Mythmaker straddles the old, new West

"The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays"

by William Kittredge

Graywolf, 256 pp., $15

Before he published his critically praised first novel at the age of 74 ("The Willow Field," 2006), William Kittredge was already an established master of the well-crafted essay and short story with a keen focus on the American West. "The Next Rodeo" is a slim, sturdy collection of the best of those essays, rounded out with a few more gems.

Kittredge's career as a writer has followed a unique trajectory. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Warner Valley, Ore., in the 1930s and worked there until he was 33. After completing the writing program at the University of Iowa, Kittredge taught creative writing at the University of Montana for 29 years.

The author's experiences on his family ranch straddled the old and new ways of the West. Raised in an era before tractors and pickup trucks, he herded livestock with ranch cowboys — buckaroos, he calls them — and his writing is suffused with these memories. "Warner Valley is that place which is sacred to me as the main staging ground for my imagination," he writes.

Kittredge examines the myths of American West from the inside out, both its past glories and disturbing flaws. While he holds a deep respect and fondness for the (white) people who settled the West, he understands the tragic consequences of their treatment of Native Americans and the despoiling of the land for profit.

Kittredge is not above creating personal myth. As a reviewer, I'd be remiss for not mentioning that this book includes accounts of the author's wild drinking binges with Raymond Carver (which made me think this was the last generation of writers who drank like fish — and were proud of it), and that he introduces us to the poet Richard Hugo in an essay called "Drinking and Driving."

More than drinking buddies, Hugo and Carver were his writing mentors. Also in that category was the novelist Bernard Malamud, his teacher at Oregon State University in the early 1950s; Malamud showed him the value of "recognitions" in writing — that is, seeing the world freshly.

Some of the essays don't hold together. Kittredge's clipped, spare style works with some topics and not others. He is an interesting writer primarily for his profound evocation of place. Although he doesn't explicitly compare cities and the country life he knew as a boy, his writing about farming, Western lore and landscape emits a "rootedness" that his other life phases do not.

Rising to the grandeur of those familiar topics, he can be pithy and poetical. Recalling work horses running in the fields of his youth, Kittredge writes, "The boy I was knew at least enough to know he loved them and how that love was reason to revere everything in sight for another morning."

He begins a tale of an adventure in the Teton Mountains of Wyoming: "Hung over and semi-heartbroken when I woke up at sunup in Jackson, I'd gotten out of town in a hurry, before any true sense of my own isolation could come catch me."

Kittredge frequently muses on the binding power of story telling. Stories, he writes, "help you understand your place in the world and even help you come to believe in the importance of your own life." Kittredge's prose, dense with stirring images and imaginings, provides ample evidence of this worth.