My-52-Book-Year #23: The Virginian

The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, by Owen Wister was published in 1902, and is said to be the first ‘true Western’ ever written. As such it can also claim to have been the precursor to a new genre of novels that has since gone on to spawn a million others. 

The book is dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt who, judging from the dedication must have read early drafts of the book and provided comments and feedback to Wister.

The Dedication reads: Some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it; and all, my dear critic, beg leave to remind you of their author’s changeless admiration.

The story begins with the arrival of an unnamed narrator (the Tenderfoot) in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and his encounter with a tall, handsome stranger (the Virginian), who remains nameless throughout the novel—tho’ late in the book he is referred to as ‘Jeff’ by one of the other characters, although it is not clear if this is his real name. 

The novel revolves around the Virginian and the life he lives, first as a cowboy and general hand, and then later as a foreman on the ranch of Judge Henry Taylor. Woven throughout the book, which covers a period of around five years, is the Virginian’s barely controlled conflict with his arch enemy, a man called Trampas, as well as the Virginian’s romance with the pretty schoolteacher, Molly Stark Wood. 

All the Western tropes are here, gunfights, Indian raiders, cattle rustlers, rattlesnakes, hangings, and an on again/off again romance between two seemingly mismatched lovers from vastly different backgrounds and social classes. With all these elements to play with, Wister skilfully weaving together a tale of action, violence and betrayal, hate and revenge, and love and friendship.

By and large I enjoyed the story, and thought that Clint Eastwood in his younger days would have played the character perfectly. I’m surprised Eastwood never directed himself in the film. Actually, now that I think of it, Eastwood did direct himself in other variations of this story. While not always nameless, as played by Eastwood the tall, dark stranger turns up in movies like Pale Rider, High Plains Drifter, A Fistful of Dollars, For A few Dollars More, and other great Westerns.

But back to the novel. I did think the Virginian was just too perfect for the setting and the historical period in which the book is placed. He was slow to anger, rarely raising his voice about anything, and was calm and measured in his responses to whatever affront may have been directed at him. He was self-assured, knew his strengths and weaknesses (not that he had any weaknesses), was clear-headed, decisive, a complete gentleman and … on and on and on. Seriously, this guy was simply too perfect for the period being written about.

The only lapse in his demeanour came when he was frustrated enough about something or someone to occasional utter a curse or two, although always under his breath. The narrator/Wister however did not feel that it was proper to actually share these curses with readers. It seems that the delicate dispositions of readers at the turn of the 19th century would not have been able to cope with this. The closest we get to a real curse comes when Trampas calls the Virginian a son-of-a-bitch (although that curse is written “…son-of-a—.” Clearly the word ‘bitch’ was deemed too coarse to spell out for the delicate eyes of readers in 1902!

By the way, the Virginian’s response to this epithet has become quite famous in its own right. Laying his pistol on the table at which he, Trampas and other cowboys have been playing cards, the Virginian delivers the now classic line, “When you call me that, smile!”

Several other passages from the book caught my attention, and I couldn’t help wondering at their origins. For example, in one passage of dialogue the character, “Scipio le Moyne, from Gallipolice, Ohio”, while referring to the villain Trampas says:

“Trampas is a rolling stone,” he said. “A rolling piece of mud,” corrected the Virginian. “Mud! That’s right. I’m a rolling stone. Sometimes I’d most like to quit being.”

Now I don’t for a minute assume that this is the first time the words, “I’m a rolling stone” are appearing for the first time in print—but then again who knows?

Some other brief quotes took my fancy as well. 

“When yu’ can’t have what you choose, yu’ just choose what you have.”

“In bets, in card games, in all horse transactions and other matters of similar business, a man must take care of himself, and wiser onlookers must suppress their wisdom and hold their peace.”

In other words, don't butt in when it's none of your business.

While the language of the novel is a little dated, The Virginian: A Horseman of The Plains is still worth setting aside some time for. The book is available as a free download from the Gutenberg Project website, as are eleven other titles by Owen Wister. Click here to download the eBook… 

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Note: The cover illustration above is from the Early Bird Books eBook edition. This is not free but can be download from the iBooks store for just ninety-nine cents (higher charges may apply via iBooks stores in countries other than the United States).

