, you know that that's another side
of that. That's the darker side of the
same coin.
Now,
Elmer, you just beat me to it
by a few years. I would have come around
after a while to try to write this great
novel. You did the last thing
that the last words that Sam
Chance, if you read my book,
was Water is more precious than land
in this country.
And a whole lot of people have come
to realize that over a long
period of time. I think we've found out
in the last year or so that it's more
precious than all of the nurture
readers and would be.
Writers are often interested in how
writers produce their work, as if
there's some magic formula which, if they
follow, will lead them to be writers as
well.
These two novelists are careful to point
out how they got started and
how they do the work that they've managed
to produce.
It's just a curse you're born in.
I think know I think
many writers have read a whole lot when
they're young,
and it's not that they live
in dreams or something,
but it just seems like.
That's that's part of life, I like
your.
I think that most of the writers I know
in their childhood or big readers
and continue to be as much as I have time
for. And
when I was pretty small, my mother
had been a schoolteacher and she read to
me, she read me stories.
And and this made me want to
learn to read for myself.
And I did learn to read when I was five.
And I don't know when I
started to write, but it was fairly
early on, at least by
the age of eight or 10.
I knew that probably more than anything
else I wanted to do. I wanted to be an
artist and a writer.
During those years, I wasn't sure which
I really thought I'd combine the two.
I thought I was going to be the new will,
Jane.
But
it just goes that far back.
And I think it goes back to the love
reading, first of all, probably.
And then, you know, I had an avid
imagination and life could get
pretty dull sometimes out on one of
these ranches nine miles from town.
So you live in your imagination a lot.
But you know, that's not restricted to
kids in the country. That's you know,
I think like Ben says, you're kind of
born with a curse and in a manner of
speaking, you know, I think we're all
born with certain tendencies.
We're not born with a talent, necessarily
born with tendencies.
And and whether we develop those
tendencies or not is
a question. But there there
nobody else in my family
ever had that
that kind of direction until
well, I have a cousin, somewhat
younger cousin who got started in the
newspaper business.
He didn't stay with it.
And I have my number two son
is kind of a writer, newspaper
man. But it didn't come out of my family
background. They were all cool people.
My dad never was totally
attuned to my choice
of a vocation.
To him, work was something you did with
the picture show or on horseback.
And he never did totally concede
that I was making an honest living,
sitting behind a desk.
I always organize now
the hard way.
And one thing I tried is taking the whole
lot of these.
File, you know, manila folders
in the filing cabinet, thank you, some
Scotch tape and tape them together.
It was kind of a little hands on.
Each one of you just folded up like an
accordion. Or you can stretch
it out on the wall with thumbtacks.
And, you know, if you're going to there's
going to be a chapter here, you just
leave in a black place and you're
planning that they you see how developing
and you put it put
in the stuff now saying the other
day, which I think is a great idea, you
know, he found that he needed the dog
down here at this point and go back
to Chapter two zone.
But to go again, OK,
see, planning with me,
it's hard and long process and
and I.
Don was probably telling the truth,
I probably had about 19
file holders strung out here across the
wall and it was just part of the process
of getting my mind together to make it
all fit together.
50 to 60 thousand words is pretty much
their optimum length
to have anything in the literature.
No, no, it's it's a commercial
considerations.
Does that affect your writing of your
story? If you're writing in the genre,
you have to be able.
It's it's a little bit of a
metaphor.
I'm not trying to say a disciplined thing
with you. Just like if you're writing a
short story, you've
got to tell that short story saying five
thousand words, no more than that.
And that's you know, that's a discipline.
That's a challenge to get that story told
and well-rounded within that
limitation.
The discussion and evaluation work
is what scholars do.
Scholars often wonder if what they've
done has any influence on the creative
process, particularly on novelists.
Kelton and Caps comment on what
they think about the work that has been
done in evaluating their material.
Writers don't learn to write their
writing critics, but
it nevertheless makes a heck of a big
difference, you know, as to
whether what am I going to do next?
She's going to try to shoot them up or
I'm going to write something that would
really if I
were a reader, I'd like to read.
