by Duane Spurlock
In some recent contributions to The Pulp Rack, I've been writing a few notes about how Frederick Faust (Max Brand) used landscape in his stories. In many cases, the landscape acts as a character—it provides an obstacle for a protagonist to overcome, much as a dragon or a chapel perilous might serve as a test for a hero on a quest. In other cases, the landscape serves an expressionistic role that highlights or reveals something about a character's qualities or psychological makeup, much in the way the film directors of the 1920s, '30s and '40s used expressionistic scenery and sets to create an atmosphere of menace and visually portray a character's psychological state. In this essay, I'm going to look at how Faust used mountains in some of his stories, particularly in the novel, The Lone Rider.
Mountains have been a literary device since Moses came down Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. In the 20th Century, for a few examples, Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain, showed characters hiding from life (and the conflicts of World War I) in a sanitarium located high on a mountaintop. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway's novel, A Farewell to Arms, depicts an American soldier and an English nurse who fall in love and hide from that same war in a house located in a mountain range.
Moving to the western genre, in 1949, Houghton Mifflin published Shane by Jack Schaefer. (It originally was published, in somewhat different form, as a three-part serial – "Rider from Nowhere" -- in Argosy a few years earlier.) When Shane feels turmoil, the boy, Joey – narrator of the novel – sees the gunfighter stretch his hand up to the distant mountains. Shane seeks strength from those mountains during his inner conflict as he wrestles with his gunfighter past and his farmhand present.
Frederick Faust used mountains in many of his stories. For example, in Bull Hunter (New York: Leisure Books, 1996; a compilation of two stories first published in Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine July 9, 1921, as "Bullets with Sense" and August 13, 1921, as "Bull Hunter Feels His Oats"), mountains provide a test of character and willpower. The mountain-sized title character (Bull Hunter) crosses a mountain range in a snowstorm to avenge the disabling of bitter-hearted man who has raised him, Bill Campbell, and to prove his worth in the sight of this man and other men.
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And suppose he, Bull, were to accomplish this great feat and return to the shack? Would not Bill Campbell feel doubly repaid for the living he had furnished for his nephew? More than once the grim old man had cursed the luck that saddled him with a stupid incubus. But the curses would turn to compliments if Bull left this little man, this catlike and dangerous fighter, this Pete Reeve, dead on the trail.
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Bull is a complete outsider. As Faust writes, "If the bullets of little Pete Reeve dropped him in some far-off trail, the old-broken-down horse would be the only living creature that would mourn for him." So Bull's trek to punish Pete Reeve is a quest for his manhood, a test to relieve his self doubts.
In an earlier article, "Frederick Faust's Abrupt Endings" (which is available here on The Pulp Rack), I wrote that in hammering out his stories about men overcoming great odds, physical and human obstacles, Faust was "following a tradition of heroic stories" in which, "like Hercules working through his twelve labors, Faust's heroes move from one task or difficult situation to another. A story recounts a hero's particular labor, then ends."
Bull is following this heroic tradition by setting out on a quest and throwing himself against the blizzard and the mountain. The ascent is not easy, for if a test is simple, it proves nothing:
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Still it [the snowstorm] gained power incredibly. Up the side of Scalped Mountain it was a steady weight pressing against him rather than a wind. And now and then, when the weight relaxed, he stumbled forward on his knees. For there was now hardly any shelter. He was approaching the timberline where trees stand as high as a man and little higher.
. . . While the day grew steadily his heart sank. He needed the rest, but the cold bit into him while he lay extended, and the peril of the summit would be before him for his march of the day. The wind mourned over him as if it anticipated his defeat. Never had there been such wind, he thought. It screamed above him. It dropped away in sudden lulls of more appalling silence. Then, far off, he would hear a wave of the storm begin, wash across a crest, thunder in a canyon, and then break on the timberline with a prolonged and mighty roaring. Those giant approaches made him hold his breath, and when the wave of confusion passed, he found himself often breathless.
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Faust heightens the sense of battle by describing the surrounding trees as soldiers when he calls them "the Spartans of the forest." Bull pushes himself to a point at which he cannot back away from the challenge he's set:
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There was only one way to make even the attempt. He sat down, took off his snowshoes, strapped them to his back, and began to work his way up the slope, battering out each foothold with the head of his ax. It was possible to ascend in this manner, but it would be practically impossible to descend.
