Of late I have become an enthusiast of typewriting— the machine I am working on these days is a refurbished Swiss-made 1967 Hermes 3000, and quite the workhorse it is! (Ribbons? Kein Problem.) Of course I do most of my writing on my computer using Microsoft Word; WordPress for this blog; not to mention multitudinous hours spent with ye olde email program. But for laser-level attentional focus–and percussive energy!– the typewriter is something special, and as time goes by, the more I use it, the more I appreciate it. In fact, I now use my typewriter for one thing or another (drafts, notes, letters, recipe cards) almost every day.
Though I have yet to meet him in person, my mentor in the Typosphere is none other than Richard Polt, professor of philosophy at Xavier University and the author of some heavy-weight tomes on Heidegger, and, to the point, a practical manual I often consult, and warmly recommend to anyone thinking of buying a typewriter, or, say, hauling Grandpa’s out of some cobwebbed corner of the garage: The Typewriter Revolution. As “Richard P.” Professor Polt also maintains a blog of the same name. And now he, Frederic S. Durbin, and Andrew V. McFeaters, have put together a pair of anthologies, both just published, the second of which, Escapements: Typewritten Tales from Post-Digital Worlds (Loose Dog Press, 2019), includes a story of mine: “What Happened to the Dog?”
Herewith, “What Happened to the Dog?” (Caveat: undoubtedly the photographs in the book itself are of better quality; these I just snapped with my smartphone, too quickly, I daresay, in a rush to make the PO with the originals.) May this entice you to buy the ridiculously low-priced anthology of a cornucopia of wildy-imagined stories by many other writers, now available at amazon.com— and better yet, have a go at typing your own pre-/post-digital fiction.
My writing assistant answers the title question: She was having a perfectly reasonable morning siesta when, suddenly, this book appeared on her back. She reports that this reminded her, mistily, of a previous life as a dimetrodon.
Those of you who follow this blog may be wondering, what perchance, and by jumpingjacks, does this short story about a typewriter have to do, and by the way what has happened with, the book in-progress on Far West Texas? The question of technology has turned out to be central to what I am writing about Far West Texas. (Darkly: there will be Heidegger quotes.)
Fingers crossed that I can finally get the next Marfa Mondays podcast up Monday after next.
Next Monday, the second of the month, I post here for the writing workshop. More anon.
This year I’ve been posting a Q & A with a
fellow writer on the fourth Monday of the month, and while I have every
intention of continuing to do so, this Monday instead herewith some notes on
the epic novel by the artist who, back in 2001, passed over to the Great
Beyond: Tom Lea.
“It is part and parcel of your culture and I
think you should cherish it,” says Italian art historian
Luciano Cheles of the surprisingly little-known works of El Paso, Texas painter
and writer Tom Lea. And encouraging that is precisely what Adair Margo has been
doing with great verve for the past many years with the website and educational
programs of the Tom Lea
Institute. I had the immense privilege of attending Margo’s talk
about Tom Lea at the Bullock Museum in Austin back on October 15, 2015. (And by
felicitous happenstance, I sat next to Luciano Cheles.) More about that anon.
Here is the must-see 5 minute video with what
Cheles has to say about Lea’s artwork:
For more on Lea’s and The
Wonderful Country’s place in the canon, see Marcia Hatfield Daudistel’s
majestic anthology, Literary El Paso
(TCU Press, 2009).
WILDEST WEST EL PASO
This post is prompted by my work-in-progress about Far West Texas (…stay tuned for more podcasts…) At long, belated last I have tackled Tom Lea’s epic historical novel of El Paso.
I am happy to report that The Wonderful Country is wonderful indeed, a masterpiece not only of works set in El Paso, but in the genre of the Western, and indeed in all of American fiction.
