Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  Earliest photograph of Zane Grey. Taken by a professional photographer in Delphos, Ohio, ca. 1893. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)

  Having been raised in rural Ohio, Lewis, like Ebenezer and his brothers, was a hunter, and he introduced Zane to the woods at an early age. Though he was marginally literate (“I never [k]new a card”), he wanted to write, as a surviving poem about his dead mother and an account of his woodland walks verify.15 Religion was also important to Lewis. He attempted to be an itinerant preacher prior to taking up dentistry, and he taught regularly at the Mission Sunday School while Zane was growing up. A surviving three-page autobiography attests to his fundamentalist beliefs. In this curious document, which may have been written for a church event, Lewis announces his trust in the Lord, the importance of moral training, and the triumph of his faith and hard work over his lack of education. He states that at the age of seven, he resolved to “be good, do good, and make something of his life,” and that at twelve, he vowed never to swear or drink. He maintains that temperance, morality, and religion enabled him “to rise in the world.” “I love cultured, talented society,” he admits, “but have had a hard struggle to get there. What I am I made myself, a self made man.”16 Despite Lewis’s fervent efforts to appear humble, his testimony contains telltale hints of the resolve and sternness that Zane would later resent.

  Through his drive and hard work, Lewis was able to develop a successful dental practice and to construct a modest residence in one of the most desirable areas of Zanesville. In Zane’s earliest attempt at autobiography, a 1918 letter to a clairvoyant named Anna Andre, he claimed that he grew up in “comparative poverty” and initiated a misleading impression of deprivation that has persisted in accounts of his life since. From his birth in Zanesville until he was seventeen years old and the family relocated to Columbus, Zane lived in the family residence that was constructed in 1871 at 303 Convers Avenue (currently 705). This area of Zanesville was originally named “McIntire Terrace” after John McIntire, the son-in-law whom Ebenezer initially disliked, but later favored over all the other members of his family. In 1799, Ebenezer had him lay out the town of Zanesville. Called simply “the Terrace” by the time the Grays moved there, this large hilltop plateau overlooked the Muskingum River and the historic bridge connecting it to the town center. This was prime real estate, and it remains so to this day. Across the street and on both sides of the Gray house are large historic dwellings built of brick and stone that are attractive and still command high prices. By comparison, the two-story clapboard Gray home looks plain and austere—that of an interloper aspiring to status its owner cannot afford. Twentieth-century photographs of this house do suggest impoverishment, but they also fail to convey the affluence of the surrounding area or to hint at the respectable salary Lewis was making while the family lived there.

  The year before his death, Zane drew upon this letter and several other short articles about his life and expanded them into a little-known autobiography entitled “The Living Past.” Not published until forty-five years later in an obscure journal, this unfinished account covers his life through his first year of college, and it is the primary, almost exclusive, source of information about his early years.17 For an author of fiction, Grey was unusually honest and reliable in writing about himself, but he was also an accomplished storyteller sensitive to the expectations of his audience and anxious that his life appear colorful and attractive. His candid admission that he was wayward and delinquent as a boy capitalized on the fact that these traits in a boy were widely regarded as healthy and normal. He exploited the image of the young roughneck so successfully that readers are more likely to notice his prowess and potential and to miss the pain. His presentation resembles The Adventures of Tom Sawyer so much that Grey appears to have used Twain’s classic as a model; the young Zane has an uncanny number of Sawyer’s traits. Like Tom, he dislikes school and is a poor student. His enthusiasm for manly stories suggests that his scholastic aptitude is misrepresented by his failing grades. He too commits petty thefts, feuds with rivals, and disobeys adults. His thirst for adventure carries him away from school and home. His flights to the woods express rebellion and enable him to escape misunderstanding, unwanted responsibilities, and damaging criticism. There he finds the one place where he can be himself and do as he pleases. Twain had done such a good job of convincing adults that this kind of behavior was the stuff of boyhood that the young Zane and his experiences seem normal, even conventional. However, Grey’s account is much darker and depicts a seriously troubled boy.

