The gunfight that never ends

The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted a matter of seconds, yet the buildup to it took months to develop and the memory haunted survivors for the rest of their lives. Mary Doria Russell tells the whole story in Epitaph, her 2015 novel that may hold more truth than fiction, perhaps even more truth than most historical accounts of the gunfight.

The book might be seen as a sequel to Doc, her outstanding earlier novel about Doc Holliday in Dodge City. Now Doc and the Earp brothers have moved to Tombstone, hoping some of the bountiful silver mine money will wind up in their pockets. Instead they get nothing but trouble.

This time Russell's focus is on Wyatt Earp and she writes quite a different sort of novel, hardly seeming like a sequel at all. This one is longer, full of more characters and more story threads, all weaving their way toward the O.K. Corral.

Much of the story involves a runaway Jewish girl from San Francisco named Sadie Marcuse, who now calls herself Josie. An actress passing through Tombstone, she becomes attached to Johnny Behan, an up-and-coming politician who will become sheriff. Later she becomes drawn to Wyatt, whom she realizes is a much better man, more likely to remain faithful to her and less likely to beat her. Her desire for a faithful man does not keep her from turning, briefly, to prostitution, however.

The Josie factor is one that leads to the gunfight. Another is Kate, the woman Doc loves when she is away yet can't get along with when she is around. Her actions, too, cause trouble. Doc, despite his frailty from tuberculosis, has a reputation as a troublemaker, another factor. Then there are the Cow Boys. a group of cattle rustlers, robbers and troublemakers who always seem to have solid alibis when the law closes in. And when Johnny becomes sheriff, he becomes their ally rather than their foe. All these factors and others lead to that gunfight.

After the gunfight and the subsequent shooting death of Morgan Earp, Wyatt, who formerly had been the most quiet, devout and civil of the Earps, becomes a killing machine, determined to wipe out the Cow Boys singlehandedly, if necessary

Russell follows Wyatt all the way to his death, Sadie still at his side, years later, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral still the source of both his fame and his infamy.

Russell's novel probably will not be the last word on the gunfight, but anything else will have to be very, very good to top it.

What happened in the Territory

Most of us who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remember that Huck plans to "light out for the Territory" at the end. And then what? Mark Twain's ending practically begs for a sequel, and all these years later Robert Coover finally provides one in his 2017 novel Huck Out West.

It's not just Huck who heads out west, but Jim, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher as well, each of them crossing paths now and then. Tom and Becky actually get married, but it doesn't last. Tom still has big dreams and grand ambitions and hasn't lost that ability to talk people into almost anything. Becky turns to whoring. Jim finds religion and becomes a cook on a wagon train.

As for Huck, he remains something of an innocent, still uneducated but wiser and a better person than he thinks he is. Now that slavery has been outlawed, his new guilty friendship is with an Indian named Eeteh, ostracized by his tribe yet hated by white settlers as well. The latter, Tom included, want to kill him on sight. Huck remains torn between loyalty to his old pal, Tom, and his affection for Eeteh. He hates to admit that Eeteh may actually be the better friend.

With language that includes words like ruinder, sadfuller and possibleness, Coover's Huck sounds a lot like Twain's, yet somehow Coover himself doesn't sound much like Twain. We are never convinced that this is the sequel Twain would have written, nor is it told in the way Twain would have told it. Still it's quite a story.

The joys of reading

If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity — and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured — then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits.

Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

Nick Hornby

It's better to read a romantic thriller that we may not even remember a week from now than to not read a great work of literature. That seems to be Nick Hornby's point. So many people attempt to read some important book they think might be good for them, then soon fall asleep or get so bored after four or five pages that they close it and turn on the TV. His advice is the same as that of good teachers suggesting summer reading to students who don't like to read: Find something you like and read that. Reading a Spiderman comic book beats not reading anything.

