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.

Studying the unbelievable

But no one really knew what telepathy was or how it worked, including Rhine. All he did was establish that it was there, and to this day, many would argue that he hadn't accomplished even that.

Stacy Horn, Unbelievable

Many people might be surprised to learn, as I was, that for decades Duke University was home to a department dedicated to the study of telepathy, ESP, poltergeists and other forms of parapsychology. All this seems, as the title of Stacy Horn's 2009 book suggests, Unbelievable.

For half a century, J.B. Rhine, whom Horn describes as "the Einstein of the paranormal," headed the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory and performed countless experiments to try to demonstrate that such extrasensory powers could be proven scientifically. In fact, the laboratory still exists, sort of. After Rhine's death in 1979, it was incorporated into The Rhine Center: An Institute for Consciousness Research and Education, mostly involved in other forms of psychological research.

Rhine did identify a few individuals who, at least for a brief period of their lives, were able to perceive images shown on special ESP cards even from another room with remarkable consistency. But what did that prove? Other scientists remained skeptical, whatever Rhine's experiments showed. And in most cases, of course, they showed nothing.

Rhine angered even his supporters with his insistence that telepathy must be demonstrated in the laboratory, even though most examples of the paranormal — suspected haunted houses, for example — happened elsewhere.

Among the surprising aspects of Horn's book are the prominent names of those who took an interest in his work. These include people like Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Richard Nixon, Timothy Leary, Jackie Gleason, Upton Sinclair, Rod Sterling, Helen Keller, B.F. Skinner and Carl Jung. But then, isn't everyone at least a little bit interested? Scientists now suggest there might actually be several dimensions other than the ones we know about. Might some of these unbelievable things be evidence of these suspected dimensions and thus worthy of scientific study?

Burning books

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter

I saw the movie version of Fahrenheit 451 way back in the Sixties, but I only recently read Ray Bradbury's novel, published in 1951. Interestingly this novel about book burning is set in a future that is today's present, the third decade of the 21st century.

Firemen aren't starting fires to burn books and the houses that hold them as in the novel, at least not yet, but the banning of certain Dr. Seuss books and Amazon's refusal to sell certain other books does suggest something similar is under way. Once this sort of thing starts, will there be any way to stop it? Will the words of writers as diverse as St. Paul, Mark Twain, David McCullough and even Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury be safe in a world where contrary ideas become dangerous ideas? Eventually can't all independent ideas become contrary?

Le Guin, like Bradbury a science fiction author, stood on the left side of the political spectrum, yet it would be interesting to know how she would have reacted to events taking place just a few years after her death? What would she have thought about attempts by today's Left in America to eliminate ideas and opinions they don't like?

Bradbury's novel illustrates Le Guin's words quoted above and written decades later. He describes a time and place where all books are banned, after a gradual process that began perhaps even with books as innocent as those of Dr. Seuss. Now the culture, consumed with entertainment and threatened by incessant war, nears collapse. The "operating instructions" are missing. Mindless television programs play constantly on screens that cover all four walls, but people lack a "useful guide" to their own lives. Only a handful of people who have memorized entire books keep alive a hope for a brighter future.

Unconventional fun

Patrick DeWitt's 2015 novel Undermajordomo Minor suits its title. It's cute, charming, unconventional and fun. Except for the train that passes through the novel regularly, the story could take place at any time in the past thousand years or so. It all feels like a fable or fairy tale, like something from the Dark Ages.

Lucien Minor, called Lucy, is a young man who feels out of place in his own hometown, so he accepts a position at a baron's castle as an undermajordomo, without having a clue about what the job entails.

It turns out that the baron is quite mad, given to roaming the castle at night and eating live rats. Yet each day he writes a love letter to the baroness, who left him, and it becomes Lucy's job to hand that letter to the engineer as the train flies by each morning. That is, until one day the engineer carries a reply: the baroness is returning home. That means restoring both the castle and its baron to dignity and respectability.

Meanwhile Lucy finds his own true love, Klara, a lovely girl who also happens to be pursued by a giant warrior, whose own true love happens to be fighting a nonsensical, never-ending war. When separated from Klara. Lucy begins to understand what happens to the baron when the baroness is away.

