By Duane Spurlock
In many cases, Frederick Faust uses landscape 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 expressionistic film directors of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s used scenery and sets to create an atmosphere of menace and visually portray a character’s psychological state.
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In one 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 uses landscape and the weather to portray a character’s dilemma. In this story, young Harry French -- nicknamed The Shifter -- has earned a reputation as a gunfighter. Hoping to find relief from the burden of his reputation, he returns to his hometown, where he is known by the people among whom he grew up. But his deadly reputation is an albatross around his neck even in that place. He ends up driven from town.
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:
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.
So perilous is the trail that 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.
Not only is the trail narrow and dangerous, but in his haste to leave his hometown and the ugly reception he encountered there, Harry travels during a blustery gale. 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.
Deciding to leave difficulties behind can mean that difficult times of another sort may lie ahead. Short cuts have their own perils. For example, Harry had earned his nickname by his manner of moving quickly through a fight, dodging blows and gunfire swiftly and successfully. He seemed to shift from one spot to another so well that he remained untouched by the violence that his opponents sought to deliver upon him. But once Harry decides to leave that wild life behind for a new, law-abiding life, he can no longer shift untouched from trouble or dodge danger so easily.
Here are some of the passages that depict Harry’s crossing:
Ordinarily even The Shifter would not have thought of using this route, particularly now that the north wind was tearing through the gorge, ready to pry between the rider and the cliff wall beside him. But this was not an ordinary day for The Shifter. His mind was in a turmoil of rage, and he welcomed the prospective danger of the one-way trail as a relief. He only wanted to get out of his home town by the shortest and the most expeditious means, and consequently he directed the big, ugly head of Glorious [his horse] toward the mouth of the gorge.
The wind was increasing steadily, stringing long, pale drifts of clouds across the sky, clouds in such rapid passage from the north that they flicked across the face of the sun in swift succession and dimmed it only momentarily, like a winking light. The Shifter bowed his head to the gathering force of the gale and rode on.
. . . . The trail was almost indistinguishable as it wound here and there, climbing with well-nigh imperceptible footings from one jutting crag to another. Sometimes it was merely a distant scratch along the blank walls of stone.
. . . . The first sharp turn, following the winding of the valley, had proved nearly the death of both of them for, as they went about it, the storm smote them squarely from the inside, and Glorious tottered on the very edge of destruction. (168 – 172)
Faust turns again to psychological weather for another character when Sheriff Clark realizes that his son, Jack, is “mean by nature, a sneak by training, and a hound by general principles.” (213) The father, a good man and a good lawman, is struck nearly dumb by how he has willfully blinded himself against seeing his son’s true nature:
Left to himself, the sheriff stepped to the window and stared into the blackness until he could make out the tops of the trees around the house swinging to and fro in the full current of the wind, for the night had turned wild again, and the storm struck the sides of the house in rattling gusts and then rushed wailing away across the forest. He turned back, shivering, and took down a heavily lined raincoat from the peg. It would be cold outside in that driving blast of rain. He himself was already cold to the heart. (204)
And here:
. . . the storm was a fitting accompaniment to the tumult in his brain. (209)
Let’s return to discussing how the landscape magnifies the story’s dilemmas: After Harry French (The Shifter) leaves his hometown and is heading along the one-way trail, he encounters at one of those impassable points of the trail a rider heading the opposite direction. This second rider turns out to be Jack Clark, the no-good son of Sheriff Clark and an object of scorn for everyone in Vardon City, home to Jack and his lawman father. One of those Vardon City residents 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 –- in an echo of the Bible passage in Matthew 7:14, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” -- it’s narrow and the going can be treacherous, but Harry is heading in the right direction for his life. Jack Clark, Harry's 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.
Although Jack Clark tries to trick Harry and push him off the trail to his death, Harry turns the tables –- Jack’s horse falls from the trail, but Harry manages to save Jack from dropping to his doom, and leaves the rascal on the trail while he continues on to Vardon City. However, when Harry arrives there, Sheriff Clark arrests him for allegedly murdering Jack on the trail.
Before the Sheriff learns of Harry’s innocence, Nick (perhaps a play on Old Nick, the Devil?), the town’s bartender, attempts to stir up his patrons into forming a mob to lynch Harry. In the following passage, Faust describes Nick’s passionate exhortation:
There is an accumulative power in words. They build out of nothing. They lead nowhere. But out of them comes an effect. They have, at least, the value of mass. They have the emphasis of quantity. And the emphasis, in the case of Nick, was pointed by a fierce energy which came out of his heart. (211)
Thanks to Robert Easton’s The Big Westerner (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970) and other sources, we can see how Faust might have been describing not just Nick’s appeal but his own pseudonymous story-smithing, for we know how Faust pounded out his pulp fiction –- fast, furiously, seemingly heedlessly. But the power of his words over readers shows the lie to that last adverb. For even if he was unconscious of the ways he used motifs and elements -- such as landscape and weather -- to expand the realms and depths of his stories, the passage above accurately describes the power of his narratives and, in particular, his use of what otherwise would be simply scenery.
LINK:
You can purchase the paperback edition of The One-Way Trail at Amazon.com by clicking here.
Posted by ds at February 3, 2006 03:12 PM
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