Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  From Tuba, the group continued to a trading post at Red Lake that was also owned by the Babbits and Preston. Grey got badly sunburned during the slow, grinding uphill ascent and found the trading post “a horribly lonely place.” When they reached Black Mesa, he was so saddle-sore he could hardly walk, even though he had been riding more than a week and had not experienced any discomfort until then.29 Because the remaining pages of his unpublished account have disappeared, the details of the final leg of the trip are unknown. He and MacLean almost certainly reached Kayenta, but Wetherill’s absence, Grey’s limited time, and the significant distances separating Betatakin, Keet Seel, and Monument Valley probably prevented them from seeing all three.30

  Grey returned via El Tovar and was back in Lackawaxen by May 6. On May 11, he wrote in his journal, “This time, out in the Painted Desert, something came to me and changed me. Only time will tell how.”31 He immediately began work on his next novel and finished it in August 1911.32 Today, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) is Grey’s best-known and most often read novel, but the novel’s personal wellsprings have never been explored beyond its connection to his outings with Jones because his journals were unknown and inaccessible. Like his account of Long Key, Riders was a romantic conflation of his experiences that cryptically veiled the true sources of Grey’s inspiration.

  Map of Zane Grey’s northern Arizona trips. (Map by Shelly McCoy, University of Delaware Library, 2003.)

  The novel is set in Cottonwoods, a fictionalized site whose rugged, mountainous terrain and narrow, intersecting canyons possess the North Rim’s immensity and grandeur, but the landscape is so generalized and so poetically rendered that its basis is unclear, and it is even hard to say for sure that Cottonwoods is north of the Colorado River. On the first page, Grey more specifically dates the unfolding events sixteen years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre and six years before the execution of John D. Lee, and draws upon actual history more than his previous Western did. As he explains, “That year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border … [who] had risen against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of rustlers.”33 This conflict is crucial to Grey’s story as is the Mormon practice of polygamy, which the U.S. Congress had outlawed in a series of enactments extending from 1862 to 1887.34 His original vow “not [to] write anything about the Mormons that would hurt anybody’s feelings” was reaffirmed in a letter informing Rust that he would not “roast the Mormons,” despite the offer of a large advance to do so.35 But he changed his mind. The finished book is a harsh indictment and reversion to his 1907 estimate: “I met Mormons and I hate them. I learned something of their women and I pity them.”36

  Grey’s decision to make Mormons the villains of his novel boldly asserts itself in the opening scene in which a band of elders comes to punish Jane Withersteen and her gentile friend for their transgression of Mormon law. This chapter was startlingly original at the time, but it has been reenacted so many times that today its classic traits have been drained of their power. In characteristic fashion, Grey utilizes impressionistic landscape description to embellish the scene, but here the unfolding drama dominates. Well-orchestrated entrances and terse dialogue exchanges create abrupt shifts, but Grey masterfully sustains the scene’s tension.

  As a result of her father’s death, Jane Withersteen has inherited a large ranch, but the area around her is controlled by Mormons. They oppose outsiders and support Elder Tull’s wish to marry her, despite the fact that he already has several wives. Her compassion toward those in need has caused her to befriend an impoverished outcast named Venters. “Jane Withersteen, your father left you wealth and power,” Tull tells her when he and his band of Mormon gunmen corner them together. “It has turned your head. You haven’t yet come to see the place of Mormon women” (5). As he prepares to horsewhip Venters, a solitary figure appears in the distance silhouetted against the setting sun. All eyes fix upon the leather-clad stranger who appears to be “forever looking for that which he never found” (8). Calmly he rides up and politely asks Jane for permission to water his horse. When Tull proclaims that he is meddling with Mormon law, he responds, “To hell with your Mormon law!” During the tense uncertainty that follows, Jane beseeches the stranger to save Venters. With an uneasy laugh, Tull starts to leave with Venters and is told, “Mormon, the young man stays” (10). Tull now demands his name and learns that he is Lassiter, the legendary gunfighter. The chapter ends:

  Tull put out a groping hand. The life of his eyes dulled to the gloom with which men of his fear saw the approach of death. But death, while it hovered over him, did not descend, for the rider waited for the twitching fingers, the downward flash of the hand that did not come. Tull, gathering himself together, turned to the horses, attended by his pale comrades (12).

