Despite repeated rejections and disappointments, Grey’s annual income continued to rise, and he elected to rent a New York City apartment for the winter of 1911–12. Since Dolly was pregnant with their second child and expecting in April, they wanted to be near good medical help for the delivery. In October, he signed a lease on a flat at 550 W. 157th Street. A few days later, he wrote George Allen in Tampico about the serialization of “Down an Unknown Jungle River” that was nearing conclusion. “You will observe that I made George a little funnier than he really was, and also a darn sight poorer shot than he was,” he explained. “But I had to put in some fun. And, of course, I exaggerated other things.”46 The purpose of the letter was not only to maintain their friendship, but also to inform Allen that he would not be returning to Tampico.
Instead, Grey persuaded R. C. and Reba, his wife, to accompany him to Long Key for three weeks over late January and early February 1912. Again, lovely weather greeted their arrival and their hopes soared. Grey was especially pleased to learn that his article about his previous visit had been much noticed and had significantly increased the number of guests.47 However, the weather again turned windy and they were able to fish only three days. While he was there, Grey received his first batch of reviews on Riders, and they were disappointing. “I didn’t think so much of the reviews, and that one in the Sun just about floored me,” he admitted to Dolly. “You know the Sun did not give me a good review on the Heritage.”48
Despite the negative appraisals of editors and reviewers, Riders of the Purple Sage was the first of Grey’s books to make the best-seller list. This achievement requires some explanation, since the list then was quite different from today’s. The American best-seller list originated with the first issue of Bookman in February 1895. In a section entitled “The Book Mart,” this journal published a list of novels “in order of demand.” Extending to the United States a system that originated in England, Bookman contacted bookstores in nineteen cities and ranked the six most popular books in each one. In 1899, when the original list of cities was expanded to thirty, the magazine added another list of “Best Selling Books” for the entire year, calculated by the number of times a given book made the monthly lists with a weighting for the positions it achieved.
This system was little noticed and little questioned until the era of Riders. At this time, “best seller” first became an understood, commonly used term. In 1911, Bookman ran a series of articles about “best sellers” from the past, and the 1910–14 volume of the influential Readers’ Index of Periodical Literature added the term as a category for entries. In 1912, Publishers Weekly initiated a rival listing of the sixteen most popular novels. This “Books of the Month,” which appeared irregularly at first, likewise polled bookstores around the country, but found differing results. Over the five years that followed, this competition sparked debate over the accuracy of the lists, spurred Publishers Weekly to amend its method of computation, and moved Bookman to discontinue its lists for several years, leaving Publishers Weekly the dominant source. Even more significant was a related debate over the differences between “high brow” and “low brow” literature.49 The only point on which everyone agreed was that best sellers were attracting more notice, undermining the authority of critics, and altering the way publishers sold books.50
The March 1912 issue of Bookman positioned Riders of the Purple Sage at number two in Cleveland and number one in New Haven for the month of January.51 The April issue, which ran February’s results, placed it on the lists for Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo.52 The month following, its ranking at number four in New Orleans and number two in Birmingham showed that its appeal had extended to the south. That same month, it reached number three for New York City.53 Although Grey was too busy and too far away to notice, it probably would have surprised him to learn that his novel appealed most to readers in urban centers of the industrialized northeast and did not make the list of any city west of Ohio.
