Educated Guesswork

Sea Of Grass, by Conrad Richter (1936)

This very brief (just over a hundred pages, in the edition I read) narrative is a prose poem, a threnody for a lost time and place, New Mexico when it was new in the American imagination. As well, it is a meditation on the mystery of marriage and the ways of men with women. It is also a Western novel mistakenly assigned to schoolchildren, perhaps with the notion that it is short and therefore the little ones might actually complete their assigned reading, or perhaps because the narrator is himself a youth in the opening chapters and thus some identification is expected by the priests and priestesses of pedagogy. The book is mistakenly compared to Zane Grey’s work, about which the less said the better. The author seems to have been yet another example of a man bewitched by the wide open spaces of the Southwest, like the creator of Krazy Kat, though Conrad Richter never personally experienced the lost era he so obviously longs for, although ….

His rude empire is dead and quartered today like a steer on the meat-block, but I still lie in bed at night and see it tossing, pitching, leaping in the golden sunlight of more than fifty years ago, sweeping up to his very door, stretching a hundred and twenty miles north and south along the river, and rolling as far into the sunset as stock could roam

Reading this paean to the now lost days when the great cattle ranches and even greater cattle herds dominated the mythic West, you know that the author truly lived this life he remembers, that he experienced as a young man the unceasing mutability of this ‘sea of grass’. You would be wrong. That is, Conrad Richter only moved to Albuquerque when he was almost forty years old, and you would be wrong if you thought, as did I, that Richter had lived through the last years of the crowd of beeves and antelopes that once rode over thousands of square miles of New Mexico grassland with nary a town, home, or even outbuilding in sight. Such is the poetic power of his language that we can be forgiven this mistake (yes, I forgive myself in this instance), and can almost be persuaded that he speaks of real events and real people reflected in the mirror of memory a half century later. Such is the benison granted to fiction, to make more true than artless nature the vision of other peoples and other times.

To the newcomer in our Southwestern land it seems that the days are very much alike, the same blue sky and unchanging sunshine and endless heat waves rising from the plain. But after he is here a year he learns to distinguish nuances in the weather he would never have noticed under a more violent sky; that one day may be clear enough, and yet some time during the night, without benefit of rain or cloud, a mysterious desert influence sweeps the heavens. And the following morning there is air clearer by half than yesterday, as if freshly rinsed by storm and rain.

Conrad Richter’s Sea Of Grass is like an Icelandic saga writ small upon a landscape writ large. The intricate genealogies and intertwined characters of the sagas are whittled down to only three, four, five actors in the brief drama of this novelette, while the twisted paths leading through the mountains between the narrow fjords of the tiny island of the North are replaced by the most expansive horizons imaginable beneath a hot but nurturing sun. And while the sagas seem always to involve violent action—and often burning—and carefully cultivated hatred, in Sea Of Grass the action is nuanced and often ‘offstage’, the emotional turmoil only guessed at for every character save the memorializing narrator. At the heart of the story is the helpless love of Colonel Brewton for the lovely Lutie from St. Louis, the lord of cattlemen hopeless before the strange female power of the woman who detests the large and lonely land from which the Colonel’s own power derives. Lutie turns heads wherever she appears, including that of our narrator, Colonel Brewton’s nephew, Hal. A dark and unspoken shadow lies between Lutie and her husband, a shadow which reflects the clash between the Colonel and the new district attorney Brice Chamberlain. The up and coming lawyer means to break up the endless ranch of the Bar B brand—the Brewton brand—and to support the ‘nesters’, immigrants who seek to turn the ‘sea of grass’ of the title into farmland. With deft strokes Richter limns the clash between Brewton and Chamberlain, and this almost stream-of-consciousness narrative shows the collapse into desuetude and decay of the empire of cattle giants under a misguided idea of progress.

