American Myth, Literary Journalism and The Last Cowboy's Henry Blanton
Susan Blue
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Graduate student: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
American Myth, Literary Journalism and The Last Cowboy's Henry Blanton
Abstract
Commentary on American Western myth emerges from Jane Kramer's The Last Cowboy.
This paper traces landscape and language in this piece of literary journalism,
examining the myth's roots in early American rhetoric. This cultural exploration
also reveals pertinent gender tensions. In revisiting the cowboy myth and its
formation, it is possible to isolate the changes in Western myth that Kramer
shows, and to explore the myth's contemporary ramifications.
American Myth, Literary Journalism, and The Last Cowboy's Henry Blanton
American Myth, Literary Journalism and The Last Cowboy's Henry Blanton
One of the characteristics and strengths of literary journalism1 lies in this
form's tendency to challenge a society's common myths, forcing readers to
reconsider them, perhaps even reconstitute them. Works of literary journalism
that force readers to consider myth include Joan Didion's Salvador, John
Hersey's Hiroshima, Lillian Ross' portrait of Ernest Hemingway, and Adrian
Nicole Leblanc's "Trina and Trina." To demonstrate literary journalism's
propensity to accomplish such cultural critiques, this paper uses literary
theory to focus on one work, Jane Kramer's The Last Cowboy. Originally published
as two parts in the "Profile" series in the New Yorker2, Kramer's work is more
than a mere biography or a piece of conventional journalism: it is an artful
reconstruction of fact. Thomas Connery defines literary journalism as
"nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed
into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical techniques generally
associated with fiction. The themes that then emerge," he continues, "make a
statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted"
(xiv). It is this interpretative quality of literary journalism that makes both
a literary and cultural analysis of it appropriate. This interpretive nature of
literary journalism, as opposed to conventional journalism, invites critical
response.
In The Last Cowboy, Jane Kramer looks carefully and insightfully at the life of
Henry Blanton, a genuine Texas cowboy at his fortieth birthday. Her story
centers on Henry and his wife Betsy, as they attempt to live the American cowboy
dream in the Texas Panhandle3. All his life, Henry has pined for the West of the
movies: the black clothing of the Virginian, the code of the handshake, life on
the chuck wagon, and the quintessential showdown. Kramer gives Henry his
showdown in The Last Cowboy, and he loses. Although, as will be explained later,
Betsy's role in the book is smaller than Henry's, her growing isolation and
sadness are juxtaposed to his insistence on adhering to the old codes of the
West and his optimism that those codes will work in his everyday life. This
essay explores the commentary on the myth of the American West that emerges from
this piece of literary journalism, specifically through Kramer's use of
landscape and language. Ultimately, The Last Cowboy leads us to cultural
realizations highly relevant in contemporary America. To unearth that
contemporary connection, this paper traces the myth of the American West back to
its roots in the early American psyche, allowing this context to appropriately
frame Henry's attachment to Westerns. Examining American mythology's roots in
the pastoral fantasy of the first colonists hints at why Henry loses the
showdown and finds himself so disappointed when his fortieth birthday rolls
around; Betsy's role in the myth reveals pertinent gender tensions. In
revisiting the cowboy myth and its formation, it is possible to isolate the
changes in that myth that Kramer shows, and to explore the myth's contemporary
ramifications.
Kramer foregrounds a record of how the myth actualized in the lives of Henry
and Betsy, highlighting how out-of-sync Henry's imaginative world is with the
real world in which he is trying to survive. While who won the conflicts over
physical territory in the West is fairly clear, who is winning the ongoing
cultural territory is still unclear; and American perceptions of myth lie at the
center of the battle. Contemporary America seems generally to understand and
widely recognize that Native Americans were treated unconscionably by settlers,
and that women's needs and aspirations were secondary to the "westering" impulse
which produced cowboys. In fact, James Maguire notes that during the last
thirty-five years, most writers of Westerns have "articulated in their art the
conviction that we must stop exploiting not only other human beings but also the
natural world that sustains all life" (437). Yet in The Last Cowboy, the myths
which drove people West and which resulted from its settling are still obviously
at work. Cultural and literary critics alike have noted the presence of the myth
of the West in American literature and its significance. The myth of the West
includes, of course, the idea of America as an open land full of unlimited and
ever-expanding opportunities for individuals strong enough to forge success.
Richard Slotkin writes that myths give coherence and direction to societies
(Regeneration 3) but continues that "a people unaware of its myths is likely to
continue living by them," (4) even if the ideas are destructive. "Myths reach
out from the past," he writes, "to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the
living" (5). This look at The Last Cowboy focuses on that uncertain cultural
territory of American myth.
In exploring that territory, Kramer gives Henry's world dramatic form by
presenting the events of the book, as mentioned, as a Western showdown. She does
this structurally by alternating chapters between Henry's daily existence and
aspects of his past that threaten him. They come together as the narrative
progresses, a scene of Henry's present and then a scene which threatens Henry's
lifestyle (a glimpse of general history or of Henry's past), much like
alternating scenes in Westerns often show the conflicting parties riding
furiously on their horses to the meeting place. Readers gain a clearer view of
Henry's rejection of his past as an imminent confrontation draws closer.