  Although most of Grey’s novels were converted into movies, it was not until the 1950s and long after his death that any would successfully replicate the prolonged menace of this scene in which violence and death constantly threaten but never happen.

  This powerful scene is energized by Grey’s personal involvement in it. The Mormons who lecture Jane and threaten Venters echo Zane’s in-laws, who likewise judged him to be an outsider, unworthy of Dolly and a threat to the wealth and position that her dead father had bequeathed her. Venters recycles the weakness and rehabilitation of Hare in The Heritage of the Desert. Lassiter, on the other hand, is a wholly new character who imaginatively converts Grey’s lower-class status, athletic prowess, and interest in the outdoors into a charismatic figure of enormous potency who defends Jane against the onerous expectations of her enclosed society. As Grey remarked in his journal following completion of Riders, “I love to idle—to dream impossible stories of which I am the central figure.”37

  This conflation of Zane’s personal experience and wishful thinking underpins the remainder of the story. Back at her ranch, Jane tells Venters that “men like Lassiter and you have no home, no comfort, no rest, no place to lay your weary heads” (23). At this point the reader expects Jane and Venters to become romantically involved and Lassiter to aid them and move on. In the original manuscript, Tull’s visit is prompted by Jane’s sexual involvement with Venters. Although Grey eliminated this pesky complication and the guilt and self-condemnation Venters suffers when he later falls in love with Bess,38 he retained his story’s two romances, which complicated the focus and flow of his narrative because they absorbed the deep conflict within himself. Into the one involving Bess and Venters he channeled his wayward dreaming of other women. The one between Jane and Lassiter expressed his contrasting commitment to home and family.

  Venters’s involvement with Bess, a legendary outlaw whose true identity is hidden behind a mask, is downright prurient with its steamy eroticism and coy avoidance of actual sex. It begins during a gunfight with rustlers of Jane’s cattle, in which Venters shoots the lead rider of Oldring’s gang. When he realizes the person is not dead, he investigates the chest wound and discovers “the graceful, beautiful swell of a woman’s breast!” (53). He discreetly covers this revelation, and decides that he must save the woman’s life. His quest for a haven carries him to the tops of the highest ridges, past a site of cliff dwellers like Betatakin and Keet Seel, and to a secret entrance to Surprise Valley with a natural arch and large balanced rock nearby. The verdant foliage and cold, swift-flowing stream in the valley below, developed from Grey’s romantic memories of the Thunder River, furnish the couple a perfect hideaway. There Venters nurses Bess back to health, and he falls in love:

  He had nursed what seemed a frail, shrunken boy; and now he watched a girl whose face had become strangely sweet, whose dark-blue eyes were ever upon him without boldness, without shyness, but with a steady, grave, and growing light. Many times Venters found the clear gaze embarrassing to him, yet, like wine, it had an exhilarating effect (134).

  “Well, Bess, the fact is I’ve been dreaming a lot,” Venters later observes, ec
hoing Grey’s journal admissions. “This valley makes a fellow dream” (194).

  Venters’s romance with Bess frees Jane for an involvement with Lassiter into which Grey channeled equally strong feelings and misgivings about his marriage. “I’m a man of strange beliefs an’ ways of thinkin’,” Lassiter says, repeating Zane’s confessions to Dolly. “The trail I’ve been followin’ for so many years was twisted an’ tangled” (73). Jane’s interaction with this powerful stranger is overtly sexual, but sex is decidedly not its objective. She wants him to give up his restless, violent life: “If she were to influence him it must be wholly through womanly allurement … if Lassiter did not soften to a woman’s grace and beauty and wiles, then it would be because she could not make him” (74). Jane is twenty-eight years old, the same age as Dolly when Zane wrote this story. Her caring, maternal nature has moved her to adopt the orphan child Fay Larkin, and she and Fay team up to change Lassiter. Fay’s childish play with Lassiter’s ornamented clothing and imposing guns gives Jane an idea, and a few pages later she too goes for his weapons. Although Grey’s description bristles with sexual implications, Jane’s objective is emphatically a sublimation of sex with a forthright objective of suppression:

  “Lassiter! . . Will you do anything for me?”