Written in 1936, this dirge for the Southwestern grasslands may have been influenced by the ecological disaster underway at the time, that devastation of the soil we now call “The Dust Bowl”. And it is true that much of the western United States is better grassland than farmland. But the king of New Mexico beeves that Richter portrays in Sea Of Grass owes more to a devotion to strong men than to ecological, economic, or even Western history. (Clashes between cowmen and farmers, or the related dust-ups between the cattle ranchers and sheepherders, rarely ended up only in the courtroom, and at times erupted into full-scale war.) But Richter has created an almost godlike father figure doomed to fall into tragedy, just as all fathers must eventually be revealed to have feet of clay. Here the tragedy, in all its aspects—the Colonel’s marriage, the fights between ranch and farm, between country and city—the tragedy is visited upon and fulfilled by the youngest son of Colonel and Mrs. Brewton, Brock. Spoiled and erring, Brock sneers at the Brewton name and its import, and the young man’s fate ties together the dark threads of the story in a heartrending climax to this elegy of the old west and the towering figures that once rode across the vast plains as their rightful dominion, only to subside once more under the waves of time.

I believe now that every piece of news about Brock my uncle read in the Albuquerque and Denver papers was a secret Apache lance in his heart. His forehead was incommunicable as an old rawhide and branded like one with the mark of the band of his hat. And of what went on behind it he never spoke.

The prose of Sea Of Grass has been compared to that of Zane Grey’s Riders Of The Purple Sage, but that is to compare poetry with doggerel. Richter’s genius is to present a poetry of just those men and women who never speak their innermost truths, but live them in their every act and choice. The first-person narrative of Hal flows true and natural through this book like a burbling brook in spring, and his memory of his uncle and Lutie evokes clearly their deep character and the sway they still have upon him years later. But it is the silences that Richter somehow manages to convey in his writing, the unknowableness of the inner life of the two main protagonists of the novel and their secret thoughts over all that came between them. And the flowing narrative with its sparse dialogue also conjures up just the sort of inner monologue a man used to riding for miles across an endless land beneath an infinite sky might have. Some loves are not made stronger by talking about them, but by living inside them and through them and, at times, in spite of them.

The MONTH at Goodspeed’s Book Shop (May 1930, Vol. I, No. 8), by Norman Dodge

Just one of the many delightful issues of the “PAMPHLET concerning books, prints and autographs” found in the famous Boston book store Goodspeed’s Book Shop, this slim staple-bound tract shows off brilliantly the lucent prose of Norman Dodge, whose trenchant wit, catholic knowledge, and wry observations made every number of this catalogue from the past a treasure perhaps more worthy of esteem than some of the books which The MONTH detailed. The store, alas, is no more; the owner, George Talbot Goodspeed, finally closed the doors in 1995, hoping to move to an online business, only to pass away himself two years later. And so the storied bookstore, first opened by George’s father Charles Eliot Goodspeed in 1898, became defunct, a mere three years shy of the century mark, ending an era, perhaps only a small era in the larger era which sees the final extinction of all bookstores and perhaps all books.

Some bibliographical distinctions may seem of small consequence to those who prefer to do other things than unmask an elusive anonymity or a puzzling colophon, yet the process of solving the mystery of a book’s origin frequently leads to the discovery of facts of unquestioned importance in the history of printing or of literature.

You buys your ticket and you takes your chances

But something of Goodspeed’s Book Shop lives on in these tiny almost monthly (The MONTH was published ten times a year) pamphlets, and somehow one can almost smell the delightful scent of aging yet well tended paper when reading the brief notes and observations about the books, prints, and ephemera which wended into the Boston book shop. The love of the products of the press is obvious in every word, every wry remark, of Mr. Dodge, supported by a large team of experts in the various departments of Mr. Goodspeed’s stores. The editor’s erudition is obvious, and perhaps to be expected in an antiquarian bookseller (and graduate of Harvard), but what is a continual surprise is the humane irony with which Dodge views the products he finds at hand. While honestly describing the products he is (very gently) hawking, he never fails to connect each piece to the larger tapestry of books, history, or even human nature, of which each is a part.

on the South Sea atolls the native sons and daughters were lazy, benighted, and happy. They had never been obliged to make virtue of necessity nor confer nobility on labor. There was little cookery, fewer clothes, some art, small science. Now, we have heard, they shiver in overcoats.