During the poor weather of Long Key and long days of writing, Grey’s mind returned to women and the thrill of imagined encounters. In early February, he wrote Dolly about his ruminations and, with surprising candor and less sensitivity, he confessed:
I don’t seem to be satisfied. I want so much, and I don’t know what all of what I want is. Can you understand that? There is always the perfectly clear knowledge and happiness that I want to spend nine tenths of my time with you & Baby & my work. But that other tenth haunts me. I wish there was some beautiful worldly woman here or some slip of a silly pretty girl, so that I could talk to her & walk with her along the beach. Don’t fail to understand that, Dolly. I insist that that can be true and all right even when I know I am a better man than I was and that I love you a million times more than when we were engaged, or even after we were married. There is something provocative & stimulating in this habit of mine. Even the poor vain silly girl friends you choose to pity and despise are good for me. What wouldn’t I give now for one of my old friends I used to neglect!54
This preoccupation with other women persisted after his return to his apartment in New York City. “Yesterday I saw a perfectly, wonderfully beautiful woman,” he wrote in his journal in early April. “She was a Russian. I was so moved by her grace and beauty that I cannot remember just what she looked like. But I shall go again to see her and then, perhaps, I may dare attempt a description.” The next day Zane did go, and afterward recorded this description:
She was regally tall, a slender woman of perfect form, hair a golden brown, eyes wonderful dark blue, an exquisite mouth. Yet these tell the least of her charm. It was nameless. I thought of something noble, gracious, patrician. I have seen many beautiful women, but none like this Russian. She was so new, so strange, so startling, so natural. … I remember once before in my note book I wrote of a beautiful woman—Lina Cavalieri. I have now seen one infinitely more lovely than the Italian beauty. … I did not think of any lover for this flower-faced Russian. It seemed to me, if I were to think of that, that the idea would be presumptuous. I cannot imagine the heaven there would be for the man she loved. Yet I know it would be so.
I have no wish to meet this woman, to know her. I want to have her always as my possession in fancy. I have looked at her: I have her face engraved forever upon my mind; I do not want to change in the least that image. Perhaps to know her would hurt the beauty, the purity, the nobility. She was just a splendid gleam of light, and I never want a shadow to darken its memory. … She touched a divine chord and the melody will haunt me all my life.55
Over the months spanning these two reflections, Grey completed Desert Gold, another story with two romances set on the Mexican-American border and meant to capitalize on the unfolding civil war in Mexico.56 Gold does not factor into the story until the final pages, and the only character who rises above convention is the intuitive, mystical Yaqui who anticipates Indian characters who would be more important in Grey’s future novels.
On April 22, 1912, Dolly gave birth to a daughter named Betty. This pregnancy made her even sicker than she was with Romer, and the delivery was especially taxing. Zane wrote this vivid description of the event:
I left the room just before the child came, and it was at this time that she had the severest pains. I crouched in my chair in the next room, and listened to the first real cries of mortal agony that I ever heard. She called for me—my name—in a voice low, vibrant, deep, poignant, terrible in its racking power. Powerless to help her I trembled there, suffering through that cry, realizing through it what she really meant to me, what I was to her, and I sweated and shuddered in my own agony. I heard the baby squirt out—heard the last shrill shriek of the mother—heard the doctor slapping the infant—and then its faint wail. “It’s a girl,” said the doctor. And then I knew. Elizabeth Zane Grey had been born to me. A Betty Zane!57
The child was healthy, but Dolly’s difficulties were more severe than Zane realized. She developed phlebitis and doctors worried about blood clots and a possible
stroke. She could not walk for weeks, and months later she was still weak and recuperating. The persistence of her ailments into the fall provoked a traumatic dream in which a doctor informed her that she had terminal cancer. In her diary account, she explained, “I had no fear but there was an awful horror in my soul—I cannot describe it—a feeling of doom, the feeling which can be caused by one thing alone—the certainty of death.”58 Zane had intended to have Wetherill take him to the Rainbow Bridge, but Dolly’s prolonged recovery kept delaying and altering his plans. In July, he canceled a six-week trip he had scheduled and wrote Hitchcock that he would instead take a much shorter trip involving a plane ride both ways.59 This would have been Zane’s first time in an airplane and his cancellation of this trip as well postponed his eventual first flight for twenty-five more years; he flew in an airplane for the first and only time the year before his death.