Ironically, within the larger scheme of Kramer's structural showdown are Henry's
continued refusals to actually confront what threatens his well-being and his
attempts to manufacture meaningless showdowns to satisfy his pride. To craft
Henry's showdown, Kramer builds suspense and meaning by developing Henry and
Betsy as characters and revealing their relationship to the myth. The track she
follows in doing so recounts their life together:
Chapter One: Henry's current situation, especially his unsettled state of mind,
Two: a history of the cowboy and the myth surrounding the reality,
Three: a description of their current location, Willow Ranch, and its
background,
Four: Henry's birthday adventure with Tom, including a manufactured showdown, a
fight they pick with two strangers daring to wear cowboy hats,
Five: a history of cattle country and Henry's grandfather,
Six: Henry's and several colleagues' discussion of the life, woes, and virtues
of the modern cowboy,
Seven: a history of the Panhandle and the economics of the cattle business,
Eight: Henry's mini-showdown with George and Emily, who confront him with his
distorted version of the past,
Nine: personal background, including Henry's educational history that left him
sour on the world outside ranching and led him to "tak[e] his instruction from
the movies" (97),
Ten: Henry's sheer optimism stemming from his impending deal,
Eleven: the desolate life Betsy has led,
Twelve: and finally the narrative's culmination in Henry's final failure to
effect change and express himself "right" as he castrates his neighbor's bulls.
Thus, tension in the chapters builds as Kramer alternates truth against Henry's
interpretation of it.
After recounting certain gains Henry's family has made, beginning with his
grandfather, such as a pragmatism born of hard work, religious conviction, and
the possibility of material prosperity, Kramer then revisits the losses, the
greatest of which is the loss of land and cattle through failed negotiations.
She shows the greatest effect of these losses through Betsy. The contrast
between Henry and Betsy forms the most poignant manifestation of the book's core
tension, Henry's obsession with the myth; for Henry remains self-centeredly
optimistic that the code of the handshake will come through for him, and Betsy
sacrifices herself, denying her own happiness. Kramer's attention to character
development and the book's structure intertwine. She links her chapters together
through character development and attention to myth in Henry's life. The art of
her tale is driven by uncovering what has caused Henry's inability to achieve
success. Through these disparate episodes we see that Henry's tragic flaw is his
need to cling to these defunct images and codes. This development provides much
of the unity between chapters.
Every episode in The Last Cowboy develops this characterization. Through her
alternating chapters, Henry as a character emerges, and Kramer reveals that his
true showdown is the search for his identity; the search is a showdown because
it is not a journey, it is a fight. A "cowboy in trouble" may have generally
been "spared the humiliation and confusion of accounting for himself" (Kramer
26), but that lifestyle has robbed him of a clear identity. As he sits silently
in the Robinson kitchen on his birthday, having picked a fight with strangers in
town and "looking as if he had done his duty to his brother and did not know
why, suddenly, his duty seemed so humiliating to him" (30). Henry distrusts his
grandfather's and father's experience, and even his own experience, living in
such a pastoral fantasy that he actively fights reality. His struggle with
reality informs much of the book's tragic nature; he is the incarnation of
misapplied, misunderstood myth. Henry's final showdown with the bulls only
accentuates his fruitless struggle.
Henry's struggle with reality surprised Kramer, as it surprises many readers.
She writes in her book's preface that she expected to find someone "less
troubling" when she traveled to Texas in search of a cowboy. She returned to her
own world with " a kind of parable of failed promise" that taught her more about
America than she "had ever hoped or wanted to discover" (ix). Yet her account is
distinctly touching; she does not overlook Henry's courtesy or his pain. The
ambiguity and irony in Kramer's work are evident in its very title. For the
American reader imbued with the cultural myth of the brave cowboy riding his way
to happiness, "the last cowboy" perhaps indicates a final vestige of real men
and a purer America. Indeed we still hear echoes of Frederick Jackson Turner's
frontier claim: that settling the West enabled Americans to shun European ways
and transformed them to set about the crucial, democratic task of settling the
continent. For such readers, Henry's failures no doubt seem aberrations. In this
light, instead of resonating with irony, Henry Blanton's last act of castration
affirms his masculinity and hope for a new beginning.
Read this way, though, as a simple culturally-relevant biography, Kramer's book
loses much of its irony and richness. The Last Cowboy has been understood in
various ways: an account of the difficult economy of ranching, a biography
including varied tangents4, and as "part of a larger project of intercultural
interpretation5." Part of the power of Kramer's book lies in the possibility of
these multiple readings. But if we place the book in its cultural context and
examine its codes carefully, we can uncover a specific, relevant message that
situates it at the center of an important moment for myth and literature in
America. In one sense, the "cowboy" clearly is Kramer's focus, but other
significant cultural allusions permeate the book. In their cultural context,
past and present, cowboys enact conquest upon the land and people of the West;
today the cowboy images, codified as a throwback to a more innocent time,
perpetuate that conquest-oriented attitude. In this context, Henry's incessant
optimism is undercut by impending disaster; and through showing Betsy's
increasing, profound sense of loss and grief, Kramer critiques that
myth-in-action. For a complete understanding of The Last Cowboy, Henry's
struggle with reality must be contextualized. Though Kramer's findings may be
unconscious, the particular ways in which Henry's story indicts the myth of the
West are salient for any discussion of her book.
The dichotomy between Henry's optimism and his failures that permeates The Last
Cowboy inhabits the very landscape surrounding Henry and fills the book. Jane
Tompkins explains the importance of landscape in Westerns and writes that the
land is "defined by absence: of trees, of greenery, of houses, of the signs of
civilization, above all, absence of water and shade6." She writes that the land
challenges those who inhabit it to be as brave and strong as it is (71). Kramer
seems to sense this relationship between people and land and focuses directly on
the landscape of the Panhandle ranch where the Blantons live, ascribing
importance to the idea of place.
