Thursday, August 07, 2008


Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns
From the Guardian, Wednesday August 06 2008

Clive Sinclair is the author of several novels and short stories, as well as a collection of essays on "the facts of life and the facts of death". Included in Granta's original list of Best Young British Novelists, he has also received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Fiction. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in St Albans. True Tales of the Wild West is published by Picador, priced £9.99.

1. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister
In the 1880s a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons. Collecting his notes he produced the novel that is the western's sine qua non. It was Gary Cooper, I think, who first spoke the immortal line on camera: "When you call me that, smile!" Researching for my own book I came upon the Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, Wyoming, where I was shown the very room in which Wister composed a part of his masterpiece. Some claim it was the very room whither the Virginian repaired to claim his Molly after his climactic shoot-out with Trampas. A good corrective to Wister's world view - in which the cattle barons (the "quality") were born justified - is Michael Cimino's unfairly vilified Heaven's Gate.


2. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Although set on the eastern seaboard the story it tells, as its narrator himself observes, is really about the West. But that admission is not the primary reason for Scott Fitzgerald's novel to be invited into the Western Hall of Fame; no, it has more to do with the metamorphosis of Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby. The process begins in childhood (evidenced by a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy, into which Gatsby-to-be had inscribed a strict daily timetable, and a list of general resolves), and concludes when he meets a mentor surnamed Cody. The name of course is a signal. It broadcasts that Jay Gatsby reborn is a part of that line of self-made westerners that begins with the scout whose exploits reenacted thrilled the Crowned Heads of Europe; none other than Buffalo Bill Cody. On top of all that is the fact that the book concludes with the necessary shoot-out.
For the other eight in Clive Sinclair's choice link to the Guardian online.

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