Zane Grey

by Thomas H. Pauly

  Public fancy is hard to capture and, once gained, even more difficult to hold. The life of any sort of author is not easy; but the life of a successful author is fraught with many perils. He stands in constant fear of losing his great audience. He may turn it away by some thoughtless act of his life which puts him into the limelight and destroys a popular illusion concerning him. His viewpoint may change, so that whatever the magic of his writing was, it vanishes—and he always knows that it will take perhaps only one dull book to drive away his following.61

  During this discussion, Patrick provides his reader a list of contemporary repeaters—Gene Stratton-Porter, James Oliver Curwood, Peter B. Kyne, Joseph C. Lincoln, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Patrick was citing authors who were at the time almost as well-known as Grey, but today their names read like material for a quiz on the arcane, and serve as a bracing reminder of how ephemeral best-seller success truly is.

  Grey began to worry about this problem during his January 1923 trip to Long Key. At first, all was well. There he was able to write in uncharacteristically “good spirit, with a slow sure grip on myself,” and to make great progress on The Code of the West.62 During a seat-flattening session of thirteen hours on his fifty-first birthday, Grey completed the novel.63 Eager to capitalize on his exceptional productivity, he decided to push ahead with a new work to be entitled The Thundering Herd, but soon found himself unable to continue. Two weeks later, he was gripped by one of his depressions. In a rare journal entry that went beyond his normally terse mention of whether his writing was going well or poorly, he reflected, “There is something wrong with me. This time is it development or retrogration?”64

  This doubt was prompted and aggravated by unfavorable reviews for his most recent novels and a percolating worry that he might be losing touch with his readership. The Day of the Beast (1922) was the completed version of Shores of Lethe, a novel that Grey had worked on prior to his marriage and unsuccessfully revised at least four more times. His most recent rewrite during 1921 represented a fierce determination to finish his novel of social criticism and to speak out about current social conditions. Like The Desert of Wheat, Beast features a protagonist, Daren Lane, who gets badly wounded in World War I. As in many Hemingway stories, this physical wounding acquires a psychological dimension as Lane has to reckon with radically altered postwar conditions and values, which has the effect of worsening his illness. Lane is a native of Middleville, a thinly disguised version of Middle-town, where Grey had been so depressed over his mother’s death and the unfolding war. He valiantly enlists to fight in order to protect the women of his hometown, but his wounding sends him back home and transforms his battle into one against disillusionment. Grey utilized Lane’s return to attack the modernization that had been troubling him for years. Although his sweeping condemnation of emergent Jazz Age conditions is not surprising, his preoccupation with the promiscuity of young women and harsh denunciation of it is. Initially, Daren is bothered that the town’s fifteen- to eighteen-year-old women care nothing about the war or his efforts on their behalf. He is upset more to learn that they are interested only in smoking, drinking, petting, and, almost worst of all, the widespread use of cosmetics. Having made themselves as alluring as possible, these sirens have no qualms about hopping into a car with a single male and going off to park outside of town. Daren doesn’t speculate about what they do, but he imagines the worst. At one point when he believes that his sister has gone off to park with a rival, he is so enraged that he goes after them with his military revolver. Luckily, he discovers that the girl is not his sister and does not kill her male companion. Dancing upsets Daren as much as cosmetics and automobiles, and he believes that it excites participants into a sexual frenzy that leads to parking.

  What was Zane thinking? Perhaps more accurately, was he thinking about his own involvement with Louise? Had he written the book after he had broken up with Louise, it might have made sense, but writing the book just before he met Louise and during the period of his most intense involvement bespeaks a strange psychology. This is especially true of his phobia about dancing. Back in 1915, shortly after meeting Dorothy Ackerman at a dance in Middletown, Zane took her dancing several more times, and afterward wrote in his journal:

  I have been going out with D—to dances and am enjoying myself and making pleasure for her. … My conscience is not wholly clear, but I seem to scorn the idea that I could stoop to feel a sensuous pleasure in the embrace of a pretty girl in a dance. That seems cheap to me. But it may be true. I certainly have been infatuated with dancing with several of these younger girls, and I am little ashamed of it. On the other hand, I enjoy a good dance and a good dancer, entirely apart from the sensual appeal.65

  Both Dolly and his editors at Harpers had urged Zane not to publish The Day of the Beast. In April 1922, when it began to run as a serial in the Country Gentleman, Dolly reported that the reception was very negative, and she went on to explain, “They (his editors) don’t want you in the reform class. Your public for Western fiction is absolutely universal, from the child to old men and women.”66 But Zane insisted upon publication of the book anyway. Weak reviews and lackluster sales kept The Day of the Beast off the annual best-seller list for 1922, and made it the first of his last six novels not to make the list. The reviewer for the New York Times was typical in his proclamation that “in none of the factors of fictional excellence does it compare favorably with his previous work.”67 Though warned of this prospect and therefore prepared, Zane was nonetheless dispirited.

