The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters!

Our book today is Robert Lewis Taylor’s 1958 historical novel The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which made as much of a splash as any book could reasonably be expected to make. It sold briskly (thanks to an innovatively energetic ad campaign); it garnered an enviable collection of critical praise (The New York Times called it “tremendously exciting,” the old Boston Transcript praised its “grubby verisimilitude,” and the San Francisco Chronicle, perhaps inevitably, referred to its “rollicking good humor”); it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (undeservedly, it must be admitted – good as it is, it’s not a patch on Mary Renault’s The King Must Die); and it spawned a popular TV series. It’s a pure demonstration of sic transit gloria mundi that the book and its author are now completely forgotten.

It’s the story the titular young hero, who follows the pioneer wagon train west from St. Louis to California in the 1849 Gold Rush, a standard spine of travel-novel around which Taylor was free to deck all the period-research he’d done piecemeal over the course of two decades. The book has a deal too much of that regurgitated research, but it’s saved from tedium by the fact that Taylor has a very entertaining grasp of his main character, who comes across as a dimmer, less funny version of Huck Finn:

Well, this was all right. I turned around slowly, naked as a jaybird, roasting one side after another, letting the heat sink clear into my bones. When you come right down to it, there’s nothing like a fire for putting the spunk back into a body. Looked at in some ways, the situation didn’t exactly call for a celebration – I was standing pelt-bare in a strange woods out I the middle of nowhere – but I felt fine and ready to push ahead.

The bulk of the book, as the title suggests, consists of Jaimie’s various coming-of-age adventures, during which he learns the ways of adulthood, the ways of prostitutes (gold-hearted and otherwise), and the ways of the Indians he encounters along the way (those particular scenes are the book’s most memorable by a long shot). These adventures are punctuated regularly by Jaimie’s reflections, not all of which are quite as profound as their author probably thought when he was writing them:

In books I’ve read, I notice that they do a lot of talking about so-and-so’s “character,” making the point that hardly anybody’s what they seem but that everybody’s pretty deep and shifty. I can well believe it.

Taylor wrote a whole shelf of other books in his forgotten career, including 1978’s A Roaring in the Wind, which has an even creakier premise than The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters: a naïve Harvard city-slicker heads out West to Montana, gaining worldly knowledge enough to replace all that stupid book-knowledge he’d been taught at school. It’s a big, very enjoyable book all the same, not quite sunk by the fact that a staggering ten reviewers referred to it as some kind of yarn.

These books are gone now, at least as much gone as any book ever is these days (probably you could buy a copy of each for one penny in 40 seconds online, if you were of a mind to), but re-reading them brought back memories of a reading-era that seems now a bit simpler. Or maybe it’s that the whole sub-genre grew up quickly when Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove appeared.