Henry's passion to succeed on the land and in fact own land of his own again
places him in the middle of the idea of American dream. Patricia Nelson Limerick
writes in The Legacy of Conquest that "neither the Western past nor the Western
present will make sense until attachment to property and attraction to profit
find their proper category as a variety of strong emotion" (76). And Annette
Kolodny has written that to fully understand the literature of the frontier, we
must "see the ways in which the collision of languages encodes the physical
terrain as just as much a player in the drama as the humans, with the landscape
variously enabling, thwarting, or even evoking human action and desires
("Letting Go" 3). This concern for the land in literature is enlightening, for
the landscape is symbolic; Kolodny focuses on the need to understand the
unacknowledged fantasies that drive us either to desecrate or preserve the land
(Land Before xii).
Elements of Henry's approach to myth and reality can be found in the early
American perception of land and its use. Kolodny effectively demonstrates that
when colonists came to the New World,
all the backdrops for European literary pastoral were subsumed in the image of
an America promising material ease without labor or hardship . . . and all
this possible because, at the deepest psychological level, the move to America
was experienced as the daily reality of what has become its single dominating
metaphor: regression from the cares of adult life and a return to the primal
warmth of womb or breast in a feminine landscape. (Lay 6)
Americans actually interpreted their metaphors as literal truth. "American
pastoral," Kolodny writes, "holds at its very core the promise of fantasy as
daily reality" (7). Colonists saw the land as both attractive and vulnerable
(3). This "pastoral impulse" to view the land as feminine creates a
disconcerting tension: viewing the land as both virginal and maternal (22). The
very core of American mythology is that the symbolic and daily activities are
joined in this odd, mixed metaphor. The Last Cowboy is a prime example of the
metaphor which Kolodny isolates still in action. We may no longer consciously
think about land in feminine terms, but clearly many still experience land in
this way, living as if a frontier lay before them awaiting their arrival.
Certainly this is the center of Henry's problem: he has confused the myth with
a reality he can act out every day. Kramer's construction of him in this light
is deliberate; her story is fact, but she chooses carefully what she includes,
and she consciously shapes the narrative as a distortion of myth. She creates a
Henry Blanton who is trapped in a present in which he cannot cope because he
references his life in terms of myth. He exists apart from The Last Cowboy, but
within those pages, Kramer portrays him against the backdrop of the landscape of
American mythology. The initial colonial tension is easily seen in Henry: he
wants to be one with a pristine land (e.g. sleeping under the stars), but he
fights to subdue it (e.g. irrigation, electric fences).
This tradition of which Henry is a part is long and illustrious. Philip
Freneau's poetry and Thomas Jefferson's agrarian ideal are both firmly based on
the pastoral impulse (Kolodny 26). Kolodny pinpoints the oscillation between
enthusiasm and disillusion which stems from this conflict (44); Henry
experiences such shifts throughout the narrative, especially highlighted in
chapters ten--sheer optimism--and twelve--utter despair. Language plays an
important role in trying to maintain both aspects of the land metaphor.
Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur attempted to forge a vocabulary which
would hospitably house the varying tensions, but his work as a whole simply
exposes them (65). John James Audubon, too, grappled with the conflict but found
himself unable to resolve his concern and called upon Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, and others like them to reconcile the ideas (88), much as Henry
counts on his big screen cowboys, John Wayne, Glen Ford, and others, to do the
"expressin' right" for him. It is significant that Audubon looked to fiction to
work out the messy details of the conflict, realizing that the ideas could not
coalesce realistically. Fiction began to historicize and actually shape the
myth; pieces of literary journalism like Kramer's, then, work nicely against
that tradition. As a literary journalist, Kramer can expose the reality
artfully.
Kolodny writes that women of the frontier developed their own metaphor for
relating to the land, and she presents their version as a more desirable
alternative: "If the men altered the landscape to make it comply with their
dreams of pleasure . . . the women patched quilts and embroidered . . . and
cultivated a nearby garden plot . . ." ("Honing" 201) Women, she writes,
"required the intercession of a meaningful relational paradigm in and through
which [they] might be usefully and comfortably located on [the] terrain . . .
for women, massive physical alteration was a fantasy projection honed not by
force but by the transforming power of language: a languagescape" (200). "If men
persisted in discovering--and then despoiling--Paradise, the women (it appears)
all along knew the garden needed tending," she adds (194). This information is
useful in examining our frontier history and our current views of land; it also
provides a helpful tool in understanding Betsy's relation to myth in The Last
Cowboy.
But Kolodny's implication that the female metaphor is acceptable is
problematic. This is a dangerous supposition for Kolodny to make, that the land
needed tending. The truth is that neither the male nor the female metaphor is
entirely acceptable. They both contribute to the futility of the myth; they both
imply conquest. An important aspect of these metaphors Kolodny seems to miss is
the displacement of American Indians necessary to enact either metaphor and the
changes in the land either requires. Approval of a garden metaphor seems
premature, given even its imposition on the land. She writes that "to survive,
women needed to readjust and recast alternative relational paradigms" to "assert
their right to a languagescape of their own" ("Honing" 202), neglecting the
right of Native Americans to enact their languagescape.
