Of all the collective imaginings that the human imagination has imagined, the
Wild West must show the greatest disproportion between fictional product and
historical base. There have been 1,700 dime novels written about Buffalo
Bill, Clive Sinclair tells us; by 1932, Hollywood was making a hundred
westerns a year. Television series like Bonanza went on and on and on. How
many times did the Lone Ranger rescue the unfortunate Tonto, and the Cisco
Kid cry “Oh, Pancho”?
What they all traded on was not plot but scenario. It was an unchanging,
dateless and historically contextless mixture of cowboys and Indians,
sixguns, shoot-outs, cavalry bugles, red-eye whiskey and swing-door saloons,
sheriffs and marshals and hanging judges, buffalo and war-bonnets and
palomino ponies. And from this mixture you could assemble pretty much
anything you liked. “We all grew up putting together our own little
miniature Wests”, is one of the epigraphs to Sinclair’s novel (if it is a
novel), and that at least is very largely true.
Quite what else is true in these True Tales is deliberately hard to call.
Sinclair claims that the hybrid work he has written could be called
“Creative Nonfiction”, but he prefers the term “Dodgy Realism”, and the Wild
West is the perfect arena for both – and not just in the twenty-first
century, when everything is up for re-enactment, from Custer’s Last Stand to
Billy the Kid’s jailbreak and the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The fact is
(and this one is a fact) that fiction and realism were mixed up from the
start, with people writing dime novels before the smoke had cleared. In
1892, Bob and Gratton Dalton, of the Dalton Gang, were shot dead trying to
rob two banks simultaneously in Coffeyville, Kansas; their bodies were
handcuffed, stood upright on a board and then photographed. Their brother
Emmett, however, did his time in the pen, wrote two books about the Daltons,
lived to see one of them filmed, died wealthy in Hollywood; he now has a
presence, thanks to Ron Hansen’s 1979 novel Desperadoes, on university
courses in Contemporary Western Fiction.
In 1849, Kit Carson tracked down a raiding party of Jicarilla Apaches, trying
to rescue their captive, Mrs White, but they only found her still-warm body;
she was holding a copy of another dime novel, Kit Carson: Prince of the gold
hunters. Carson was upset, confessing in his dictated autobiography that he
was ashamed of the false comfort which that particular piece of dodgy
realism might have offered the victim. As a coda to that story, I would add
that in one of the very few relevant works not mentioned by Sinclair –
George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Redskins (1982) – Flashman, who
happens by and is doing his well-honed impersonation of Mr Good Guy,
consoles Carson by observing that hope of rescue by the famous mountain man
may have lightened Mrs White’s last moments. History and fiction overlap,
sometimes gruesomely, and they keep on doing so.
All this is a gift for postmodern interpretation, and the double strand on
which Sinclair threads large amounts of information about places and events
and movies here is the adventures of two Jewish cousins from Luton,Saltzman
and Peppercorn, who wander the West trying to write it up. Peppercorn is a
photojournalist doing a piece on the Buffalo Roundup at Custer State Park in
South Dakota, but that is just an excuse for trying to find his inner
cowboy. The trouble is he can’t ride, not even the kind of horse they give
you at dude ranches, and he doesn’t get very far when he meets a classic
rhinestone cowgirl, either. What he does get involved in are the
contradictions surrounding Custer re-enactments. The director boasts that
this is the first time that the story will be told “from an Indian point of
view”, but the scriptwriter is not a Sioux but a Crow, and the Crow were on
Custer’s side. The re-enactment takes place on their land, where the Sioux
are no more welcome than they ever were. The Christianized Sioux retaliate
with images of the Crucifixion in which the Romans wear 7th Cavalry uniforms
or Crow headdresses.
The whole thing is one scandal after another: first the theft of the Black
Hills, now the dreary statistics of life on the Pine Ridge Reservation: 85
per cent unemployment, average per capita income $4,000 a year, and so on.
In Peppercorn’s foreground – and here the wary reader starts doing some
research to see how dodgy these particular pieces of non-fiction are – are
the cases of Bill Janklow, the former Governor of South Dakota who was
convicted of manslaughter, Jacinta Eagle Deer, allegedly raped, possibly
murdered, and Leonard Peltier of AIM (the American Indian Movement) who was
jailed for shooting two FBI agents. Custer gets re-enacted but not Wounded
Knee, though that lives on in Kevin Costner, while AIM confronts the
still-extant BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), of unsavoury reputation.
