That was the most uninspiring farewell we bade each other this morning. You were cussing mad and exited with a most unpleasant expression on your face and I grabbed you and planted a kiss on all that wrath and sprinted madly home on a fool’s errand. … And then I went down stairs and read what you’d written in the book and I wept some more. … If you are awake when the New Year comes in, I want you to think of me exclusively for a minute or two no matter who is with you.150
In New York, Zane could have consoled himself with the fact that he was still America’s most popular author and one of its best-known anglers, but he was too distraught over his perilous lurching toward his father’s embittered isolation. In his heart, he felt like the loneliest man on earth.
7
Movin’ On: 1924–25
The California conservationists have arrived late, maybe too late to save the game and fish, but they have arrived! And we want it distinctly understood that we are for California and our children and grandchildren, to the end of saving something of California’s wild life for them to enjoy and to live with. This is the main issue.
—“California Game Fish: How Long Will They Last?”
Had Zane been able to foresee the future, he would have done nothing and given thanks that his problems passed so quickly. Of course, he could not, and in deciding to take action, he prolonged the healing process. Prior to his departure for New York City, he mailed the Catalina Islander an article entitled “Heavy Tackle for Heavy Fish,” which ran on the front page of the January 2, 1924, issue. This article opens with the declaration, “After years of trial and experience I have come to the conclusion that the standard twenty-four-thread line was not heavy enough for broadbill swordfish, not to mention big tuna.” He reveals his decision of the previous season “to use tackle which we were convinced was more sportsmanlike and fairer to swordfish,” and to purchase the $1,500 Coxe reel that he had equipped with 39-thread line. He condemns the recently reaffirmed Tuna Club regulation limiting the strongest allowable line to twenty-four threads with a breaking strength of sixty pounds, and he advocates an alternative, custom-made 24-thread line with a breaking strength of eighty-eight pounds. Despite its $30 cost, he judges this line to be vastly superior to the “inferior grades” that cost only eight to twelve dollars. In support of these decisions, he argues that tuna frequently break standard 24-thread lines, become bloodied, and are devoured by sharks. He argues that boat captains, who work hard to locate big fish, are frustrated by the failure of the inadequate lines, and that many fishermen agree with his proposals. He quotes the words of support offered to him by the accomplished angler Harry Adams: “Now I want you to sell me one of your thirty-nine-thread lines. I’ll use it, and when I catch a broadbill I will call a meeting of the directors of the Tuna Club and tell them flatly that you are right and they are wrong.” R. C. not only used a 39-thread line for his first broadbill, but he also told Zane that he had “never had such a feeling of security as this tackle gave him.”1
This airing of Grey’s dispute with the Tuna Club worsened the rift. When he allowed “Heavy Tackle” to be reprinted in the February issue of Outdoor America, his disagreement turned into an open declaration of war. Even though his article appeared during the off-season, it elicited much discussion and little support, certainly not enough for the Tuna Club to reconsider its decision. Under pressure to comment, Harry Adams wrote a frontpage article for the Islander urging that Grey’s suggestions be considered, but he also insisted, “I have never used a thirty-nine-thread line on any fish.”2 Among the many letters of opposition, perhaps the most interesting was by “A. Westerner,” who related Grey’s position to his Westerns and parsed its ironic implications:
I have just finished reading Zane Grey’s article on heavy tackle, and my world has come tumbling down about me. I don’t seem to be able to believe that there is a sportsman left! The whole charmed game is commercialized. The days of fast transportation, bodily comforts, gasoline, electricity and money have driven out of existence those old-time, hardriding, clean-hearted men of the out-of-doors. … Now that is all ended, and it’s bigger lines, heavier reels, more boatmen and more fish! Oh, the pity of it! Vale, Zane Grey, the ideal, ‘Rest in Peace.’3
This controversy focused more attention upon the big fish being caught and whether the angler followed Grey’s proposals or the Tuna Club regulations. Harry Mallen, a Tuna Club member loyal to its regulations, was handed a major role in the unfolding drama. On May 21, 1924, the Islander devoted the center section of its front page to a story headlined “Harry J. Mallen Lands 319-Pound Tuna on 24-Thread Line.”4 Previous reports either ignored line size or only mentioned it in passing. Suddenly the size of Mallen’s line was as important as the size of his fish. His catch occurred in Mexico, far away from Catalina, and did not break any record, but it was judged newsworthy because of its verification that big fish could be caught with skillful use of 24-thread line.