Encoding this within the myth/metaphor hints at Mary Louise Pratt's work on
ideas of conquest. She reveals that "European bourgeois subjects [sought] to
secure their innocence at the same moment as they assert[ed] European hegemony"
and terms this process the "anti-conquest" (7). Anti-conquest notions are all
throughout The Last Cowboy, and Kramer alerts her readers to the oppression
inherent in the activities throughout the course of the book. By coding their
action as positive (asserting that the land needed tending), innocence is
maintained. This is evident in Henry's treatment of Betsy; he tells her, when
discussing various times he has left her alone in the country, "I was protecting
your interests, Betsy" (Kramer 91), while he was clearly simply indulging his
own wants. He tries to contextualize his actions positively. Elements of the
anti-conquest are visible on a broader scale as well through the "mythic
geography" (9) the cowboys create. Kramer writes that
The Panhandle was Indian country until 1874. Comanche had taken over the area
after 1700, and they kept it for themselves for the next hundred and fifty
years, letting in only Cheyenne and Kiowa . . . Kit Carson arrived for an
Indian war in 1864, but the first whites who actually came with the intention
of staying were the buffalo hunters, and they did not arrive until 1873--which
was the year they seem to have discovered that the Army's much-vaunted
Indian-treaty "policy" of keeping white hunters north of the Arkansas River was
little more than a rumor . . . After that, the cattlemen came in. (38)
The myth is entirely one of displacement. The people of The Last Cowboy are out
of sync; they don't belong. Henry himself notes, "It's just that no place seemed
right . . ." (105) Kramer colors even the first move West as a displacement:
they were "crowded out of home and pushing west toward a lost privacy that had
more to do with Eastern forests than with Western plains" (7). Soon, "Texans
were buying up good pastureland for just a few dollars an acre . . . and there
was still so much land left over that the state was able to offer sixteen free
square-mile sections in exchange for every mile of track surveyed and laid on
its new railroads" (32), she writes. All of this was possible because the "early
Panhandle ranches were financed by English or Scottish capitalists" (39).
Missing in the minds of the settlers, are the Native Americans.
The "collision" of relationships between people and the land Kolodny alludes to
becomes clear in Kramer's description of the landscape. These images show the
importance of the metaphor in Henry's life--it has left him utterly desolate:
"Henry Blanton turned forty on an April day when the first warm winds of spring
crossed the Texas Panhandle and the diamond back rattlers, fresh and venomous
from their winter sleep, came slipping out from under the cap rock of the
Canadian River breaks" (Kramer 1). Kramer writes that there was "something
unsettled about his character--something that made him restless and a little out
of control" (3); these qualities are in direct response to his relationship with
the landscape. It should be noted that Henry is not entirely unsuccessful on the
land. His neighbors recognize what a good cowboy he is, and he has established
quite a reputation. Yet Henry's conflict with the land is obvious. He hears
"moaning ghosts who r[i]de the river breeze" (Kramer 2).
Kramer provides images of isolation as she relates that the road to the Blanton
house begins "as a narrow, rutted cowpath off a highway" (11), winds on and on,
"tracing enormous curves across the pastures," and then twelve miles later dips
"behind a little rise shaded by hackberry trees and cottonwoods" where it trails
off into a footpath to their front door (13). Either side of the path is "flat,
irrigated land" where the cows stand as if "puzzled and repelled" by it (12).
Outside their door is a "sheet-metal barn the size of an airplane hangar," a
little hill, a "shabby, solitary willow," wooden pens, and the old chuck wagon
Henry's grandfather once used (13). These disparate elements of Henry's
landscape reflect his inability to achieve peace.
The land isolates Betsy too, and due to the condition of the cowpath and the
Panhandle weather, she spends about two and a half hours commuting every day to
work (Kramer 19). Earlier in their marriage, they lived on ranches where camp
was "thirty or forty miles from a paved road, ranches where Betsy had to cart
water from a spring to do the dishes or wash her babies' diapers" (4). Henry is
aware of this isolation but revels in it: "Course it was hard on Betsy. She was
lonesome, I guess, with no women around to talk to. And it must of made her
nervous, being way out there with a baby to look after and the twins on the way
and no water for diapers, no electricity or telephone or nothing . . . I'd
rather be a-horseback, thinking, than talking to a woman. Cowboys don't like the
company of women much" (102). Betsy's alienation from the land becomes clear
during Kramer's description of her two-week stay in the hospital when her
appendix burst: "[S]he was having such a wonderful time visiting up and down the
corridors, talking to people about their troubles, that when the doctor
dismissed her she begged him to let her stay" (124).
Betsy's response to the land aligns with Kolodny's discussion of how frontier
women reacted to the land, just as Henry's response to the land evidences the
virginal/maternal metaphor. Women either viewed landscape by seeing "many
delightful prospects," (Kolodny, "Honing" 196) resulting in quilts and gardens,
or as the source of violent headaches, resulting in a return to town or back
East (200). Both responses can be seen in Betsy's life. She lives on the land
and makes the best she feels she can of it by tending to her daughters and
keeping the property running smoothly. Yet she "returns to town" several days a
week to work as an invoice clerk for a grain-sorghum dealer and yearns to stay
in the sociable context of the hospital. Betsy feels not only alone but also
vulnerable on the land:
Betsy's house on the Willow Ranch was small and not very solidly constructed.
It had no basement, and Betsy, who worried about tornadoes, had kept it spare
and simple, as if she half expected it to blow away one day . . . She knew that
the men, out in the pastures, would find a creek or a gully to protect them,
but to her mind a flimsy prefabricated ranch house was no place to wait out a
tornado . . . (Kramer 127)
The men differed; Calvin, another cowboy, "loved to see the dirt turned, to
pick it up and smell it, to sit on a tractor and watch things grow" (Kramer 47).
He appreciates the land, but he also wants to see it used for his profit, and he
wants to oversee it. Another cowboy asks,
"See that tree, Ed?" He pointed to a fine old cottonwood over by the pen. It
was heavy with ripe seeds, just bursting into bloom. "That's real pretty, ain't
it . . . What I mean is this . . . You know what they say about this life
being no more than--now, what is it that they say?--no more than a flower
blooming. Well, that's what I believe." (59-60)
The men are clearly comfortable with the land. Theirs is an innocent view of the
land, but it is not carried out in action; it is anti-conquest. The cowboys use
the land in strange ways, such as supporting cattle to provide Americans with
the twenty-seven billion pounds of beef they consumed in 1976. The land will
probably continue supporting "that appetite," Kramer writes, "until no one can
afford the cost, in dollars and in lost protein, of the seven or eight pounds of
grain that a steer consumes to put on one pound of weight in a feed-yard pen"
(62). The cowboys change the land--via fences, irrigation, etc.--to suit their
needs, and the land does not always accommodate them.
The land is also used in a transitory sense: "Cowboys call yearling ranches
'calf hotels,' because calves use them like hotels--stopping on their way from a
farm to a feedyard for a little grazing, a little fresh air and medicine, and
the ministration of an able staff" (Kramer 71). Those who live on the land lack
stability. Kramer writes of time after time ranchers and farmers go broke off
the land, always fighting to survive. "Memory is short in west Texas," she
notices, "and only the cowboys and the rich widows talk much anymore about the
good old days of ranching" (77). Yet Henry persists in the anti-conquest: "One
thing's true, people sure is jealous of Texas grass," (85) he comments one time.
Henry does appreciate the sunsets now and then just as they are, but largely he
appreciates the land for what has been added to it: "This sure is one pretty
pasture, with all them windmills," he reflects (Kramer 111-12). His reasons for
ascribing value to the land are entirely for profit with no regard for the land
itself. He strikes the ultimate irony when he muses, "Course, sometimes I think
that if that old lake got polluted and had to be drained away, things might be a
whole lot better. I mean, a lot of people would leave, and it'd be a real nice
place again" (86). He is oblivious to his own displacement and to the fact that
the land does not exist solely for him. He fails to see that his presence on the
land displaced others, and, finally, he fails to see that he will be displaced
in another sense if he continues to view the land so destructively and
possessively.
And Kramer chooses to frame Henry's final failure of the book, effectively, in
a foreboding landscape:
Henry lost his deal with Lester Hill on a day in June when summer seemed to
settle over the Panhandle like a cloak of heat . . . The rich spring green of
the pastures had begun to fade to the dry dull green of a tough scrub that
would keep the cattle working for their nourishment through summer, and by
early afternoon that day even the yearlings were sluggish, as if the morning's
grazing had taken all the effort they could muster. (138)
Clearly, Henry doesn't have a chance. It is, in fact, the "droughty summer"
which Lester uses as his excuse to rob Henry of the calves he had promised him
(140).
Henry fights every day to be what he believes a cowboy is: in harmony with the
land and "expressin' right." He, of course, achieves neither because he follows
the same path the first settlers did. In resolving the tension the metaphor
implies, the settlers' practicality took over through their desire for wealth.
All movement into previously unsettled areas involved the idea of conquest by
its very nature, regardless of the metaphor used to encode the action. With
"their technology at once the instrument of wealth and the instrument of
penetration into nature's darkest and most hidden precincts" (Kolodny, Lay 134),
soon no more land existed to settle, and the frustration took on a new aspect.
The tension of the pastoral impulse was "finally expressed through anger--anger
at the land that had seemed to promise and then defeat men's longings for an
ambience of total gratification" (137). That anger at the failure of the myth is
clear in Henry. Neighbors noticed him becoming hard on his wife and his animals
(Kramer 3-4). Kolodny's hope is that in transforming the landscape metaphor,
change in perception can be wrought (Lay 159). Language and landscape
imagery--the languagescape--become, then, the key to the myth. Examining
Kramer's contribution to this issue engenders a way to examine how and if the
metaphor is changing.
Since Henry's attachment to myth is embedded in what he says and will not say,
language is a crucial aspect of this inquiry. This issue of language is also
important because Henry's preoccupation with it reveals his roots in the
American psyche. The language he uses is the manifestation of the metaphor and
points to Puritan rhetoric. Sacvan Bercovitch writes that the "Puritans were
inveterate believers in words" (221) and that their main legacy surviving in our
culture is that of rhetoric (219). The Puritan tradition is steeped in "a new
American identity that obviated the commonsense limits of history. They took
possession by designating America as text and then interpreting the text as
themselves . . . whose meaning transcends territorial limits, so that it could
be extended, in a sort of movable feast . . . to any place . . . that could be
invested with the sacral qualities of the myth . . ." (224) This extension
includes any movie house and Henry Blanton's Texas. Just as Puritans found their
destiny in the Bible, Henry finds his in the movies.
"What happens," Bercovitch poses, "when history severs the symbol from the
nation . . ." (228) What happens when Henry's myth is separated from reality? He
aspires to be a cowboy in the tradition of Glenn Ford, but he shies away from
confrontation, never making it to a showdown until a literary creation crafts
one for him. But even then, he cannot prevail. He is unable to revise the cowboy
images that dominate him to fit into the changing twentieth century. Kramer
shows that he is stifled by the shadows of movie figures and calls upon
them--the perpetuators of the myth--as gods. Alfred North Whitehead offers
additional insight into this futility which traps Henry:
The art of a free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic
code; and secondly in a fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code
serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies
which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must
ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life
stifled by useless shadows. (88)
Henry's shadows on one side of him are images of his grandfather and father whom
he disregards, and on the other side are the movie cowboys he so esteems but
with whom he has no real connection. The disparity between the existence of his
grandfather and characters portrayed on screen is wide. The real life of a
cowboy was not typically glamorous, and the public perception of cowboys until
businesses and artists set about changing it was pejorative. "It was in the year
1886--the same year that brought the down-fall of the open-range cattle
industry--that the cowboy was fully rehabilitated," Lonn Taylor writes. "In that
year there was a flurry of articles and illustrations glorifying the
cowboy. . ." (64). Just as settlers quickly used the "virgin land" for profit,
the cowboy myth was based on profit.
