Over the Northern Border
MAX BRAND
Fredrick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was born in Seattle, Washington. He wrote over 500 average-length books (300 of them Westerns) under nineteen different pseudonyms, but Max Brand—“the Jewish cowboy,” as he once dubbed it—has become the most familiar and is now his trademark. Faust was convinced very early that to die in battle was the most heroic of deaths, and so, when the Great War began, he tried to get overseas. All of his efforts came to nothing, and in 1917, working at manual labor in New York City, he wrote a letter that was carried in The New York Times protesting this social injustice. Mark Twain’s sister came to his rescue by arranging for Faust to meet Robert H. Davis, an editor at The Frank A. Munsey Company.
Faust wanted to write—poetry. What happened instead was that Davis provided Faust with a brief plot idea, told him to go down the hall to a room where there was a typewriter, only to have Faust return some six hours later with a story suitable for publication. That was “Convalescence,” a short story that appeared in All-Story Weekly (3/31/17) and that launched Faust’s career as an author of fiction.Zane Grey had recently abandoned the Mun-sey publications, All-Story Weekly and The Argosy, as a market for his Western serials, selling them instead to the slick-paper Country Gentleman. The more fiction Faust wrote for Davis, the more convinced this editor became that Faust could equal Zane Grey in writing a Western story.
The one element that is the same in Zane Grey’s early Western stories and Faust’s from beginning to end is that they are psycho-dramas. What impact events have on the soul, the inner spiritual changes wrought by ordeal and adversity, the power of love as an emotion and a bond between a man and a woman, and above all the meaning of life and one’s experiences in the world conspire to transfigure these stories and elevate them to a plane that shimmers with nuances both symbolic and mythical. In 1920 Faust expanded the market for his fiction to include Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine for which throughout the next decade he would contribute regularly a million and a half words a year at a rate of five cents a word. It was not unusual for him to have two serial installments and a short novel in a single issue under three different names or to earn from just this one source $2,500 a week.
In 1921 Faust made the tragic discovery that he had an incurable heart condition from which he might die at any moment. This condition may have been in part emotional. At any rate, Faust became depressed about his work, and in England in 1925 he consulted H. G. Baynes, a Jungian analyst, and finally even met with C. G. Jung himself who was visiting England at the time on his way to Africa. They had good talks, although Jung did not take Faust as a patient. Jung did advise Faust that his best hope was to live a simple life. This advice Faust rejected. He went to Italy where he rented a villa in Florence, lived extravagantly, and was perpetually in debt. Faust needed his speed at writing merely to remain solvent. Yet what is most amazing about him is not that he wrote so much, but that he wrote so much so well!
By the early 1930s Faust was spending more and more time in the United States. Carl Brandt, his agent, persuaded him to write for the slick magazines since the pay was better and, toward the end of the decade, Faust moved his family to Hollywood where he found work as a screenwriter. He had missed one war; he refused to miss the Second World War. He pulled strings to become a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine and sailed to Europe and the Italian front. Faust hoped from this experience to write fiction about men at war, and he lived in foxholes with American soldiers involved in some of the bloodiest fighting on any front. These men, including the machine-gunner beside whom Faust died, had grown up reading his stories with their fabulous heroes and their grand deeds, and that is where on a dark night in 1944, hit by shrapnel, Faust expired, having asked the medics to attend first to the younger men who had been wounded.
Faust’s Western fiction has nothing intrinsically to do with the American West, although he had voluminous notes and research materials on virtually every aspect of the frontier. The Untamed (Putnam, 1919) was his first Western novel and in Dan Barry, its protagonist, Faust created a man who is beyond morality in a Nietzschean sense, who is closer to the primitive and the wild in Nature than other human beings, who is both frightening and sympathetic. His story continues, and his personality gains added depth, in the two sequels that complete his story, The Night Horseman (Putnam, 1920) and The Seventh Man (Putnam, 1921).
Those who worked with Faust in Hollywood were amazed at his fecundity, his ability to plot stories. However, for all of his incessant talk about plot and plotting, Faust’s Western fiction is uniformly character-driven. His plots emerge from the characters as they are confronted with conflicts and frustrations. Above all, there is his humor—the hilarity of the opening chapters of The Return of the Rancher (Dodd, Mead, 1933), to give only one instance, is sustained by the humorous contrast between irony and naïveté. So many of Faust’s characters are truly unforgettable, from the most familiar, like Dan Barry and Harry Destry, to such marvelous creations as José Ridal in Blackie and Red (Chelsea House, 1926) or Gaspar Sental in The Return of the Rancher.
Too often, it may appear, Faust’s plots are pursuit stories and his protagonists in quest of an illustrious father or victims of an Achilles’ heel, but these are premises and conventions that are ultimately of little consequence. His characters are in essence psychic forces. In Faust’s fiction, as Robert Sampson concluded in the first volume of Yesterday’s Faces (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), “every action is motivated. Every character makes decisions and each must endure the consequences of his decisions. Each character is gnawed by the conflict between his wishes and the necessities of his experience. The story advances from the first interactions of the first characters. It continues,a fugue for full orchestra, ever more complex, modified by decisions of increasing desperation, to a climax whose savagery may involve no bloodshed at all. But there will be psychological tension screaming in harmonics almost beyond the ear’s capacity.”
Faust’s finest fiction can be enjoyed on the level of adventure, or on the deeper level of psychic meaning. He knew in his heart that he had not resolved the psychic conflicts he projected into his fiction, but he held out hope to the last that the resolutions he had failed to find in life and in his stories might somehow, miraculously, be achieved on the higher plane of the poetry that he continued to write. Yet Faust is not the first writer, and will not be the last, who treasured least what others have come to treasure most. It may even be possible that a later generation, having read his many works as he wrote them (and they are now being restored after decades of inept abridgments and rewriting), will find Frederick Faust to have been, truly, one of the most significant American literary artists of the 20th century. Much more about Faust’s life, his work, and critical essays on various aspects of his fiction of all kinds can be found in The Max Brand Companion (Greenwood Press, 1996).
Chapter 1
“It ain’t hard at all,” said the sheriff. “Most likely he thinks that nobody seen him because of the dark. And he’s right when he thinks that nobody could make out his face. But the point is that there’s lots of ways of identifying a gent, and one of the ways is by the hoss that he rides. And old Jeffreys is willing to swear that he made out the gray gelding of Bill Vance, the high-headed fool of a hoss that young Vance has been riding around lately. So all I’m going to do, boys, is to wait till the moon comes up and then slip out to the Vance place. The reason that I want you fellows to come along is because I never can tell when the Vance people will put up a fight. They got the spirit of a load of dynamite, and any old spark is lightning enough to set them off and blow the tar out of everything within reach.”