The "Forest Fire" at the end of Western individualism
The lurid overtones of a 1933 novel hid its cultural critique
Where’s the fire? If you read last week’s essay about Forest Fire — the 1933 novel that was conceived as an intellectual exploration of misogyny, and is sometimes remembered as a failed early gay Western — you may have wondered at the title of the book. Forest Fire does indeed depict a man valiantly commanding the fight against a wildfire. Today, the best reason to read this flawed novel is its depiction of that fight as a symbol of the changing economic and social order of the American West.
At publication, most of the (straight, male, New York) critics missed the book’s ambitions and subtexts. But one review—by a woman named Mary Ross in the New York Herald Tribune—saw through author Rex Stout’s feint toward lurid motifs to grasp the novel’s real lessons. Ross’ review was titled “The Power of Rejected Emotion.”
A raging wildfire brings a crisis to the book’s protagonist, forest ranger Stan Durham. Stan solves that crisis with the best practices of the day: a self-disciplined application of logic and planning. He has mastered the logistics of wildland firefighting to exert complete control over the Middle Branch Ranger District. Stan’s one rule is to “Never be in a position where you have to decide what to do now, that must always have been decided an hour ago.”
Stan thus stands for a professionalism that altered the post-frontier American West. For example, the gold prospectors of legend gave way to large corporate mines with organized workflows. The legendary open range was carved into private holdings by smart lawyers pursuing complex legal strategies. In an increasingly competitive market economy, a successful rancher had to develop a detailed knowledge of cattle breeding to thrive—or choose to instead become a dude rancher thanks to detailed knowledge of tourists’ romanticism.
The professionalization trend rose simultaneously with, yet in direct opposition to, the mythologized Zane Grey novel, the classic Western. In the romantic ideal of those novels (and, later, movies), the cowboy conquers a difficult environment with his wits. He is a multitalented, handsome, proletarian individualist with a deep relationship to nature.
The cowboy is famously stoic. He doesn’t talk about his emotions. He does, however, have emotions. They define his actions. He defends the villagers, seeks revenge, regrets his past misdeeds, and falls in love with the schoolmarm. Even if unspoken, emotional conflict is always at the heart of a Western story.
But the professionalized West rejected emotion. Accordingly, the footloose, jack-of-all-trades cowboy went from conquering hero to low-status laborer. Acting on orders, his emotional depth became useless. Meanwhile the people giving the orders, like emotionally repressed Stan Durham, acted on professional standards rather than heart.
In the book, Stan loves the Forest Service. He finds his true calling in the bureaucracy because it allows him to reject emotion. But that merely accentuates his failure to connect emotionally with his wife, children, employees, or friends. The critic Ross saw how the fire mirrored crises in those realms, dooming Stan to failure.
In other words, Forest Fire fails as a Western novel not because it lacks gunfights but because it’s centered in professionalism and procedure, rather than emotion or individualism. That makes for a lousy story.
America doesn’t have a lot of great literature set in the midcentury professionalized West. (Sometimes a Great Notion maybe? The Indian Lawyer?) Instead we have kept rehashing Westerns set in the “Old” West. They serve as nostalgia. Back then, people faced situations where emotion and wits were more important than logic and credentials.
When the 20th century West chose professionalism over emotion, it rejected the stories that had made the region special. The great stories thus left the West. They went to settings such as teeming cities, frontiers of technology, ever-emerging business models, or the wilderness of outer space. These were places that could still stir emotions because they hadn’t yet been professionalized.
I doubt that author Rex Stout realized the implications of his chronicle of a professionalized West. Nor could he have known how few other authors would tell such stories (making his own contribution a more valuable historical artifact). But his actions suggest that he did realize he was not telling very good stories.
Stout gave up on novels of ideas, and (with one old-age exception) novels set in Montana. He decided that his next project would be set in New York City, would be full of action, and would seek to capture these very conflicts in his two major characters. Next week: The shift he made, and the reason you might have already recognized his name.
End notes:
This is part 2 of a trilogy on the book Forest Fire. Part 1: “Why the first gay Western came from a straight Easterner more interested in ideas than romance.” Part 3: “The detective novel as failed Western.” Stay tuned!
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I quote from Mary Ross, “The Power of Rejected Emotion: In Rex Stout’s Bold New Novel, Fire is the Symbol of Unconscious Forces,” New York Herald Tribune, Apr. 16, 1933. For comparisons, see “Books: Western,” Time, Apr. 17, 1933, and “Drama in the Forest,” New York Times, Apr. 16, 1933.
Good read. About the only acceptable emotion men could show in the Old West (and still too commonly in the New West) was anger. Anger often stands in for other emotions, of course. A well-veiled tear ("this dang dust is gittin' in my eyes") was allowed to be shed, though, if a man's favorite horse or dog died.
America has lots of literature set in the midcentury professionalized west: books by Louise Erdrich, Ivan Doig, Larry Watson, James Welch, Cormac McCarty, and Wallace Stegner to name a few.