In the same July letter to Hitchcock in which he mentioned his plans to go West, Grey explained that he was well into a novel to be titled “Under Western Stars.”60 He expected to finish it that fall, and he was writing it for both serialization and dramatization. Five months before, Robert Davis had suggested both the topic and a strategy for his story. Since 1903, Davis had been editor of Munsey’s and he had recently accepted three articles by Grey for Munsey’s—“Horses of Bostil Ford,” “Tiger,” and “Phantoms of Peace.” Davis was sufficiently impressed with Grey’s potential that he agreed to serve as his agent for film and play rights. During their conversations, Davis suggested that his next novel be about “a splendid girl, an American Beauty, developing and finding herself in the west.”61 Grey liked this idea because it encouraged him to indulge his dreaming about women and to have a woman discover the uplifting power of the West.
Madeline Hammond, the chief character in The Light of Western Stars (1914), Grey’s final title for his novel, is beautiful, wealthy, and refined. She comes from a distinguished Eastern family accustomed to status, privilege, and comfort. Unlike the Eastern males in Grey’s previous Westerns, she is neither ill nor in need of rehabilitation. Rather, she is “tired of fashionable society” and wants more from life.62 Too restless and headstrong to be the indolent, dependent woman esteemed by her class, she goes to see her brother in New Mexico and exhibits remarkable enthusiasm for Grey’s interests.
Madeline embraces life in the West and adapts quickly. Despite her lack of experience, she is eager to ride. On her first try, she allows her horse to go as fast as it can, and finds the experience thrilling. Later, when she stops at the top of a hill and surveys the magnificent scenery that extends for miles, she beholds her destiny. “She felt a mighty hold upon her heart. Out of the endless space, out of silence and desolation and mystery and age, came slow-changing colored shadows, phantoms of peace, and they whispered to Madeline” (87). Madeline decides not to return to the East and to purchase a ranch instead. This decision is tested when her sister and some old friends come to visit her. Most of these women have trouble riding, complain of their discomfort, and are unimpressed with the West.
Until The Light of Western Stars, all Grey’s heroines tended to be strong women and enthusiastic for outdoor activities, but diffident lovers. Jane Withersteen represented a tentative movement away from the submissiveness of Mescal and Bess. She resisted Mormon demands that she marry, but was notably reluctant to challenge the authoritarian Mormon elders and even felt guilty when her actions violated their expectations. She relied on Lassiter to protect her and even addressed him as “master” (286). Having noticed how Grey had used the West to make weak men stronger and more resourceful, Davis suggested that he do the same for a woman. Davis realized that both Grey and the culture of his day were gravitating toward women with greater vitality and independence, and he urged Grey to depict a woman who developed these traits from her contact with the West.
Grey’s Madeline is less intimidated by men than his previous female characters. Her experience in the West convinces her that she could never again be happy with a man from the East. Boyd, who has been a close friend for years, journeys from New York to New Mexico with a marriage proposal. He is “handsome, young, rich, well born, pleasant, cultivated—he was all that made a gentleman of his class” (256). However, Madeline is uninterested in these traditional male attributes. His skin does not tan, his hands are soft, and riding is distasteful to him. Madeline wraps up her catalogue of his drawbacks with an observation that his flaccid children would resemble him and be “a generation more toward the inevitable extinction of his race” (256). Needless to say, they do not marry.
This encounter with Boyd reorients Madeline toward Gene Stewart, a lower-class cowboy who falls in love with Madeline before he meets her. Like Zane with his photo of Cavalieri, Stewart has a picture of Madeline from a newspaper that convinces him that she is the woman for him. When she takes over the Stillwell ranch, Madeline inherits Stewart as foreman. Though she notices him and interacts with him, he seems more a problem than a marriage prospect. As with most of Grey’s stories, mishaps and misunderstandings keep the couple apart over much of the story, and in this novel they are caused by Gene’s rambunctious behavior, and Madeline has to rescue him several times.
Gene’s waywardness misrepresents the loyal, hardworking, natural leader that he really is. Madeline detects that there is more to Gene than she has realized when he gathers her onto his horse and speeds them away from a band of guerrillas after her.
