On the third day of fishing, Grey landed a 318-pound Alison tuna that some have considered a third world record, although Zane never claimed it to be. Claire characterized the area as “a tuna paradise,”101 and Zane wrote, “There was something wonderfully thrilling for an angler in this beautiful bay, with its wild shore line and the incredible number and size of the game fish. It was heart-satisfying” (184). His excitement intensified when he discovered that the gulf contained black and striped marlin. Efforts to catch them produced several dramatic fights, but the only one that Zane landed weighed a mere 180 pounds; a dozen of the tuna caught by the group outweighed it. Back at the dock, Grey was awed by a giant, 690-pound black marlin taken by a market fisherman. On an outing at the conclusion of their stay, the fishermen sighted a giant whale shark (Rhineodon typus). Since it did not flee and was impossible to catch with rod and reel, Grey decided to harpoon it. The men attached stout lines to the embedded hook, lashed them to the boat, and affixed empty casks to prevent the fish from sounding, but eight hours later, the leviathan initiated a sustained dive, broke free, and made off with their equipment.
Shortly after their departure for Los Angeles and the final leg of the voyage, the Fisherman ran into a punishing, relentless headwind that necessitated long tacks, and its progress north slowed to a crawl. Outside Mazatlan, as Claire finished typing Grey’s account of the trip, a spar broke loose and crashed down onto his stateroom. Grateful to have escaped without injury, he decided to complete the trip by train. Leaving Boerstler and the crew with the ship, he and his guests cleared customs and purchased train tickets.
Zane Grey residence, Catalina, ca. 1925. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Shortly after their arrival in Los Angeles, Claire, Lillian, and Jess bade Zane farewell and headed east. This was a momentous parting with the Wilhelm sisters. After myriad trips spanning more than ten years, and after nine months on the go with him this time, Lillian and Claire left Zane for good and settled into their marriages. Lillian and Jess accepted jobs at guest ranches, and she arranged for her paintings to be displayed in the lobby of the Monte Vista hotel in Phoenix. Five years later, when the new Biltmore Hotel opened, she worked in the art shop in the lobby, where she was allowed to sell her paintings and her Hopi-style china.102 Claire returned to New York City where Phillips met her train. After escorting her to a room he had reserved at the Plaza, he sat her on his lap and engaged her in a four-hour discussion that resolved the strains in their marriage. Several weeks later, Laurie Mitchell wrote to her, “I miss your laughing face and jolly ways; you were surely the life and soul of the trip south.”103 Over the next three years, Claire had two daughters, and she gave up traveling until they were grown. Lillian and Claire saw Zane again only when his trips brought him nearby, and these visits were infrequent and brief.
Zane Grey on Rogue River trip, September 1925. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Grey’s decision to end Tales of Fishing Virgin Seas with a description of defeat—the whale shark that got away—was apt since his trip to South America fell short of his expectations. His experience in the Galapagos convinced him that McKay’s glowing estimate of its fishing was overly optimistic. Zane was disappointed by the omnipresent sharks and absence of big fish; he caught his biggest fish at the end of the trip when he was closest to home. Had he gone to Cabo and devoted his time to fishing there, he probably would have caught a brawny marlin and broadbill, and perhaps set a world record that mattered. But this would have been following an already blazed trail. To his credit, Zane understood that the real achievement in his trip was the experience, not the fishing or his three world records: he had dared to journey far away from a culture he perceived as unreceptive to his values and beliefs. He had extended his range, reached the truly remote, and was now ready for somewhere even further away.
8
Fresh Starts and Farewells: 1925–30
Oh Dolly, the rooms are haunted. There are our spirits there. … Perhaps the strangest impression, of which I was not conscious at first, is that of going back after all these years—going back alone. I mean, and changed as I am.