Once committed to this way, he had either to go on to the summit, or else perish. . . . Yonder, beyond the summit, lay his destiny—Johnstown—and this was the way toward it; it was a simple thing to Bull. He could no more vary from his course than a magnetic needle can vary from its pole.
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In another early story, "The One-Way Trail," from The One-Way Trail (New York: Leisure Books, 1998, pp 157-231; first published in Street & Smith's Western Story Magazine February 4, 1922), Faust again uses landscape to illustrate a character's dilemma. In this story, young Harry French -- nicknamed The Shifter -- has earned a reputation as a gunfighter. Resolved to change his ways in the hope of escaping his reputation – "his plan for life hereafter was to be free from violence" (170) -- he leaves town by the most direct route -- a narrow, unsafe trail that clings to a mountainside overlooking a deep gorge:
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Along one side of the gorge a difficult trail had been cut, dipping up and down, twisting in and out. In half a dozen places it was wide enough for passing, but mile after mile it stretched as a narrow little ledge where a man on foot was in danger and where a man on a horse continually risked his own neck and the life of his mount.
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Faust's descriptive landscape in this section of the story nicely captures Harry's situation: He is crossing a chasm from one part of his life-- that marked by his deadly reputation as a gunfighter -- to the next part, which he hopes will be marked by his own mild manner and a lack of conflict. That this passing from one sort of life to another is depicted in so perilous a manner emphasizes Harry's inner turmoil. It also is Faust's way of showing that making changes of this sort have their own difficulties, no matter what one determines to do.
The trail is so perilous it has been declared a one-way passage for travelers from the direction of Harry's hometown. Everyone in the region knows this. So Harry imagines he has little worry about meeting anyone on the trail traveling from the other end. Yet he does meet someone on the trail, someone heading the wrong direction, and the encounter occurs at one of those narrow, dangerous, impassable points of the pathway.
The man Harry French meets is Jack Clark, "mean by nature, a sneak by training, and a hound by general principles." Another character puts into words the situation that this encounter on the trail captures: "The Shifter was going the right way, and Jack Clark was riding the wrong way on the one-way trail." (213)
In other words, Harry French, who resolves to change his life by leaving behind his gunfighting reputation, follows the right path – it's narrow and the going can be treacherous, but he's heading in the right direction for his life. Jack Clark, his opposite number in qualities, is heading the wrong way. As often happens, the Jack Clarks of this life cause troubles for those trying to follow the proper path.
The Lone Rider is a still earlier work (New York: Leisure Books, 2005, first published in All-Story Weekly as a five-part serial July 14 through August 11, 1917, titled as "Fate's Honeymoon"). Here, Faust's mountains serve more than one role. First, they provide a land of escape – similar to the mountains in Mann's The Magic Mountain and Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms. But while those more famous literary mountains offer escape from responsibility and from the ugliness of war, Faust's mountains offer a respite from evil and corruption. For Billy Newlands, the mountains provide a location where he can create himself – where he can replace the corruption that he has absorbed from his life of high finance and high living in San Francisco with a wholesome, honorable manliness. The mountains become a place for purifying his soul and flushing away the evil he has embraced.
Newlands marries the lovely, trusting, and innocent Beatrice in a false ceremony – the officiating preacher is actually a disguised Jimmy Munroe (an amoral, Iago-like schemer who continually feeds Newlands ego and gets him involved in shady deals of financial and other sorts) – in a plot to take her sizeable inheritance to pay off his debts in a backroom effort to prevent Billy's going to jail. The day of their wedding, while they travel to their honeymoon location, their train wrecks while passing through a mountainous region. In the confusion, Billy disappears. Beatrice helps a badly injured fellow-passenger – Crawford, a mining engineer – and accompanies him with his crew back to the mine, where she nurses him back to health.
Billy, meanwhile, staggered farther into the mountains until he comes across two miners. He offers to help them with their digging – with no pay. He calls himself "Gilson." Through honest labor, he slims down and muscles up and flushes the poisons of his civilized life from his soul. When later he takes a job at Crawford's mine – still under the name Gilson – he is at first unaware of Beatrice's presence. When later she sees him, she doesn't recognize him as Billy Newlands, for his physical appearance – especially with the addition of a beard – has greatly changed.