His arm, like a band of iron, held her, yet it was flexible and yielded her to the motion of the horse. One instant she felt the brawn, the bone, heavy and powerful; the next the stretch and ripple, the elasticity of muscles. He held her as easily as if she were a child. The roughness of his flannel shirt rubbed her cheek, and beneath that she felt the dampness of the scarf he used to bathe her arm, and deeper still the regular pound of his heart. Against her ear, filling it with strong, vibrant beat, his heart seemed a mighty engine deep within a great cavern. Her head had never before rested on a man’s breast, and she had no liking for it there; but she felt more than the physical contact. The position was mysterious and fascinating, and something natural in it made her think of life. Then, as the cool wind blew down from the heights, loosening her tumbled hair, she was compelled to see strands of it curl softly into Stewart’s face, before his eyes, across his lips. She was unable to reach it with her free hand, and therefore could not refasten it. And when she shut her eyes she felt those loosened strands playing against his cheeks (166–67).
This sensuality, with its own elements of wildness, inspires Madeline to reconsider Gene and her feelings for him. Over time, she finds him to be “an object of deep interest to her, not as a man, but as part of this wild and wonderful West which was claiming her” (243). He completes her conversion into a Westerner.
In causing his heroine to be transformed as men had been in his previous stories, Grey fretted about a consequence that was not a problem for them: Madeline might become too strong. He did not want her to become the “Majesty” that is her nickname. Madeline’s love for Gene causes her to realize not only that she needs and cares for him, but also that her influence, rather like that of Jane upon Lassiter, impairs and debilitates him. Once Gene has revealed his love to Madeline, he makes a determined effort to become the respectable, peaceable cowboy that she wants him to be. When he is charged with a crime that he did not commit and meekly submits to Hawe, a corrupt sheriff he previously dominated, Madeline is upset by his docility and worries correctly that his ignoble behavior results from the force of her influence:
The vague riot in her breast leaped to conscious fury—a woman’s passionate repudiation of Stewart’s broken spirit. It was not that she would have him be a lawbreaker; it was that she could not bear to see him deny his manhood. … When the man Sneed [Hawe’s assistant] came forward, jingling the iron fetters, Madeline’s blood turned to fire. She would have forgiven Stewart then for lapsing into the kind of cowboy it had been her blind and sickly sentiment to abhor. Thi
s was a man’s West—a man’s game. What right had a woman reared in a softer mold to use her beauty and her influence to change a man who was bold and free and strong? (317–18)
The restless, homebound author who dreamed of this charismatic woman as a diversion from the constraints of his wife, marriage, and family also conceived of her as sympathetic to his plight. Madeline’s romance with Gene helped Grey to formulate a concept that quickly became a cornerstone convention of the Western: a man grows weak and ineffectual when he commits himself to one woman and her expectations.
While Grey was writing The Light of Western Stars, a glamorous approximation of Madeline entered his life. The same October 1911 letter in which he informed Dolly that he had signed the lease for their New York apartment, Zane mentioned that he was taking “your charming relative” to the movies.63 He was referring to Lillian Wilhelm, Dolly’s cousin, whom he met before his marriage and got to know better during his stay in New York City over the winter of 1911–12. Though she was born in Flagstaff, Lillian grew up in New York City. Her maternal grandfather sold his catering business to the famous New York City restaurateur Louis Sherry, and her mother had studied piano and opera in Switzerland. For years, her father operated a store on Broadway that imported fine European objets d’art. Lillian was ten years younger than Zane and the oldest of seven siblings; five brothers separated her from her sister Claire, the youngest. She was raised in a spacious three-story brown-stone and attended by maids and governesses. However, a series of reversals over the 1890s eroded her father’s business and left a cloud of gloom over the family. In her diary, Lillian would characterize her life from sixteen to twenty as the “Time of Trial.” In a reflection on her unhappiness over the family’s economizing relocation to New Jersey, she would declare, “I am burning to shake off all the trammels of conventionality and stand—alone—free and for Art!” This resolve motivated her to take up painting and to enroll at the School of Fine Arts of the National Academy of Design.64 Zane had a longstanding interest in art—his drawings impressed one of his dental school professors and were used in the original edition of Betty Zane—and the fact that Lillian was a serious, trained artist made her even more attractive.
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