The Virginian (with an Introduction by Struthers Burt)

THE VIRGINIAN

By OWEN WISTER

Introduction by STRUTHERS BURT

The Virginian

By Owen Wister

Introduction by Struthers Burt

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5571-2

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5572-9

This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of The Cowboy (oil on canvas), by Frederic Remington, (1861-1909) / Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

To Theodore Roosevelt

To The Reader

I. Enter the Man

II. When You Call Me That, SMILE!

III. Steve Treats

IV. Deep Into Cattle Land

V. Enter the Woman

VI. Em’ly

VII. Through Two Snows

VIII. The Sincere Spinster

IX. The Spinster Meets the Unknown

X. Where Fancy Was Bred

XI. You’re Going to Love Me Before We Get Through

XII. Quality and Equality

XIII. The Game and the Nation—Act First

XIV. Between the Acts

XV. The Game and the Nation—Act Second

XVI. The Game and the Nation—Last Act

XVII. Scipio Moralizes

XVIII. Would You Be A Parson?

XIX. Dr. Macbride Begs Pardon

XX. The Judge Ignores Particulars

XXI. In a State of Sin

XXII. What Is a Rustler?

XXIII. Various Points

XXIV. A Letter With a Moral

XXV. Progress of the Lost Dog

XXVI. Balaam and Pedro

XXVII. Grandmother Stark

XXVIII. No Dream to Wake From

XXIX. Word to Bennington

XXX. A Stable on the Flat

XXXI. The Cottonwoods

XXXII. Superstition Trail

XXXIII. The Spinster Loses Some Sleep

XXXIV. To Fit Her Finger

XXXV. With Malice Aforethought

XXXVI. At Dunbarton

Introduction

Some writers are famous for a single book. The rest of their work is not much read except by an occasional student and is largely forgotten. Or rather, to put it more accurately, some books, as time goes on, become more famous than the men or women who wrote them. Their titles, the knowledge, vague or definite of what they are about, are more securely imbedded in the public mind than the names or personalities of the authors.

We speak of Dickens or the novels of Thackeray, but for the most part of Don Quixote not Cervantes. The Pilgrim’s Progress is another such book, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, on a lesser level, Quo Vadis and Gone with the Wind. The list is long. These books transcend ordinary literary criticism. They are more than books, good or bad; they are, to a lesser or greater degree, social phenomena. All of them have this in common: they have appeared at just the right moment, the exact and apposite hour that coincides with something in the general consciousness: some wish or interest or movement or dream, formless or concrete, important or unimportant. They respond in part with their plot or their thesis or their characters or in some other way, or they respond as a whole to what a nation or the world is thinking. Even the tawdriest and most temporary of best sellers, if it sells solidly enough, has a social and historic significance, although, as a rule, the research is not worth the time and thought involved.

Writers do not invent or create any more than do inventors, scientists who discover new scientific laws, or explorers who discover new continents. Not, that is, if you use the word invent in its commonest meaning, to originate. No one by himself originates anything. To originate is the job of the many. Everything is first in the minds of numerous men and women, the minds of the succeeding generations, stirring, growing and awaiting form and expression. Writers, artists of all kinds, inventors, scientists, explorers are merely interpreters who, with trained and directed talents and extra-sensitive perceptions, gather up, for the most part unconsciously, and make audible or visible or, in one way or another, usable what is in the atmosphere about them. Long before Newton and his famous apple, lots of people had been wondering why objects fell to the ground unless supported.

The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains—one always forgets the clumsy and unnecessary sub-title—seems to me one of the books in question; one of the more important ones. If you will recall the year of its publication, 1902, you will see that it fits accurately into the category of social phenomena; in this case, national social phenomena. Moreover, although the title and the figure of its cowboy hero, the Virginian, and even the famous sentence, When you call me that, smile!, have become part of American folk-lore, very few present-day Americans know much about the man who wrote the book. As is the case with a great many writers, Owen Wister was, if anything, even more interesting than his work, excellent as much of that is. He, too, was typical of certain social phenomena, literary and social, of his period: literary and social phenomena which need much fuller explanation and interpretation than they have ever had.