The mountains have provided a refuge from the temptations of evil for Billy. Now, as he works toward his redemption, the mountains offer a source of strength. Even Crawford calls him a "black-browed hero from nowhere." (p. 123) In Schaefer's novel, Shane becomes a hero against his will. He, like Billy Newlands, seeks strength from the mountains, (although Billy may do so more unconsciously than Shane, who raises his hand to the mountains). But Shane is not revived by the ridges. The mountains represent an obstacle – his inner turmoil between his past and what he wants to become. As Marc Simmons describes the gunfighter's dilemma in "A Salute to Shane,"
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In the end Shane's personal conflict remains unresolved. After defeating the rancher Fletcher and his hired gun, he tells Bob that he must ride on. Of course, this is a fine stylistic touch and one that the book requires. But in his final speech, Shane gives the actual reason that compels his departure. "A man is what he is, Bob, and there's no breaking the mold. I tried that and I've lost." In a sense it is a capitulation, at least for the moment--an admission that he needs the stimulus of violence to reach the higher levels of human consciousness. This dénouement might suggest to the unwary that the mountain peak, which the hero unsuccessfully sought to scale, was in fact unassailable. But such a conclusion would be misleading, as it obscures the authentic message of this novel: that the trail to the top, win or lose, is well worth essaying.
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Billy also comes to realize the importance of the journey, for he decides to do all in his power to help Crawford succeed in his mining venture so the engineer will earn riches and be able to marry Beatrice and make her happy in ways that Billy – remorseful about his past and his manipulation of Beatrice, and realizing that he truly loves her for her trusting nature and her purity – imagines that he cannot do.
And so Billy relies on the mountains to sustain him. In his guise as the miner, Gilson, he is emotionally distraught at the sight of Beatrice tenderly caring for the ailing mine owner Crawford. Billy turns away to look out the door. "There heaved the honest mountains, ridge on ridge, proud, self-sufficient, eloquent in silence. When he turned back, he was himself again." (p. 94)
Crawford sees the mountains as a symbol of purity. While she cares for him, Beatrice and Crawford tell the rest of the mining camp that she is his wife – the story keeps her safe from the rowdy miners, who have not left camp for months while trying to meet the terms of Crawford's contract with his investors. The lie bothers Beatrice, who has not even revealed her background to the engineer she has nursed. Crawford can tell she is troubled by her past, but while Faust suggests that Crawford imagines some sort of history for Beatrice that may be tarnished and tainted by sin, he never mentions what he supposes it might be, and he does not wish her to worry over it, for the engineer has come to love his nurse:
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"It is not right to tell me what has happened in your past," he declared. "I don't care what has happened, and I can imagine things far more horrible than any that have happened to you. All I know and care is that I am mad for you, hungry for you and for your love as you are this moment here before me. I know what you are. Why should I care for what you have been? Oh, my dear, don't you see that the past is as nothing? That our lives look forward and upward like that range of mountains, Beatrice?" (p. 120)
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Although we've looked at the men in this and other stories, Beatrice also finds strength in the mountains:
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As she walked up the hill, her eyes went up by instinct to those peaks which stood up with sentinel white heads against the pallor of the upper sky, and, as she stepped up the mountainside, she found herself walking with a longer and more buoyant stride. (p. 205)
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The mountains and their purity are wounded by the evils of civilization and the appearance of such evil's representative, the weasily Jimmy Munroe. When Munroe travels to the small mountain town closest to Crawford's mine – appropriately named Crackens – in his efforts to hunt down the missing Billy Newlands, Faust's description of the village's location is a metaphor for Munroe's cracked, amoral heart:
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Crackens lay in the hollow of a wedge-like gulch, split through the heart of the mountains. (p. 110)
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These few examples of Faust's use of mountains show how he employed landscape as an element in his work to further reveal the working of his plots and characters.
Bibliography:
Marc Simmons, "A Salute to Shane." (The article was first published in The Roundup, the magazine of the Western Writers of America, in May 1974, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Shane. Reproduced by kind permission of the author at the Jack Schaefer tribute web site, which you can reach by clicking here.
Links:
You can read "Frederick Faust's Abrupt Endings" elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.
You can read "Frederick Faust’s Use of Landscape: 'The One-Way Trail'" elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.
You can purchase The Lone Rider in hardback from Amazon.com by clicking here, or in paperback by clicking here.
You can purchase The One-Way Trail from Amazon.com by clicking here.
Posted by ds at February 17, 2006 12:08 PM
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