  “The Living Past” does not hide the fact that Zane was alienated from others, with more enemies than friends. Although he enjoyed privilege, he was inclined to befriend those lower on the social scale. Zanesville’s modest size made it necessary for him to attend grade school at the Eighth Ward School along with working-class children who “did not think much of the boys from the Terrace.” He preferred “these rough appearing boys” and their unruly conduct, but their surly response to him and his superior status made acceptance impossible (1, 7). This friction was worsened by his enthusiasm for baseball and the formation of local teams by district. Grouped with boys from the Terrace, he strove to best opponents and did not bond with his teammates. Grey comments, “I knew I was misunderstood and unappreciated and the object of jealousy to some of the boys of the best families” (5, 5).

  Zane’s many fights worsened this displacement. He hurled himself into combat with disturbing relish and ferocity, flinging stones without regard for potential injury. He relates how he toppled a boy with a brick (3, 5), and another one was lucky to survive a rock bounced off his temple (5, 9), yet this good fortune did not prevent Zane from striking another behind the ear and sending him to the hospital (6, 7). He knocked a rival into a ravine so that he “plunged down in a most alarming manner” (3, 5), and he kicked another in the face “with all my might” (3, 8). He so enraged one adversary that he returned with a rifle intent upon shooting Grey (3, 8). This penchant for violence spilled over into his thievery. He chased down a neighbor’s chickens, clubbed them to death, and cooked them in tin cans over an open fire.18 Years later, a female classmate wrote to him, “I am truly glad to know that ‘the wild boy’ I once knew has outlived that wildness.”19

  Lewis Grey, date unknown. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)

  Any parent would have faced a formidable challenge with a son like this, but Zane’s father obviously made matters worse. His demanding work ethic antagonized his son. Zane disliked having to clean the office, mow the yard, and work as a shoe salesman. His resentment over the obligations imposed by his father outweighed the value of whatever money he received. Moreover, his father’s harsh response to his delinquency aggravated it. At the outset of his account, Grey recalls how his father insisted on being fanned during his Sunday naps and punished his son for slipping away when he went to sleep. In winter, his father sent him to gather fresh snow for a drink, and he was so displeased with what he brought back that Zane was sent for more until after dark and he became frightened (1, 5).

  Grey recalls, “I had many a poignant acquaintance with the apple switch” (3, 1), and some of these beatings were harsh and abusive. In one egregious example of his father’s harshness, Zane relates how he and his friends built a pirate’s club and there, during idle hours, he wrote a short narrative called “Jim of the Cave” on pieces of wallpaper. When his father discovered Zane’s hideout, he angrily hurled this first story into the campfire and then inflicted “the worst [whipping] I ever had” (6, 11). Another time, Zane was so outraged over “a terrific whack with a good stiff willow stick” that he fled up a seventy-five-foot tree. When his father threatened a worse beating, he furiously bounced on a large limb until it cracked and nearly broke, terrifying both of them (3, 4). These beatings are never linked to Zane’s many fights, but it is hard for a modern reader not to connect them. Years later, when his own son Romer announced that he was going to run away from home and steal a horse, Zane was intimidated
by the threat “because I had made worse to my father, and carried it out.”20

  Lewis’s anger was not directed only at his wayward son. His father so abused visiting salesmen that Zane was deeply embarrassed (7, 5). An obituary affirms this harshness in its characterization of Lewis as “rather peculiar,” “very positive in his likes and dislikes,” and “somewhat cranky.”21

  Zane’s characterization of his father in “The Living Past” contrasts with his affectionate references to his understanding mother. Though she is mentioned only in passing, his comments about her are uniformly positive. Her “soft dove eyes” and “gentle smile” (1, 8) communicate nurturing support. “My mother was sweeter and kinder than ever” (6, 10), he observes at one point, and earlier notes how she “divined my feelings and sought to comfort me” (5, 5). An observation by Dolly in a letter from their courtship reveals more about Zane’s feelings than any of these comments: “I fell all over in love with you again when I saw how nice you were to your mother.”22

  An aged fisherman named Muddy Miser is presented as even more of a foil to Lewis Gray. Miser was an obvious vehicle for discussing his early interest in fishing, but Grey accentuates his difference from his stern, hardworking father. During a trip when he was only eight, Zane saw his first fish. From his excited conversation with his mother, he learned about Miser. When she characterized the stream containing the fish as “a bad place,” Zane pressed for more explanation. Groping for “the unfavorable impression that she knew would have pleased my father,” she informed him that Miser, who frequented the stream, was “a lazy, good-for-nothing fisherman” (1, 6). During a later outing, Lewis directed Zane’s attention to a poorhouse frequented by Miser and warned, “If you don’t learn to like work and study that’s where you will end up” (1, 7).

