Outlaws are catnip to writers. What’s not to love about a mustache-twirling, profanity-spewing, squint-eyed, lip-sneering, morality-challenged reprobate? How can writers resist the opportunity to depict cackling, flamboyant evil? As John Milton discovered while writing “Paradise Lost,” the character of Satan is heaven-sent for a scribe. No wonder it’s always tempting to give all the best lines to the bad guy: The good guys are generally too boring to make snappy copy.
On Friday the film “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is scheduled to open, and if there is any justice in the world, the movie will prompt renewed appreciation for Ron Hansen, author of the 1983 novel upon which it is based. Hansen has been turning out beautiful, heavy-duty work for decades now. He has a soft spot for outlaws, having written, in various novels, about James, the Dalton gang, Adolf Hitler and the Devil — the real one, not the pale, Earthly incarnation.
We’ll get back to Hansen in a minute. First, though, a word about another author who took on James and came out on top: T.J. Stiles, whose 2002 non-fiction book about the notorious killer, “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War” (Knopf), banishes forever the notion that James was a romantic antihero, a noble if misguided man of the people, a democratic dreamer who stole from the wealthy to revenge the wrongs visited upon hard-working laborers. Instead, as Stiles methodically shows, James was a vicious racist whose exploits were motivated by a hatred of abolition, a rampant paranoia, a persistent foolhardiness and plain old blood lust. A Robin Hood, he wasn’t. A Bonnie-and-Clyde figure? Wrong again. James was pure bad news.
In the biography, one of the best about any American legend, Stiles reveals “the deeper, darker fires of his personality — his recklessness, his sense of persecution, and, most of all, his desire for revenge.” Unlike his brother Frank James, Jesse James despised a quiet life, a life devoid of gunshots and bloodbaths. He was addicted to action. He lived for trauma. And like a plant that thrives exclusively in a particular kind of rarefied soil, Jesse James needed the specialized atmosphere of the post-Civil War Midwest — “an explosive culture,” Stiles writes, of “hatred, personal firearms, and political alienation” — to make him a legend. Otherwise, he might have been just a petty crook, a maladjusted sneak with a killer instinct. “He represented forces larger than himself,” Stiles notes. “He made them concrete, understandable, undeniable.”
Stiles’ book is a grand example of just how imaginative actual facts can be. That sounds like an oxymoron — how can facts be imaginative? — but it’s not, as our great non-fiction writers demonstrate with each keystroke. With his diligent, far-reaching research, filtered through his crisp and rigorous writing the same way a cowboy’s kerchief strains the coffee beans over a trail-drive campfire, Stiles evokes James’ world in all of its brown-leather bluntness, its agitation, its casual cruelty.
Hansen’s novel also rescues the vanished world of Jesse James, but with words that leap and holler on the page, like kids in the grip of a massive sugar buzz. “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is a writer’s book, which is to say its prose style draws attention to itself. Sentences that have been labored over, and sound like it, are as flattering to you, the beholder, as someone who’s gotten all dolled up for your date. Who’s complaining?
Here is Hansen’s description of James at the crucial moment: “Gunpowder and gun noise filled the room and Jesse groaned as a man does in his sleep and then sagged from his knees and tilted over and smacked the floor like a great animal, shaking the house with his fall.” With more sentences that like around, we could declare films obsolete.
Hansen’s best novel is “Mariette in Ecstasy” (1991), a luminous exploration of religious zeal, sparkling with unanswerable questions. The author is always searching, always thinking, and he writes with passion and polish.
His novel about James, in fact, is almost too good: That is, it tends to glamorize James, a crook who doesn’t deserve it. As Stiles tells it, James “made old wounds ache again; he reminded the public of precisely where the blows had fallen, where the social fabric had been torn.” James was a selfish, unrepentant racist. He wouldn’t let the world forget about the Civil War; that was a war in which, as James saw it, the wrong side won. Next time you’re tempted to admire the outlaw with the sandy hair and alliterative moniker, you might want to remember, too, that he thought slavery was a first-rate idea. Some Robin Hood.
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jikeller@tribune.com
