Gene Rhodes: Cowboy Novelist

by J. FRANK DOBIE

1

THE fame of classical authors, said Arnold Bennett, “is originally made, and maintained, by a passionate few. . . . The one reassuring aspect of the literary affair is that the passionate few are passionate about the same things.”

It was the passionate few who in 1946, twelve years after his death, brought into book form, under title of The Little World Waddies, a collection of stray stories and verses by Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Only a thousand copies were printed, and now that book is out of print and the type has been destroyed.

The critical passion which makes and maintains classics is not confined to literary people. On the author named Rhodes, I ask for no better judges than the waddies themselves— the ones who read. Cole Railston is one of the “passionate few,” and, as perhaps no other man does, he combines knowledge of Gene Rhodes’s life as a cowboy with appreciation of him as a writer. He was range foreman for the Bar N Cross when, about 1889, Gene came to work for it.

“Gene grew and spread after leaving our Bar Cross outfit at Engle,” said Cole Railston. “He was a remarkable character. About 1905 he put out a little story called ‘The Last Guard.’ I liked it best of all his writings.

“As to the kind of cowboy he made, while Gene worked for me on summer roundups some three seasons, his job was mostly to care for the saddle horses, but the last summer he was a cowhand. Gene never claimed to be a top hand, but he was an all-around good hand. On day herd, night guard, or in the branding pen, he was loyal, tireless, and fearless. There is no question about Gene’s courage in the wild work of duty and danger. They used to say jokingly that young Rhodes carried a book instead of a gun. I never knew him to carry a pistol. I believe he liked to herd the saddle horses because that work gave him more time for reading. The boys all liked him.

“Next to cowboying and reading, he liked poker and a fight, He was not a trouble-maker — far from it — but no one stepped on his toes or rode his pet horse. I never knew any man to throw Gene in a wrestling match. He feared no bad man or bad horse. He was a real good rough bronc rider. Send him anywhere to be gone from the roundup wagon for a day or so, and he made no fuss about bed or food. He simply went, did the job, and came back smiling.”

Being a good hand on horseback did not make Gene Rhodes a good writer, though one may find certain common denominators — pride and vitality, especially, It is the spirit of the waddies of the Little World and not an exposition of their occupation that we find so excellently and delightfully distilled in his fiction. Like Owen Wister’s cowboys, but unlike those of Andy Adams, the riders that range through Rhodes’s stories are usually separated from their cows.

Their most distinguishing characteristic — and the most natural— is the wit and vivacity, never glib, of their talk. The culmination of the art of writing as Eugene Manlove Rhodes practiced it, so it seems to me, is in this talk. It constantly fulfills Stevenson’s direction - Stevenson who, in Rhodes’s opinion, “used the English tongue more skilfully than any other man”—to have characters talk “not as men talk in parlors, but as they might talk.”

This talk may be homely and earthy—“We’ll wash our hands and faces right good, catch us up some fresh horses out of the pasture, and terrapin up the road a stretch.” It may be, and often is, as lightsome as the white smoke of coals in a serene campfire; it may occasionally be dark with human destiny; it repeatedly glints and gleams with literary allusions. Yet no bright speaker ever sacrifices fidelity to his own naturalness, or to the flavor of the earth to which he belongs, in order to say a good thing.

The Eugene Manlove Rhodes “manner of cowboy” belonged to the Rhodes who night-herded and day-herded, as well as to the Rhodes who wove out of experience and imagination those gay riders named John Wesley Pringle, Johnny Dines, Jeff Bransford, Ross McEwen, Ptomaine Tommy, and a cavalcade of others. Their individualism goes deeper than bowlegs and the you-all drawl. They can all read, write, and recollect. They have read; they combine in themselves generosity with that you-be-damned air; they are utterly at ease on the planet that their author “recommended" as being “a good place to spend a life-time" ; they carry “bottles of salvation" filled with uncorked champagne-natured mother wit.

Rhodes often transmuted real people into book characters. If a writer does not steal, he naturally has to borrow. He put Cole Railston into more than one of his stories. John Wesley Pringle came out of Gene Rhodes himself. ”I have a woodshed where I can retire to split an infinitive with a friend,” he wrote. He proposed to an editor a column for letter-writers, where the liar and the lamb can lie down together.”

He seems to have felt under compulsion to justify his literary-allusioning cowboys. “They all smoked,” he explains in Bransford in Arcadia — smoked Bull Durham tobacco. “A certain soulless corporation placed in each package of the tobacco a coupon, each coupon redeemable by one paper-bound book. ... There were three hundred and three volumes on that list, mostly-but not altogether—fiction. And each one was a classic. Classics are cheap. They are not copyrighted. . . . Cowboys all smoked: and the most deep-seated instinct of the human race is to get something for nothing. They got those books. In due course time they read those books. Some were slow to take to it; but when you stay at lonely ranches, when you are left afoot until the waterholes dry up, so you may catch a horse in the waterpen — why, you must do something. The books were read. Then, having acquired the habit, they bought more books. Since the three hundred and three were all real books, and since the cowboys had been previously uncorrupted of predigested or sterilized fiction, or by ‘gift,’ ‘uplift’ and ‘helpful’ books, their composite taste had become surprisingly good, and they bought with discriminating care.”

Despite the pretenses of advertisements of the classics and despite the practices of book-review clubs, nobody ever read seriously for the purpose of displaying familiarity with literature; least of all, Eugene Manlove Rhodes. In his scarce booklet Say Now Shibboleth, he rejects the idea that a writer should read the great writers “for style.”He says: “Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.”