The following summer, Mallen presented the Tuna Club an even better gift. On August 8, near Avalon, he landed a 528-pound broadbill that bested Martin’s record of the previous year by a whopping forty pounds, and again he used a 24-thread line. This time the Islander did not headline the size of Mallen’s line, but its relegation to a passing mention was accompanied by a quote affirming that Grey’s pronouncements were far from forgotten:
Earlier this season, Zane Grey, the author, landed a fish weighing 413 pounds; but I understand a thirty-nine-thread line was used, which disqualified his fish under the rules of the Tuna Club.
“At no time during the fight did I feel that the twenty-four-thread line was insufficient to hold the big fish. I exercised the greatest care with the rod, but did not pay much attention to the thread as it cut into the water.”5
Once more the existing broadbill record had again been broken, and again Zane was not the one who did it. Mallen’s use of 24-thread line left him discredited, isolated, and embarrassed. Even worse, Zane was indignant over the way in which Mallen landed his broadbill. The Los Angeles Examiner reported that his battle lasted only forty-five minutes, and that the propeller of his boat had badly gashed his fish.6 Since Tuna Club regulations disqualified a damaged fish, Grey was understandably offended over the club’s acceptance of his catch and the Islander’s discreet elimination of this information from its report.
After the flap over Mrs. Spalding’s catch and his proposal for heavy tackle, Grey was understandably wary of more controversy. Luckily, much of what he had to say was already in print. As support for “Heavy Tackle for Heavy Fish,” a month later he published “Xiphias Gladius,” an account of a broadbill caught four years before which he used to denounce unsportsmanlike tactics. Admitting that over these four years he had written several other articles about broadbill that were never published, he reveals why editors might have found these impolitic or intemperate:
What does it mean to catch a broadbill swordfish in a fair battle? To subdue him by dint of your own stalk, skill, strength, and endurance. … There have been innumerable instances of anglers fighting and losing broadbills after long hours. It used to be a joke on the pier. These must all have been fair fights. But a broadbill gaffed in a few minutes after being hooked—that is not to the credit of the angler. Nor is it a fluke! Nor can it be called good luck! A broadbill that swims to the surface in a half hour or so, to see what is the pesky thing bothering him—to look around—and has a harpoon, or three or four jabbed into him is most certainly not caught honestly or fairly.…
R. C. pointed out to me how very easily a gaffed swordfish could make a surge, catch the gaff rope under the propeller and pull out half the stern of the boat.7
Grey’s allusion to Mrs. Spalding’s catch was uncanny in its anticipation of the maiming of Mallen’s broadbill that made his battle similarly brief. Zane was too vexed to adhere to his initial silence.8 In his Tales of Swordfish and Tuna (1927), he included a short, previously unpublished piece entitled “The Deadly Airplane-Wire Leader.” This im
passioned denunciation of airplane-wire as leader for game fishing included a thinly veiled attack upon both Mallen and Martin. Grey argues that airplane wires inflict deep wounds in the bodies of fish, impair their ability to fight, and sometimes strangle them. He references the record broadbills of 528 and 571 pounds—the catches of Martin and Mallen—and claims that the brevity of both fights was due to the damage caused by their wire leaders. Grey’s argument implies that Mallen’s broadbill was slashed, not by the boat propeller as the Examiner reported, but by his wire leader. Besides naming Martin as the one responsible for introducing wire leaders, Grey points out that he lost several fingers to coiled leader and that he once landed a broadbill in a mere six minutes, presumably not his record catch. These revelations are accompanied by five grisly photographs of badly mutilated fish, and in one, Martin is shown standing alongside his maimed catch.9 As in his dispute with the Tuna Club, Zane held his tongue initially, and then belatedly and intemperately he proclaimed his disagreement.
The fallout from “Heavy Tackle” did not wound Grey as much as it might have because the main problems of 1923 were already behind him by the time that it hit. In late January 1924, Dolly sent a letter to Zane in Long Key that salved his wounds and facilitated his recovery. At the time of their November reunion, she realized that his acute depression left him beyond help; there was little that she could do for him, and little that she cared to do. Secretly relieved that Zane’s tempestuous affair with Louise was over, she decided that her best strategy was to remain calm and detached until he eventually reached out for her, as she knew he would. In early January, Zane wrote to her from New York, “I miss you like hell. Something is wrong with me.”10 A week later, he confessed, “I have such dreadful fears, morbid some of them—that I might lose you or die away from you.”11 “I’d give all the money I sent you if I could just go to bed with you a while,” he opened his next letter, an unusually long one. “I need to be soothed and reprimanded and sympathized with and talked to.” He had met with Dorothy, Mildred, and Claire, but they had been cool toward him and critical of his behavior. “If I do not recover my balance and health and spirit in a very few days, I shall come home,” he confessed.12 “I feel that my anchor is slipping, or that I am skating on thin ice,” he added in a letter that followed. “What is to become of me if I can no longer go to you with my troubles?”13
Sensing the need she had been anticipating and armed with the information that he had divulged, Dolly decided that the time to act had arrived. On January 18, she sat down, wrote a long letter, and mailed it so that it would be in Long Key when he arrived. “You don’t know the longing that goes out from me,” she opened, “to get my arms around you & comfort you and smooth things for you when you are sick, or distressed and worried.” After initially vowing “I won’t go into the matter of the girls again, it’s useless,” she paused for a quick observation that evolved into a searching analysis of Zane’s unhappiness:
Only this I say to you, no woman is ethical, can possibly be, in the relationship these girls are placed to you. So you will have to ignore that part of them & get what is worthwhile to you out of your personal contact with them. In a certain sense you have idealized every woman you have ever come in contact with—made her something to fit your momentary need, rather than grasped at all their real characters or relation to the world. It was when these latter considerations impinged on your “dreams of fair women” that the trouble began.
Your friends have always been nice, more or less normal girls in the ordinary walks of life, but in their relations to you they have become just the biological “female of the species” and in that manner have reacted to each other and used their claws. … I find that the fighting spirit in the human species requires a blow for a blow, a hurt for a hurt. The Christ-like spirit of turning the other cheek never manifests in a battle of woman against woman for a man! That’s where nature gets in her deadly work.14
Indirectly, Dolly was presenting herself as different from these needy, demanding women, and she was playing her strong suit of understanding and compassion. She was also consciously absolving Zane of guilt. Dolly realized that he had been castigating himself for weeks for all that had gone wrong, and she offered a new perspective that made him the victim—a victim of his romantic nature and of women turned cruel by their circumstances and natural instincts.
After reading this letter, Grey confided to his journal, “Today I received a letter from Dolly and it was medicine, strength, religion, [and] love. Something about my children delighted and thrilled me. Saddened me, too, because I see them so little.”15 The next morning, he dispatched Dolly a telegram proclaiming, “Bless you for wonderful sweet uplifting letter.”16 Having felt powerless, guilty, and alone, Grey was reassured that Dolly and his family were still behind him, even though they were, as usual, many miles away.
Two days after Dolly’s uplifting letter, Zane received another boost from a more surprising source—a very positive review of his most recent novel. The Call of the Canyon (1924) was published that month, and ever since he had read Flaming Youth, he had worried that this Western might be viewed as even more reactionary and out of step with the times than his two previous novels. Like Day of the Beast, this novel featured a female protagonist whose chief adversary was modernization. Grey knew that commercial success was almost assured by the new plan that Lasky had devised, which had the film version open a month before the novel appeared. Recognizing that serialization actually increased sales of the novel, Lasky convinced Grey that movies would be even better promotion, shrewdly calculating that early access to Grey’s latest novel would also greatly increase the box office for his film. This astute marketing strategy helped The Call of the Canyon to jump to number five on the best-seller list for January and to claim number six for the year. However, this aggressive commercialization left Grey understandably worried that reviewers might respond to it like bulls to a red cape and savagely gore his novel.