Kramer recognizes and exposes this false base of the cowboy myth. She writes
that the vision of the country was "rooted in Europe" (7) and that even in the
1800's ranchers were busy "turning cattle kingdoms into cattle companies" (10).
"It took the rest of the century and the imagination of Easterners to produce a
proper cowboy--a cowboy whom children could idolize, and grown men, chafing at
their own domesticated competence, hold as a model of some profoundly masculine
truth" (6). She relates that Henry despises the "insidious Eastern effeminacy
that had infected the moral landscape of the West and left a man like him nearly
helpless in his outrage" (28-29); Henry's life is clearly directed by bosses in
the East and even owners in Europe, and he cannot see that they have dictated
the myth all along. "Ranching lately," he feels, "ha[s] less to do with an
individual's adventure with a herd of cattle than with that global network of
dependencies and contingencies that people had taken to calling 'agribusiness'"
(35). He looks down on Easterners and at the same time depends on them: "'I'm
going to find me a backer,' Henry told [Tom]. 'Maybe a rich lady from New York.
I saw on television the other night that them Eastern ladies got control of all
their husbands' money'" (46-47). The commodified cowboy, of course, continues
today outside of Henry's interpretation--in cigarette advertisements, for
example. Jonathan Franzen describes the classic Marlboro campaign:
Place a lone ranch hand against a backdrop of buttes at sunset, and just about
every positive association a cigarette can carry is in the picture: rugged
individualism, masculine sexuality, escape from an urban modernity, strong
flavors, the living of life intensely. The Marlboro marks our commercial
culture's passage from an age of promises to an age of pleasant empty dreams.
(43)
The myth has been thoroughly commodified from the start and remains so, but
Henry cannot see through the movie images to the "empty dreams" and the false
constructions of reality that lie beyond them. "You got to see old Chill Wills
in 'The Rounders' to know what those old cattlemen were really like" (Kramer
56), he insists. Yet film historians and most Americans know that most Westerns
are "a deliberate manipulation of a nation's history" (Fenin and Everson 58).
Henry's patterning after the wrong images explains his failure to revise the
myth. Henry looks to the set, finalized cowboys on screen who are the same each
time the tape rolls. Movies of the American West, beginning with The Great Train
Robbery in 1903 and continuing through today's epics, typically present
landscape in much the same way Henry sees it. Kramer summarizes the Western
scenario well:
the land and the cattle went to their proper guardians and brought a fortune in
respect and power. It was a West where the best cowboy got to shoot the meanest
outlaw, woo the prettiest schoolteacher, bed her briefly to produce sons, and
then ignore her for the finer company of other cowboys--a West as sentimental
and as brutal as the people who made a virtue of that curious combination of
qualities and called it the American experience. (10)
The operative phrase here is "proper guardians."
Women, too, played a role in this "civilizing" process, and Kramer's discussion
of Betsy reveals key changes in approaching the myth. The Western itself went
through several stages of depicting women before it settled near reality.
Initially in films of the West, the women were from the East and did not
understand the West, resulting in a culture clash (Warshow 65). Women who
understood the cowboy were typically prostitutes, independent themselves (66).
Shelley Armitage has traced appearances of cowgirl heroines in novels and notes
that while early literature portraying cowgirls emphasized the distinct actions
of the heroine and her skills, later novels returned to pat stereotypes of woman
as either "good" but inert, or active and assertive but sexual (175). The
Eastern female often played the role of civilization; women were genteel females
and the primary source of refinement in the Western story (Smith 112). Countless
movies end with a marriage of the civilized woman and the frontier man,
suggesting the happy union which creates America and perpetuates the illusion of
successfully living by the code of the Western myth--the synthesis of Eastern
civilization and Western coarseness. After the genteel female type came women
who were independent but either had grown up as Indians or roamed disguised as
men (Smith 112).
Looming in this reality, is Betsy. Kramer does not make Betsy the main
character or thoroughly feminize the myth by focusing exclusively on the female
roles. Rather, she gives them exactly the weight they are given within the
perimeters of the myth itself. This actually works to make her feminization of
the myth more effective, because this portrayal suggests the oppression that the
women of the myth face. And while Betsy's role is smaller than her husband's,
she is the active process of civilization in the narrative. The realistic and
civilized responsibilities in this story are evidenced by Betsy, who was once
"the prettiest girl in her class" but has been "looking tired lately" (22).
Kramer feminizes the myth by clearly showing the female as thriving. This is not
a reversion to the typical Western in which the female civilizes the savagery of
the West through marriage. This is an addendum, an extension, an "and now, the
rest of the story." Kramer places Betsy's sympathetic portrayal significantly in
the second-to-last chapter, where Betsy's role in the scenario will potentially
remain in readers' minds, immediately before Henry's last attempt to gain cowboy
authority.
Clearly, this attention to Betsy is not a manipulation of truth by Kramer. She
does not paint the females of The Last Cowboy as helpless pawns who have no
control; they do choose to be part of the myth and have compassion on their
cowboy-husbands. Betsy participates in the myth in this sense, so is
complicit--as the garden metaphor suggests--although she is not the active force
perpetuating the myth. Within the reality of the lived-out-myth, the female
characters attempt to carve a life-giving code of their own. Emily has found her
niche beside her cowboy-husband, asserting her independence and working with him
outside. Annabel stands distinctly behind hers, dedicated to providing Calvin
with solace and peace at home through nice meals and a chintz couch. But Betsy
struggles, and each attempt she makes leaves her more frustrated and tired. She
tries Emily's code and then Annabel's, and neither works for her. Perhaps the
other females in the story have gained an amount of satisfaction because their
husbands do not merge myth and reality as Henry does; that information does not
emerge from the text. But Betsy's struggle is clearly rooted in Henry's
misapplication of the myth. Henry is completely oblivious to his effect on
Betsy; Betsy says, "He's the most responsible man I know about his job, but not
about me" (134). He feels all a woman "should need" are "her home and her
babies" (102) and can only respond to Betsy's tears with, "The county's good for
a man and a cow, honey, but it's always been hell on a mule or a woman" (122).
