“What neither [my father] nor my mother had the least taste for was that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland.”
~CS Lewis, Surprised By Joy
I recently joined a Book Club for Men very self-consciously inspired by the Oxford Inklings and the vibe follows the advertisement: we drink scotch and smoke cigars and discuss literature. My arrival coincided with their review of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, followed by The Revenant. They had already finished Shackleton’s South: The Endurance Expedition; we will shortly begin Paradise Lost. If that all sounds unbearably pretentious—actually, hang pretension, and in God’s name let there be an Inklings club in every town and parish!
While discussing The Revenant during our last meeting, the remark was made that men used to read Western authors like Louis L’Amour, but since the 70s or 80s had left off for different genres and settings. As everyone nodded along and drew breath for a protracted exploration of the zeitgeist, I quickly inserted myself to ask: who was this L’Amour? Based on the reaction, apparently everyone has heard about or read him (to include my dad and my barber, whom I later asked by way of informal survey). However, when one of the men seated nearby (he who was most astonished at my uncultured ignorance) handed me a copy of The Rider of the Ruby Hills, the answer to my folly struck me at once: if it wears a cowboy hat, then I have not read it!
A couple weeks having passed and my now having finished the first novella (Ruby Hills being the first of three collected in the book), I am having trouble telling what it is that I like about the story or or don’t. Its appeal (as teased out during the ensuing zeitgeist discussion above) is clear enough: the tale of a self-assured and honorable man doing hard things while living a hard life; yet it strikes me that this has already been done elsewhere and better. Not that L’Amour is incapable as an author—his prose is engaging and his characters colorful and fun—but something of the style or perhaps the setting just did not strike the cord for which I had hoped, the persistent idea fussing about my mind, that the Ruby Hills would be more interesting a thousand years ago in England.
It was a moment of existential horror that found me suffering the insufferable notion espoused by Millennial and Generation Z proponents of intersectionality, that if I cannot relate to the subject, then I cannot appreciate it. But it is true: for all that Ruby Hills is engaging and dramatic, I cannot really relate to the theme. The self-sufficiency and bravery of its protagonist I cheered, but the subject is acquisition of land and establishment of a ranch, something that I have never been inclined to do, born academic that I am. Yet again, there is nothing wrong with a story about men on horses doing hard things. So why is it that I’d be instantly engaged with an Arthurian romance versus a Western drama?
As a rule I have never really been drawn to Westerns, though I certainly love the drama in Westerns. In this regard the Western is in an entertainment category alongside sports movies, dog stories, 1980s “kids on bikes” mysteries, and zombie apocalypses; all of them very engaging if done properly, and enjoyable in the moment, but seldom if ever sought out independently. Put simply, to me the Wild West is bland, while the Ancient Past is not.
I accord well with Lewis’s statement that he had early and unabashedly pledged his loyalty to fairytales. In an honest parallel with my idol, I cannot get enough of a good fantasy (Narnia or Hyperboria or select corners of Westeros) or science-fantasy (Star Wars or Paralandra or John Carter’s Mars), to say nothing of sword and sandal or sword and board historical fiction (Suttcliff’s Britain or Cornwall’s England). To these not a single Western can hold a candle. As to why, the most obvious difference between stories about cowboys and Indians and rival stories about knights and barbarians is one of setting and dress and bearing. There’s just something cool about swords and togas and dragons; and yet there is just as much excitement in revolvers and ten gallon hats and mountain lions. In both settings there are horses and savage opponents, whether strange natives or desperate men. Both settings have damsels to save, either in a tower or alone on a ranch. And it is the image of that tower that illustrates the greatest thematic difference between Arthurian romance and the Wild West: one is ancient and storied; the other is new.
In Westerns, the protagonist must war against nature and the locals in order to establish his claim and he challenges the untamed wilderness in order to tame it and settle it and establish a name for himself, to say, “I did this, I made something from nothing.” By contrast, romances exist in worlds ancient and full of ruins and temples and histories, with ten times the material culture and ten thousand times the people. There the hero moves within the context of the past, either to preserve its heritage or tear down its sins or rebuild its past glories. Even the wild places and the wild animals have a history: a mountain lion may have been a kit yesterday, but the ancient dragon is a Thing from beyond time and space.
Certainly not everyone views antiquity as good. In The Shadow Kingdom, Robert E. Howard bemoans the passing of aeons, his King Kull gazing up at crumbling ruins in his own capital city and pondering the slow passing of time that renders all greatness nothing and reduces all monuments to dust, extinguishing all heroes not through fire but decay and loss of memory:
The age of the city, its incredible antiquity, was almost oppressive to the king; it was as if the great silent buildings laughed at him, noiselessly, with unguessable mockery… ‘You are young,’ said the palaces and the temples and the shrines, ‘but we are old. The world was wild with youth when we were reared. You and your tribe shall pass, but we are invincible, indestructible. We towered above a strange world, ere Atlantis and Lemuria rose from the sea; we still shall reign when the green waters sigh for many a restless fathom above the spires of Lemuria and the hills of Atlantis and when the isles of the Western Men are the mountains of a strange land. How many kings have we watched ride down these streets before Kull of Atlantis was even a dream in the mind of Ka, bird of Creation? Ride on, Kull of Atlantis; greater shall follow you; greater came before you. They are dust; they are forgotten; we stand; we know; we are. Ride, ride on, Kull of Atlantis, Kull the king, Kull the fool!’
Howard was a cynic and thus his words are at once tragically romantic and wholly wrong: far from fools, the storied past makes heroes of us all; we work within our cultures and heritage and though Western cowboys may strike out for parts unknown to create something new, we left behind in the cities and settled lands strive to preserve that which is old and worth remembering. Cynics bemoan the persistence of Scripture and insist that this is the year we forget the tired old tomes that have been long outgrown! and yet age renders those works not irrelevant, but holy. They are valuable all the more for their ancient pedigree and sheer obstinate perseverance; the gods of the copybook headings will always return.
Thus I anticipate Paradise Lost to beat The Rider of the Ruby Hills—not least for its sheer excellence but also for its theme; like the Ruby Hills, it is an untamed wilderness into which Adam and Eve are born, but it is an ancient one and the story is the very first since creation itself; despite their old-fashioned setting, the Ruby Hills exist in the “present”; Paradise is the very most ancient past.