These days most literary readers, and especially those out on the coasts, tend to turn their noses up at Westerns. Dear curious and adventurous reader, if that describes you, be assured that to overlook reading The Wonderful Country is to miss out on something very fine in U.S. literary heritage. The Wonderful Country was popular in its day, back in the 1950s, but it is not a typical commercial novel; it has a high order of literary quality; morever, its treatment of Mexicans and Mexico is unusually knowing and sensitive. (What would I know about that? Start here and here; my books are all here).
Set in post-Civil War El Paso, that is, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the first days of the railroad and the
last of the free-roaming Apache, and published in the pre-Civil Rights era,
Lea’s The Wonderful Country forthrightly portrays many of the still
painful tensions in the border region. While he writes with an unusually open
heart and mind, Lea is scrupulous in rendering accurate period detail. The
“N” word appears! (In the mouth of a character.) There is no lack of
roastin’ ‘n stabbin’ n’ shootin’ n’ scalpin’ and our hero is the son of a
Confederate from Missouri. Vegetarians and those with flea-trigger hot-buttons,
be forewarned.
From the catalog copy, TCU Press, 2002:
“Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier– shortly after the end of the Civil War–when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.
“Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man.
“When Brady / Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.
“The Wonderful Country is marvelous in its depiction of life along the Texas/Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago. Lea brings to life a time that was wild, a time when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed. Lea knows the desert region of his birth as well as anyone who has ever written about El Paso and the great nation that borders it to the south.”
NOTES ON THE TCU PRESS EDITION WITH AN AFTERWORD
BY JOHN O. WEST
You should be able to scare up a first edition
over on www.abebooks.com,
and power to you if you want to shell out the clams for a fine first with
intact dustjacket and an autograph. The copy I read is the paperback
reprint of 2002 available from TCU Press (and most online
booksellers) which includes afterword by John O. West, a noted US-Mexico border
scholar. For West’s afterword I would recommend the TCU Press paperback as your
best buy (unless your main goal, buck for buck, is to beat the stock market).
As far as I know, all editions include the
elegant and evocative drawings Lea made to head each chapter.
John O. West argues, and I concur:
“The story of Martin Brady is that of Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again, of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; the setting in the desert Southwest gives it particular realism, but the theme makes it speak beyond the region where it grew.”
West also provides some illuminating background
on the inspirations for the novel. My additional notes below.
NOTES ON THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, AND THE EVENTS
THAT INSPIRED THE NOVEL, PLUS SOME RELATED RECENT WORKS & WEBSITES
Tom Lea’s “El Puerto” is based on El Paso; Fort Jefflin, clearly inspired by Fort Bliss.
El Paso pioneer W.W. Mill’s memoir Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898 was Tom Lea’s major inspiration. A first edition is pricey! But it is out-of-copyright now so you can read a digitalized edition for free online.
W. H. Timmons’ El Paso: A
Borderlands History (Texas Western Press, 1990). Back in the
1960s, Timmons served as Chairman of the History Department at the University
of Texas El Paso.
Fort Bliss actually moved around the El Paso region
quite a bit in the 19th century, but you can visit the current Fort Bliss,
which has an adobe museum and a modern museum– the latter perhaps of most
interest for WWII aficionados. The historic parade grounds, surrounded by
stately houses for senior officers, are well worth a visit.
Some of the characters in The Wonderful
Country are inspired by (or mighty similar to) some real people, among
them:
Both the U.S. Army and the Mexican Army went after the Apaches, and in some instances, U.S. forces chased Apaches into Mexico. In general such US Army forays seem to have been welcomed by the Mexicans, but communications in these remote areas were dicey and resentments still very raw after the US-Mexican War. Many historians writing in English about border history have not had the wherewithall to research Spanish language sources, and vice versa, so there is some low-hanging fruit here for those historians with cross-border cultural and language skills. The Apaches also have something to say about it. One recent biography of note is Kathleen P. Chamberlain’s Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
The hero of The Wonderful Country becomes
a Texas Ranger. A crucial source for Lea, writing back in the 1950s, was James
B. Gillett’s 1921 memoir, Six Years with
the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881, from which Lea takes the epigraph and
his title:
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe
the wonderful country as I saw it then.”