Van Wyck Brooks, in his The Ordeal of Mark Twain, described some of these stoppages that from one angle or another affected and inflicted American writing of the time.

At the turn of the century three things were happening to the United States and, unless a man was alive in 1902, it is difficult for him to reconstruct the excitement which the appearance of The Virginian created, or the prairie-fire-like rapidity with which it swept the country.

The first of the things that were happening was a growing rebellion in the minds of Americans against the arrogant materialism and ruthless exploitation that had marked the decades following the Civil War. People were weary of the pretensions and tyranny of naked wealth and were beginning to recognize it not as a blessing but as a sardonic tragedy to those who had achieved it, and especially their heirs, and to the nation as a whole. Leading this rebellion were the intellectuals, a few of the underprivileged, although the underprivileged were still confused and largely ineffectual: the Liberals and a certain number of the younger Tory-Liberals. This is the usual coalition in all rebellions or reforms. Unfortunately, as a rule, in the case of actual revolution the intellectuals, the Liberals and the Tory-Liberals end up by having their heads cut off. Owen Wister, by birth, by environment, and with all his heart, was a Tory-Liberal.

In the United States the Tory-Liberal looks back to the virtues, supposed or real, of an agrarian America and the simple elegance, honorable behavior and wisdom, not always there, of the Founding Fathers; and looks forward (and will fight for it) to a reign of good manners, good public morals, equal dealing before the law, self-controlled individualism and general comeliness, scenically and personally. Alexander Hamilton is the Tory-Liberal archetype. They are excellent people, the Tory-Liberals, humane, enlightened and given to leadership; but they are unleavened aristocrats and look down, if in a kindly fashion, and not in or around and about. Invariably they deprecate the present and do not understand, and are impatient with, the slow processes of evolution and democracy, although in America most of them in theory are earnestly democratic. But trial and error are not in their natures.

The Far West—the cattle country—with its space and beauty and emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility, together with the life of the well-run ranch with its curious but harmonious mixture of feudalism and fierce independence, has always been the refuge of the young Tory-Liberal wealthy enough and restless enough to leave the more crowded East. The Far West has been largely settled by landless men, seeking land or some other natural resource, and by young Tory-Liberals uneasy in the position where God has placed them: one reason why the Far West has always been one of the most cosmopolitan sections of the country, and a political and social puzzle to those who do not understand it. With Owen Wister it was a case of love at first sight. He did not settle in the Far West although, much later on when he was approaching fifty, he bought a ranch in the Jackson Hole Country of Wyoming which he occupied for a couple of summers before selling it.

The second thing that was happening in the United States at the turn of the century, partly due to the Spanish-American War, was a recapturing of national pride and national consciousness. America was seen to be a land of infinite color and variety. American writers began to look inland and no longer toward Europe. In other words, regional-writing and research began, although the term has become so limp from usage that I am reluctant to use it. Even Boston and Philadelphia realized that there were such things as American folk-heroes and heroines, and that they were worth reading about.

Owen Wister was the first to put that most popular of all our folk-heroes, the American cowboy, into fiction. The portrait, to be sure, was romanticized, but that was due to the period in which it was painted and to the shock of youthful delight which Owen Wister felt upon his first discovery, as a very young man, of these hardy and lithe horsemen of the plains and the spacious and lucid country in which they lived. As a matter of fact he was boldly realistic, and that was his nature, considering the times in which he wrote. He admitted that his hero had a past and he made him a fairly earthy and natural young man who got drunk, swore and invented and sang bawdy songs. Also, although he, or perhaps the editors, spelled it son-of-a —, he was among the first to drag into the open that most popular American term of endearment and abuse, now an indispensable part of present-day American literature. Toward the end of the book when the Virginian and his bride, Molly Wood, the school marm from Vermont, are on their pack-trip honeymoon and camped on an island in the middle of a mountain stream, he has them bathe without any clothes on, although he is careful to separate them by the width of the island and a grove of trees. This sent a delicious chill down the spines of the American public.

Today all this sounds very funny. But it wasn’t then. The Virginian was considered an extremely daring novel.

