The Salina Public Library sponsored a celebration of Robert Day's seminal novel with a community reading of the book, author visit, dinner, movies, and a panel discussion Sept. 17, 2017, that included Fred Whitehead, Mary O'Connell, Leo Oliva, Robert Day, and myself. Here are my remarks.
I
have participated in formal and informal discussion of Robert Day’s Last Cattle Drive— in libraries (the
Kansas Humanities Council TALK program), in prisons, in coffee shops, and around
kitchen tables. I have lived with the book almost from its first publication.
Ed Ruhe, the legendary Kansas University professor, introduced me to Day, Fred
Whitehead, and Ward Sullivan—the model for Spangler—when I was in graduate
school.
I
remember Ruhe’s dining room table piled with books, with only small spaces left
for plates. The cast was like a novel’s playbill. I remember being mesmerized
as Robert Day shook my hand before dinner and then announced I was just a few
handshakes away from Tolstoy. He recounted the lineage back to Nabokov, and
then Tolstoy. It was magic.
Then
Bob did what he does best, after a few magic tricks. He told stories into the
night. I was enchanted. I read The Last
Cattle Drive at that time.
I
grew up in Emporia at the edge of the Flint Hills, cattle country. My relatives
were involved in
The Last Cattle Drive is one of the few mainstream-published
books that shows sentient beings in grasslands cattle country, in 1977. Just a
handful of names are in this category, Willa Cather’s My Antonia was 1918, then there is a gap until William Stafford’s
National Book Award-winning Traveling
through the Dark, poems, in 1963. Wright Morris published Plains Song in 1980. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series was 1985.Cormac
McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses was
1992, Kent Haruf’s Plainsong was
1999, and in 2002, Annie Proulx published That
Old Ace in the Hole. In film, Urban
Cowboy appeared in 1980 and City Slickers in 1991—and its
resemblance to The Last Cattle Drive,
well, that is another story. Unforgiven,
the definitive revisionist cowboy flick, was 1992. So, in 1977, Last Cattle Drive was the first novel to
show contemporary 20th century life since Willa Cather.
A
major accomplishment of The Last Cattle
Drive is its update of the cowboy story. This is a classic United States story,
as unique as jazz. The loner hero, the vagaries of weather and critters, the
challenges of the people—all these are present.
Day
roots his novel in storytelling, with love of his characters’ idiosyncrasies.
No one is Garrison Keillor average. Leo tries, but he falls in with the
stronger characters. Authenticity triumphs over the superficial. Most of all,
the cowboy in the story, Jed, leaves a legacy that will live on, even after he
dies in the end. People like Bob Day and some present company still push books
aside to tell stories at table. New generations will continue this tradition.
Another
note—the author Robert Day is very well educated. I remember as a young writer
listening to him quote Rousseau, Jane Austen, and Terry Southern. The Last Cattle Drive borrows from Huckleberry Finn, Andy Adams’ fictional Log of a Cowboy (1903), historic
documents, and pulp westerns. It is a sophisticated piece of writing that
foretells the mashups and metafictions that are common today. He relishes
blending high and low cultures in this well-wrought book.
This
is a book that has reflection, wisdom, action, payoff, and warm characters. It
made me feel more secure in my identity as a grasslands person when I first
read it, and it influenced me as a writer tremendously. I have kept my region foremost
in sight, and I have tried to maintain authenticity. I remember when Bob spoke
to a Washburn University class decades ago and said he did not follow up the Last Cattle Drive with a sequel, because
his writing did not take him that direction. He has remained true to his
stories above all. That is a feat of heroic stature, worthy of Jed and all the
cowboy ancestors.
