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