Carrol:
Don't think you are unusual. I think what you were responding to back then
was the same thing that captured ZG: the marvel of "the West," which despite
bad prose he so winningly conveyed. In defense of introducing more about ZG
in a Pound list, I think ZG and LL illustrate something EP talks about in
one of the essays in Impact, namely the value of skilled storytelling
(FMFord was esp. big on this). Pound was instancing detective stories, which
he apparently read in later years. (I know of no mentions of Westerns). I
think the story art can exist apart from Flaubertian writerly excellence. I
did a modest essay on an aspect of this (amateur point of view) I'd be glad
to email, but I do not think it proper to bother the whole list with it. Tom

> From: Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 14:02:51 -0600
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Zane Grey and Westernesse
>
> It's been 60+ years since I read Zane Grey, but for a year or so I read
> every book of his I could get my hands on. I can't remember any
> specifics re Purple Sage other than the hero suffers from TB (that's how
> he gets in Mormon country), and cures by surviving a case of pneumonia.
> The passage of his prose posted certainly makes one cringe -- but I
> loved his prose style at the time. One of the biggest disappointments of
> my childhood was the movie of _Western Union_ -- I had loved the book,
> and the movie was so different. (Can't remember either now -- just the
> expectation and the letdown.)
>
> Carrol Cox
>
> P.S. In his Ohio frontier books he makes a hero of an actual historical
> figure, Lew Wetzel, who I understand was in life a pathological killer.