Wed 29 Nov 2023
A Western Fiction Review by Tony Baer: GLENDON SWARTHOUT – The Shootist.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[8] Comments
GLENDON SWARTHOUT – The Shootist. Doubleday, hardcover, 1975. Bantam, paperback, 1976. Signet, paperback, 1986. Berkley Books, paperback, 1998. University of Nebraska Press, softcover, 2011. Film: 1976. Directed by Don Siegel; starring John Wayne (his last movie) and Lauren Bacall.
J. B. Books, 51 years old, of Creede, Colorado, is the last of the legendary gunfighters. It’s 1901. John Wesley Hardin? Dead. Billy the Kidd? Dead. The James brothers? Dead. Wild Bill Hickok? Same. The time of the gunfighters is gone. But Books remains, a dinosaur that survived the asteroid.
He’s been feeling pretty run down lately, so he sees a doctor. The doctor tells him he’s dying of prostate cancer. But he doesn’t believe him.
There’s only one doctor he’ll believe: Dr. Hostetler of El Paso, Texas, who saved Books’s life 11 years prior, expertly extracting a bullet from his liver and sewing him up before he could bleed out.
So he rides horseback 10 days straight to El Paso on his bloated, contorted underside, comforted only by “a soft pillow of crimson velvet trimmed with golden tassels” he’d stolen from a whorehouse.
Dr. Hostetler confirms the worst. He’s got about 6 weeks to live — if he wants to die in bed, screeching in pain, unable to move, soiled in filth and wretched incapacity. But, Dr. Hostetler suggests, perhaps that’s not the way he’d prefer to go out.
The e.e. cummings epigraph is the best summary of the story:
We doctors know
a hopeless case if — listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door: let’s go
So Books decides to go. But go his own way.
Books asks the town Marshall for the names of the baddest gunmen in town. The Marshall gives him 3:
1: Jack Pulford: “Runs the faro layout at Keating’s….straightest shot I’ve ever seen, and cool as a cucumber. Couple years back he got off one round here, under fire, through the heart, and they measured. Eighty-four feet. Through the heart.”
2: Serrano: “El Tuerto they call him, ‘Cross-eye.’ He’ll rustle a bunch of cattle over the river, sell ’em on this side, then rustle ’em back and sell ’em to the same outfit he rustled ’em from in the first place. A real cutthroat. I wouldn’t turn my back on him in church.”
3: Jay Cobb: “Cobb’s only twenty or so, but I’ll hang him before he’s thirty, or somebody will. Gun crazy–been toting one since he was big enough to lift it.”
Books invites all three to meet him at 4:00 p.m. at the nicest tavern in town. May the best man win.
“They were like actors on an empty stage….The curtain had risen, the hour come. But they had no audience, save for one another, and even more bewildering, they had no play. They were assembled to take roles for which no lines had yet been written, to participate in a tragedy behind which there was no clear creative intent, to impose upon senselessness some sort of deadly order.”
The deadly order comes, but comes too pat for my tastes. It’ll smack you right between your thousand-yard stare.
It’s a good concept for a story. But at the end of the day, it didn’t do anything for me. You can tell by the last line that Swarthout thinks he’s written a freaking masterpiece. A tour de force of the first magnitude. Self-congratulations are clearly in order. Just no congratulations from me.
November 30th, 2023 at 3:43 am
John Wayne made a fine, elegiac farewell film out of this, but Swarthout’s book is so relentlessly deglamorized that I never managed to care much about anyone in it.
November 30th, 2023 at 12:05 pm
The Shootist — I have to read the book and have no intention of doing so, but I have seen the film, and disliked nearly everything about it other than the intelligent usage of od Wayne film clips. The film was under-produced and over-directed. Wayne, Bacall, and Sheree North were fine. No one else, including James Stewart in any of his old-man parts, worked well for me.
Bat Masterson died in 1921, unrelated to the old gunfighters. He was at his desk while working as a writer for Teh New York Telegraph. Wyatt Earp outlived them all, made eighty, nearly as old as I am.
November 30th, 2023 at 4:54 pm
As I understand it, James Stewart did the movie only as a favor to John Wayne. His hearing was gone and while he knew his lines, he couldn’t make out his cues. He probably shouldn’t have done the film.
November 30th, 2023 at 12:13 pm
Barry,
Yes—Bat Masterson shouldn’t be included on the list of dead gunmen. My mistake there.
November 30th, 2023 at 4:56 pm
I’ll delete the reference. No one else will know.
November 30th, 2023 at 1:09 pm
In re the Swarthout self-comment…as my mom used to remind me frequently, self-praise is no recommendation.
November 30th, 2023 at 9:04 pm
I was a little surprised at Swarthout, who I assume knew that Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Tilhman, and others were still alive in 1901 and lived well into the 1920’s in the case of Masterson and Earp (Masterson mentor to Damon Runyon and a major sports writer and Earp growing oranges and acting as technical expert on silent Westerns), and that the last official gunfight of the Old West was fought in Denison, Texas in 1915 where Ben Thompson was killed.
Al Jennings lived until the 1960’s as a producer and second unit director, and Emmett Dalton well into the modern era as a producer.
Of course, a good novel doesn’t really have to stick that closely to the truth and I give leeway for a good story, but this one doesn’t really get where it is going. It feels slight and off-hand, ironically like a scenario for a movie (and I would not bet against it being just that).
This coming from someone who enjoyed Swarthout’s THEY CAME TO CORDURA and the book he wrote about Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp’s last adventure South of the Border.
I like the movie, but the book is never fleshed out the way the performances of Wayne, Stewart, Bacall, and Ron Howard flesh out the film version. As a novel it is more cut and dried than a novelization.
I agree completely with Tony’s review. The book smacks of a writer patting himself on the back for what a good job he is doing throughout. Stripped of the actors it makes little damn sense as a story.
In the end rather than eligaic it feels contrived, stagey, and false, a tribute to a group of murderous prima donna’s lusting for one last orgy of murder, bloodshed, and suicide in a final Western Gotterdammerung. The only thing missing are Valkeries and Wagnerian music.
November 30th, 2023 at 9:29 pm
Good, David, and touched on Damon Runyon’s relationship with Bat. The brilliant musical adaptation of Runyon’s work makes its tribute to Masterson known, naming the central male figure Sky Masterson. Played in the film by Marlon Brando, should have been Gable, or Grant, but on Broadway, Robert Alda knocked it out of the park. I know, I saw it in 1951. A personal aside somewhat related.
A dozen years later, my family had gone not just bankrupt, but homeless. I was allowed to sleep in someone’s living room on East 34th Street. Looking for a job I answered and from theMusic Corporation of America. I did not get it, and that was clear from the moment I entered Larry Barnett’s office, but he told me everything, or nearly so, that I needed to know to get a job in the business. Two weeks later, I had one, and very occasionally stayed in touch with him, especially after the death of his wife, Isabel Bigley, the leading lady on Broadway in Guys and Dolls.
Lawrence Barnett has a Wikipedia page second to none. He did nothing but great things for people throughout his life.