Glendon Swarthout — Love Affairs with the Old West

When lapsing into tales of the Old West, Glendon Swarthout not only spins them, he lives them.

His eyes squint into slits.

Then, as he warms to the subject, his full, black-as-pitch mustache undulates rhythmically, as words from what might be an unsavory character in one of his Westerns roll menacingly from his lips.

To Swarthout, the West and its heri-tage-real and imagined-are his special passions.

The love affair is evident in memorabilia mounted on a corner wall in the tidy den of the Paradise Valley home where Swarthout has spent the better part of two decades producing a batch of best-sellers.

High on the wall is the long-barreled Civil War six-shooter that belonged to great-grandfather Ephraim B. Chubb, a corporal in the 10th Michigan Cavalry's Company K. And a genuine Army recruit-ing poster of an era long past ("The Horse Is Man's Noblest Companion - Join The Cavalry And Have A Courageous Friend"). Finally, a poster of the Holly-wood Western classic, The Shootist, John Wayne's last film and, to Swarthout fans, the novelist's crowning literary glory.

All this started improbably enough. Swarthout was an associate professor of literature at Michigan State University, his wife Kathryn, an elementary school teacher. Their combined annual income was a dignified, but lean, $11,000 a year, when, in 1957 at thirty-nine years old, Swarthout sold his first novel, They Came from Cordura, a fictionalized account of the last American Cavalry charge into Mexico in 1916.

Random House and Columbia Pictures paid Swarthout an astonishing $350,000. As with The Shootist, this film starred John Wayne.

What followed were more Western classics in the unique Swarthout style - The Tin Lizzie Troop, purchased by actor-producer Paul Newman in 1973 for a film yet to be made; the unforgettable and controversial Bless the Beasts and Children, with several million copies in an array of languages as well as a movie; Skeletons, and The Shootist.

Swarthout ventures occasionally afield -as with the college kid capers of Where the Boys Are, and the familial nostalgia of Welcome to Thebes and The Melodeon. The Swarthouts have co-authored books, and she has written a column, "Lifesavors," in Woman's Day magazine for ten years.

Inevitably, however, the ghosts of the West beckon, and Swarthout returns to familiar territory.

In his relatively comfortable circumstances, Swarthout has the luxury of pacing himself. He publishes a book only every two years.

His is an agonizing process, however. He scrawls a few lines by hand, reads them aloud for sound and meter and effect, then types them. A good day's work is twenty-four typewritten lines, one page of manuscript. Consider, then, the time devoted to a 300-page novel.

Swarthout lovingly chooses words as a master vintner might tenderly squeeze each drop from the choicest grape.

In the final shoot-out scene of The Shootist, for example, each of the fatal gunshot wounds inflicted on the hero and villains is described with chilling, bloody, anatomical detail, the result of several weeks of consultation with a forensic physician.

His newest work, The Old Colts, a rollicking and frolicking tale of an untold adventure of onetime Western lawmen Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, is rich with the punctilious Swarthout style and his caring search for melodic phrasing.

"The race room," he writes in The Old Colts, "reeks of sweat, smoke, spit, and concentration, but to Bat Masterson the smells are bugles."

Even words that send readers scurrying to the dictionary add special sounds and character to a Swarthout phrase.

He has Masterson "absquatulating" (moving) to New York, and one character in the novel The Old Colts utterly "spiflicated" (drunk).

Already, the ghosts of the Old West have beckoned again. This time, Swarthout has found in the plains of Nebraska another romantic, untold story of the American frontier.

The book is at least two years away. For Swarthout fans, the wait is small enough price to pay.

Pat Murphy is a columnist with the Arizona Republic and a close friend of Author Swarthout.