oregon literature

On Meeting David Shetzline and Discussing Heckletooth 3

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On Sunday, my friend Kevin and I sat down with David Shetzline, author of Heckletooth 3, one the greatest overlooked American novels of the last 50 years, and talked of Heckletooth 3, and other matters, for over three hours. It was easily one of the top moments of my many years reading, studying and writing about Oregon history and literature. It’s right up there with interviewing Dr. Cameron Bangs of Vortex I fame and Maurice Lucas, the bad ass Portland Trail Blazer.

Thank you David, for sharing the remarkable story of this incredible novel, your writing career, and other stories that probably deserve novels or films.

(And thank you to his daughters Andrea and Erika for arranging the meeting.)

Published by Random House in 1969, set in and around the mythical coastal town of Sixes and the Oregon woods, which happened to be engulfed in fire in the plot, Heckletooth 3 is a classic, a forgotten classic, that never saw a paperback edition, was never reprinted, and is almost impossible to find except for a few rare copies. It’s pretty much been purged from Oregon libraries except University of Oregon’s.

I am overjoyed to announce here that David has agreed to allow the publication of an e-book version of H3 scanned from the original version. (More on that project later and how you might be able to assist the resurrection of this novel.) He is also going to write an introduction to the e-version!

We are also on the hunt for the missing manuscript of David’s novel called October All Over, about his experience as a salmon troller out of Newport in the 1970s. Our hope is to locate it and somehow have it published. Where there is a will, there is a way. That’s been my whole publishing career and want to see if we can make it happen for this novel. It must exist.

Again, thank you David. It was something else to read that final magisterial paragraph of H3 to you, and we both were tearing up. It was also fantastic to break huckleberry pie with you, pie made by Kevin’s wife Wendy, from coastal huckleberries! Don’t get no more Oregon than that.

Welcome back to the Oregon world of letters David Shetzline. Oregon is very much a different place than it was in 1969, but H3 is more relevant today than it was upon its release. That’s why it’s a masterpiece.

Letter From a Bonnie and Clyde Reader

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I’d like to share an excerpt from a letter a reader of the Bonnie and Clyde book sent to me this week. Two friends sent the reader the book and I am grateful for that act because this letter deeply touched me and offered fresh insights about the book and its larger story of and institutionalized (and lucrative) inhumanity unique to America. The letter also reminded me how wonderful it is for a writer, any writer, to hear from readers, about where the writer’s words landed. I know I often write to authors whose books have made an impact on me. Typically, you never hear a thing back, but sometimes you do. I encourage everyone out there who loves books to communicate with authors and share your appreciation and insights about the work. Even conflicts or perceived inadequacies with the book can be shared. Most writers don’t want Valentines from readers, at least I don’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, a poem, a painting, a fort, a song, a play, a craft, a grand meal. If the art and artistry moved you, let the maker of that art know.

Dear Matt,

I just finished The Bonnie & Clyde Files at my living room table with Glenn Gould playing the last movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto #24 in C minor playing on my stereo; perfect music for the ending of your book and what may come afterwards: a mixture of mysterious foreboding built into the main theme and throughout the movement, nostalgia for past beauty recently experienced simultaneously with Sturm und Drang on either side..

When I sent you my first email that I was “enjoying” your book, I immediately felt that was an inadequate and inappropriate word to use, although I was mostly thinking at that moment about your adventures with Bonnie & Clyde, the beautiful river sights, the formal structure of your book which is so powerful and profound as it proceeds, and the clarity and concise skill of your perceptions put into words, all of which I continued to admire more and more as I read deeper into the book. I must have been at around page 52 at that time.

Now that I just finished it, reading this afternoon from around page 71 to the end, I have deep emotions and feelings that have very little to do with “enjoyable,” but I can still admire the climax you so skillfully brought towards the end, like a dramatic symphony that both recapitulates itself and goes beyond what has come before to leave the listener, here reader, with its ending, at a peak of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual intensity that only resolves itself through a vow to continue onward as a more informed spiritual human being, much more aware of injustices and atrocities occurring in our natural and social environment, determined to take actions, or adopt appropriate inactions, to make our beautiful miraculous world a better place—I can say this of few books I’ve ever read, but know your are a true brother in spirit along with Walt (Whitman) and Hesse.

Thoughts on Heckletooth 3

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The novel is Heckletooth 3 and it was written by David Shetzline and published by Random House in 1969.

It is set on the Southern Oregon Coast in and around Sixes, a forest fire has broken out and the community and the authorities have galvanized to extinguish it. One man, Replogle, a WW II vet, has shot an elk out of season and tries to cover his poaching using the fire and confusion as cover. Meanwhile, other men in the woods fight the fire or pretend to fight the fire, and reflect on their lives and duties and dreams as Americans.

After Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I would rate Heckletooth 3 as the second best novel ever written where the story unfolds in Oregon. I recently reread it and marveled at the ruggedness of the setting, characters, plot and exploration of the rural American mind. With the exception of one character, a family country doctor, who of course don’t exist in rural America anymore, everything holds up about the novel. These type of men are still living in Oregon’s hinterlands and struggling to make a living while people from the larger cities grow wealthier and distant from nature. The chasm was real then. Think of it today. It’s an ocean.