Many adults are those students who didn't like to read now all grown up. Reading a book still seems like work. It seems boring. One thing you can say about a television program is that it keeps playing even if you fall asleep or even if you lose interest or get distracted by something else. You can pause your DVR, the electronic equivalent of a bookmark, but you won't feel guilty if you don't. Nor will you feel stupid. 

Or you can change the channel. And that's what Hornby suggests for wannabe readers who just can't seem to get into a challenging book. Don't pause it. Change the channel. Get another book. You are not in school anymore. There is no required reading. Nobody says you have to read something by Marilynne Robinson, no matter how good other people, including Hornby, say it is.

"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good," Hornby says. Not true, he argues. Some books are like broccoli. They may be good for us, but we'd rather have some fries. Hornby says go ahead and eat the fries.

Stepping into a large bookstore I am often struck not just by how many books there are but also by how many of them don't interest me in the slightest. And I am someone who always has several books of various kinds and various levels of difficulty going at once. I may not like most of the books in a bookstore, but somebody else will. Nobody says we have to like a book somebody else raves about.

I know how hard it is to put aside a book that fails to interest me. I recently did that with a Richard Powers novel, and it made me feel stupid. Did I discard it too quickly? Should I have stuck with it? Yet eventually I put it aside and picked up a Miss Julia novel. Some fries, in other words. Nick Hornby would have been proud.

The power of metaphors

Steven Pinker

Try explaining anything, especially something complicated, without using a metaphor. You can do it, but it my not be easy. And  it may not be as easy for another person to follow your explanation.

To make difficult ideas easier to understand we all use metaphors. And so it is that cosmologists talk about a big bang and black holes, economists talk about crashes and bull markets, Christians talk about being born again, broken-hearted lovers talk about being, well, broken-hearted. Metaphors are the way most of us make sense of things. We use so many metaphors, in fact, that usually we are not even aware of them.

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker mentions the many metaphors used in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "the Course of human events," "dissolve the political bands," "the Laws of Nature," "the causes which impel them," etc.

Everything, it seems, can remind us of something else. Human events follow a course like a river. Government controls can seem like physical restraints. Nature seems governed by laws. Some causes don't just appeal to us but seem to push us, impel us to take action.

The best writers, the best teachers, the best preachers, the best explainers may be those who use the best metaphors.

Inventing our lives

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills, we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people,

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

The above paragraph by Ursula K. Le Guin reminded me of the Larry Watson novel The Lives of Edie Pritchard, which I reviewed here last August ("Someone else's movie," Aug. 24, 2020). Watson tells of a woman, a grandmother by the end of the novel, who feels that throughout her life her identity has been determined by other people, mostly by the men in her life, but also by her parents, teachers, neighbors and friends. She's still trying to find out who she really is, not just what others want her to be.

Edie Pritchard does this without reading books. the "guides" that Le Guin writes about, although perhaps reading would have made her task easier. Reading, especially when we are young, can help us discover who we really are. What fictional characters, what ideas, what individuals in the biographies and history books we read most speak to us, most inspire us, most sound like the person we might actually be?

Books open up possibilities, reveal options we might never have realized otherwise. Perhaps this is one reason some parents actually discourage reading by their children — their kids might get ideas about leading lives different from their own, and that seems somehow threatening.

When Huck Finn, in Robert Coover's novel Huck Out West,  questions Tom Sawyer about why his kinder, nobler views about mankind have changed since their boyhood, Tom replies, "Well, I was still reading books. I've growed up since then." Did Tom discover his true self by ceasing to read books, or did he lose his true self that way? Le Guin would probably choose the second option.

"What a child needs, what we all need," she says, "is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen." Then she adds, "Reading is a means of listening."

Anonymous fame

Any fame that you can achieve as an author isn't what most people regard as real fame, or even fake fame. It's not just that nobody recognizes you; most people have never heard of you, either. It's that anonymous sort of fame.

