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Reviews
On a Silver Desert: The Life of Ernest Haycox
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By Ernest Haycox Jr.
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University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 352 pages. $39.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Robert Frank
Oregon State University, Corvallis
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| On the jacket of this biography of a fatherby a son — hence also a partial autobiography — is a photograph of Ernest Haycox (Erny) at work, with a scene from the movie Stagecoach wrapped around the jacket. Each image aptly introduces this life of a writer best-known for writing close to three hundred short stories and twenty-four novels, most of them Westerns, one of which, "Stage to Lordsburg," was filmed as Stagecoach by John Ford in 1937. |
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While Ernest Jr. periodically reflects on aspects of his father's writing career, his is not a scholarly treatment. He refers interested readers to "studious appraisals" in his afterthoughts (p. 269). Although Erny's family, friends, and relatives appear, this story is mainly Ernest Haycox's. Ernest Jr. lets his father speak through generous excerpts from dairies and letters, especially in the last several chapters. There we mainly hear Erny talk, for example, about his ambitions as a writer and his views of modern fiction. Ernest Jr., a retired journalist, mainly reports. He speculates little and psychoanalyzes even less. Of his father and mother, for example, he writes: "Erny and Jill were serious parents" (p. 129). |
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Erny's parents abandoned him to the care of various relatives several years after his birth in Portland, Oregon, on October 1, 1899, but continued to surface in his life until his death of cancer on October 18, 1950. After Erny experienced considerable financial success in selling his stories and serial novels, the family built a large home on seven acres in Portland's West Hills, summered on the Oregon Coast, and occasionally traveled throughout the country. They also accompanied Erny on his few stays in Hollywood, where he wrote scripts, including those from his own work. Friends of Erny and his wife, Jill, saw their marriage as a mismatch. She had a lover at one point and doubted her husband's fidelity. "They kept up appearances for their children and, in truth, the relationship was not unrelentingly acrimonious," concludes Ernest Jr. (p. 154). |
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Erny's success as a writer — by 1935 he had been published eighteen times in Collier's— caught the attention of the Portland community. He was an active Rotarian and known as a "solid Republican" who often appeared at functions of the Oregon Republican Party's elite. He wondered about the role of the federal government in an inequitable free enterprise system, but he distrusted Big Government and especially disliked Roosevelt, positions that seem consistent with the self-reliance of many of his protagonists. |
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After graduation from Lincoln High School in Portland and a stint at Reed, Erny enrolled at the University of Oregon to study journalism. He wrote for the Oregon Daily Emerald under the handle "The Campus Cynic" and also wrote some book reviews for a Eugene daily, but he took most seriously a class in fiction writing with Professor W.F.G. Thatcher. As a student, he developed work habits that supported him as a writer for the rest of his life. He would become known for hard work, attention to detail, extensive knowledge of the early West, and historical accuracy in his all his writing. |
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After fifty rejections while still at the University of Oregon, he sold his first piece, "The Corporal's Story," to the Overland Monthly. He hit a national audience with his first sale to Collier's in 1930 and made a comfortable living as a writer thereafter, publishing frequently in Collier's and Saturday Evening Post. He earned sixty thousand dollars in 1941, for example. |
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Although financially successful and well-recognized as a writer, Erny chafed against the conventions of Westerns and aspired to become the "Balzac of the Badlands" (p. 168). He felt caught between the "financial angle" and a desire to use his talents for the "very highest end" (p. 169). He flirted with what he called the "thematic, clinical, case-history novel," or "the big circus wagon story with everything thrown in but the kitchen sink," but he kept being drawn back to character and action, the engines of his Western stories and serial novels (p. 242). The result of this turn to a different kind of fiction was two novels, both published posthumously, The Earthbreakers and The Adventurers. The Earthbreakers was to be the first of "five of the beasts" in his system (p. 243). |
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The Earthbreakers is an Oregon settlement book set in the Willamette Valley around 1845. Erny admired the pluck, shrewdness, energy, and luck of these early Oregonians. Of their ordeals, he wrote: "All of this leads to the major point I wish to rub over the story — like a clove of garlic ... over a piece of bread: There is no escape, no golden land, no security; it is a timeless illusion. We must sweat and cry. This will be in every future novel I write" (pp. 247–8). Regrettably, he did not live to write these future novels. The Earthbreakers was well received upon publication and maintains a steady readership, but he is still best remembered for his Westerns, in the company of Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour. |
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On a Silver Desert will appeal to those interested in Westerns, American literature, Ernest Haycox's life, and the social and political scene in Portland, Oregon, in the first half of the twentieth century. |
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