  His next offering, Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923), was undertaken and completed with much higher hopes. While the serial version was being prepared for publication, his editors at Harpers decided that the book was flabby and advised him to eliminate a hundred pages. He immediately responded that this request was the “hardest—the most heartless, stultifying, demeaning, and alienating shock I have ever sustained,”68 but reluctantly he cut 60,000 words. When the novel came out in January 1923, Grey was in Long Key. Though he was sent only a few reviews, the criticism was harsh enough that he could no longer dismiss the flaying of The Day of the Beast as the consequence of a wrong turn. The reviewer for the Boston Transcript wrote:

  There is a fundamental simplicity about Mr. Grey’s novels. They require all the attention of the reader, because of the excitement of the plot, but they do not leave him with any problem to consider. Undoubtedly Mr. Grey has found the secret of his own success to lie in his appeal to the child qualities in the minds of grown men and women. He asks them to give him their attention but he does not ask them to think for themselves.69

  The reviewer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle claimed that Grey had “dragged [his] story through the turgid waters of inanity,” and he reiterated the Transcript’s indictment of Grey’s readership with an assertion that “morons will flock to purchase this drivel.”70

  In spite of these criticisms, Wanderer reached the best-seller list, but Book-man’s listing of it at number three for March 1923 was accompanied by the following explanation: “Zane Grey has another book out; naturally it jumps from nowhere to a place very near the top of the list. If this proves anything it would seem to be that the age of realism in American literature has not yet quite arrived. A great many persons, apparently, still believe in fairies.”71

  The most worrisome review was one written by Burton Rascoe for the New York Tribune that anticipated Bookman’s assessment and probably influenced it, since it appeared several weeks before. Rascoe was a distinguished reviewer, and, up to this point, reviewers of his stature had treated Grey’s novels as unworthy of notice. He broke with this stonewalling, and awarded Wanderer a long review. His avoidance of criticism throughout most of the review implied a circumspect and favorable estimate. However, the closing paragraphs reveal this to have been a setup for a final withering assault:

  But do Mr. Grey’s readers believe in the existence of such people as Mr. Grey depicts; do they accept the code of conduct implicit in Mr. Grey’s novel
s; do they like to think that in similar situations they would act as Adam does? If they do I bow my head in ignorance and in humility. I have been among ranchmen and cowboys of the Southwest and I have never seen such purple cows. I hope I never see one, but I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.72

  The Literary Digest judged Rascoe’s review important enough to reprint it in an abbreviated version. This was introduced with an account of the novel’s sale of 100,000 copies “before publication” and Harpers’ expectation to sell three times that number the first year after its appearance in print. Noting that “there is no better seller in America,” the Digest presented Grey’s success so that it worked against him. Given the enormous audience predisposed toward any new Grey offering, the Digest proposed its reprint of Rascoe’s article as an experiment to see “how he [Grey] strikes a sophisticated editor of a New York newspaper … [who] comes from that part of the country dealt with in the story, and he brings a fresh appreciation of the author.”73 Unlike the other reviews of Grey’s work, Rascoe’s was much noticed and discussed within publishing circles. Two years later, when continuing criticism provoked Grey to respond with a piece entitled “My Answer to the Critics” that Dolly opposed and he elected not to publish, Wanderer of the Wasteland was one of the few novels that he specifically mentioned, and he did so only to comment upon Rascoe’s review:

  He took me seriously. He really read my book. He wrote a wonderful review, which, as I perused it, seemed to repay me for all the stings and arrows of outrageous criticism. I believed my justification had come. I was unutterably grateful. But—the very end—in the last paragraph—he spoiled it all; he crucified me by saying he could not believe in purple cows. To such ends do brilliant critics stoop!74

  Though conditioned to negative assessments of his work, Grey believed that the reviews of Wanderer were exceptionally harsh. The assault of the critics upon his readers as devoid of intelligence threatened to drive them elsewhere. For over a year, he had been noticing an emerging bias within literary circles for a new realism sharply at odds with the pronounced romanticism of his work. Back in March of 1921, he had commented to Dolly about Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920): “It is interesting realism of commonplace, vulgar, raw people. I really think it is a big book. But it is disappointing, of course, most of all real life is. Not one of the heroines’ dreams or ideals ever come true. … I dare say the critics give it place far ahead of mine. Why? Why do the critics repudiate romance?”75 Grey accumulated so much experience as support and inspiration for his romantic novels that he considered them as realistic as they needed to be.

  Immediately following his journal notation that “there is something wrong with me” and his questioning of whether his new novel was “development or retrogration,” Grey mentioned that he had read Warner Fabian’s popular, widely reviewed Flaming Youth (1923), and proceeded to discuss the agitated thinking that it provoked:

  What is the younger generation to me? Or rather what was it to me? My distress, or part of its origin, may be traced to the secret hidden in the above. There is no longer any use in deceiving myself. Developments of the last year or two, perhaps longer, have stricken me to the heart. What was the younger generation to me? It would take a volume to answer that.76

  That Zane was upset with the sensational realism of Flaming Youth is not surprising. This controversial novel offered an eye-opening look at the emergent Jazz Age and its radical alteration of the ways men and women related. The author, Warner Fabian, a pseudonym for Samuel Hopkins Adams, a reputable writer from Boston whose books had not sold well, later explained: “I knew it was a book that could make a helluva of a lot of money, but I didn’t want my name on it.”77

  Flaming Youth was the Primary Colors of its day, although its inflammatory exposé of contemporary mores avoided politics. The chief character, Mona Fentriss, is the mother of three attractive teenagers. She is thirty-seven years old, but still beautiful, especially to her many male admirers. She is receptive to their advances and open to where they lead. For her, doing as one pleases is more important than doing as one should. At one point she asserts, “Don’t you know better, after all these years, than to try to keep me from doing anything I want to do? I always get what I want” (9). When questioned about expectations for her daughters, she replies, “Not goodness; that’s for plain girls. Nor virtue, particularly; that’s more or less of a scarecrow. I want happiness for them” (80).

