Hoppy Rides Again

A favourite photograph of one of my grandsons shows him astride his rocking-horse, wearing one of my old hats, a rifle and a pistol in his tiny hands and the reins between his teeth – a miniature copy of John Wayne in the iconic scene from True Grit, in which he challenges the outlaws to draw their guns and face him. As soon as I saw it, I realized I had infected him with my lifelong obsession with Westerns, on screen and on the page. I thought: ‘If that child says “Fill yore hands you sonsabitches” I’m in trouble.’

Naturally, it was my grandfather who indoctrinated me in Western ways. When I was about 10, and coming home from Saturday matinées with my head full of the exploits of Hopalong Cassidy, he gave me one of his library tickets and sent me into the adult section to find the books of Cassidy’s creator, Clarence E. Mulford, or the even more authentic writer of Westerns, Zane Grey. Successive generations came to identify the actor William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy, hardly surprising since he played the role in over sixty films, followed by another fifty black-and-white TV shows. The silver-haired former silent screen star turned Hoppy into an industry. He received 15,000 fan letters a week and undertook personal appearances and charity tours around the world, often taking his faithful and highly intelligent horse Topper with him. He even devised ten Hoppy Cassidy commandments for boys and girls: ‘The highest badge of honor a person can wear is honesty. Be truthful at all times. . . Many animals are good and loyal companions. Be friendly and kind to them . . . Children in many foreign lands are less fortunate than you. Be glad and proud you are an American.’ It was not only because of that last one that I went off my hero. I quickly realized that the on-screen Hoppy was something of a milksop compared to the hard-drinking, red-blooded, trouble seeking and often vengeful wrangler in the Mulford books. Boyd insisted his Hoppy did not smoke, drink or kiss girls: ‘I played down the violence, tried to make Hoppy an admirable character and I insisted on grammatical English.’ Mulford’s prose in his books was anything but grammatical, but it rattled along at breakneck speed, and was all the more gripping for it: ‘Snake-mean rustlers started themselves a cattle war, the powder was primed, the guns cocked, and Hoppy was smack in the middle.’ Girls were ‘purty’ and men spoke their minds. The opening of the very first book in the series, Bar 20 (1907), sets the tone of underlying violence and retribution which so thrilled a bloodthirsty young reader:

‘Keep your hands where I can see them!’ Marshal Edwards shouted at the outlaws across the bar. ‘The first man I see move, I’ll drop.’ But he couldn’t see everything. He couldn’t see the outlaws behind him or the bullet he took in the back.

But Hoppy would see them – every single one of them. You could count on it. He would hunt them down if it took him the rest of his life. He would find the man who killed his friend. Hoppy would see they paid.

And so we’re off and galloping for more than two dozen titles, half of them still in print, written over an amazing span from 1914 to 1942, by which time Boyd was firmly in the saddle in Hollywood and remained so, on TV, into the 1950s. However, there was much more substance and satisfaction for the true Western aficionado in the written portrayal of Hopalong; whereas he remained (apparently) celibate in the cinema, in the books he had a wife and child, both of whom died. After that he went off ‘to seek forgetfulness’ in adventures in which it was ‘friend against friend, brother against brother, gun against blazing gun’. Despite my loyalty to Mulford’s Hopalong, the true begetter and pioneer of the Western genre is Zane Grey whose books are better researched and more historically authentic. Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was one of the first Western best-sellers and The Lone Star Ranger (1915) introduced a character destined for immortality. Grey was also ahead of his time in questioning the slanderous stereotypes of the original inhabitants of the Old West; in The Vanishing American (1925), his hero is a Navajo Indian struggling to preserve his tribal identity and culture against corruption by government and missionaries – of whom Grey said after years of study: ‘The missionaries sent out there are almost every one mean, vicious, weak, immoral, useless men.’ Many of the Western novels originally appeared as serializations in pulp magazines. As well as Mulford and Grey, there were high-class journeymen such as Max Brand and Ernest Haycox. Together they wrote millions of words and hundreds of books and were among the highest-paid writers of their day, earning the equivalent of a working man’s annual salary in a single week. Brand was the author of the frequently filmed Destry Rides Again (1930) but was also responsible for the phenomenally successful Dr Kildare. Haycox wrote the original version of Stagecoach and counted Ernest Hemingway among the fans of his stories in the Saturday Evening Post. In later years, books such as Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), voted the best Western novel of the twentieth century by the Western Writers of America, Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953) and Alan Le May’s The Searchers (1954) kept the genre alive and moved the form into new territory. Shane is an Arthurian knight-errant story in which the eponymous hero wants to give up the gun but sacrifices himself for a boy and his settler family; while The Searchers, voted the greatest Western of all time, is actually an examination of racism and genocide. Interestingly, as the Western film has declined and been reduced to pale remakes or ‘revisionist’ versions like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the novels have gained in prestige. There has been a growing realization that the Western can also be great American literature, and a succession of front-rank writers have given it a new dimension through the power of their writing and their unblinking reassessment of the legend. Perhaps most eye-opening of all, the macho cowboy myth was undermined by E. Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, published in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) and later filmed, telling of the long-lasting emotional and sexual attachment of two young ranch hands. So much for the Old West, where men were men and women made apple pie. Unquestionably, today’s top hand is Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has been compared to Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway and who is rated by one respected critic as ‘the best living American writer’, a considerable claim when you consider the contenders. His Borders Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, 1992–8) has an elegiac quality, regret for a lost way of life, though the book many consider to be his true masterpiece is Blood Meridian (1985), one for readers with strong stomachs. Based on historical fact, it is the nightmare odyssey of a young runaway who falls in with a bestial band of murderers who have an official contract to clear the Texas-Mexico borderlands of Indians. Great literature, certainly. But you can understand why, when myself and grandson mosey back to the bunkhouse, our bedtime reading is more likely to be the straight-shootin’ stories of Hopalong and his fellow old-timers. So long, pardners . . .

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © Tom Brown 2011