Elmore Leonard
THE COMPLETE WESTERN STORIES
528pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £16.99.
0 297 84811 9
Joyce Carol Oates, editor
THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES
320pp. Quercus. £12.99.
1 905 20420 5
US: Houghton Mifflin. $14.
0 61851745 6
In 1954, three years after a youthful Elmore Leonard tentatively began his writing career, John Steinbeck published the novel Sweet Thursday. In its prologue, the literate layabout Mack sets out the criteria for what he considers to be an appropriate narrative style: “I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing – I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says”.
For Mack, this was mere casual criticism: descriptive passages (“what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it”) were acceptable, as long as there was “not too much of that”. But for Leonard, Steinbeck had set out a philosophy that was to provide the guiding principles for his subsequent career. When Leonard came to put down his renowned ten rules for writing fiction, he ensured that they were Mack-compatible. The result was a literary manifesto that acted as a heartening overstatement of the need for understatement: “don’t go into great detail describing places and things”; “show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story”; “try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”, and so on. “If it sounds like writing”, concluded Leonard, “I rewrite it.”
The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard now gives us the chance to skip back to the 1950s, when he was not so sure what writing sounded like at all, and watch his (anti-) literary style in its development. Thick enough to stop a bullet from a Sharps rifle at ten metres, the volume contains thirty fine tales of the rough world of nineteenth-century Arizona and New Mexico. Leonard selected westerns as a genre, because he “liked the movies” and could sell stories to the ever-proliferating pulp magazines, while also developing his nascent writing style. It seemed the ideal situation for a young author: earning and learning at the same time.
The earliest stories of this chronological collection show that these two motivating forces can easily come into conflict. Earning two cents a word to help support his family, the author is caught between the twin demands of household and literary economy: a pressure to leave in what should be left out. We do, at least, have some moments of the pared-down clarity that is so characteristic of later Leonard, like this description of a murdered body, evoked with clear-eyed brutality:
“The old man’s head hung only three feet above the smothered ashes of the fire. His head and upper portion of his body were burned beyond recognition, the black rawness creeping from this portion of his body upward to where his hands were tied tightly to his thighs; there the blackness changed to livid red blisters . . . . He was dead. But death had come slowly.”
The effect is tightly controlled; the narrator’s eye carefully picks out each detail of this mouldering corpse. We linger – through the well-judged semicolon that stubbornly refuses to shift the focus of the sentence – on the thighs that bear the evidence of the victim being bound and then slowly burned. The narrator then moves our attention to Travisin, the Indian agent, “a good Samaritan with a Spencer in his hand”. Leonard shows this unbreakable man, speaking resolutely and simply (“the poor, poor old man”) in a voice that “just cracked faintly to tell more”. All of which is unimprovable genre-writing: the violent action of the murder, and the stoic reaction of the hero, clearly realized in spare, necessary prose. Unfortunately, Leonard spoils the effect, by throwing in his two cents extra, attempting specifically “to tell more”:
“Only once in a while did Fry see him as the young man with feelings. It was a strange sight, the man fighting the boy; but always the man would win and he would go on as relentlessly as before, but with an added ruthlessness that had been strengthened by the emotional surge.”
Leonard had already shown us that emotion; by trying to tell us about it, he lessens its effect. The paragraph is mere filler, used to bulk out the narrative rather than advance it. And the motivation behind the inclusion is too clearly, perhaps, cents not sensibility.
In the early stories, we can see signs of mercenary haste overriding artistic judgement. There is the accidental jangle of near-rhyme: “de Both didn’t particularly give a damn. He knew he was a man”. Or the relentless description of weather and landscape that – as Leonard noted – merely means “the reader is apt to leaf ahead, looking for people”. In four pages, the featureless background features like this: “wild, rugged rock”; “steep, craggy mounds”; “steep, jagged rock”; “craggy peaks, sharp and jagged”; and “steep, jagged rock” again.
There is only one other type of solecism in the collection: what Mack memorably called “hooptedoodle”. This occurs when a writer wants to “sing a little song with language”, to make his writing – in other words – sound like writing. At such (rare) moments, Leonard obtrudes with attention-sapping superfluity into the world he has conscientiously created: “somewhere in the stillness was the cold-throated howl of a dog coyote. It complemented the dreary blackness pressing from the north like a soul in hell’s despair”; or “time lost its meaning after a while and became only something that dragged hope with it as it went nowhere”.
Fortunately, what Leonard comes to recognize – and what The Complete Western Stories predominantly proves – is that “being a good author is a disappearing act”. As each story passes, so the young author allows himself to recede from the text. This offers one model of successful genre-writing, in which the genre is more important than the writer: the development from the exceptionable to the unexceptional. However, this collection demonstrates that Leonard is, in fact, exceptional in his ability to evoke the romantically rancorous world of the American West and to do exactly what all writers are supposed to do: tell a story well. For most of the time, he just doesn’t make a song and dance about it.
This is the world of Elmore Leonard, the 1880s encapsulated in the 1950s:
“Yuma, Whipple Barracks, Fort Apache and Thomas. Officers’ row on a sun-baked parade. Chiricahua, White Mountain, Mescalero and Tonto. Thigh-high moccasins and a rusted Spencer. Tizwin drunk, then war-drums. And only the red sun-slash in the sky after the patrol had faded into the glare three miles west of Thomas. Shapeless ponchos that used to be men. The old story.”