Hardly anyone in the story can talk in a straight line, which becomes frustrating for Lucy but delightful for the reader. The conversations are great fun even if they often go nowhere. Lucy witnesses an orgy, confronts the giant and falls into a Very Large Hole. Anyone who loves The Princess Bride, which is just about everybody, should love DeWitt's novel.

Sensitive crimes

Alexander McCall Smith, that master of soft-boiled crime novels, began a new series in 2019 with the publication of The Department of Sensitive Crimes, set not in Botswana or Scotland but Sweden.

It never becomes clear exactly what constitutes a "sensitive crime," but Ulf Varg (a name that means "wolf wolf," we are told) and his team investigate cases involving a man stabbed behind the knee, a young woman suspected of killing her imaginary boyfriend and a possible werewolf. These cases are handled with relative ease, so as with McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the main interest becomes the lives of the detectives themselves.

Varg and Anna Bengtsdotter, one of his detectives, are in love with each other, a fact complicated by the fact that Anna is married. They are both honorable enough to keep their relationship strictly professional, yet their true feelings for each other have a way of leaking through. Although he much prefers the company of Anna, Varg must sometimes work with a talkative uniformed officer named Blomquist, whom by the end of the novel is made an official part of his team. Varg is simply too polite to raise an objection.

As in the author's other novels, the story meanders at an easy pace. No one ever seems to be in a rush. Sensitive crimes will apparently wait until someone gets around to them. Insight and intuition mean more than actual evidence.

All this is quite pleasurable, perhaps not as much fun as the Precious Ramotswe stories but good enough to entice many readers back for more.

Intentional obscurity

When I was a newspaper editorial page editor I supervised a program called Opinion Shapers in which selected readers were chosen as op-ed columnists for a year. Each of the 13 Opinion Shapers submitted four columns on any subject at three-month intervals during that year. The results were spotty, as you might imagine, but overall the program proved successful and continued for several years, a new panel of columnists each year.

One of the best of these Opinion Shapers was a professor at nearby Ashland University. His columns were insightful, witty and beautifully written. I also wrote a book column for the newspaper and was interested when I was sent a review copy of a book by this same professor published by a university press. Then I was surprised when I found the book to be terribly written gobbledegook. In my review I said I couldn't understand how a man whom I knew to be an excellent writer could write so poorly and then get his book published.

I thought of this when I read a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (March 20-21, 2021) by James Campbell called "Deconstruction, Identity and the Dying Art of Criticism." Campbell wrote about modern literary criticism, not my professor's field, yet Campbell's comments seem apt. He said that to sound appropriately scholarly, today's scholars must write so that nobody but other scholars can understand them, and even that is apparently not a requirement for publication.

Regarding academic writing, Campbell writes, "No one speaks like this and no ever will."

And, "Since none but a few can understand it, it must be the most elitist literary genre ever known."

There was a time when scholars wrote for the masses, not just for each other. Any literate person might read a piece of literary criticism and understand what was being said. Scholars weren't "talking down" to their readers. That was just the way they wrote. Clarity of expression was considered an academic virtue. Today the recognized virtue is obscurity. If everyone can understand it, there must be something wrong with it.

When I panned that professor's book, I may have been doing him a favor.

What really happened?

Robert J. Hutchinson's The Dawn of Christianity (2017) would make good reading anytime, but it seems especially helpful during Holy Week as Christians everywhere ponder the meaning of it all. How did it happen? Why did it happen? And for that matter, what exactly did happen?

The author covers the biblical account from the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem for the final time to the ministry of the Apostle Paul, but he also goes behind the Bible to accounts from other sources from that period of history and the latest archaeological findings. He presents everything in such a way that one does not need to be a doctor of divinity to understand it. Numerous photos, maps and charts help make the book even more reader-friendly.

Where was the upper room? Who was Pilate? What was the reason for crucifixion? What happened on that first Easter morning? How did Saul of Taursus, one of one Christianity's most violent opponents, become one of its greatest defenders? Hutchinson tackles such questions with authority, clarity and apparent ease. He packs an amazing amount of information into less than 300 pages.

Although Hutchinson does side with the traditional Christian interpretation of these events — Jesus really did die and Jesus really did rise again — he also gives a hearing to opposing views. The evidence, he argues, supports tradition.