6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Overlooked Gem: tales of Montana and Kentucky and the writing life, February 11, 2006
One of the American West's best authors, born way back in 1901, A. B. Guthrie became a rancher, a newspaperman, a teacher, a naturalist, an author who would win the Pulitzer Prize for THE WAY WEST, then a screenwriter nominated for an Academy Award.
Guthrie says he went into college as a conservative Methodist, became president of his fraternity, thought he had a good grip on permanent reality:
"An instructor of forgotten name asked students to list their prejudices. I couldn't think of any and wrote down 'none.' No prejudices, but we didn't want a Jew in the fraternity and were careful about that. There was only one Negro on campus, a fine boy too, as all admitted, but he was a Negro...No prejudices. Just a normal capacity for realism."
But his sense of reality changed: "Gone by the time I graduated was the last shred of belief in supernatural religion. In its place was a vehement rejection that, if less vocal now, yields not an inch to argument. Gone was the complacency about our social order. I became a liberal, if that word has any meaning any more..."
Guthrie recounts his reading back then, a long list of authors that he says left him cold in 1963 when he was writing this:
"A penalty of authorship is the restriction of range as a reader...fewer and fewer books enthrall him. For myself, I'll never again read a line of Sinclair Lewis. Reaching back once, I discovered I couldn't go on with Tess of the D'Urbervilles, under whose cloud I had lived so long. Dreiser, for all of his power, is too awkward to take. Afraid of disappointment, I haven't reread Frank Norris, much as I used to like him. Shaw is too wordy. Swinburne is too easily expert, Mencken too showy, Wolfe is too much woe-is-me. Of the authors who used to engage me, I find Joseph Conrad and his smoky prose perhaps the most rewarding now."
Guthrie tells some good stories, the ones about Kentucky especially interested me (he lived next door to Dr. Thomas Clark) but that section may not interest others.
More generally interesting are his encounters with Bernard DeVoto, Robert Frost, and other authors and academics. Howard Hawks, who worked on the movie of THE BIG SKY, recommended him for the job of adapting Jack Schaefer's SHANE:
"In 1951 I went to Hollywood, there to write a screen-play based on a thin western novel called Shane. I had never considered Hollywood or imagined I would be summoned. I had never written a screenplay. I had never even seen one on paper."
"When my agency called, I was incredulous. Yes, the agency assured me, George Stevens of Paramount was to be the producer-director, and he was an uncommon man, one that I'd enjoy working with. I had never heard of him. I said I wanted to read the book."
"Although Jack Schaefer, the author, betrayed some ignorance about the West that I knew--he came to know a lot more--his prose had drive, and it introduced into the myth of the West a couple of elements which, if not unique, were fresh and engaging nonetheless. One was that the story came from the observations and through the senses of a small boy. The other was that a triangle was kept innocent by the admiration of each character for the others. You would hardly have thought that situation had much appeal to the industry."
"Misgivings drove me to accept the assignment, though the salary of $1500 a week was no deterrent."
Guthrie recounts his meeting with Stevens on the day of his arrival. Stevens agreed that there would be no right and no wrong in the novel, that all sides would have their case. There were to be departures from the standard western of the day, "but in the main, we accepted the western myth, as we had to if we were going to stay with the book."
Guthrie was a naturalist, and it went against his grain to be otherwise. His autobiography is an overlooked gem and might be better known if the author had not lived and worked another twenty-some years, dying in 1991. David Peterson's splendid afterward fills in the later history of this man (in the trade paperback edition), but it left me longing for a fuller, more comprehensive biography of A. B. Guthrie.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A not-very-interesting book by a great writer, September 27, 2010
I was a bit disappointed in this memoir by a Pulitzer prize winner. I mean I read his famous trilogy of the settling of the west (The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills) years ago and I loved 'em. And later I read some of his more contemporary stuff - Arfive, Wild Pitch - and enjoyed those too. But this memoir, which Guthrie wrote at the age of about 65 - mid-career, as it turned out - was just 'okay.' There was something too careful and artificial about it, like he didn't want to offend anyone. And he gave rather short shrift to details about his boyhood and youth in Montana back in the early days of the 20th century (although there were hints of problems and tension between him and his father). There was way too much information about his "newspapering" days in Kentucky with its scattered not-very-interesting anecdotes about covering the police beat, local politics, colleagues, and local 'characters.' My interest was briefly rekindled when he talked of his days as a Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard, and then his time at Bread Loaf back in 1945, where he was carefully critical of Robert Frost's apparently overlarge ego and the poet's wanting to be "the only bull in the pasture."
The tone of the last part of the book is overly melancholy it seemed, which may have been due to the end of his 30-some-year marriage in divorce. He waxed briefly philosophical about this personal failure. But had very little to say about winning the Pulitzer prize and not a lot more of his days as a Hollywood screenwriter, of which the pinnacle was his work on "Shane." Guthrie did find another soulmate, a wife thirty years younger than him, and stayed married (over 20 years) until his death at the age of 90. But he didn't know any of this would happen when he wrote this book. He was still pretty down, and it shows. According to the Afterword by Guthrie scholar (and long-time friend and protege) David L. Petersen, Guthrie was planning to update this autobiography near the end of his life, but never did.
Once again, this is not a bad book per se; it just wasn't very interesting. It wasn't personal enough. I remember I had the same problem with the autobiography of Louis L'Amour, The Education of a Wandering Man. Both books were a bit too distant in style, too self-consciously stilted and mannered. I ended up skimming significant portions of both books. Sorry, Bud, but I just got the feeling your heart was somewhere else when you wrote this summing up of your life up to that point. I can't help but wonder how the "revised version" might have read, after 20 years of more success, honors and a happy marriage. I'm glad I read this book, but it was simply not A.B. Guthrie Jr at his best. - Tim Bazzett, author of BOOKLOVER
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