  Zane’s building resentment toward his father discredited these negative appraisals and attracted him to this fellow outcast. Grey’s description of his first sighting of Miser is both poetic and mythic:

  I was amazed to look up and see the strange figure of a man standing way out there where the water poured over the long fall. He stood up to his bare knees in the current that foamed around his legs. He was an old man, gaunt and bowed, and he pointed a long pole out over the swift water (1, 9).

  Later, when boys from the Terrace taunted the old man for his poverty and hurled rocks at him, Zane impulsively rushed to his defense and got into one of his most violent fights (3, 7). In the meeting with Miser that followed, Zane fastened upon the old man’s “weary sad eyes” and “mild and soft-spoken” demeanor (3, 8–9), so different from his father’s “piercing gray eyes” (1, 7) and abrasiveness. Thereafter, from their many conversations about fishing, Zane learned so much about life that he judged Miser to be his best teacher. The old man encouraged him to admit his animosity toward work, dentistry, and, most of all, his father. Miser’s approval of the fishing and writing that his father condemned helped Zane to follow his heart, disregard the expectations of the Terrace, and trust that he would “become somebody someday” (4, 7). This portrait of Miser suggests that he also strongly influenced the alternative fathers depicted in Zane’s novels.

  If Muddy Miser was the father he preferred and someone who approved of his wishes, there was more Lewis in Zane than he acknowledged. He too would be opinionated, irascible, and antisocial. Later, with his fishing, he sought advancement and distinction as well as relaxation; his articles about his adventures were written for money and to augment his reputation. Even his criticisms of his father and his unreasonable expectations served to make him likewise “a self-made man.” As he admitted in his 1918 letter to Anna Andre, “I did inherit much from him [Lewis].”23

  If Zane’s battles with his rivals and his father differentiate his youth from Tom Sawyer’s, this distinction is even more striking in his response to the opposite sex. Most readers of “The Living Past” are struck by Zane’s preoccupation with fishing, but, oddly enough, do not notice the attention lavished upon his girlfriends. Twain, of course, gave Tom Becky Thatcher, but he scrupulously avoided sexuality. Grey, on the other hand, makes his sexual experience central and important.

  The earliest surviving example of Zane’s writing is a verse he wrote in an autograph book for Anna Oldham at the age of twelve:

  Friend Anna

  Remember this and bear in mind

  A good beau is hard to find.

  But if you find one gentle and gay

  Hang to his coat tail night and day.

  But if your hand should choose to slip

  Catch another and let him rip.

  Yours truly

  Pearl Gray24

  Despite the obvious flirtation in this exercise of wit, Grey claims in “The Living Past” that that he was not interested in the opposite sex until he was fourteen. At this age he suddenly developed “an unaccountable fascination” with social functions that opened to him “all that was wonderful and mystical and alluring about girls” (3, 9). One of his first parties involved a parlor game in which a girl with a pillow selected a boy from those encircling her, dropped her pillow before him, knelt upon it, and received a kiss. This game produced Grey’s first kisses, and his extended description of them makes clear that they were uplifting, upsetting, and momentous. A kiss from “Pet” transfixed him until he was rudely jolted from his reverie by everyone’s laughter. As the game continued, Grey was bypassed several times. Eventually, a girl named Alice hesitantly approached, dropped her pillow before him, and looked up sweetly for a kiss. Although he had never spoken to her, he knew from others that she had never been kissed. Her kiss, he writes, “burned like sweet fire on my lips,” but this time the crowd’s jocular reaction upset him so much that he fled home early (3, 9–10).

  Later that same summer, Grey attended another party at which “the boys were wilder [and] the girls freer.” Instead of playing games, they danced, paired up, and left for walks in the woods. “Somehow I liked this better,” he confesses. There he met Maud, who was a year older, had “audacious hazel eyes,” and wore a “tight fitting dress of blue.” When they left for the woods together, she “met my timid hand more than half way” and so too his “further advances.” His transport over this experience ended when he learned that Maud was a flirt who “acted precisely the same” with other boys (3, 10).

