John Clayton's Blog

Responding to my recent post on Richard Wheeler's quest, Ed Kemmick writes:

Coincidentally, I read a piece by Yardley just yesterday, in which he extolled C.S. Forester's "Hornblower" novels. I was surprised to see how smitten he was with those books, which are virtually the epitome of the "genre" novel. Then he had the audacity to say that Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic sea novels couldn't compare with the old master's works. He pronounced O'Brian's novels "arch and precious." I was more in the camp of so many other critics I had read, who agreed that O'Brian had so far surpassed his model as to have written an entirely different kind of work.

But then I realized the important factor: Yardley said he discovered Forester as a teenager. To have read books of grand adventure as a young man is an experience not easily forgotten. Maybe O'Brian could not have expected to make inroads against such a prejudice. I didn't read O'Brian until a few years ago, and I rank him with my favorite authors. As I said in a column I wrote about him, he is possibly the only author who has been compared to both Jane Austen and Homer -- and with justice!

Sadly, my own teenaged years included neither Forester or O'Brian. As an adult, I have had little interest in Louis L'Amour, Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, or several other writers of suspense and mystery who occupied my teenaged years.

The exception, however, is Rex Stout. When I'm tired and in need of escapism, I'll always read another Nero Wolfe novel. The one set in Montana, "Death of a Dude," is absurd by standards of both life around here and the Wolfe canon. But Stout always creates his own world, and I always find myself drawn into it.

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Montana author Richard Wheeler has some intriguing observations here on the state of fiction. Building on a recent Jonathan Yardley Sunday Washington Post column, Wheeler suggests that most "literary" fiction is these days at best self-absorbed. I've heard others make similar arguments: contemporary fiction and memoir are often formulaic.

Wheeler and Yardley suggest that "popular" and "genre" fiction is where today's action really is. No surprise from Wheeler, who has long been known as one of the most literarily accomplished writers of novels set in the Old West (in other words, books commonly derided as "Westerns"). But Yardley is part of the Eastern establishment that has often scorned writing from elsewhere as mere "regionalism."

I don't know if they're correct, if the future of literature is 'genre.' (Maybe it's 'film', or 'narrative nonfiction', or even 'greeting cards'.) But I'm delighted that Wheeler has chimed in on the argument. His later posts have built on it, giving his blog a wonderful thematic integrity.

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I'm glad that Louis Warren's new biography of Buffalo Bill Cody, "Buffalo Bill's America," has landed so prominently in this week's New York Times Book Review. From Warren's other work I believe he is a worthy scholar, and I had not previously found Cody's definitive biography. (In writing about some of Cody's contemporaries, in a now-completed but yet-to-be-published book, I desperately wanted one.) For NYTBR to recognize that such a book has been written, and that it is important to nation as a whole, is a credit to the continuing role of the West in our literary culture.

On the other hand, it also makes me wonder a bit. Why should our finest scholars and finest book reviews be so overly concerned with reinterpreting the life of a cowboy-circus celebrity? Why is it so important to us that Warren "separates biographical truth from fiction whenever he can"?

The obvious answer to that question is that Cody created an image of cowboys and the West that many people now believe to be false -- even dangerously false. If today's statesmen try to act like Buffalo Bill–style cowboys in the belief that this behavior won the West, then yes perhaps somebody should point out that it didn't.

That's a great job for journalism: telling truth to power. But as any tour of political blogs will show you, myth-busting has its limits. In general, it is only fun within your cadre. Democrats love to poke holes in Bush; Republicans do the same for Teddy Kennedy. Such behavior bolsters the base but often fails to change the culture as a whole.

That's where literature comes in. If we now believe that Buffalo Bill's image of the cowboy -- well-accepted as it was in its day -- is not correct. . . then we have to do more than say, "Lookit all this stuff that's wrong." We have to provide images and stories of Western experiences that match the narrative and allegorical power of Cody's, but are also true.

I mean "true" in the sense of not-false. Fiction can be true in its representation of society. I find the work of Guy Vanderhaeghe and Mark Spragg to be true in this sense -- but NYTBR has not given them the same sort of praise or prominence. Of course there are also plenty of true stories that are also factually accurate; indeed (I'll admit my self-interest here) that's what I've tried to write myself. I may not succeed very well, but I continue to hold out the hope that if and when somebody does, the culture at large will take notice.

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This month marks the second anniversary of my achieving a big career ambition. In December of 2003 I was given the job title Dog Columnist.

Really. It says so on my business card. "John Clayton - Dog Columnist."

True, I write for a very small publication. True, they've spent more on my business card than my salary. True, "they" is my wife.

But still. I'm a Dog Columnist. Not only do I get to write stories about dogs, but I get to tell people it's my job. Must be. Says so on my business card. (Plus, my various other jobs are much harder to describe.)

Sometimes all I have to do is rewrite a story in the news. Other times traditional newspapers are months behind my reportage.

Reading recently that offbeat job titles are on the wane, I started worrying. Should I stop being a Dog Columnist? (If so, would there be another one anywhere in the world?)

Then I realized that it's just offbeat job _titles_ that are on the wane. Human Resources Managers thought it'd be cute to be called something else. Then they realized that if they were stuck managing HR, maybe recognition and money were better compensations than cuteness.

The story doesn't have anything to say about offbeat jobs, themselves. I doubt they're on the wane. After all, once you luxuriate in the perks of being a Dog Columnist, it's not something you want to give up.

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Too often nature writing feels concocted in a laboratory: antiseptic, carefully controlled, and obsessed with technology. A wonderful counterexample this week comes from Gary Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times.

I was drawn in by the specificity of the descriptions, especially the smells. I was pulled along by the richness of the metaphor. And then of course there's the depth of feeling to the piece: this is no mere walk in the woods.

Ready for the irony? The newspaper has decided it doesn't want to publish anything more like this.


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