L'Amour / Manfred / 1 November class problem

					24 October 1995

	Ann-Maria will not be able to join us tomorrow night.  She is
enmeshed in a household move.  Think of her.  Tompkins writes of the
physical pain that is a constant in westerns; but has any of you ever
moved house?? 

	What follows is to suggest some things for us to think about (and
speak about) when we meet tomorrow evening. 

(1)  L'Amour

	Louis L'Amour's *High Lonesome* was first published in 1962.  It
went through nine printings (Bantam) before 1971; my copy is the thirty-
third printing since 1971 (as I read the copyright statement on the
title-page verso).  Of its popularity we can have little doubt; how many
other 1962 novels continue to do as well?  

	L'Amour himself fills shelves in every bookstore you have ever
been in; people read him.  Hell:  *you've* just read him; *I* read him. 
Unlike you (at least while Ann-Maria is off moving), I am an English
teacher.  I read him anyway.  How come?  ("Just natural bad taste" is not
an acceptable answer.)

	*High Lonesome* concerns a group of men, none of especially high
standing in his community, who rob one bank and fail to get a great deal
of money out of this effort.  In a fit of pique, or need, they then rob
another--making them men's men, perhaps, but not Republican culture heroes
for all that--in Obaro, a town where one of them (the novel's "hero"--why
put this word into quotation marks?) has a significant, although not en-
tirely admirable, past history.  

	How come Considine *is* the "hero"--?--of this book?  Relatedly: 
make a guess as to the likely demographics of L'Amour's readership and ask
about my "Republican culture heroes" "joke":  *is* it a joke? or a ques-
tion?  Why do we finally agree with Pete Runyon's decision to take the 
gold back to Obaro and leave Considine alone?  (Or do we agree with it?)

	Second:  "Race" is/isn't an issue here--"the Kiowa" is a member of
the embattled group; but he is, of course--along with his bank robber
companions, Spanyer, and Lennie--embattled by Apaches.  So:  is? isn't? 
*And*:  if *not* race, then what *are* the issues of this novel? 

	Third:  why do all us Bad Guys rush off to High Lonesome in order
to protect Lovely Ladies and their Aged Parent?  (Oh, yeah, and how come
Lovely Ladies are androgynously named "Lennie"?)  Mere sexual attractive-
ness?--well, not counting Spanyer, of course . . . unless, when it comes
to sexual attractiveness, we *should* count Spanyer??  (Gad, what a
thought!)  What (in short) is this short book *about*? 

	Or am I thus asking you to "allegorize" *High Lonesome*? that is,
to make it tell a story "other" than the story it ostensibly tells? 

(2)  Manfred

	Frederick Manfred's *Lord Grizzly* dates from 1954, eight years
before L'Amour's book.  About Manfred (who died earlier this year), it
isn't necessary to know too much:  nowhere near as popular a writer as
L'Amour, he is perhaps the only Frisian-American writer whose height ex-
ceeds 6'7"; was a classmate of novelist Peter De Vries at Calvin College
(in Grand Rapids, MI), where good Frisian-Americans go (although they
resist being lumped in with all of the good Dutch-Americans who [it is
western Michigan, after all] form the core of Calvin's consituency); and
wrote a short memoir of Hubert Horatio Humphrey with what must be one of
the most startling quotations from an American politico I have *ever*
read. 

	His basic subject is the people and the country of *Lord Grizzly*: 
southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, the Dakotas (recall that L'Amour
comes from Jamestown, ND), and northeast Nebraska--a country he calls
"Siouxland" in homage to guess who. 

	Hugh Glass, as Manfred tells us, was "real."  His tale was a
western legend for many years before Manfred got to it; indeed, Manfred's
is by no means the first "literary" treatment of Glass's tale.  In 1915,
for instance, John G. Neihardt's epic poem *The Song of Hugh Glass* opens: 

	The year was eighteen hundred twenty-three.

	'Twas when the guns that blustered at the Ree
	Had ceased to brag, and ten score martial clowns
	Retreated from the unwhipped river towns,
	Amid the scornful laughter of the Sioux.
	A withering blast the arid South still blew,
	And creeks ran thin beneath the glaring sky;

. . . well, enough:  reading this stuff makes it hard to remember that
Ezra Pound and Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot were writing poetry in 1915
too, doesn't it?  in case you wonder why I assigned Manfred instead of
Neihardt, you can occasionally still find Neihardt in paperback (Lincoln: 
University of Nebraska Press, 1971; the poem is one-third of a volume of
Neihardt's western epic poetry entitled *The Mountain Men*) and read him
for yourself.  Or there's a copy of the 1915 original in the Rare Book
Collection; come up to six and read it.  *Coraggio*!  It won't bite.

	In addition, in 1963, John Myers Myers (sic:  "Myers Myers" it is)
wrote *Pirate, Pawnee and Mountain Man:  The Saga of Hugh Glass* (Boston: 
Little, Brown).  This (Myers Myers believes) is *non*-fiction.

	The story *is* amazing, in its way; and, too, rather appallingly
admirable in its simple singlemindedness.  The scale of persistence Glass
demonstrates in refusing to give up and croak is something we tend no
longer *quite* to understand.  But that is not all we don't understand,
nor perhaps even the most important thing about the book we don't un-
derstand. 

	Manfred gives his book a straightforwardly tripartite structure: 
"The Wrestle" (the expedition up through Hugh-meets-bear/bear-meets-Hugh);
"The Crawl" (Hugh's return); "The Showdown" (Hugh's "revenge").  Parts 1
and 2 pose us (I think) no difficulties:  if we adopt, for the moment,
some of what Jane Tompkins tells us about the central roles of violence
and physical stress in "the western," these parts suit her thesis to a
crossed "t" and dotted "i."  We read contentedly on, relishing grubs, baby
mice, and dogmeat, and reveling in Hugh's agony. 

	Then, boom, part 3.  Well, wait just a minute:  what happened
here?  Manfred lost his bearings?  Failed to read Tompkins?  Just didn't
get it?  Failed to understand his tale? his source? his genre?  How come
Hugh *doesn't* kill--despite all the best and must easily justifiable
reasons in the world--the sonsabitches who left him to die? 

	Why write such a book?  Where--without a shoot-em-up ending--is
the appeal of this story?  What are its *uses*?  (Oh, dear:  allegory
again?)

	Revenge is a dish (says an old Italian proverb) best tasted cold.
(Is this also true of dogmeat?)  Is Hugh therefore "punished" for being 
too hot? or we, his readers?  Something goes very skewey in part 3:  
*why*?? 

	In any event, these are some questions (by *no* means all of 
them) that these two books suggest to one odd reader; and perhaps we can 
speak about them when we meet tomorrow evening.  As I said last week, I 
would *like* to think we can have finished *both* L'Amour and Manfred 
when the end of class rolls around; and move on, with a clean slate, to 
our class of November 1 . . .

(3)  A problem of a different sort 	

	Which, via a nifty transition, brings me to a wee little problem: 
a MAJOR Library conflict next Wednesday, the 1st, when we have an exhi-
bition opening (look at the cases on the sixth floor while waiting for me
to arrive tomorrow from downtown) and the Library's Overseers in town. 
Alas, I have to be at both the exhibit and dinner with the Overseers.  CAN
WE FIND AN ALTERNATIVE MEETING TIME?  E.g., Saturday, the 4th?  I *hate*
to bag the class, but you will need to be able to gather, if gather we can
at all, at an unusual time, and for some of you this may pose real diffi-
culties.  PLEASE COME WITH SUGGESTIONS!!  (I've just made one, as you may
have noticed.)

			Cheers to you all!			Dan