  Zane was confused and troubled by his intense attraction to girls who were so different from each other. Muddy Miser counseled him that he could either support the “noble ideal of womanhood” or turn women into a “great evil” (4, 8). Unfortunately, his smoldering desires made Miser’s advice hard to follow. Grey remarks, “I could not cast the girls out of my heart” (3, 11), admitting a defeat that was worsened by its betrayal of his fundamentalist morality. His “contemptible weakness for girls” (3, 11) made kissing both shameful and irresistible. When his lust overcame his reservations, he discovered that the virtuous Alice and flirtatious Maud harbored similar desires and were equally receptive to his advances. But “this company of girls, seductive and alluring as was Maud and bewildering and sweet as was Alice, did not satisfy like a lonely walk in the woods or like fishing beside the running stream” (3, 9–10). This flight from temptation helped, but did not last. By the time Zane was sixteen, Alice looked “prettier than ever” (4, 11). Unfortunately, an accidental soiling of her dress during a classroom brawl turned her against him and sent him after “companionship with new and more attractive girls who made eyes at me and wrote me notes and waylaid me after school” (5, 5). These overtures ended his solitary walks, worsened his academic performance, and embroiled him in more fights. Although his fundamentalist upbringing gave him a lifelong opposition to drink and smoking, he allowed himself to join a dancing club and quickly became one of the best dancers. This involved him with three girls and “a predicament.” Nelly, one of the three, had a jealous brother named Ralph who used his friendship with the club president to circulate lies about Zane and get him expelled. Outraged at this injustice and the conseque
ntial loss of his girlfriends, Grey thrashed Ralph. He then sought out Nelly, explained Ralph’s lies, and informed her that he “cared terribly,” but she was unmoved (5, 5–6). Years later, she would reenter his life and provoke even greater distress.

  When another Nell spurned Zane because of false rumors about them and turned her two friends against him, he searched out and thrashed the boy she blamed. These conflicts led to his first serious depression and the greatest humiliation of his Zanesville years. Eventually Nell and Pet softened, but Margaret, the third girl, haughtily persisted in ignoring him. Determined to win her over, he confronted her and appealed for a hearing, but was coldly rebuffed. As Grey explains: “It seemed that something youthful and fine in me died a violent death. I was ashamed of her for her false pride and of those who had made her wish to shame me. But the finer feelings gave place to fury. I would show her how little I cared for her, or Nell, or anyone” (6, 8). With a pair of friends, Zane stormed off to a brothel and was arrested in a police raid.

  Frank Gruber’s biography totally ignores this event despite Grey’s claim that “this calamity marked a great difference in my life in every way” (6, 10). In “The Living Past,” Grey offers his arrest as the climax of his years in Zanesville and as a momentous reckoning with his budding sexuality. Whether they were so at the time, his intense feelings of sexual excitement, confusion, and humiliation are depicted as interlaced with an aggrieved sense of injustice and mistreatment. Grey acknowledges that his brothel visit was motivated by “a dark excitation of spirit [and] enticing sensation of forbidden fruit.” The prostitute there was “shockingly beautiful” (6, 8). Later, mired in the disgrace and depression of his jailing, he thought to himself, “I had not done any harm” (6, 9). When asked by a fellow inmate if he realized that he was going to “a donie-castle,” he replied, “I’m afraid I didn’t think of it in that way; I was excited—carried away—terribly thrilled” (6, 9). Grey leads his reader to believe that he did not deserve to be jailed, in part because he had not bedded anyone, but also because his wayward desires were instinctive and natural. This estimate is further supported by his revelation that the “poor” owner of the brothel was driven by her arrest to commit suicide. Grey also references a kind, sympathetic teacher who reassured him, “You were not bad. You were just wild and foolish,” and he reveals that she too committed suicide when an affair of hers was exposed (6, 10). Grey believed that his arrest was not for a legitimate crime or even a bad decision. On the contrary, it was the culmination of many narrow-minded, small-town judgments that left him alienated and resentful.