Oh, the power of civilization

Norman Dodge was the editor of this unique antiquarian resource for the entirety of its forty year run, beginning in the year of the Great Depression, 1929. I only have a portion of the complete set, fifty-eight issues from 1930 to 1939 (alas, my collection begins with the seventh number, so I have to content myself with observations following the Great Disaster, not those of the Disaster itself). The entire set is available on microfilm, if you know what that is beyond hearing about it in Cold War movies. The catalogue—or rather, the survey of selections—is still prized by bookpeople for the historical information about prices contained therein, in addition to the many and varied notes about various editions and states passing through Goodspeed’s. Always scrupulous and honest, Dodge spends a little time, for example, in the tract we’re considering now, detailing the various points of difference between the true first edition of Sense And Sensibility and the particular mongrel copy that somehow came to be in the Boston book shop and under the study of the experts at Goodspeed’s. After showing that the book sold in 1912 as a first edition for $175 cannot possibly be so, he speculates as to why various pages were grafted into the volume at hand, and offers the old-but-not-quite-old-enough book for $40. How much this drastic price cut is due to the defects of the book itself, and how much due to the Depression, is a question to which I am ignorant of the answer.

It is amusing to think that instances of carelessness or ignorance are nearly always the causes of the “points” in the most sought books. An author, perhaps being young and more poet than grammarian, misspells the name of a Sanskrit deity. His manuscript goes to press and it is not until the small first issue has been dispersed that some roving eye in a wagging head fixes on the offending letter. In subsequent issues the fault is corrected, but the original sin remains to vex the poet and delight the bibliophile who harries relentlessly all blemishes. From a taint the misspelling becomes a distinction and a badge of priority.

Now the cause is autocorrect, and the mistake will never be corrected

In this one tiny tract we learn about Julia A. Moore, the “Sweet Singer of Michigan”, the Texian Navy (which invites autocorrect to blemish its name), The Daniel Catcher (a poem from 1713 anent the life of the prophet), Enrico Caruso’s caricatures (by, not of), an actual Pequot Indian harpooner, the famous Lord Timothy who authored A Pickle For The Knowing Ones, and McDonald Clarke, who seems to have been the Damon Runyon of early 18th-Century Broadway. As well, there are brief mentions of the Rogerenes (q.v.), Audubon (whom Goodspeed’s were one of the first to notice), and much more.

Clarke resembled Villon with his trick of turning the gossip of the Main Stem to metrical account, yet he differed also, because they say Clarke had no vices. He attended Grace Church, married an actress, was drowned in a cell of the city prison, and done in an oil

Runyon, on the other hand, smoked incessantly and married a dancer, briefly

There are many books in each edition of The MONTH for which modern collectors would give their eyeteeth (or more likely simply extend themselves through the medium of Visa), as well as many offerings for which we must remain puzzled as to why anyone ever—ever!—paid so high a price, especially in 193os dollars. Among the latter are the many prints and etchings being sold hundreds of dollars whilst finer 19th-Century books may be bought for a mere sawbuck. Somewhere in between these two extremes are such works as that mentioned briefly above, and discussed at fair length in this issue of The MONTH, the book which pushed Julia A. Moore into American awareness, The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. This book of bad obituary poetry by one of the most famous bad poets of all time—and surely the most famous bad American poet—is described in the leading article of this pamphlet with the same anguished love that caused Mark Twain to become devoted to the execrable Mrs. Moore. In May of 1930, you could have bought this terrible poetry book for the same $10; now I see a copy in much worse shape for sale at €750. Alas, that for lack of a time machine we are all forced to live in these pestilential days.

So much poetry! But this is the May number. But so much execrable poetry! Then we can be more certain that you haven’t read it before.

The final remarks from this issue of The MONTH

Unfortunately, one of the rusted staples has just broken off entirely, so I need to put this pamphlet into protective material. Until next time.