You know, I think it has some effect,
but very indirect and it takes time
and Western literature.
So since about 20 years old this
year and they have done
a I think, a great job in
raising the level of criticism
and dealing with different kinds of
Westerns.
I don't know what kind of influence that
has all these awards
that that element may have gotten from
Western writers of America and other
groups.
How does that affect you, like
you want to get that
next award, or do you think that not in
terms of that, but it puts pressure on
you to try to top yourself
to do better for the next one?
You know, and that in that
respect, I think is a very it can be a
positive thing
if they just absolutely lacerate
it, made it may have the opposite
effect, you know.
But, um,
if you get these good reviews, these
very serious reviews
like that, it is a challenge to do
that well or better the next time out
and not to sort of slip off
which or take it a little easier
on the next one. You're challenged always
to try to do better with the next book.
A lot of the early writing about the West
was a very highly sensational nature,
the so-called,
what they call them, the other books and
so forth,
that that deadline deadline
now.
Yeah, and I think we're still
as a genre, as a group of people
writing on that subject matter.
We're still being tarred with that brush
because of those things at that
early
influence, those things that were taken
as cheap and and trash.
And a lot of critics today
still will not read a book if they if
they regard it, if they see it and it
looks like it's a Western, they won't
read it. If it were written by William
Shakespeare and it was about guns on
Rimrock, they wouldn't touch that,
you know. And so we're still
we've been tarred with that brush and
we have to kind of live with it.
We hope we outlive it.
I don't know if we'll make it, but
somebody eventually will, you know.
Fans of Western fiction wonder about the
future of the Western, as well as that of
the American West itself.
There are lots of theories, of course,
and only time will prove which ones are
correct.
One of those includes a notion of the
modern Western which may attract new
readers and critics.
Galton and Caps have strong feelings
about modern Westerns and what might
be involved in them.
There will be a twist it
their viewpoint on that West may be
different from ours because they've been
conditioned differently and I don't know
how much they'll read stories
of the West. You know, young kids today,
by and large, are not reading Westerns
all that much. They're reading science
fiction and they go into these
are big movies.
You know, that's the problem with the
Western movies. They couldn't sell them
to the kids. And the kids are the ones
who are buying the movie tickets.
It's sad, however,
that the movie market is gone to
the best place.
I've got nibbles on, too, right now,
but I had options, military options
served up.
And they're just
there's an awful lot of luck involved and
whether your lives now or picked up from
movies. Right.
And then there's an awful lot of luck as
to whether.
You get a hold of a good script writer,
good director and good actress.
No, I don't
wish to discuss Nermin nuttery, but I
believe that he's the luckiest writer
who has ever lived in this
movie business, because really,
you know.
Well, I don't think he's good at writers
as a accountant, but
he has had fabulous look.
No, I'm not saying he's a bad writer.
I'm saying that he's the luckiest writer
in the country.
All of that movements and there are
there are times when I
see the big deal is to get your angels.
These are the people that put up that ten
million dollars, whatever it takes.
But then are you lucky enough to get a
director who really can do it?
And the actors know
and it makes all the difference.
You can be recognized a whole lot faster
through the movies than you can through a
good novel.
But they are very old, no questions
being made, you know, they may tempt with
Pale Rider and Silverado to see if they
could bring it back and neither one of
them is really a house burner or they
both did moderate business and
that was it.
Clint Eastwood, for the time and money
put into it, he would have made twice as
much if he'd made another Dirty Harry
or something, you know, so it didn't it
didn't just catch fire like they hoped it
might look like a lot of us hoped it
would.
I've never I've never had a movie
made out of any man.
I have sold one recently to
Independent the day the Cowboys
quit for not to go for big
money, but first real Hollywood money
I ever had, you know, so I can't complain
about whether they'll ever make it or not
or what kind of movie they'll make out of
it. I have no idea.
I certainly have not been asked for any
advice.
And you ask about half of the book sale.
I'd say the Western books, by and large,
from all I hear from
from and Doubleday, most of the
Western sales far and away.