Interestingly enough, Shetzline wrote about dope coming into the land. He almost anticipates the opiod crisis that is clearcutting its way through rural areas but not the invasion of Dollar General or the Dollar Store. Someone needs to write a novel of that invasion. Shetzline also writes with insight on the relationship of rural men and the various governments that often provide their bread and butter. It is a curious relationship indeed, one I’ve observed up close in my 21 years of living on the Oregon Coast.

The book never went into paperback as far as I can tell, and is almost impossible to find for an affordable price. It has almost entirely disappeared from Oregon’s libraries as well, including all the ones on the Southern Oregon Coast. I’ve talked about Heckletooth 3 with multiple aficionados of Oregon literature and they all feel the same way about it—a regional classic—that somehow must be resurrected. I wish Nestucca Spit Press had the ability to do that.

I reached out to Shetzline a few years ago when I was writing my Lost PNW classics column for the paper then known as the Oregonian. We were tentatively going to meet, somewhere near his home outside of Eugene, but it didn’t happen and I can’t recall the reasons.

He never published another novel that I am aware of and I recently learned he’s in poor health. Where is the Oregon literary community to reprint this novel?

I urge anyone with an obsession with Oregon novels to track this book down. It came out four years after Notion but is entirely of the late 1960s and Vietnam while Notion was set in the 1950s and sounds more honky tonk than rock and roll. Both novels get logging like nothing I’ve ever read. Obviously Shetzline worked in the Oregon woods and it even says so in his biography at the end of the book.

One wonders if there will ever be another novel set in the Oregon woods written by an Oregon writer who worked in the woods and can spin a story out to readers who have never seen the Oregon woods yet live just miles from them. One wonders.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

A Western Set in Western Oregon

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I have watched half the episodes of NetFlix’s new Western serial Godless, and proclaim it highly worth viewing. In fact, I would rank it as one of the better runs at the genre in the last 30 years or so. The writer/director wonderfully bends the cliches and introduces some interesting female characters that belie typical female characters in modern Westerns. The dialogue is sparse, almost Old Testament at times, and so far the show hasn’t been riddled with gratuitous sex and violence.

Of course Godless is gorgeously filmed in the ranching high country where virtually every Western of distinction since the advent of film has been filmed. It was either the high country or the SW desert. I understand the cinematic reasons for that, but still, the panoramas are the same and readily identified about a half dozen or so from previous Westerns, including, I think Duel at Diablo, one of my all time favorites.

If only John Ford had filmed a Western in Western Oregon, set on west side of the Coast Range, where it really gets tiny, strange, green, dank and claustrophobic. Ford loved big open spaces and tall skies to tell a Western. There are no big open spaces with tall skies on the Oregon Coast, excepting of course the biggest space and sky on the planet, the Pacific Ocean. How come no one has ever filmed a Western at the ocean? Consider that!

Ken Kesey wrote a Western set in the woods near the ocean. It’s called Sometimes a Great Notion. It is has chainsaws, clearcuts, a wild river, honky tonk music, fist fights, whores, talking dogs, rain, cheap beer, Cain versus Abel, death in the woods, cuckolding, and deer swimming in the ocean.

Zane Grey wrote a Western called Rogue River Feud (about salmon fishing) that was set on the Southern Oregon Coast, but the deep purple prose just doesn’t hold up, neither does the happy ending.

There was the Western Honey in the Horn by HL Davis, Oregon’s only winner for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1935), but that novel’s style reads more out of the 18th Century Western Europe than modern American literature circa post early Hemingway.

There was a two-hour special of Gunsmoke, latter in the show’s run, filmed in the upper Rogue River. I had a man send me his self published memoir that included an essay about his being an extra on the production. He said all the extras were flying on acid the whole time and I asked if James Arness as Matt Dillon dabbled. Sadly, no.

Yes, there were Paint Your Wagon and Meek’s Cutoff and the original True Grit, but I’m talking west of the Coast Range and something more modern.

Perhaps modern like this:

Rain and wind howled. The streets and sidewalks of a desolate coastal town were empty. It was high noon.

I pushed open the double doors to the animal shelter and entered like it was a Wild West saloon. I shook the water off my pea coat duster and my craft fair hat crocheted by a hundred-year-old woman loaded on peach schnapps.

A smocked barkeep came up to the counter. She looked worried. No one came out in a rain like this. A scotch-colored mutt on the floor behind her growled.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“I want to walk a dog, an old dog, and I want to walk him on a dirty leash.”

She smiled. The mutt stopped growling.

“How old?”

“The oldest you got.”

A few minutes later she produced Daisy, a pointer mix the color of Ouzo cut with water with nicks all over her body.

Daisy. A good country name. A lass from rain country.

“How old?”

“Thirteen, we think.”

I noticed a bowl of treats on the counter and grabbed for them. I loaded my holster and then took up Daisy’s leash and pushed through the double doors. In my mind they were swinging behind me.

Rain and wind almost blew us into the nearby river. We angled toward the beach and the jetty. The ocean was throwing drift logs onto the rocks. Harbor seals rested on the docks. A man slept in his van. Another man appeared from the underbrush wearing a t-shirt and tacked into the wind. It felt good having a sidekick. I was walking an old dog, packing treats, gulls were about, and it was a dark dog day afternoon in the rainiest month on the Oregon Coast. There was good work to do to clean up this dog-neglecting town and I would start after a long walk with an old dog and a breakfast of Hamm’s and eggs.

(Okay, a little rough, maybe more noir than a Western, but why not merge the genres?)

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)