EDITOR'S LETTER

— IN MEMORIAM —

J.P.S. BROWN

1930 — 2021

I WAS ON A TRAIN from London to Brussels the first time I read The Forests of the Night. Instead of looking out the window at Leeds Castle and the cobbled streets of Lille, I was looking at a marauding jaguar in Mexico's Sierra Madre Occidental, some 6,000 miles away. I could see him, even though I was hurtling through Europe at 300 kilometers per hour. I also heard the sound of a young duck as it dove under the surface of the water. And I tasted the wild honey that filled the enjambre in the spring. And I smelled the thick, white smoke from the fire in the shade of the aliso tree. It was all right there in the book.

At the Cronkite School, we teach young writers a core tenet of the craft: "Show, don't tell." It can be traced to Chekhov, who is quoted as saying: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." Those aren't his exact words, but they do show that by grouping together small details, a writer can paint a picture in the reader's mind. J.P.S. Brown was a master of that. Like Emily Luchetti turning flour and butter into croquembouche, he used sensory details to make jaguars come to life. And horses gallop off the page.

"The top horse in my string that year was a spayed mare we called Mae West," he wrote. "She could run a hole in the wind, but her best performance was not anything like Shorty's. Shorty had swelled up like a bomb. Then, instead of blowing up, he used his power as a jet, ran as though his feet didn't touch the ground, and shot through that horde like a torpedo."

Sadly, we lost Joe Brown in January. He died peacefully at his home in Patagonia. He was 90. By any measure, Joseph Paul Summers Brown lived an extraordinary life. He'd been a boxer, Marine, journalist, cattle trader, rancher, gold prospector, movie wrangler, whiskey smuggler and fiction writer. He had many wives, too. Between 1952 and 1965 alone, there were three. The third, a Zapotec woman who technically was his mistress, tried to kill him. She was furious about his plan to marry Jo Baeza, a longtime contributor to this magazine. When the gun misfired, she laced his stew with strychnine. That didn't work, either.

Throughout his life, Joe tiptoed on a tightrope — with his work, his wives and everything else, including his airplanes.

Once, when he was flying north from Mexico, he lost power. The only option was to land on the freeway below. Right behind a Volkswagen. "I was going to eat the Volkswagen," he said, "so I veered off the road down a sharp incline, clipping one wing on a telephone pole. That Volkswagen never had a clue. He just kept on going."

Like a man dropping off a rental car, Joe walked away without a scratch. Maybe that's why his friends in the Sierra Madre called him El Mostrenco — The Unbranded One. His friend Jim Harrison called him something similar: "the great restorer of the great American quest." The two men, cut from the same cloth, shared the grasslands of Southern Arizona and a gift for writing.

Joe discovered his talent at Notre Dame, but he didn't get serious about writing until 1964, while recovering from hepatitis at his grandmother's home in Nogales. The stories he wrote eventually became his first book, Jim Kane, about a down-and-out cowboy who traded cattle in Mexico. The book was published in 1970. Two years later, it was made into a movie called Pocket Money, starring Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, who referred to Joe as "the wildest son-of-a-bitch that ever walked." Carole King wrote and sang the theme song.

In October 1970, around the same time his book came out, Joe made his debut in Arizona Highways. He wrote about what he knew. "In any primer on cowboys, this rule would have to be the first: Cowboying is learned as a way of life, not just a vocation, not out of books, not by grunting and trying hard, not by a desire to be a cowboy, and not by donning a big hat and a pair of boots."

In a Letter to the Editor in January 1971, Phyllis Lockhart of Vernon, Arizona, said the story was "as close to the heart of a cowboy as one can get." H.R. Jordan of Arlington, Texas, was equally impressed: "Mr. Brown's masterful sweat-of-the-saddle and sometimes unexpurgated detailing sets him apart as a teller of cowboy tales."

He could write, all right, but like so many great writers — Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O'Neill — Joe was an elbow-bender. "I'd use the whiskey to keep me going when i was writing," he said. "I'd get into this groove where I didn't stop working except to eat and sleep. Pretty soon I wouldn't be sleeping, and then not eating, and then I'd just drink until I crashed."

"If you obey all the rules," Katharine Hepburn said, "you'll miss all the fun." Joe embraced that reasoning. And broke a lot of rules. Nevertheless, his muse would always find him through the maze of empty bottles. And in 1974, the Dial Press published his masterpiece.

Like Paul Simon's Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Forests of the Night catapulted Joe from prominent to preeminent. To the highest level as a writer. The book, about a Mexican rancher in a battle of wits with a jaguar, debuted to rave reviews. "His new novel is cinematic, gripping and deadly funny," Kirkus Reviews proclaimed on September 12, 1974. The late Charles Bowden liked it, too. After reading The Forests, along with Joe's first two books, Chuck picked up the phone. "He's the only writer I ever sought out in my life," Chuck said. "I think The Forests of the Night is without a doubt the finest novel ever written in our region, and the botanical accuracy of it is stunning. All three of those novels are literally classics. If he never writes another word, he's still created a better body of work than anybody else in the Southwest."

Four decades after The Forests, Joe made a long-overdue return to Arizona Highways. His first new essay, The High Lonesome, was set on the family ranch in Eastern Arizona. "In those days, the place was spotted with dozens of prairie-dog towns," he wrote. "The audacious creatures stood 5 inches tall by their holes with their hands on their chests, looked us in the eye, dared us to attack, and chattered their derision." About the homestead's 10,000-gallon water tank, he wrote: "It provided water for the cattle and a swimming pool for us. The water was so cold and hard that we bounced when we jumped in."

Reading his books and essays is like sitting across the table from him. Two guys having a conversation, one of whom was among the greatest storytellers of his generation. I guess it's fitting that he rode off while we were working on an issue about horses. And life on the range. "I say that cowboys fly," he wrote. "Some fly more often than others, some higher than others, but they all take wing when they find themselves in the big middle of an astoundingly lucky, risky and perfect performance of cowboy skills."

The great writer was a reflection of his own proposition. Lucky, risky, perfect, imperfect ... he gave the performance of a lifetime. But now, I'm sad to say, the show is over. Fly high, Joe Brown. You've got your wings.