The Pulp Frontier
ROSS, MARTIN W.
The Puip Frontier Zane Grey: A Biography By Frank Gruber World. 284 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Martin W. Ross English Department, Rutgers University at Newark Although he never found favor...
...Harper promptly accepted the book for publication, Popular Magazine purchased serialization rights, and the future course of Grey's career was substantially determined...
...in fact, today's Western is little changed from its Zane Grey predecessors...
...he never doubted his ability to write...
...The son of a dentist, young Pearl Grey (his given name) did not relish the prospect of following in his father's footsteps...
...Only when he reached the sidewalk did the full impact overwhelm him, and he had to clutch at the lamppost to keep from falling to the pavement...
...For them, Frank Gruber's affectionate biography will provide enjoyable reading...
...Grey's initial failures, although frustrating, spurred him on to new subject matter...
...The reader had no difficulty identifying with the characters...
...The frontier concept has given America its epic sense and nurtured its national spirit...
...And in response to the new climate, the Western became less divorced from reality, less idealistic...
...Questions of frontier survival were "relevant" to an audience with an appetite for romance, regardless of the fact that America was committed to a 20th-century machine age...
...This trip west proved to be the turning point of Grey's professional life...
...Max Brand, Ernest Haycox and Grey, the three giants of the genre, all wrote during this time...
...Baseball, especially pitching, interested him much more...
...it can be the Ohio River Valley just after the Revolutionary War, or Southern Utah in the 1870s...
...Gruber devotes a good portion of the second half of his book to the agonies of the novice writer desperately seeking a publisher...
...Articles by Esslin, Sprin-REVISITED chorn, Sarris, Baxandall, Fjelde, Lahr, Tov-stonogov????A portfolio of Naturalist scene design, 1876-1965????previously untranslated works by Ibsen and Strindberg (T42) AMERICA'S LEADING THEATRE MAGAZINE...
...By allowing the workaday masses to return imaginatively to America's historical Golden Age, he articulated their mute desires for something better...
...His West is not limited by geographic location...
...Gruber, himself a writer of Westerns and pulp fiction, rarely offers critical insight into the unusual bond between Grey and his audience...
...For those who are not Zane Grey fans, however, it may seem an exercise in adulation...
...A man went west not only in quest of opportunity, but of an ideal regeneration...
...The 1920s, as Gruber tells us in an informative historical chapter, were the heyday of pulp magazines and the romantic Western...
...His readers found reinforcement of their Puritan heritage in the "good man," protecting and providing for himself and his family, and the "good woman," a skilled and obedient housewife...
...There he could get his second chance...
...After his return to New York he wrote his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert (1910), based on his personal experiences...
...When economic prosperity returned with World War II, the traditional Western revived and took its place in the vanguard of the paperback boom...
...RECENTLY PUBLISHED LATIN ReP°rts fr°m Cuba, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela????Alexandra Jodorow-AMERICAN sky: interview ar|d film script????Glauber Rocha and Alex Viany on Cinema Novo????three new THEATRE Plavs by Triana, Diaz, Alvarado????Also: The Constant Prince photo portfolio????essays on the Grotowski repertory by Brecht, Feldman, Kaplan, Kott, Ludlam, Richie????stefan Brecht on LeRoi Jones' Slave Ship (T46) GENERAL Jan Ko" on ,ne lkon and tne Absurd????Alan Fran-covich on Genet and Fanon????marc Fumaroli on ISSUE Barba's Feral????donald Kaplan on stage fright?interviews with Witold Gombrowicz, Anna Sokolow, Eugenio Barba, Firehouse Theatre, Joseph Dunn????Grotowski: Apocalypsis cum Figuris, interview, report from Odin Teatret training program????music: Somma, Epstein, Musica Elettronica Viva????new plays by James Lineberger and Herschel Hardin (T45) POLITICS Darko Suvin on the Paris Commune debate????Abbie Hoffman on Media Freaking AND ????lee Baxandall and Richard Schechner on radicalism and performance????ralph PERFORMANCE J- G|eason on politics and rock????daniel Yang on Peking Drama????simon Trussler on John Arden????saul Gottlieb on the Radical Theatre Repertory?Scripts: Estrin, Bullins, Macbeth, Arrabal, Ruibal, Theatre de I'Epee de Bois, Peking Drama????Ann Halprin's US????documents: Pirandello, Papadopoulos (T44) RETURN OF THE An interview with Judith Malina and Julian Beck????stefan Brecht, Irwin LIVING THEATRE Silber, Patrick McDermott on the Living Theatre????rehearsal notes for Paradise Now????Also: Transactional Analysis, O'Horgan beginnings, Peter Brook, an interview with Joe Chaikin (T43) NATURALISM Edited by Rolf Fjelde, America's foremost translator of Ibsen...