My 52-Book-Year: The Ways of White Folks

 Back in February, in a post titled, Writers From Life’s Other Side I wrote about how over the past few years I have been seeking out writers that have slipped under my radar, despite the accolades they have won for their writing. One of those writer’s is the great African-American author, Langston Hughes.

I have been aware of Langston Hughes for a long time—years in fact—but I had never read any of his poetry, plays, novels or short stories until I read The Ways Of White Folks.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue”.

The Ways of White Folks is a collection of short stories first published by Hughes in 1934. Hughes wrote the book during a year he spent living in Carmel, California. Arnold Rampersad, in A Centennial Tribute to Langston Hughes writes that the collection is, “marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism or, contextually: humorous racism,” and adds that the collection is among Hughes’ best known works. 

The Ways of White Folks consists of 14 short stories, including "Cora Unashamed”, “Home”, “Passing”, and “Father and Son.” The fourteen stories cover the gamut of white/black relationships, and Hughes is not shy about using the 'N' word—that is nigger—often, and in all its shades of meaning.

The collection opens with "Cora Unashamed" — described by David Herbert Donald (in a 1996 review for the New York Times), as “…a brilliantly realized portrait of an isolated black woman in a small Middle Western town, who stoically survives her own sorrows but in the end lashes out against the hypocrisy of the whites who employ her.”

Two of the stories, “Home”, and “Father and Son”, end with lynchings. In “Home,” Roy Williams, a brilliant young violinist returns to Hopkinsville, the small provincial Missouri town he left seven or eight years earlier to pursue a successful concert career in Europe (during the years between the two world wars). It is not long before Roy is confronted with the racism he had left behind years earlier:

“An uppty nigger,” said the white loafers when they saw him standing, slim and elegant, on the station platform in the September sunlight, surrounded by his bags with the bright stickers. Roy had got off a Pullman—something unusual for a Negro in those parts.“God damn!” said one of the white loafers.

As he departs the station platform Roy hears someone mutter, “Nigger.” His skin burned. For the first time in half a dozen years he felt his colour. He was home.”

Over a few short weeks, the resentment from the ‘loafers’ as Hughes calls them, continues to build until their animosity and envy boils over into uncontrolled rage at this black man, who had the temerity to escape the confines of his home town and travel to Europe, where he played the music of “Brahms and Beethoven, Bach and Cèsar Franck” in the great concert halls of Paris and Berlin.

When Miss Reese, “An old maid musicianer at the all white high school,” invites him to perform for her students, her well-meaning invitation only serves to stoke the anger and resentment from many in the town.

The students went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny pieces nobody but Miss Reese liked. They went on to say that Miss Reese had grinned all over herself and cried, “Wonderful!” And had even bowed to the nigger when he went out!

The story ends when Roy takes a late night walk through the town centre, and is set upon by a mob who beat and kick him mercilessly. The final paragraph is both brutal and poetic:

The little Negro whose name was Roy Williams began to choke on the blood in his mouth. And the roar of their voices and the scuff of the feet were split by the moonlight into a thousand notes like a Beethoven sonata. And when the white folks left his brown body, stark naked, strung from a tree at the edge of the town, it hung there all night, like a violin for the wind to play.

Poster from the PBS American Collection
adaptation of Cora Unashamed (2000)

Clearly, Hughes pulls no punches in his depictions of 'white folks' and their foibles, fears, hates, contradictions, and murderous natures. To be black in America, when Hughes wrote these stories, was to live in fear that whites, well meaning and otherwise, had virtually free rein to do and say what they wanted when it came to the lives of the American negro in the years following the Civil War. The truly horrifying thing is realizing that today, in vast swathes of America, little seems to have changed.

All of the stories in this collection are brilliantly realized, and each one examines an aspect of the droll, horrifying, humorous, bizarre, and often mysterious—ways of white folks. The stories are steeped in the violence, and confusion of Depression Era America, and the collection immediately drew me into its orbit of small town Southern life, and big city mysteries.

On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in New York City at the age of 65 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. His ashes are interred beneath a floor medallion in the middle of the foyer in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. It is the entrance to an auditorium named for him. The design on the floor is an African cosmogram entitled Rivers. Within the center of the cosmogram is the line: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers,” from his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which is reproduced here:

The Negro Speaks Of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

~ Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes is surely a writer I need to read more of.

More Information about Langston Hughes 

On Wikipedia...

At Poets Org… and Poem Hunter… 

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture…