Michel Valentin
I met, at the Peak, an easygoing gentleman exuding an uncanny type of cunning kindness and a natural humbleness. One day, he had started to address me on account, I surmise, of my French accent; a correct assumption since he later told me that he was from Louisiana (which explained his Southern gentleness and polite civility) and spoke Cajun-French.
He also had been teaching creative writing years ago at the University of Montana. I finally realized that the kind gentleman was in fact James Lee Burke, a writer famous for his “Detective Robicheaux” series – from which came two Hollywood movies – one with Alec Baldwin playing the detective.
Which made me think how lucky Missoula is.
Not only does Missoula enjoy the rare advantage of cheap and easy access to a magnificent, un-crowded and still unspoiled nature (the perfect playground for poor and rich alike), but it can also pride itself in harboring a sublime wealth of writers, easily accessible by Missoulians – and this is where Europe, and especially France, come into play.
The French have always had a crush on America, the West and especially Montana. Not only, in their minds, is Montana excitingly famous for its fly- fishing, wildlife, its extreme-right militias, its desperadoes living in the woods, its cowboys and “Indians” (whom the French called Peuples Premiers – First Peoples), but it is also known for its writers and their special way of writing about the land and its people.
Why does such a sophisticated, old, urbane, blasé culture, so much in love with writing and with itself, attach such a special importance to Montana and its writing?
It is because Montana’s writers bring to French eyes exotic images of vastness (Montana is three-quarters the size of continental France), grandeur, sublimity, earthiness, country music, guns, greed, passions and violence – i.e. a raw branding of some sort on the bored sensitivity of a pallid, morose European skin. The French imagine Missoula writers with a shot of Bourbon at the ready while typing away at their manuscripts or laid-back in their rocking chairs, pensively overlooking the wilderness, while a gun hangs on the pine back-wall.
It all started with the writers Norman Maclean, Richard Hugo, Wallace Stegner, Dorothy Johnson and the University of Montana Creative Writing Program. In their wake came the four noirs (the French coined the term to describe the genre of hard-boiled detective novels/films of the ’50s): Burke, James Crumley, Robert Sims Reid and Jon Jackson, then James Welch (whom French President Jacques Chirac specially invited to Paris for a conference), not forgetting Jim Harrison, Deirdre McNamer, Robert McGuane; they were followed by Larry Watson, Kevin Canty, Rick Bass and many others.
This is why the French media invented the expression, “the writing school of Missoula, Montana,” and an Oregonian newspaper nicknamed Missoula, “Paris, Montana.” This is why the French cultural attaché came especially from the San Francisco French Consulate to personally attach on Welch’s lapel the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres medal during a moving ceremony at the old Milwaukee Road train station.
This is why successive teams of French media people (with reporters, journalists and TV camerawomen) regularly visit Missoula to meet, dine, drink with and interview Montana writers. This is why Missoula writers often take off for Paris to meet with their publishers or attend conferences and book-signings. For if you go in any bookstores in France (there are many, many left), you will easily find the translated novels of Montana’s writers.
Montana cultural heritage is exporting very well. Although not as obvious as the imposing and noisy trains of coal, crude oil or wheat and corn moving west toward the Pacific Rim, this trade is nevertheless as important as the export of heavy commodities. It is also projecting onto the world a “kinder and gentler” American dimension, an image of sophistication, reflection and sensitivity, an image of “soft brutality,” i.e. the taste and perfume of Montana itself.
This is the stuff humanity is made of, something the UM humanities program should never forget.
Michel Valentin is a French professor at the University of Montana.
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