Here Kramer shows the aftermath of the tidy marriages which often end Westerns,
as Betsy tries to find her niche in the land.
Henry cannot relate to the land because he struggles to grasp a reality outside
Westerns; his movie obsession complicates the collision of humans and landscape.
In the 1960's, Westerns began to depict the struggle of the plains and reflected
a "cynical, anti-heroic attitude toward the West" (Maynard 93). Henry notes this
shift: "But the movies were changing--they were full of despair lately" (Kramer
5). Henry objects to this trend and convinces himself that he knows what the
past was really like. Neighbors George and Emily try to prod him into seeing the
past clearly and adapting: "I sure hope you and Lester Hill got something down
on paper about that deal of yours" (84), George says. He continues,
"You can't go back, Henry," George said. "What if you was still having to go
round in a wagon?"
Henry told George that he had a cousin who preferred wagons, a cousin who had
stood at the gate to his land with a shotgun when the town came in with orders
to lay a paved road. (86)
Henry remains stubborn, and later George counters, "Come on, Henry. Don't tell
me about those old days. I was in them. And don't tell me about those antiques,
either, 'cause I lived with them." But Henry insists on his view: "I just can't
understand why you keep talking about liking progress," Henry replies (88).
Robert Warshow writes that once "the true theme of the Western movie" is exposed
as "not the freedom and expansiveness of frontier life, but its limitations . .
. then even the landscape itself ceases to be quite the arena of free movement
it once was, but becomes instead a great empty waste, cutting down more often
than it exaggerates the stature of the horseman who rides across it" (69). This
cutting down is exactly what happens to Henry when Kramer takes away the gloss
of the myth and reveals its stark reality.
These movie interpretations of the myth and Henry's acceptance of them hearken
back to Bercovitch's description of the American tradition of rhetoric. For
Henry, the cowboy is held together by words: he must express himself as a
cowboy. This expression naturally involves more than language; he dresses the
part as well, beginning each day in "black boots, a pair of clean black jeans,
and his old black hat and jacket" (Kramer 17). But even more prominently and
consistently, Henry broods over the need to say the right things. Puritans held
themselves together in the midst of the colonial tension by "obsessive verbal
rituals" (Bercovitch 221), and Henry does the same; in the age of technology, to
the "verbal" has been added the visual. Kramer writes that Henry braved nights
alone outside by "fixing his thoughts on calm, courageous movie cowboys" (2). He
cannot live in harmony with the land, because he is nearly oblivious to it--his
focus is elsewhere.
Henry remains equally oblivious to Betsy throughout, further suggesting that he
views the two--women and the land--in much the same way. He allows Betsy to
work, but begrudgingly and only according to his terms. He stiffens when
confronted by her choice, such as when Calvin says, "Least I can say that
Annabel ain't no liberated woman. Annabel ain't never run off and worked, like
some I know" (Kramer 58). Kramer draws attention to the roles women play in
these scenes of The Last Cowboy. Her vision seeks out the reality of their lives
and choices, and she finds several types, although the types are not the
clear-cut ones of the early Western. Kramer hones in on the daily tasks and
choices of particular, everyday females who populate cowboy land. Through this
discussion, she shows that the myth of the American West is entirely,
relentlessly white male, offering no equality for the Native-Americans,
Mexicans, African-Americans, or women in the narrative (or in some cases,
significantly absent from the narrative).
Kramer, though, frames her story around a white male. By choosing to work
within the mythological construct, she is able to both critique the myth and
show its power. In fact, she on one level gives credence to Henry's desire for
myth in that she grants him the showdown he always dreamed of having. Through
her alternating chapters, eventually all the concepts converge when he finds his
neighbor's bulls intruding on his land, having ruined one of his cows. His
reaction to this--it's "like you had a daughter and she was raped"
(148)--further shows his land/female link. The futility of Henry's situation is
evident from the first. Kramer writes that his fortieth birthday was "the kind
of day that Henry would have expected for the showdown in a good Western" (1).
Henry would perhaps not term The Last Cowboy "a good Western," but it is
certainly a new kind of Western, and one that works to lay the entire notion
bare. Kramer is not the first to do this, as the revisionist trend beginning in
the 1960's demonstrates; but because The Last Cowboy is a piece of literary
journalism, the opportunity allows Kramer to create a unique statement. This is
no linguistic exploration of the myth or a fictionalized probability; this is
reality that she contextualizes within the myth. She shows how the ideas
expressed by Jefferson and fictionalized by Cooper actualize in the life of a
real man.
Painfully and ironically, The Last Cowboy ends not with a marriage as many of
Henry's beloved Westerns did, but with a castration. After Henry finds the bulls
who have wandered onto his property, he castrates them one by one; he is
liberated by the possibility of violence, and yet his action does not work. He
rounds up the intruders and deals with them, making himself feel like a cowboy,
at least for a while. The action briefly satisfies him, but when "he had roped
and thrown the next bull, he knew that was not expressing right--not expressing
right at all--but by then there was nothing he could do about it" (Kramer 148).
