lOOKS
289
In
this situation the West and westering, considered as the
raw materials of art, pose a considerable problem. The very preva–
lence of stereotypes tends to proliferate stereotypes. They have an
automatic appeal to a kind of writer who seizes upon them and
lies in wait, ready to garrote "new" material and make a killing.
The West appears to be more than usually afflicted by that semi–
underworld character, the commercial writer, who deals in printed
matter precisely as he might in slot machines or panaceas or any
other devices aimed at the quick buck. He haunts writers' confer–
ences, the Apalachins of his tribe, in the fervid hope that there
the representatives of publishers will betray secret recipes for next
year's best sellers and perhaps make it possible for him to muscle
in on the still lusher territories of television and movies.
In
his home
town he has the ear of reporters, who describe his new works with
the earnest enthusiasm accorded to symphony doings and market
behavi~r,
and who distinguish him from ·the "quality writer" only
by liking him more. He himself will have nothing to do with
literary men, even though they have names; he will not listen to
them if they come to town to lecture, and he will not acknowledge
their existence except by assuring you, with a matter-of-fact cer–
tainty, that they write for money too. Indeed, he rather likes to
put on the vestments of the common man's defender against high–
brows. This writer and the local status that he often achieves rep–
resent an odd melange of local pride, naive regional consciousness,
belief in salvation by works that pay, democratic or socio-economic
cliches, and an imagination stunted by a diet of stereotypes. As a
westerner, he looks for western subjects, but he sees western history
only through the formulae of popular art. True, he would like to
go
them one better. But his great dream is the discovery, not of a
new insight, but of a new formula-a new angle, a terrific float
in
a historical pageant, a super-colossal.
This
account would
be
excessive but for the prevalence of the
commercial writer in the West, and his pre-emption of western
themes. When the script-writer, as we may call
him,
has squatter's
rights, the territory is not altogether inviting to a genuine literary
explorer. The art-writer has not only to face the exacting task
characteristic of his own work, that of probing the territory with
his
own imagination; even before that, he has to fight his way into