—Zane Grey, Letter from Lackawaxen, late May, 1929
In its February 21, 1925, issue, Publishers Weekly ran an article about the one hundred best-selling authors from 1900 through 1924 and ranked Zane Grey number six. The five authors above him—Winston Churchill, Harold Bell Wright, Booth Tarkington, George Barr McCutcheon, and Mary Roberts Rinehart—started writing best sellers before 1910.1 Since Grey did not make the annual list until 1915, he was more recent and would have been higher had the starting date been later. A follow-up article in 1927 entitled “The Most Popular Authors of Fiction in the Post-War Period, 1919–1926” ranked Grey first and the odds-on favorite to be the best-selling author of the decade.2 However, there were telltale signs of trouble ahead. The February 21, 1925, issue of Publishers Weekly that carried its first article on best sellers announced the arrival of The Thundering Herd on its monthly list.3 Although Herd remained on the list for three more months, it did not do well enough to make the annual list.4 The Vanishing American was on the monthly list for two months during 1926, and also did not achieve the annual list.5 The Call of the Canyon, which won third place for 1924, marked the last appearance of a Grey novel on the annual list.
Grey’s 1925 absence from the list on which he had been a regular for nine of the past ten years was both significant and misleading. It is quite possible that the annual list for this year was flawed and underestimated the popularity of The Thundering Herd. That year, Publishers Weekly did not publish a list for April. Since its annual list was a weighted computation of the monthly listings, it is possible that Herd would have made the April list, and that the exclusion of this month skewed the annual computation against it. This possibility is upheld by Bookman’s “Monthly Scoreboard,” which showed Herd at various positions for six months from January through June.6 Grey’s financial records furnish additional support. His initial royalty payment for the novel—the distribution from the publisher and normally the largest—was $32,000. The Call of the Canyon achieved the annual list for 1924 with a significantly lower first royalty of $29,000.7 While the periods covered by these payments may have differed, Call may have also made the list only because its competition had weak sales too. Even today’s more reliable list is based on relative sales and therefore is subject to similar variables.
Frank Gruber claimed that Herd and Vanishing American failed to make the annual best-seller list for 1925 because they were published the same year.8 Although this is true, Herd came out in January, and American was not released until December, long after Herd had dropped from the monthly listings. Each enjoyed almost a full year of sales unopposed, and Harpers was too experienced and too protective of Grey to pit his novels against each other in a ruinous competition. In fact, Herd was more of a threat to Call since it appeared the same month that Call dropped from the list, but the staff at Harpers carefully orchestrated these releases.9 In short, both The Thundering Herd and The Vanishing American did well enough to suggest that the sales of Grey’s novels were leveling off rather than declining.
Meanwhile, his annual income continued to grow impressively. He earned $128,496 for 1921, $292,473 for 1924, and $323,948 for 1927.10 Fees from his serializations continued to spiral ever higher. Back in 1920, he was surprised and thrilled to receive $10,000 for a serialization. Two years later, Ladies’ Home Journal paid $20,000 for The Vanishing American and $30,000 for The Thundering Herd. For Nevada, which ran in American Magazine over the fall of 1926, Grey received $40,000. The prices for movie rights to his novels were also rising, though not so dramatically. Lasky paid $20,000 for The Call of the Canyon and $30,000 for both The Thundering Herd and Nevada.11
The buttressing provided by the serial and movie versions spurred secondary sales of the novels and was crucial to Grey’s becoming the decade’s best-selling author. They also masked the fact that he was getting dangerously overexposed. As the i
ncreases from alternative sources overtook and surpassed first royalties from his novels, Zane discovered that he could make as much from a serialization as he got from a novel and an equivalent amount more from film rights. Unlike the staff at Harpers, neither Lasky nor magazine editors fretted about excessive supply. On the contrary, both clamored for as much as Zane could provide. Following the absorption of Zane Grey Pictures and its contract for exclusive rights to Grey’s novels, Paramount filmed three of his Westerns over the summer of 1923. Lasky was so pleased with the cost saving and handsome returns of this trio that he ambitiously raised his investment. He allotted big budgets to The Thundering Herd (1925) and The Vanishing American (1925) and shrewdly cued their release to coincide with publication of the novels. Over the next two years, Lasky remade The Light of Western Stars (1925), Desert Gold (1926), and Man of the Forest (1926) even though Hodkinson had filmed these novels only six years before. He also filmed the serials The Code of the West (1925), Wild Horse Mesa (1925), and Drums of the Desert (1927), derived from the serial “Captives of the Desert” that was entitled Desert Bound as a novel. The appetite of audiences for these films was so insatiable that Fox capitalized upon the rights it had bought outright from Grey years before and remade The Last of the Duanes (1924), The Rainbow Trail (1925), and Riders of the Purple Sage (1925), with Tom Mix in the lead role. Over 1925, seven films of Grey’s novels were released. Grey noticed the strength of this market, committed himself to writing more, and skirted Harpers’ restriction of his output to a novel a year. He completed six chapters of The Deer Stalker in six days.12 In order to finish another novel and have some free time over Christmas of 1915, he wrote forty-seven pages, over 10,000 words, in twelve hours of a single day.13 The financial incentive for this kind of productivity was so great that he began to write stories exclusively for serialization. McCall’s paid $35,000 for “Captives of the Desert.” Country Gentleman paid $30,000 for “The Code of the West,” $35,000 for “The Deer Stalker,” and $35,000 for “Wild Horse Mesa,” but Harpers did not publish any of these as novels until years later. Over 1928 and 1929, Grey published eight different serials, and Paramount speedily converted most of them into movies. Lasky was so receptive and so generous that Grey sold the rights to his name for The Vanishing Pioneer, which he presented only as a story idea that had little to do with the completed film. Grey’s alternative sources of income grew even more important after Nevada (1928) for which first royalties fell to $20,000, but his combined return from the serialization and film rights were a record $70,000.14
All these developments added to Grey’s fame and obscured the eroding appeal of his novels. Filmmakers and magazine editors noticed Grey’s reputation more than the quality of his writing. They wanted Grey because the public recognized his name and flocked to offerings that carried it. Scriptwriters simply eliminated problematic elements like the missionaries and government agents in The Vanishing American and provided film crews whatever they wanted or needed. Often the end result had little resemblance to what Grey initially wrote. These lucrative opportunities stoked Grey’s drive to write more—and to disregard his lapses into formulaic repetition and mannered styling; he was a moneymaking machine fueled by proven success. Recklessly confident that hard work could sustain his popularity, he fled doubt and worry and relied on trips to keep him motivated and productive.
Criticism of Grey’s novels increased, but had so little effect that at least one critic decided to look beyond the quality of his work for answers to his success. In the February 7, 1925, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature, T. K. Whipple, a professor of literature at the University of California (Berkeley), published an influential article entitled “American Sagas.” At the time, the Saturday Review was less than six months old, but it already had become a prestigious and influential literary journal. Its founding editor Henry Seidel Canby decided that Whipple’s analysis was so timely that he featured it. Whipple asserts that Grey’s appeal is evidence of the growing importance of the popular arts. “As everyone knows, the latest fad of the intelligentsia is discovering the United States,” he proclaims at the outset. “This is the cult of which Mr. Gilbert Seldes is high priest.” Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts (1924) had garnered widespread acclaim the year before for its impressive discussion of such diverse entertainers as Charlie Chaplin, Ring Lardner, and Florenz Ziegfeld. Seldes had argued that the success of these figures heralded the ascendance of new art forms ranging from musical theater to comic strips and that these arts deserved the same critical respect usually reserved for the traditional arts. In his acceptance of this challenge, Whipple does not bother with movies and magazine serials, but focuses instead upon the specific appeal of his Westerns as “tales of the American folk.”15 Insisting that “Zane Grey should never be considered a moralist,” he claims that Grey’s Westerns are modern versions of Beowulf and Icelandic sagas. Citing his “narrative power” and “powerful imagination,” Whipple commends Grey for presenting “a battle of passions with one another and with the will, a struggle of love and hate, or remorse and revenge, of blood, lust, honor, friendship, anger, grief—all of a grand scale and all incalculable and mysterious.”16