Some have read this scene as merely a bit of local color7, but to ignore its
place in the wider picture of Western ideology would overlook important
implications. Slotkin writes that the first colonists saw the frontier as an
opportunity for regeneration and that the means for that regeneration became
violence. That myth of regeneration through violence, he writes, became "the
structuring metaphor of the American experience" (Regeneration 5). Kramer shows
that Henry's delusion of power is self-destructive. Not only do his actions fail
to satisfy him, but he has virtually been castrated by technology himself just
as he uses technology to castrate the calves in his barn, which "was foul with a
crust of blood and feces which no spring rain could wash away" (14). His
discomfort with "that radio gadget" (85) in his truck, his refusal to sign
contracts, his desire for a drawn gun, his rigidity--destroy him. In other
words, his insistence on clinging to the code of the West instead of making him
the man he so desperately wants to be, ensures that he will never be that man.
Ironically, the movies that created his idea of a cowboy are possible only
because of the technology he disdains. His conquest-oriented metaphor leaves him
completely alienated and out of control. Trapped in his own outmoded model,
Henry cannot escape.
More than a fine piece of literary journalism depicting this modern cowboy,
Kramer's work addresses our current treatment of myth and its role in our lives.
The Last Cowboy reminds us to examine, as Slotkin suggests, what role
myth--consciously or unconsciously--plays in our actions. Maguire, too, finds
that contemporary Westerns encode the message that if we are to survive as a
society we must see Westerns as a call to transform ourselves (464). The Last
Cowboy serves as a key point in that process: a true, literary picture of the
West in action, minds and metaphors not yet transformed. Indeed, the myth
abounds in our society. Slotkin writes that if we can understand where and how
the myth originated and "what real human concerns and social relationship the
rules conceal or distort," and what historical consequences exist for acting out
the myth, we may be able to respond more intelligently the next time the ideas
of the myth are invoked (Fatal 20), whether via cigarette advertisements, an
election campaign, or Henry Blanton.
Kramer pokes through these myth distortions in Henry's world by revealing the
impotence he displays in relation to the land and the recurring images of
castration. She thus shows the complete futility of the myth of the American
West. Just as American landscape was viewed by settlers as both virginal and
maternal, the Old West, she seems to say, is both impotent and destructive. Her
work may help effect the change in language so important to Kolodny's work and
shape the way the frontier--past and present--is viewed in the future. Certainly
the myth has a place in American culture, but lived out as reality in the
pattern of the earliest white Americans, it does not succeed. Kramer does not
seem to provide the full extent of Kolodny's hope--that of a new metaphor for
the land--but she does take readers in that direction by exposing the inability
of the myth/metaphor to function as reality. She advances the process of
recognition, clearly showing the desolation of the metaphor. This paves the way
for more work to show how women and men who have revised the myth perceive land.
How has their success in revision stemmed from a new metaphor? And how must
language, the rhetoric of the myth, be used in this process? Henry's and the
Puritans' "obsessive verbal rituals" aside, what form of language accompanies a
useful application of mythology and a constructive, healthy view of landscape?
Further exploration of other works of frontier literature or additional, future
literature may illuminate those issues. Kramer's landscape imagery and Henry's
clear link to early American perceptions of myth and rhetoric create the unique
languagescape of The Last Cowboy. That languagescape speaks not just to
perceptions of frontier life, but to America's historic and contemporary
treatment of land. The importance of these issues presented in Kramer's work
attests to the power literary journalism exerts as a cultural critique of myths
in America.
Notes
1 Here "literary journalism" is used as it has been over the past 15 years, and
as it has come to be defined, particularly by Thomas Connery, A Sourcebook of
American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1992); and Norman Sims, The Literary Journalists (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1984) and Literary Journalism (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1995). Other works that deal with literary journalism include Barbara
Lounsberry, The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990); James N. Stull, Literary Selves: Autobiography
and Contemporary American Nonfiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993);
Chris Anderson, Style as Argument: Contemporary Nonfiction: Contemporary
American Nonfiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1987); Chris Anderson, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); David
Eason's "The New Journalism and the Image-World" in Literary Journalism in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
2The ran in two parts as "Cowboy" in the May 30 and June 6, 1977, editions of
the New Yorker.
3 In The Last Cowboy, Kramer traces the way in which Henry interprets the word
"cowboy" and the futility of his particular interpretation. Henry bases his
entire notion of being a cowboy on Westerns he has seen and attempts to live in
the false world those images create. The action centers on an impending verbal
deal Henry has made his immediate superior. Henry refuses to confront his boss
about money due him, and he also will not agree to ask for a contract sealing
their agreement. As time for the deal draws near, the boss changes his mind.
Henry drives around in "helpless fury" and spends the night in his truck. The
next morning he finds three bulls from a neighboring ranch wandering on his
property. Kramer closes the book with his subsequent act of retribution: he
castrates them, accomplishing nothing.
4These responses arose during a February 22, 1996, class discussion of an
excerpt from The Last Cowboy.
5John Pauly, Professor in the Department of Communication at Saint Louis
University and author of the forthcoming Dictionary of Literary Biography entry
on Jane Kramer takes this view of The Last Cowboy, seeing it as a continuation
of on-going themes Kramer has developed in other works. In that manuscript, he
characterizes Kramer's writing as depictions of cultural migrations and
disruptions.
6Characterizing the land as full of absences is, of course, a decidedly
Eurocentric perception of the landscape. Those who first inhabited the land did
not note a lack of "signs of civilization," but this view of the land correctly
summarizes the way it is perceived in typical Westerns and by the cowboys in
Kramer's work, anticipating this paper's discussion of the "anti-conquest" to
follow.
7Based on a letter dated May 4, 1996, from John Pauly, as he related an
experience with a Texan who read the book and responded to the final scene.
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