LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS by Vonn McKee

Humor me if you will. Or, rather, be humored yourself by a true master.

During those times when the creative well is running a little low and the plot lines lie flat on the page, I try to prime the pump with some good reading. There are several contemporary authors who inspire me but I also enjoy reaching back into the archives to see how the old guys did it.

One book that I never tire of revisiting is Roughing It by Mark Twain, based on his stagecoach journey to the west and subsequent adventures in silver prospecting, real estate speculation, and (after a side trip to Hawaii) newspaper reporting in San Francisco. During these years of 1861-1867, he honed his rough-hewn, almost madcap, style of writing into the Twain style that forever set him apart: sharply satirical (as in The Gilded Age) but capable of tender character portrayals as well (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). For spot-on, wry descriptions of the mundane, Twain is hard to beat. I’d like to share a few of my favorite excerpts from Roughing It.

First off, the western landscape provided Twain with all sorts of writing fodder and I love this meandering passage that manages to work in references to sagebrush, mules and anthracite coal all in one sitting:

“Sage-brush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. But their testimony to its nutritiousness is worth nothing, for they will eat pine knots, or anthracite coal, or brass filings, or lead pipe, or old bottles, or anything that comes handy, and then go off looking as grateful as if they had had oysters for dinner.”

From the stagecoach, he observed this forlorn creature:

“The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.”

In Carson City, Nevada, the young Twain is caught up in a romantic desire to own a horse and is tricked into buying one at an auction, described to him in a secretive whisper as a “Mexican Plug.”

“I did not know what a Genuine Mexican Plug was, but there was something about this man’s way of saying it, that made me swear inwardly that I would own a Genuine Mexican Plug, or die.”

As you can imagine, the partnership between horse and tenderfoot does not last long:

 

“In the afternoon I brought the creature into the plaza, and certain citizens held him by the head, and others by the tail, while I mounted him. As soon as they let go, he placed all his feet in a bunch together, lowered his back, and then suddenly arched it upward, and shot me straight into the air a matter of three or four feet! I came as straight down again, lit in the saddle, went instantly up again, came down almost on the high pommel, shot up again, and came down on the horse’s neck—all in the space of three or four seconds. Then he rose and stood almost straight up on his hind feet, and I, clasping his lean neck desperately, slid back into the saddle and held on. He came down, and immediately hoisted his heels into the air, delivering a vicious kick at the sky, and stood on his forefeet. And then down he came once more, and began the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I went up I heard a stranger say:

‘Oh, don’t he buck, though!’

While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a leather strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he might have a ride. I granted him that luxury. He mounted the Genuine, got lifted into the air once, but sent his spurs home as he descended, and the horse darted away like a telegram. He soared over three fences like a bird, and disappeared down the road toward the Washoe Valley.”

You can view the first edition of Roughing It in its entirety online, along with the wonderful original illustrations at:

www.gutenberg.org

I'd love to hear about some of your go-to Western books!

All the best,
Vonn

2015 Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Finalist, Short Fiction
2015 Western Writers of America Spur Finalist, Short Fiction





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WRITER FRENEMIES: MARK TWAIN AND BRET HARTE by Vonn McKee

I’ve been an avid reader of western fiction for most of my life. My shelves sag with books by the usual suspect authors. (You know the names so I won’t bother listing them.) I would become enamored of one author’s prosey style, dripping with adjectives, for a while. Then I’d fall in love with another’s stark, restrained realism. I’m a sucker for a stylist and still appreciate any style that’s well-executed.

When I decided to write westerns rather than just read them, I approached it a little more scientifically. Just how did this genre evolve? Who spun the first yarns that led to a literary world of laconic cowboys, stage coach heists and arrows of flame raining down on covered wagons? 

Of course, the experts disagree. The first dime western was supposedly Charles Frey’s MALAESKA, THE INDIAN WIFE OF THE WHITE HUNTER, published in 1860. Oh, but James Fennimore Cooper wrote his LEATHERSTOCKING TALES featuring protagonist Natty Bumppo beginning in the 1820’s. You know, back when the Appalachians constituted the Frontier. Throughout the latter 1800’s, there were stories of fictional adventures based on living “celebrities” like Buffalo Bill Cody, the James Brothers, Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp. Later came Wister, then Grey, eventually L’Amour. Then we lost count.

If I’d read and dissected every one of these, I would never have gotten around to writing anything of my own. I took the hummingbird approach, sampling a little of all.

One of the first accounts of the Old West that I decided to study was Bret Harte’s THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP, the story of a baby boy who is born to a mining camp’s resident prostitute, Cherokee Sal. Harte’s characters are so comically portrayed that it’s easy to overlook the grimness of the plot twists (a couple of the principals are killed off).

I also had fun reading Mark Twain’s ROUGHING IT, a travelogue – greatly embellished, no doubt – of his first trip to the West. The Twain humor is there, albeit less polished than in his later writings.

I discovered quite by accident that Bret Harte and Mark Twain were actually good friends in San Francisco. Harte was editor of the Overland Monthly and the freshly-pseudonymed Twain hit town in 1864 and found work as a freelance journalist. Ironically, Bret Harte became Twain’s mentor, guiding him through the writing of the INNOCENTS ABROAD manuscript.

In a letter to the editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Twain wrote: “Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”

The admiration was mutual. Harte wrote of Twain: “I think I recognize a new star rising in this western horizon.”

They remained friends for several years but, alas, the bromance was not to last. As the two became more widely known, a rivalry developed, possibly because they had similar writing styles and audiences at the time. Twain became increasingly cranky in his discussions of Harte. They wrote a play together which was ultimately a commercial failure. Years later, Twain suggested that Harte owed him money. 

By 1878, Mark Twain’s admiration for the man who was once his mentor had crossed into total disdain. He wrote to their mutual friend, William Dean Howells: “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as if he considered it a disgrace.”

In my opinion, it would have been almost worth ticking off Twain just for the splendid insult that followed!

Mark Twain & Bret Harte at work on a play
at Hartford House, Connecticut

It’s hard to say why their great friendship fell apart. Maybe the things they held in common dwindled over time. Certainly when Bret Harte and Mark Twain met in the rowdy town of San Francisco, they were kindred souls. They were a couple of intellectual young satirists who lived in a remarkable time and world. Nothing escaped the stab of their sharp pens. They wrote of frogs and slaves and kings and cowboys, usually with some seed of political opinion buried within.

Wives and children, cross-country moves, career successes and flops – all may have contributed to their parting of ways. Maybe they were too much alike and could never have existed in the same spheres for long. That’s often true of highly creative types. Both might be amused – or not – if they knew there is a California town named for them (TwainHarte) located near where each of them lived.

So, an interesting thing happened on the way to my western writing career. I discovered that the talent pool is very old and VERY deep. I will never again stay up half the night talking with my rowdy friends at a writing conference without remembering guys like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. Oh, to stay young and full of fire. Oh, to have fine companions with the same flame in their souls. 

I guess that’s what we’re doing here. Right, friends?

(That said, make plans to attend the first ever WESTERN FICTIONEERS CONVENTION in 2015! Details coming soon!)

All the best,

Vonn

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