We come to see that these old stories are given new life by the clearness of their telling. “Cool Hand” Leonard has an ability to picture his subjects swiftly and without undue ornamentation; like all great western-writers, he is quick on the draw. As a result, we have a compact cast list of believable archetypes – or anti-heroes who are conjured in lean, credible prose: the “sun-scarred” cowboys and “beard-grubby” agents, the ordinary and extra-ornery.
This is testament not to a lack of imagination but to the consistency of the author’s approach over thirty stories and thirty years. In his notes for The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “action is character”. Leonard has inverted the axiom, showing that consistent character can provide the action to drive a story forward. So while there are moments of bloody violence, the emphasis is on the periods before and after, when personality is tested and revealed: what Steinbeck called “the little era of rest . . . when time stops to examine itself”. Indeed, a concordance to these stories would reveal a striking fondness for concrete nouns signifying absence and abstinence: leanness, flatness, stinginess, quietness, grayness, lonesomeness; or compound adjectives that represent an effective thesaurus of taciturnity: teeth-clenched, tight-lipped, tight-jawed, close-mouthed, stone-silent, dead-silent.
This is not to say Leonard has given us a 500-page account of the mild West, rather that he does not need to rely on loud-volumed intensity to energize his fiction. There is action enough to keep us occupied, but it comes in a calm, efficiently crafted fashion. So, the openings of the stories are excitingly premiss-crammed, encouraging the reader to continue:
“He had picked up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention.
There was a time when Bonito would have fired at the rider far below on the road, and for no other reason than to test his carbine, since the rider was a white man.”
The first quotation is from “Three-Ten to Yuma”, which was later made into a film. This points to another Leonard quality: the visual nature of his imagination; his ability to create fast-moving pictures. Characters’ movements are expertly choreographed, their point of view evoked as if through a hand-held camera: “then he was looking at Katie, at the expression changing on her face, eyes alive, looking at something behind him. He turned sharply. Standing a few feet away was one of the men in range clothes. He stood with his legs spread, as if bracing himself, a short man in faded Levi’s, holding a pistol dead on Corsen’s stomach”. When men do resort to movie-style fighting – what Nabokov called “the ox-stunning fisticuffs” of the 1950s screen – the combat is described with clapperboard crispness, storyboard precision: “he came up with a fist under Tobin’s jaw, and when Tobin’s guard came apart, the same fist chopped back-handed, like a counter-punch, and smacked hard. This man knew how to fight”.
And this man knows how to write. Indeed, the central virtue of The Complete Western Stories is its record of the emergence of a real readers’ writer, one who can evoke a world through – as Hemingway put it – the “true simple declarative sentence” that would make anyone simply incapable of not reading on.
As if to emphasize this, we have the publication of The Best American Mystery Stories, a collection of writerly writers – indeed of a writer’s writers: chosen by Joyce Carol Oates. It acts as something of an uncompanion volume to Leonard, demonstrating by contrast everything he does well. Oates is gloomily pompous about crime-writing; instead of welcoming its ability to arouse and involve the reader, she is po-faced: “There is no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw and irredeemable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is endured, transcended and transformed by survivors”.
At least two-thirds of the writers appear afflicted by this seriousness of approach: the result is less a book than a hooptedoodle pad. So we have over-strenuous attempts to avoid sounding clichéd – unnecessary for genre-writing, in which familiarity of approach actually breeds content. Take these gritted-teeth similes, from Richard Burgin and Daniel Handler: “when he did begin to move he felt strangely weightless, like a dizzy ghost passing down a dreamlike street”; or “Davis poured, and the gentlemen took their drinks – the way you might take a hike if a very dangerous person suggested it”. Or this exhortation to the imagination by Tim McLoughlin (and see if you can guess what is being described here):
“Picture an embassy in a foreign country. A truly foreign country. Not a Western European ally, but a fundamentalist state perennially on the precipice of war. A fill-the-sandbags-and-wait-for-the-airstrike enclave. That was Olsen’s, home to the last of the donkeys, the white dinosaurs of Sunset Park.”
This Middle Eastern nation of donkeys and dinosaurs is, in fact, an Irish bar in New York and precisely impossible to “picture” at all. Contrast Leonard, with his visual mise-en-scène: “Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slopes and pines higher up. This is where everybody was. Not all in one place but scattered in small groups”.
Mystery or crime stories – like westerns – respond to a toughness of tone. Leonard’s characters speak tersely, with hard-earned hard-talk: “and Ruben Vega said, because he had no choice, ‘I hear the rope in the air, the one with the rifle is dead. Then you. Then the roper’”. Compare this from George W. Higgins, whose attempt to hear hardness shows instead a hardness of hearing:
“I am in the gravy,” Ellis said. “I am in the gravy up to my belt-buckle. They are heating up the gravy. I think they are planning to cook me. I am getting nervous.” “Not good,” the driver said. “Not good to get nervous. Makes the Man nervous when people get nervous. That is very seldom good for the nervous people.”
Aside from stellar efforts from Scott Turow and Oz Spies, the central mystery in The Best American Mystery Stories is how the word “best” can appear in its title at all. But the book is welcome, as it reveals the central difficulty faced by genre-writers: how to tell new old stories successfully. Happily, The Complete Western Stories is here to demonstrate that – even as a new, young writer – Elmore Leonard has always had the genius to do so.
