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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 29, 1982)
by Allan Routh John Keeble sits on his eastern Wash ington state ranch of 300 acres, bit ing on a bullet, a man bom to bal ance things. In his roughed-in kitch en, squarely in the center of the log house that is his home, amid the fresh pine scent of the Ponderosas he has cut with his own two hands, he sits. At 37 years old, his hair thinning, lines of worn' and frustration creas ing into his face and holding there from earlier days, John Keeble is tast ing the first but still difficult fruits of a long ambition. There is the ranch —300 acres of arid land, land he has worked that seems to roll forever under the hot afternoon sun; it is overwhelming to see the place, to see how he has raised from the des ert a garden, a crop, a few animals And then there is the family, healthv, strong, and proud to be on their own together in the country. But be yond this, and beyond Keeble s muddy boots and dirtv workelothes, behind his pleasant, how-do-you-do smile, there is John Keeble the novelist, the new found literary gem who has finally broken the bubble of the "easterns'' and has elbowed his way into the recognized portion of the publishing world. With his third novel, titled ) elloufisb. Keeble has finally succeeded Time M<if((i2ine and ,\etesuvek were cm the phone PuiUisber’s Weekh and the Veto York Times Keriew of Hooks spoke Ins name The local Washington week lies and Sunday supplements clam ored at his rough-pine door After two previous novels, a potpourri of articles, and a circle of literary ac quaintances that ranges from Tillie Olsen in California to Ransom Jeffery in Missouri, and after years of pov erty, times of contusion and disor der. times of discontent, there is now for Keeble the sweetness of victory Born in Canada and raised as a preacher’s son along the west coast, Keeble is as much a product of the land as is his character in Yeltouftsb, Wes Frks. Keeble left the west once a short stint of work on his docks rate at Brown on the east coast, but that, as he says, was short lived. "1 was the angr>' young man there, 1 suppose. Married, with no money, and finding Brown not to be what I thought it should have been — it was a pretty frustrating time ” The one thing that Keeble resented most about Brown was the keen competi tion. "Not that competition is in itself a hail thing — not at all. What 1 re sented was being forced to write on that kind of level. That wasn't for me, and neither were the departmental politics." So from Brown, Keeble re turned to his precious west without his doctorate, settling in Medical Lake, Washington, near Spokane. He taught at Eastern Washington Univer sity as an associate professor in En glish. “I enjoyed teaching literature,” he says, "it’s concrete — son of." He laughs Writing isn't. Maybe 1 shouldn’t teach writing. I don’t like to. College writing programs can do things, good and bad. They can give the staning writer encouragement and strength, but they can make the mediocre writer look pretty grxxd by teaching the angles, the hidden ropes, and they keep the dream alive for a great many who don't stand a chance. I don't know maybe I shouldn't teach again." Keeble's first two books — Crab Canon (1971) and Mine (1974\ the latter co-written with Ransom Jeffery — were, by and large, failures. A third book was scrapped midway to completion, and Yeltoufisb started in its place Keeble scrambled to sell it. changing agents — four agents so far in his career — haranguing the New York City publishing apparatus, pushing and pulling his way up. The txx>k. published by Harper and Row, sold its first run printing of 1~,(XX> copies, and Keeble left school to write and ranch full-time “When Yettoufisb first began to be noticed, my colleagues at school treated me differently, with an excessive respect that amounted to envy. The nature of the I rook, the aggressive characters, the thriller nature of it, alienated many of them, especially the intellec tuals. They pointed their fingers: Tie's a commercial writer, nothing more."’ And as anyone who has spent time doppjUng and dabbling around an English department can tell you. there is no greater slur than that. Like its author, Yeilouflst> is delib erate, a heavy handed novel with an assortment of detth done touches that take it from the realm of thriller to the realm of serious fiction. It is the story of Wes Erks, a man most like Keeble, rough, unkempt, inde pendent, unwilling to change for any reasons other than his own. Erks makes a living ranching, but he picks up extra money running illegal Chi nese immigrants across the border into America, from Canada to San Francisco. The txx>k deals with one particular load of passengers and the trek Erks makes with them One of the passengers is a wanted man, wanted by the Triad — a Chinese Mafioso organization — and as the story progresses, the reader finds the Triad wants this one Chinaman bad enough to commit murder. On the surface, it s a cloak-and-dagger sus pense story, complete with dark colored Lincolns (belonging to the bad guys) and a noble but criminal gtxxi guy. But what has drawn atten tion and critical acclaim has not been the surface story, but instead the story that lies just below — the