Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)
This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.
Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.
And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:
McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.
Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.
McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”
Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:
Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.
… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.
Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”