  In the moonlight she saw his dark, worn face change, and by that change seemed to feel him immovable as a wall of stone.

  Jane slipped her hands down to the swinging gun-sheaths, and when she had locked her fingers around the huge, cold handles of the guns, she trembled as with a chilling ripple over all her body.

  “May I take your guns?”

  “Why?” he asked, and for the first time to her his voice carried a harsh note. Jane felt his hard, strong hands close round her wrists. It was not wholly with intent that she leaned toward him, for the look of his eyes and the feel of his hands that made her weak.

  “It’s no trifle—no woman’s whim—it’s deep—as my heart. Let me take them?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to keep you from killing more men—Mormons. You must let me save you from more wickedness—more wanton bloodshed——” (146– 47).

  Though not immediately, Lassiter does yield, and he becomes gentler and kinder. Jane’s appeals, his doting interaction with Fay, and the fruits of domesticity prevail over his proclivity toward gunplay and wandering.

  Romance carries Venters and Lassiter in opposite directions, and the ensuing course of events expresses grave reservations about Lassiter’s decision, with ominous overtones for Grey’s relationship with Dolly. Lassiter’s involvement with Jane and Fay drains him of the strength and purpose that distinguished him in the opening scene. On the other hand, Venters’s nursing of Bess restores his masculinity and, amazingly, transforms him into Lassiter’s equal and an implacable killer. As Venters and Bess explore the valley and the site of the cliff dwellers, he grows increasingly aware of the deeper meanings of wilderness and the limitations of civilized thinking. After an earthshaking thunderstorm sensitizes him to the power of love, Venters tells Bess, “Saving you, I saved myself,” and announces his readiness to fight to save her (196).

  The changes Lassiter and Venters undergo reach a simultaneous fruition that reverses their earlier roles. Lassiter is described as “sadder and quieter in his contemplation of the child, and infinitely more gentle and loving,” but Jane grows increasingly uneasy over the force of her influence. Shortly after she experiences a “cold, inexplicable sensation of dread” (201), Lassiter hears shots, goes to investigate, and is wounded by outlaws lurking in the woods. “Have you no desire to hunt the man who fired at you—to find him—and—and kill him?” Jane asks, and he replies, “Well, I reckon I haven’t any great hankerin’ for that” (204). These circumstances of threat and hesitation recall those of the opening scene, but this time it is Venters who arrives from the Surprise Valley just in time to help the weak and needy:

  Like rough iron his hard hand crushed Jane’s. In it she felt the difference she saw in him. Wild, rugged, unshorn—yet how splendid! He had gone away a boy—he had returned a man. He appeared taller, wider of shoulder, deeper-chested, more powerfully built. But was that only her fancy—he had always been a young giant—was the change one of spirit? He might have been absent for years, proven by fire and steel, grown, like Lassiter, strong and cool and sure (205–6).

  Jane notices this change in part because she had previously convinced Venters to give up his guns, and thereby contributed to his weakness in the opening scene. A significant part of his rehabilitation, it turns out, has been overcoming the crippling effects of Jane’s influence. “Had Venters become Lassiter and Lassiter Venters?” (208) Jane wonders, and her question is answered when Venters proceeds to shoot Oldring, the man responsible for so many of her problems.