...Grey shared this American preoccupation and cashed in on it...
...Walter van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), a Western novel that replaced action with psychological subtlety, seemed to signal the end of the pulp shoot-'em-up and romance...
...Even Grey's most tangled and preposterous plots, though, have at their core a firm, unambiguous (if seldom explicit) moral code...
...That Grey's protagonists were thoroughly subordinated to plot, delineated in only the most perfunctory way, merely added to their appeal...
...He recognized that a large, primarily iiastern, middle-class audience hungered for escapist adventure and fantastic yarns...
...The first half of Zone Grey: A Biography is largely an account of the writer's family background and early years in Zanesville, Ohio...
...Enter a colorful old hunter and conservationist by the name of Buffalo Jones, who takes a liking to Grey and invites him to come along on an expedition to Arizona...
...The year 1958, Gruber believes, marked its return to peak popularity...
...But when the pitching mound was officially moved back 10 feet, his hopes for playing professional ball were destroyed????his curve ball, his "money pitch," was ineffective at the greater distance...
...With melodramatic fervor, Gruber relates one futile attempt to sell a novel to Harper and Brothers: "He left the editor's office and walked stiffly down the stairs to Franklin Square...
...In recent years Grey's commercial appeal has waned somewhat, but many readers maintain a tenacious allegiance to his work...
...Grey was thoroughly dissatisfied with his life as a dentist in New York City...
...Reviewed by Martin W. Ross English Department, Rutgers University at Newark Although he never found favor with the Eastern literati, Zane Grey was America's most popular author of the rugged, romantic Western...
...In the West a man was defined by his actions????his adaptability and self-reliance in confronting a dangerous natural environment...
...The fantastic story and faceless hero are conventions of the romance, in which excess seems somehow reasonable...
...every man could see himself in the hero...
...A man had to learn, as did Ken Ward in The Young Lion Hunter, how to wash with snow, how to recognize a good campsite, how to capture the treacherous cougar...
...Improbable plots, unrealistic characters, sentimentality, purple prose????All the causes of his previous rejections now became the essential elements of his new success...
...As Gruber observes, "it is the same story it has always been, of escapism and entertainment, of strong, silent heroes, of dastardly villains, of gunfights and action...
...Yet it is rooted in reality, as Gruber shows us...
...Searching for a way out, his thoughts turned increasingly to writing, or more accurately, to the dime-novel thrillers he had read at the corner drugstore as a youngster...
...Certainly Grey had an acute sense of the marketplace...
...Then the Depression brought a crashing end to America's years of innocence...
...His 85 books (including a number of outdoor adventures and a sports series for boys) were translated into more than 20 languages and sold in the millions, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) alone selling over 2 million copies...
...In spite of the enthusiasm with which he abandoned dentistry, Grey's first three novels were repeatedly rejected...
...But the rapport peculiar to Grey and his readers was essentially a product of their mutual fascination with the American West...
...So it was either "tooth pulling" or starvation...
...Since this country's inception the West has been the focus of hopes and dreams ????our manifest destiny, if you will...
...Thus he produced his western romances at a remarkable rate, along with short stories that were gobbled up in the pulp magazines of the day (American Boy, Country Gentleman, Field & Stream, Collier's...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 14