Saltzman’s acronyms are more familiar but just as menacing, at least for
academics. He is from the USA (University of St Albans), and a peaceful
member of SAS (the School of American Studies), until the men in black suits
turn up (university administrators), to tell him that HEFCE has ordered
another RAE, and he is his department’s only hope. He drops his moribund
course on Western Studies – though we still get a great deal of it, centred
on Kent Monkman’s weirdly symbolic painting “Artist and Model” (one of the
illustrations in the book) – writes a lightning-fast grant proposal, and
sets off to deconstruct Deadwood by comparison with the Gene Autry Melody
Ranch Museum in California, where the television series was filmed. He seems
to be doing better than his cousin, having a memorable encounter in the John
Wayne room with a Mrs Miami, who invites herself in for a bath just like
Jane Russell in Son of Paleface and soon has him hogtied and almost
ecstatic. But then she turns to reading his journal, in which he has
deconstructed not only her but also the formidable local Calamity Jane
impersonator. Their revenge is awful, though thoroughly modern, and Saltzman
is left with no option but to become a car-delivery boy, driving (what else)
movie mock-up vehicles to destinations further and further West, a new
“Trail of Tears”.
Much of Sinclair’s thoroughly engaging book reads like a fan magazine, packed
with details about actors and movies and scenes in movies, always looking
for the apparent contradiction or the deconstructed anachronism. Did you
know that Gary Cooper, one of Peppercorn’s (disputed) Top Four Cowboys, went
to school in Dunstable? Or that Mrs Wyatt Earp was of German Jewish
ancestry, and may (or may not) have been the well-endowed model wearing a
diaphanous chemise in a famous photograph? Even research doesn’t help with
much of Sinclair’s data, which makes it all the more baffling. But there is
a serious question lurking behind, or perhaps as part of, all the po-mo
smoke and mirrors. For eight years there was an actor in the White House,
but what about a re-enactor? Putting it more strongly, national myths may be
valuable and even necessary, but is it a good idea to live inside one? BIA:
should that be the Bureau of Iraqi Affairs now, and – as many loyal
Americans have suggested, see with reference to another American myth Rajiv
Chadrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City – are the same sort of
mistakes being made now, under the influence of mass-market media, as they
were in the Black Hills 130 years ago? In the latter pages, Sinclair brings
on a kneejerk anti-American academic just to show that he knows what
kneejerk anti-Americanism is and isn’t signing up to it. Nevertheless the
comparison hangs in the air.
Of course, the state of the world may not be George W. Bush’s fault, it may be
Saltzman and Peppercorn’s. As a fellow fan says, “For years
they’ve been going round maintaining that everything is relative, and that
truth is a fairy story”, now they expect people to take a position? “And
shame is so last century.” “Not for Saltzman”, replies Peppercorn, since
Calamity Jane he knows all about shame. All ends fairly happily, both the
cousins (the Calamity Jane episode once over) getting lucky with
fictionally, indeed pornographically, obliging divorcees and widows. And is
there any harm in playing Billy the Kid, as long as you don’t use live
ammunition? Yes, but it might get you into the habit of thinking they are
all just blanks.
The seed of the story, says Sinclair, came from seeing two minor tragedies as
he drove through Lincoln County, the scene of the famous Cattle War: a dead
dog left as roadkill, and “a gorgeous yellow bird run over by an RV”.
Writers such as Carl Hiaasen have argued passionately that the root of all
evil comes from seeing the non-commercial world as just so much backdrop or
stage-set, and it is surely important to be able to tell the difference. But
it is getting hard to tell the difference, says Sinclair, and that is true
too. His book has a really good, but deliberately disorganized bibliography,
picture credits with some omissions so you don’t know quite what you’re
looking at, and a dime-novel cover which says it all. Clive Sinclair’s True
Tales of the Wild West is a clever, funny, slanted take on America, pop
culture, and academics on the make but off the leash, and one which will
send its readers right back to the western.
Clive Sinclair
CLIVE SINCLAIR'S TRUE TALES OF THE WILD WEST
402pp. Picador. £9.99.
978 0 330 42643 5
Tom Shippey holds the Walter J. Ong Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis
University. His publications include Roots and Branches: Selected papers on
Tolkien, which was published last year.