2

A NEWSPAPER article about Eugene Manlove Rhodes by a historian of the West who is a thinker characterizes him as “a bold, gallant, card-playing, pool-playing, cow punching natural son of the American West.” It is this Philistine conception of what constitutes natural sons that makes the civilized pursuit of art and ideas so difficult everywhere in America and especially in the Southwest. The passionate few are not passionate in their regard for Eugene Manlove Rhodes because he was a card-playing cowpuncher; they are passionate towards him because of the way his cultivated mind played upon the cowpuncher world. One part of him was a part of this world, but the “immortal residue” of him was beyond it — the part that justified Bernard DeVoto in calling his fiction “the only fiction of the cattle kingdom that reaches a level which it is intelligent to call art.’

True art always transcends the provincial. Gene Rhodes loved his waddie land and its people passionately. He made it more interesting, gave it significance, added something of the spirit to its expanses. His art, however, is to be judged not by what he translated into books, but by how he translated it. He died before our One World had sunk into the minds of the thinking minority of this country; but the assimilation of ideas from the earth’s great thinkers and writers had made him conscious of the harmony between loyalty to one province and indebtedness to provinces beyond. In The Proud Sheriff, Andy Hinkle reports to Spinal Maginis on the people “hither,” whence he has just returned. “Fine people. Just like here. Nine decent men for every skunk. Nine that hate treachery and lies and hoggishness and dirt. They got different ways.”

“But you think our ways are best?”

“I would never say so. I think our ways are different.”

The people foreign to Rhodes were what he called “the Tumblebug People.” He was sensitive to injustice anywhere.

A Mexican sheepherder is saved from being lynched by greed, and a poor squatter from being ousted by more greed. The savior, in Rhodes’s stories, is always witty as well as decent, debonair as well as just. The hero’s being a cowboy is secondary to his believing in something.

Rhodes was not a sociological righter of a system’s wrongs in the manner of Upton Sinclair. He did not understand systems, any more than the average banker understands the capitalistic system; and being a man of intellectual integrity, he did not pretend to understand them. He more or less accepted them-as systems. He stood on the principle of applied democracy. For him, “a man’s a man for a’ that" was poetry only incidentally; primarily it was eternal verity. His nearest kinsman was Cyrano de Bergerac—with whom he would have uncovered to “that divine madman,” Don Quixote.

“And what should a man do? Attain to height by craft instead of by strength? No, I thank you. Push himself from lap to lap, become a little great man in a great little circle? No, I thank you. But . . . sing, dream, laugh, loaf, be free, have eyes that look squarely, a voice with a ring; wear, if he chooses, his hat hindside afore; for a yes, for a no, fight a duel or turn a ditty! Work, without concern of fortune or of glory, to accomplish the heart’s desired journey to the moon! Put forth nothing that has not its spring in the very heart, yet, modest, say to himself, ‘Old man, be satisfied with blossoms, fruits, yea, leaves alone, so they be gathered in your garden and no other man’s!'”

It was righteous indignation against an ignorant definition of the cowboy as “never anything more than a hired hand on horseback” that produced his most moving poem: —

“No better description of Gene’s romantic years will ever be written” than these lines give, May Rhodes well says. He was about to be sixty when he wrote them. His best years were the romantic years; he was still amid them when he died. His best characters are constitutionally generous, gay, and gallant because he himself was constitutionally generous, gay, and gallant. I do not mean gallant in the self-esteeming caballero sense, but gallant in prodigal selflessness, in upholding a principle, in being ready to charge hell with a bucket of water, to take the side of the wronged, “to find quarrel in a straw when honour’s at the stake.” As he has Jeff Bransford put it, “Speaking the truth comes easier for them than for some folks, ‘cause if speaking the aforesaid truth displeases any one, they mostly don’t give a damn.”

The Bernheimer Oriental Gardens at Pacific Palisades, California, no longer exist, but I shall always remember the bronze figure of a Chinese philosopher sitting at ease on a water buffalo, absorbed in a book, while the understanding beast carries him to whatever may be his destination. It is an exquisite piece of work, both joyful and placid. I want to contribute to a fund for erecting a bronze figure of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, at whatever may be the most appropriate spot in New Mexico. I want the figure to be of Gene reading a book on a gentle cow horse manifestly in harmony with the philosophy of his rider.

As horse wrangler he used to snake up wood for the camp cook. He would rope some poles, wrap the rope around the horn of his saddle, head his horse for camp, take out one of the books he habitually carried in saddle pocket or coat pocket, and lose himself in the pages as the horse walked along.

A woman on a lone, lone ranch in New Mexico told me how she looked out the window one day and saw Gene Rhodes reading a book on his horse, which had stopped at the yard gate. She saw that he was oblivious to everything but the imagined world, and went on about her work until, half an hour later, seeing that Gene had not moved except to turn the page, she called to him to get down and come in.

“I guess I will,”he replied. “ That’s what I rode over here for.”

Rhodes’s grave is where he wanted it, alone in the San Andrés Mountains, overlooking the pass that bears his name. A bronze plaque on a great boulder bears the epitaph of supreme fitness: —

“PASO POR AQUI”

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES

JAN. 19, 1869 — JUNE 27, 1934

Had he written nothing else but Pasó por Aquí, the passion of the few would persist. My copy of this story, bound with Once in the Saddle, is inscribed with black ink. On the flyleaf Gene Rhodes wrote, “Why is joy not considered a fit subject for an artist? He never wrote the last book he wanted to write. He did write the concluding sentence for it-a farewell salute to the “gay, kind and fearless.”

That salute is for you also, one of the “Masterless Men,” you, Eugene Gene Cyrano de Bergerac Manlove Rhodes!