> Check out Gilett’s page at
the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas. Gillett
ranched south of Alpine and upon moving to Marfa helped found the West Texas
Historical Association. He died in 1937 and is buried in Marfa.
(The Texas Rangers made up a more heterogeneous
group than some too easily conclude. See also the 2014 book by historian
Cynthia Leal Massey, Death of a Texas
Ranger. An interview with Massey is here.)
TENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Marcos Kinevan’s superb (of partial) biography of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in Texas
The Wonderful Country has
a number of characters who serve in the Tenth U.S.
Cavalry. The Tenth was famed for its African American
“Buffalo” soldiers, and its exploits in fighting Indians, especially in
Texas and then Arizona.
Less famous, but undeservedly so, is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., who is the subject of a forthcoming paper I presented at last year’s Center for Big Bend Studies Conference. His younger brother, Poultney Bigelow, who published his series of articles on trailing the Apaches, was a great friend of artist Frederic Remington who illustrated many of the articles. Their father, John Bigelow, was an accomplished editor (at one point editing the New York Times), he served as President Lincoln’s ambassador to France, and had much to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the New York Public Library, the Panama Canal, and promoting Swedenborgianism. Bigelow, Sr also entertained literary celebrities including Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. My paper explores some of the family’s rich and varied social and political connections, John Bigelow Jr’s reports for Poultney’s magazine, his role as a nexus between the Eastern establishment and the West, and his importance as a military intellectual who anticipated the profound changes to come in 20th century warfare.
NOTES ON THE 1959 MOVIE “THE WONDERFUL
COUNTRY” BASED ON THE NOVEL
… Reminds me of that old
joke about the goats out browsing on a hill in Hollywood. They find the can
with the reel of film, they kick it open, and they start munching… The one
goat says to other, well, whaddya think? The other goat chews some more.
“Eh,” the goat says, “I liked the novel better.”
One of the African American “Buffalo
soldiers” is played by baseball star Satchel Paige. Tom Lea himself has a
cameo as the barber, Peebles.
“Writing is a kind of burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight painting, but I am not overwhelmed… by problems like I was with writing. I taught myself to write and never had any kind of a mentor or formal course… I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff.”
On The Wonderful Country:
“…I wanted to do something that ad been on my mind since I was a kid: Write about this borderland and the people on both sides of the river.”
“When traveling down in Mexico I never carried anything more than a little notebook because I was trying to train myself to hear rather than to see. I was trying so hard to be a good writer, you know… The hardest chapter in that book was where Martin goes with Joe Wakefield across the river in the springtime. I was trying to tell how much this fellow felt about both sides of the river. I remember I struggled and struggled for some way to express springtime and I settled it by saying, ‘A mockingbird sang on a budded cottonwood’ or something like that. I had to watch myself about using the big word. I always chose the shortest way if it could say exactly what I wanted.”
“A gust of wind sished sand against the one small windowpane.” (p.16)
“They ate in the light of tallow dips, a dozen men in soggy leather, laughing and chewing, with the rain sounding on the roof, and cold drops leaking through.” (p.250)
“Slowly, under the winking high stars, they came to where they saw beyond the paleness of the sand the darkness of the brush that lined the river, and they rode toward it. They worked across a dry flat of alkali white in the starlight, with the hooves scuffling the crust in the windless silence. ” (p.306)
FURTHER MISC NOTES
From Tom Lea Month 2012, Nick Houser on Lea’s Cabeza de Vaca picture:
In my opinion, Lea’s masterwork is his 1938 mural
“The Pass
of the North” which is in El Paso Historic Federal Courthouse
Building.
NOTES ON HIS FAMILY
Lea’s father was Tom Lea
(1877-1945), who served as mayor of El Paso during the Mexican
Revolution. (Alas, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not remember Mayor
Lea fondly; this is
one reason why.)