Nick Hornby, Believer April, 2005

One striking thing about the recent three-night series about Ernest Hemingway on PBS was how famous Hemingway was. He was a best-selling writer, yet even people who had never read any of his books knew his name and recognized him on sight. He was pictured regularly in newspapers and on magazine covers. His death became front-page news. It was something people talked about it. Other writers of his generation were almost as well-known. These included John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Laura Lippman

Today Stephen King might be the only American writer average people would recognize on the street. James Patterson, because he's been on television promoting his books, could be another. Even readers who recognize the names of their favorite authors might not recognize these same authors on the street or in a restaurant. In part this is because authors age, while the photos on the back covers of their books rarely do.  Laura Lippman remains an attractive woman, but is hardly the pretty young lass pictured on her books until a few years ago. (I recall that I only reluctantly agreed to update the photo that had appeared on my newspaper column for about two decades.)

The lack of name recognition seems the bigger problem for today's writers, most of whom probably don't mind not being recognized in public. But they might prefer that more people would recognize their names. Familiar names often get placed above the title and help sell more books. Most readers don't even care what authors look like.

Novelist Nick Hornby's rant in the April 2005 edition of Believer magazine was not so much about his name and face not being recognized as about the fact that so many people today are unable to name even one writer, and this includes Hemingway and Shakespeare. One might think anyone who ever attended high school could remember the name of at least one writer discussed in English class, but apparently that is not the case. Hornby writes, "The 18-34 age group, incidentally, used to be the one most likely to read a novel; it has now become the least likely."

Hornby, author of About a Boy, A Long Way Down and other best-selling novels, transitions from this subject into another that might not at first seem to even be related — that so many authors today are writing novels about characters who are themselves novelists. He cites Anita Brookner, David Hodge, Colm Toibin, Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan as novelists who have done this as of 2005. In the years since the trend has continued, I have noticed. Another, related trend features novels about bookstores and libraries. Many of these are terrific books. I love many of them. Yet Hornby is right. Such novels may appeal to those of us who already love books, novelists, bookstores and libraries, but they hardly appeal to casual readers or non-readers.

One thing you can say about Nick Hornby's novels is that they are not about authors and books but rather about ordinary people who themselves may rarely, if ever, read a book, let alone write one. People may still not recognize Hornby on the street, but if they are ever going to try reading a novel, they will be more likely to try one by him than one by Hollinghurst or McEwan.

Rumpole's still got it

Horace Rumpole ages well. That's true with the character in John Mortimer's stories about a London barrister and with the stories themselves. I just finished reading the three Mortimer story collections that make up The Second Rumpole Omnibus, published in 1987.

The stories in Rumpole for the Defence, Rumpole and the Golden Thread and Rumpole's Last Case do begin to seem a bit predictable when read one after the other, yet that hardly makes them less entertaining. Rumpole is just such an endearing character, sort of like Peter Falk's Columbo, that we don't really care if the stories all seem to follow a similar pattern.

Yet there are exceptions. In "Rumpole and the Winter Break," the briefest story in the book, the aging barrister must take Hilda, better known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, on a vacation that he promised her if he won his case defending a suspected wife murderer. Rumpole never expects to win that case and is greatly surprised when he does. And even bigger surprise happens on their vacation.

Sometimes, as in "Rumpole and the Golden Thread," he successfully defends a client, then discovers that client actually wanted to be found guilty.

In "Rumpole's Last Case," he gets racing tip that he is convinced will allow him to retire with enough money to allow him and Hilda to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. Things don't quite work as he plans, which itself is predictable. What may come as a surprise is just how his "last case" becomes only the last case in the book.

No less interesting than Rumpole's courtroom successes are his life with Hilda and with his associates in his law firm. In most of these stories, his life outside the courtrooms in some way parallels his current case.

Leo McKern played Rumpole in the long-running BBC/PBS series based on Mortimer's stories, and it is impossible to read them without seeing McKern in one's mind. It was a character he was born to play. That's him on the book's cover.