This estimate was as much a departure from “high brow” values as Seldes’s study, but Whipple bundled his praise with asides that were as damaging as Rascoe’s delayed condemnation of Grey’s “purple cows.” “His art is archaic, with the traits of all archaic art,” Whipple explains, “His style, for example, has the stiffness which comes from an imperfect mastery of the medium. It lacks fluency and facility; behind it always we feel a pressure for expression, a striving for a freer and easier utterance.”17 Whipple does not speculate about what Grey might have been straining to say, but he does judge Grey’s treatment of sex to be “simple and naïve,” and says nothing about his condemnations of Jazz Age culture. Had Whipple been a bit more skeptical of the family man emphasized in Harpers promotion, he might have developed a different take on the sudden hesitations and plot turns that cut short attraction and keep the sexuality of his stories percolating but thwarted. If Grey had not made such a determined effort to eliminate his secret life from his fiction, he might not have seemed so “simple and naïve” about sex to Whipple. Because Grey capitulated to the advice of his editors at Harpers and kept his romances well within the bounds of propriety, his ritualized courtships are contrived, but they nevertheless do betray intermittent flourishes of an eroticism “striving for a freer and easier utterance.”18
Seven months after the appearance of Whipple’s article, the reasons for Grey’s success sparked a heated debate between two prominent figures from the literary scene in New York City. In the October 1925 issue of the Bookman, John Farrar, its editor, devoted his regular column to “Clean Fiction,” a title that echoed Robbins’s praise for The Call of the Canyon. Farrar chastises Laurence Stallings for his harsh condemnation of the fall offering of new books and for ascribing to the same unreasonably high standards and negative bias of critics like Rascoe, Menchen, and Van Vechten. “Why should anyone be afraid to acknowledge that he likes to read, in his leisure moments, a good story?” he asks. During this attack upon the Algonquin circle, Farrar observes, “We should consider it foolish indeed to claim that Dreiser is a better influence upon Americans than Zane Grey.”19 Although Farrar meant his remark to be only an aside, it repeated several earlier endorsements of Grey. The year before, he had commented, “We should like to appraise Zane Grey as the modern Cooper and find what you think about it. Do you realize that Cooper, Poe, and Mr. Grey are the three American authors most read in foreign languages?”20 The editors at Harpers noticed this rare example of praise and invited Farrar to develop it into a short article entitled “Zane Grey and the American Spirit” that they twice incorporated into Grey promotions.21 Consequently, knowledgeable New Yorkers were already aware of Farrar’s favorable bias toward Grey before his comment in “Clean Fiction.”
Heywood Broun, a handsomely paid journalist and an outspok
en proponent of lively criticism, quickly seized upon Farrar’s remark and subjected it to withering ridicule in his September 30, 1925, column for the New York World. Referencing Farrar’s equation of Grey with Dreiser, he announces, “I nominate John Farrar, editor of the Bookman, to be shot at dawn or even earlier.” For Broun, Farrar is merely an excuse and his real objective is to assault Grey. “One of my chief complaints against Zane Grey is that he prettifies a wild and glowing country,” Broun hisses. “It is a fine and thrilling land, but just the same the sage is not purple. It is much more a dun and dusty green like the belly of the snake after his indictment in Eden.”22
Deciding that Grey’s work presented too much opportunity for wit to settle for a single salvo, Broun opened his next column with an disingenuous apology that his damnation may have been unfair since, he admitted, he had never actually read any of Grey’s novels. As a test case and as material for more columns, he proposed to read and report on The Call of the Canyon. “It may be that I am neurotic because I have read too much in the writings of sophisticated and cynical authors,” he concedes to Farrar in feigned contrition. “I need the sanity, the strength and the wholesomeness which can only be found in one of the great popular authors of America.” The reader anticipates a withering assault, but his hastily written columns offer mostly windy summary of the novel with two notable exceptions. Perceptively, Broun notices the eroticism in Grey’s romances, which he dismisses as “a sort of ham D. H. Lawrence,”23 and his social criticism, which he dubs “very precisely a Ku Klux philosophy.”24 Broun’s blustery efforts to extend his discussion of Grey through six columns exhausted his sense of humor, but he understood better than Whipple those pressure points in Grey’s writing with “a striving for a freer and easier utterance.” However, it was not in these columns that Broun coined the single most famous criticism of Grey—“the substance of any two Grey books could be written upon the back of a postage stamp”—but they certainly anticipated it. The source for this comment is actually unknown, and it would probably be forgotten today had Grey not referenced it in his complaint against critics’ mistreatment of his work.25
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