story of Erks, the story of travel and death. Wes Erks is the last of a breed of men who, if we are to believe popu lar myth, were the kind largely re sponsible for settling the American continent. Erks resents government — "the fine print men” — and des pises sing-song morality; he hates weakness, especially in himself, loves excitement, and seeks to find his ul timate capabilities and his own per sonal code of morality. Of course, what Erks does for extra money is il legal; but his breaking of the law is the breaking of written laws, while j his compliances are with unwritten 1 laws, the laws of humans thrown to gether randomly to survive as best they can. Erks could he called a noble savage, as well as die sensitive, confused rebel. During the long haul to San Francisco, Erks discovers him self and his boundaries. He is shot at, chased, harangued, double-crossed; but he remains true to his allv. the wanted Chinese immigrant, because they have been thrown together, both with a job to do, and Erks is, in the end, successful He Is a larger than-life hero, but still he is ptaus ible. and the reader applauds him Another element of Keehle's novel that has drawn attention is the tela (kinship that is strongly established between l.uidtorms, and history, and the present da\ As Erks travels a southward route out of Canada, he associates his location with w hat has been there in the past — ihc Fraser parti of explorers, the early Indians, the Donner party who were forced to survive a w inter by feeding on their own dead Erks is characterized as an amateur historian of sorts, and as he travels, the land around him piques his scholared memory, im ploring him to call up the past. It is Keehle’s conviction that land, its forms and shapes anil general aura, dictates who w e are and who we will be This, along with our history, makes up our own unique existence. Men of the Pacific Northwest, a sprawling, still virgin portion of America, are seen as mirror images of the land, and of the men who came before them Erks is therefore unsettled, like his land, and has a sense of treachery of the land, what it can and has done. It is an old phi losophy. this belief that land and his tory are the mainstays of what we are —it is the philosophy of Jefferson, of Emerson and Thoreau But Keeble takes it further than any of them, by still believing it in an age when most of us live in apartments or in subur bia Keeble wonders Without hind, without our own private struggle to live what even rancher and fanner and settler has experienced, what kind of people are we becoming? Rootless, confused, spiritually ex hausted? As for the negative responses to Yellouftsh. most mention the un canny similarities between Keeble and his influences, notably those of Faulkner “l resent that kind of fool ishness. Keeble says, testily , "those blanket statements like that Rhythm — my rhythm is different. It is my own. A writer is the synthesis of the writers before him There's even an homage to Steinbeck in the book, an homage to his The Chrysanthemums, and there is some of Faulkner, and Joyce, tors, in the tx>ok; but I'd never read any of the Snopes stories before istories that bear close resemblances to a few scenes in Yelloufisb] and I've only recently read Kesev.” Ken Kesey is another “problem” for Kee ble, since Kesey has with his two books (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion) already established himself strongly as a national spokesman/author from the Northwest "There are many Northwest writers,” Keeble says, a bit tiredly, “other than Kesey Fm not jockeying for a position next to or above or below him. I resent that, again. 1 write, and write as well as I can — I leave the rest of it to other people, it's out of my hands. Kesey is famous. So are a hundred other writers. I'm tust me — that's all there is, that's all that matters." And of other writers from the west? "Tillie Olsen is a fine writer — a combina tion of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway. Theodore Dreiser. She skipped modernism, that Philip Rrxh style of trash writing We need more writers like her who aren't from New York City And we don't need the New York City critics telling us what to read and what not to read. I d like to see the west have its own publishing apparatus, but we don't. "There are those writers," Keeble continues, “both dead and alive, who came before me They're all impor tant. But in the end, the writer is no body when he sits to write. He must do it all over again everytime he sits down. That leaves only the individual —alone." John Keeble walks plaintively out the front door of his log house. A heavy ax handle works as a sliding leverage weight on the dix>r. There are no locks or latches anywhere in the house. Outside, the late day sun has turned even hotter, and the pigs are in need of watering, and the lone goose Keeble keeps for his own amusement honks for water, too. The garden's strawberries, still un bloomed, are nonetheless green and velvety. With a large dirty hand, a hand that couldn't possibly write a book, let alone three of them, and with his moustache untrimmed and hanging over his lips, John Keeble grabs up the watering hose and starts for the pigpen. Allan Routh is a freelance u riter from Eugene, Oregon. A Writer in Ranchers Clothes