At the turn of the century the cowboy, that is, as far as the Northwest was concerned, was only about thirty years old. He had first appeared, along with range cattle in any quantities, in the late ’60s, coming up from Texas and Colorado and being joined by adventurous young men from the East and Europe. The great days of the open range were in the ’70s and the first half of the ’80s. The Virginian was laid somewhere in the ’80s or early ’90s. In his first preface to the novel, signed Charleston, S. C., March 31st, 1902, Owen Wister laments the passing of the cowboy. What has become, he asks, of the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? . . . a hero without wings. No one need worry. This is an ancient delusion repeated with each decade: an occupational disease of those who write about the West. The cowboy still exists in large quantities and will continue to do so. He is merely a young man who, with special technique and fairly intricate knowledge and experience, handles cattle, and still rides horses despite Ford cars. He is as permanent and necessary as a bank clerk, but more glamorous, at least on the surface, because of the life he leads, the clothes he wears (our only indigenous folk costume and a beautiful one), and because of the country he works in. It is the Far West that makes the cowboy romantic, not the cowboy the Far West.

The Virginian is not by any means solely a novel of action, character and atmosphere. It is also a social comment, although whether Owen Wister definitely intended this or it just came about as he went along, it is difficult to tell. At all events, it is starred with caustic comparisons: many of them shrewd; some to our eyes naive, between the life of crowded places, of the mob, of the idle rich, of the money-mad, and the supposedly stark and clean-cut virtues or vices of the cattle country. Had Owen Wister actually lived the life of the Far West, which he never did despite his many visits, I doubt if he would have found either the virtues or vices quite so clean-cut. Humanity, whether it rides horses or not, has a way of behaving in a muddled fashion. Where morals and opinions and behavior are concerned it functions, save for occasional individuals, in a gray twilight zone.

The third thing that was happening to the United States at the time of The Virginian’s appearance was a growing awareness in the American mind of the fact that the Far West at long last had become a place to visit, to see and stay in for a while, without too much danger from Indians, bad men, sheep-and-cattle wars: a place that had become fairly civilized, but not too much so, and where there was still plenty of adventure and surprise, although these were to be had without abnormal risk and discomfort. The West was no longer the terra incognita of the mountain-man, the explorer and big-game hunter, the emigrant and the Frontier Cavalry. The Virginian met all these requirements squarely; and back of them, underlying and perpetual, was the American sense of the frontier, the deepest and richest vein in the American nature, as strong today as ever.

To repeat old news, America was settled by frontiersmen and women, and this special immigration, with all its variations, continued. Most of these frontiersmen and women never reached the frontier and took their adventuring in other ways; but they could, at least, read about the frontier and, in their off-moments, dream about it. Practically every American male has at one time or another thought of himself as a cowboy or rancher and practically every American woman has at one time or another envisioned herself as being wooed by something tall, sunburned, lithe and lean-hipped, with spurs and chaps, and the deed to a ranch in his hand.

For a little while—two summers in succession—I had the opportunity of knowing Owen Wister intimately: as intimately, that is, as a young man, shy and self-distrustful, hoping to be a writer himself and made all the more shy by that fact, could know a man twenty-two years his senior and at the height of worldly and literary success. The Virginian had been out seven years and its immense success was assured. Already it had gone into thirty-five printings, had sold over a million and a half copies, and had been made into a play in which Dustin Farnum was to star continuously for ten years. For six years it had been, without a break, a national best-seller. It was to go into many more printings and editions and was to be made into several motion picture versions. For upward of thirty years it was destined to sell steadily.

Owen Wister had become a household name: and in Canada and England, too. Everybody had heard of him, even those who never read a book, and, naturally, he was as well-known in our Far West as in the East, although in those days, except in a few places, the Far West was not a novel-reading section of the country. Various communities in Wyoming, the state where the novel is placed, were disputing for the honor of being its exact locale; everywhere you went in the Northwest you ran into retired cowboys who admitted, on the slightest provocation, and with the secret but delighted casualness of those revealing a hidden but indisputable fact, that they were the originals of Owen Wister’s hero. A few of the original Virginians are still alive.