  Of course, Lassiter’s submission to Jane does not last. When he learns that his sister Milly was destroyed by Dyer, another Mormon allied with Oldring and Tull, his thirst for revenge returns. He fastens on his guns and shoots Dyer and several of his henchmen. With two of the main enemies dead and their henchmen in hot pursuit, both couples flee for their lives. In a major reversal of expectations, Bess and Venters head east for civilization. Lassiter and Jane, reunited with Fay, ride for the Surprise Valley. When they reach its mountaintop entrance, Lassiter strains to topple the balanced stone onto Tull and his gang below, but cannot. The problem is not his five wounds; rather, it appears to be more psychological, perhaps an uneasiness, that he, Jane, and Fay will be left sealed in the valley. “Roll the stone! … Lassiter, I love you!” (335) Jane cries, and he finally succeeds. This ending leaves their future to the imagination of the reader. Lassiter and Jane have never excited each other the way Venters and Beth did—will the valley make it happen for them too? Or will Lassiter revert to his happy/unhappy domestication?

  In early September 1911, when Grey submitted his completed manuscript to Harpers, he was filled with “hope, enthusiasm, energy, [and] fire” because he believed that it was superior to The Heritage of the Desert.39 When Heritage was accepted, he suspected that Ripley Hitchcock, his editor at Harpers, may have done him a favor because his rejection of The Last of the Plainsmen was handled so poorly and pained Grey so deeply. His dealings with Hitchcock had taught him that this editor favored a circle of young, new writers and the acceptance of Heritage encouraged him to believe that he had been admitted. Thus he was stunned and devastated when Hitchcock speedily rejected Riders “with the same chill, aloof, stereotypical advice” that accompanied his rejection of Plainsmen.40 Unwilling to accept this judgment, Grey appealed to Hitchcock’s superior, Frederick Duneka, through his agent Dan Murphy, who got Duneka’s wife to read the manuscript. She was impressed, and told her husband so; he then urged Hitchcock to accept the book.41 “I really feel I did not lay sufficient stress on my appreciation,” Hitchcock wrote back to Grey on September 15. “And my conscience reproaches me for having possibly been too critical. … Of course, as I said to you, we wish to publish it.”42

  When the manuscript was shopped to magazines as a serial, there was more rejection, and it was adamant; no one wanted the story. After their Arizona trip together, Grey was especially pained by MacLean’s curt letter of rejection stating that “the interest is centered too much in the women.”43 Finally, Field and Stream broke another of its policies, this time against publishing fiction, and accepted the novel, though Grey received considerably less for the serial rights than he was expecting. The serialization of Riders commenced in January 1912, and by July 1913, when it ended, Field and Stream had included a piece by Grey in every issue since March 1911, twenty-eight consecutive issues.

  More disappointments followed. Over the fall of 1911, Murphy reshopped Zane’s collection of short stories and it too was rejected by everyone. In December, Zane returned from a discussion with one publisher “unable to see what use there was in me writing.” His efforts at “swift action” and “keen dramatic life” were condemned as “melodrama.” Like coun
tless writers before and afterward, he was left with “a suspicion that they do not know what a big story is until it has been printed and proved by the test of time and many readers.”44

  In an effort to settle his dismay and confusion, Grey arranged a long meeting with Hitchcock, but the advice he received left him even more embittered and resentful. Hitchcock counseled him to analyze a current best seller. Having already read the book, Grey boldly told Hitchcock that it was “poor wooden writing” and that he “would be ashamed to have my name on such a book.” Afterward, he reflected:

  I have confided a great deal in this man. I have trusted him, have believed him and tried to learn from him, to do many things because he advised them. I looked up to him. But I cannot ever do that any more.

  I understand him now, and I cannot blame him. His idea is the commercial one. He would sacrifice genius for the “best-seller.” It is simply that appalling thing commercialism.

  I have been bitterly hurt. … My work is not to be what this critic advises, or that publisher wants. It is to be what I cannot help but make it. I am driven. I’ve got to write what I feel and see and think. But I am not yet an artist. In so far I thank these men who are torturing me. The best I can do is to study anew as if I really thought they were right. But I think they are wrong. I believe they have not even suspected my power. I have faith in myself. I stand alone. I can get no help from anyone.45