  A significant portion of the novel is devoted to an objective, nonjudgmental account of the activities of the three daughters. They are free to do as they please and naturally inclined to be like their mother. They go out without chaperones, drink, smoke, and actively participate in petting parties. They engage in sex before marriage and afterward with men who are not their husbands. The conniving charm of these women endows them with power and they do not hesitate to use it. One states, “I’ve always done exactly what I liked and never done anything I didn’t like” (164). When they find true love, they consummate it—or, more accurately, they have sex and discover love. The reader is oriented to this new thinking by one character’s question, “But how am I to tell whether I am or not (in love) without letting him make love to me?” (210).

  The fates of these women could have been used to indict their mother as a disastrous parent. Her two older daughters wind up in loveless marriages and one elects to have an abortion when she becomes pregnant. However, these melodramatic elements are ostentatiously purged of the condemnation that traditionally attended them. As presented, they are the facts of life.

  The overt sexuality of Fabian’s novel was particularly troubling to Grey because of the operative assumption that women should make their own decisions and rely on their wants as determinants. If Grey was attracted to the young “Calamity” because she reassured him that young people were still impressed with his novels and with his dedication to outdoor adventure, the criticism of his recent work and the attention lavished upon Flaming Youth left him unsure and worried. For years Grey had been insisting that women inspired his writing, but this thinking took a strange turn in his answer to the question “What is the younger generation to me?”

  But it can be partly answered by splitting the younger generation in half—keeping only the feminine. … I do not deplore so much the loss of—whatever it was that this generation held for me as I do the incontrovertible truth of materialism. I cannot feel longer that I am writing to a legion of eager romance loving dreaming girls. The movie, the motor car, the jazz and dance, the suggestive magazine and novel, have done away with that type. I am a faint little voice in the cataclysmic roar of the age!78

  What could have caused him to think of the readership for his Westerns as “a legion of eager romance loving dreaming girls”? Was this not a paranoia resulting from the recent defection of his girlfriends and his aversion for the unfolding Jazz Age? Were Grey’s readers not male and solidly committed to the manly actions celebrated in his books? Perhaps, but he also knew that women were a major component of his readership, and he was justifiably worried about the sensational appeal of Flaming Youth.

  Back in January of 1920 when he negotiated his lucrative, long-term contract with the Curtis Publishing Company, Grey was dealing with Barton Currie, the current editor of the Country Gentleman. Later that same year, Curtis promoted Currie to head editor of its Ladies’ Home Journal. Keenly aware of Grey’s contribution to the success of the Country Gentleman, Currie wanted Grey to come with him. To accomplish this, he wooed him with a sweetened contract that doubled his $15,000 fee for a forthcoming serialization of To the Last Man in the Country Gentleman and thereby tripled the $10,000 that he received only the year before.79 When Grey accepted, Currie urged that he keep the readership for Ladies’ Home Journal in mind when writing his next novel. The result was The Call of the Canyon, which commenced with the November 1921 issue.80

  The Call of the Canyon features a woman from the East as the lead character and was meant to be an updat
ing of The Light of Western Stars. Like The Day of the Beast, it is also set in the present, and contains impassioned attacks upon postwar American culture. Carley Burch is a wealthy young New Yorker who enjoys the liberated life of a typical flapper. When her fiancé, Glenn, returns from war wounded and troubled, he is so upset by Carley and the altered conditions of life in Eastern cities that he flees to the West. There he meets the loving, rustic Flo Hunter whose hard elemental life bears more than a little resemblance to Lillian’s, and Flo provides Glenn the therapeutic healing that was by this point an overworked convention.

  Carley decides that she likes Glenn well enough to visit him in Arizona. Surprisingly, she dislikes most of what she encounters, and she adamantly refuses to adjust or change. To a local dance she wears a fashionable, revealing dress that provokes Glenn to remark, “But, Carley, the cut of that—or rather the abbreviation of it—inclines me to think that style for women’s clothes has not changed for the better. In fact, it’s worse than two years ago in Paris and later in New York. Where will you women draw the line?” (42). Her disregard for this warning gets her assaulted by an uncouth local. When she declares him “crazy,” the local explains, “Nope, I’m not crazy, ’an I shore said invitation … I meant thet white shimmy dress you wore the night of Flo’s party. Thet’s my invitation to get a little fresh with you, Pretty Eyes!” (148).