But this did not happen. In late January, the New York Times featured an unusually positive review in the Sunday Book Review that folded Grey’s other novels into its discussion of Call. L. H. Robbins, the reviewer, cleverly recycles the Literary Digest’s introduction to its reprinting of Rascoe’s Wanderer review: “Certainly his [Grey’s] popularity is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored in any study of contemporary American life, social or literary.” With a flourish of wit meant to show himself as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as Rascoe, Robbins praises Grey for his “honest workmanship,” “clarity of thought,” “strength of phrase,” and, most of all, for his “corking good story.” After judging his novels “as clean and fresh as a New England village after a three-day rain,” he credits Call with “as thorough an understanding of the psychology of sex as any Washington Square production suppressed by the Anti-Vice Society.” Relying on irony and condescension to qualify his praise, Robbins directs his criticism at Grey’s detractors, branding them “sophisticates” who fail to appreciate the decency of his stories.17
The editorial staff that approved this review did so out of concern that the recent outpouring of condemnation for Grey’s books sprang from a Jazz Age, metropolitan prejudice against popular readership and against subject matter that smacked of backwater, small-town culture. As calculated support for Robbins’ estimate, they framed his review with an informal essay, unusual for the Book Review, in which Silas Bent returns to his Kentucky hometown to investigate reader preferences at the local bookstore. Bent is surprised to discover that its patrons are not much interested in trendsetting, avant-garde literature. They prefer classics and popular fare. Bent learns that a local flapper has just finished Flaming Youth, but the store owner informs him that more typically “[Joseph] Conrad [is] linked in popular demand with Zane Grey and Oliver Curwood.” The most remarkable feature of Bent’s nostalgic appreciation for heartland values was his disregard for the role commercialization played in such preferences, and his willful suspension of the critical acumen that wou
ld later make his Ballyhoo (1927) such a brilliant analysis of the culture of his day. Clearly, Robbins and Bent had been recruited by the Book Review to defend common, unpretentious readers, who wished only to read what they enjoyed, and to counterbalance the acerbic critics who were deriding their preferences.
These two articles help to explain why the mounting criticism of Grey’s novels had little effect upon their popularity. When Grey’s Westerns first appeared prior to World War I, they appealed mainly to an Eastern, urban-based readership that shared Grey’s belief that city life caused sickness, and that rugged life in the unspoiled outdoors was therapeutic and invigorating. However, during the decade of his popularity, these assumptions underwent a profound change. The prosperity and industrial expansion of the 1920s endowed urban existence with renewed vitality and appeal. Glossy ads aggressively promoted new commercial products and associated them with glamorous, fashion-conscious cities where they were available. Outlying areas that lacked them were were staid, old-fashioned, and dull. As metropolitan culture embraced the latest clothing, conveniences, economic opportunity, and entertainment, the desire for these advances supplanted the dated longing to get away from them. Grey’s outspoken aversion for flappers, cigarettes, and jazz arose from a reactionary sensibility that he had been harboring for years, but the changing times drew it out and made his voice shrill. He had good reason to worry that the renewed allure of cities might upstage the wholesome, elemental conditions that he had been celebrating as a preferable alternative.
On the other hand, those who continued to live in small towns and rural areas did not believe that city life was better, and they responded defensively to the urban derision for their tastes and mores. They embraced Grey as a successful writer who spoke out on behalf of their values and attacked the suspect thinking and living conditions of big cities. Though his West may have been far away, they accepted the premise of his stories—that the simple life away from crowds, tall buildings, and aggressive commercialization was better attuned to human needs. Although Grey retained a solid base of loyal readers in urban areas, this new readership from the rural heartland embraced his outlook because it was old-fashioned. Meanwhile, Zane worked feverishly to feed this demand with new variations and to ignore the widening disparity between the circumstances in his stories and those of his own life.
Zane Grey Page 28