The majority are in
the west of the Mississippi and in the
old South.
Years ago I used to write when I started
out in the four days I wrote for romances
and I worked wrote for editor
named Fanny Elsworth.
Well, in those declining days of the
Pope's what she retired and another
fella took over and my
agent told me he lived in one
of the ethnic neighborhoods over there.
And they always in those days, they still
had stacks of magazines and the
drugstores.
But Rancho Mates came out over to eat
on the day the ranch romances were to
appear in the drugstore.
The ED would go down to his corner
drugstore and kept magazines.
How many ranch romances ahead?
A week later, he'd go back and he'd count
them again. And usually they would have
sold maybe one, you know,
and he would just take.
That is the worst omen in the world.
But he was trying to judge the whole
market, the whole country by New York
City. They don't sell western New York
City.
Most of them were sold in the West.
We're preaching to the converted.
I have a modern western
Sydney in nineteen eighty six
that's been rejected by all the very
finest publishers in New York.
It's about an old man born
about nineteen hundred and had a great
big rate.
And he's just escaped from a nursing home
out there somewhere,
and he's stubborn and opinionated and
everything else, and he's got kids
scattered all over the country and even
abroad to some in Alaska and God knows
where.
And I don't know, I think it's about.
They're trouble and understanding,
really what he did and what he thought
and what he was doing, not that he was
right.
But no, I mean, you guys really
know what your grandparents thought
about and how they laughed and how they
felt and all that, we don't know.
Also, this question.
You had a pretty good side, right?
I think that sections a
small ranch in west Texas, 10
square miles.
What are they going to do that
then? You do have a land well trained
and go off to
the Christian retreat and everything.
What are we going to do with what
we have inherited from our ancestors?
And I think this is what troubles these
editors.
You're leaving these questions here caps
that
tell us what we're going to do.
And what I can say to the modern Western
dilemma can speak that he has a modern
Western at a press.
I've just finished one set
today.
Sounds a little bit like being
one of
my old man hasn't escaped from a nursing
home, but but his son is thinking
very hard and trying to convince the old
man that that might be the place to go.
And from which he might ultimately
escape.
But it's somewhat same thing.
And in a way, it's an extension of all
these other books I've had because, you
know, each one of them has been based on
some kind of change.
When people confront a change
in times, an old order
being phased out by something new and
either the acceptance or the resistance
to change.
In this case, I have this old fellow who
is now 77 years old
and he has a little
ranch, that home, which he was
able to raise his family in pretty good
shape and two sons, you know,
years ago when it was big enough.
Now, with today's economy,
it's no longer big enough.
Uh, he's in the hill country
of Texas, a little town
that has been down on the vine
like most of them have.
The smaller ones in the town wants
to take his ranch and build a dam and
have a recreational lake so that they can
get income from tourists.
You know, bring in bring in fisherwomen
course. That lake would flood most
of the most of what's been his ranch all
these years, and he doesn't want to give
it up.
So that's that's a Western, but it's a
modern and very contemporary problem
that, you know, in one way or another.
So many people today face the problem
of, uh, well, the point
is made in there that 30 years ago, this
rancher could take 10, came to town and
buy a pickup.
Today he has to take 30 caves to town
by the same pick up.
He can't raise 30 more caves on that land
than he could 30 years ago or 20 more
than he could 30 years ago.
The place has gotten too small.
And this is a problem that that
places all the people in agriculture
today in one form or another.
So it's very contemporary thing
to me, a very relevant problem for a lot
of people in this country today.
And yet, in a way, it's sort of an
outgrowth of this same old
process of change that we've had
throughout our history.
Now, you've got the contract on this.
Yeah, luckily, I do
want to say, who's the best
writer?
Nobody is contracted in a Reader's
Digest. Condensed books is evidently
going to do a condensed version of
that for a couple hours.
And you wait
till the first of the year.
Both Kelton and Caps are still producing
quality fiction about the West, still
interpreting the West past
and present.
How much more work they'll continue to do
remains to be seen.
But we know that they have already
produced a remarkable body of work
and look forward to what else they might
produce.