Will Henry
1912-1991

Will Henry, Clay Fisher, or Henry "Hank" Allen; it matters little by which name he’s known for his words sing like no writer before him. His romantic, poetic, often cynical prose is shot with humor and appreciation for simpler time when a man’s word was his bond, and a woman was a warm, noncompetitive companion.

The tall, lanky author of more than fifty books, most of them Western novels which sold more than fifteen million copies, once worked as a script writer in Hollywood, where a number of his novels were adapted to film.

One of the few of his profession who actually looked like a novelist, Henry described himself as having that "old-hand, far-squinted look, all-bearded and Levi-ed, mainly unshorn, and eons ahead of the hippies. But God understands that Will Henry is not a hippie." He was a guarded, self-effacing man who said he skulked around life’s edges, a reclusive hypochondriac (an occupational hazard). He had reason to worry about his health during his later years, yet always seemed to find time to come to the defense of his fellow man.

If Henry’s collection of awards is indicative of his writing ability, few can match him; nor was he inclined to talk about the honors heaped upon him. Research uncovered the fact that he was the first writer to receive the prestigious Saddleman Award from Western Writers of America in 1961 for outstanding literature. He also shared the honor with Fred Grove of winning five Spurs. Another kudo was the Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Wrangler Award.

To tamper with such creative talent would be pure heresy, so the following interview contains his unabridged responses to his poetic, often tongue-in-cheek self-appraisal: "Come out, come out, Will Henry, whoever you are. . . You must be warned that my name is not Ishmael, nor was I born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Neither was it the best of times or the worst of times. My name is Will Henry and maybe Clay Fisher, and for sure Henry W. Allen. Likewise, this is as much of my story as I would care to see displayed where small children might get their hands on a legible copy. Attend therefore charitably. It was a raw, cold day that saw my birth in old Missouri. Mean with the bite of sleet in its frozen teeth. One of those westering days when the very wind carried a knife. A perfect day for a Libran child to emerge, gaze in whinnied startlement at the strange world all around, recoil and cry out, "Oh, my God, I thought it was 1812."

Q. How did your family background shape your life?

A. They always want to know right off about your family background. And this is a subject that must be approached with some care in the present case. The family background is no stranger to suspicion. Indeed, there must have been an extra-legal scrape, or six along the way. Even some time served, or owed the state. Who knows? We don’t guarantee a thing here. I mean family background? On me? A fellow whose father was a best personal friend of Jesse Woodsen James III? Who was whelped and reared in one of the two counties that harbored the James gang in its halcyon raids? Who got to meet Cole Younger in the Confederate Veterans Home at Liberty, when his oral surgeon dad took him along one day when called out to treat the old outlaw? But, after all, how many ten-year-old kids get to meet Cole Younger?

Q. Where were you born?

A. I was born fit and proper of a married mother and father in the "Show Me" state of Missouri, which everyone knows is pronounced "Missourah," county of Jackson, city of Kansas City," September 29^th, 19 and 12. That made me the middle of three brothers, with two sisters, one each flank, oldest and youngest of the brood.

Q. So you’re a Libra?

A. Yes, A Libra, naturally. That’s the brand of starchild I was. Libras are nuts, you know. But mostly just dingy, not dangerous. They drink spunkwater and hang upside down in old barns. And they’re sneaky. But excuse me, Ma’am, you wanted specifics?"

Q. Yes, what were you like as a child? Shy? Precocious?

A. Was I shy? Of course, cripplingly so. Precocious? Not likely! If I knew the antonym for precocious, I mean if I were a writer or something like that, I would know. I’d tell it right out, that’s what I was, the antithesis of precocious. Friendly, outgoing? Quite the contrary. I was a crafty and coyotish child. Stealthy, skittish, not above the occasional disinformational mispresentations. Just your typical middlebrow neurotic kid growing up bored and restless in the midwest heartland of the early 1900s.

Q. Were you a bookworm?

A. Oh, no, I was much more catholic in my tastes. Books were hard going. I read the popular literature of the day: labels on prohibition liquor bottles, naughty classified ads, steamy personals, bank ads offering high three percent interest rates. I was a boy of the world, Ma’am. Never your one to read anything longer than a prescription.

Q. What kinds of literature did you read during your youth?

A. Weird Tales Magazine. Oh, hard cover? Well, there was Sax Romer and old Dr. Fu Manchu, and Edgar Rice Burroughs with the Mars books and At the Earth’s Core, and Conan Doyle and that doper Holmes, and Jeffry Farnol and The Money Moon, and Kipling and that talking animal act and Soldiers Three, and oh, Lord, all that wonderful old stuff of a better day among reader-people.

Q. Were you a good student?

The answer is nyet. But I don’t want to be misunderstood. I know it is popular in current biographical references to say that were educated in the streets–street child, street smart–the usual dreary litany of modern validation. But such anti-establishment posturing, with its incurable juvenilitis, was not for me. I was not, as they put it, into that. Of course, no generation escapes its rebel youth. I was a bunchquitter, myself, but not in their frame and fashion. I was in business for myself, a certified lone-hand kid. If I were not a good academic risk, neither was I pointlessly rebellious. I just didn’t belong to any crowd, and still don’t. I was a child and then a young person, an edge-of-the-crowd operator, a stand-off to monitor the human condition of others. A combat observer of the fray. But never, save if caught in its back flow, a participant. That would have taken resolution and courage. I had neither, but I watched my fellows without fail.

Q. What were your majors and interests in high school and college?

A. Hmmmm. My interests in high school were–I don’t know–to draw away from myself. Probably. I fancied myself as holding an advanced view of humanity and mankind for a fourteen-year-old boy. I knew all about people, kids around me, they knew nothing. And my teachers didn’t either. So, anyway, about majors and interests in high school and college, I held to none that counted in the end. I made it through three semesters of junior college–the level of college then realistic for families of limited income and a litter of siblings to educate–but junior college and I had nothing of value for one another, as should be no surprise.

Q. Which subjects then interested you?

A. I memorized the 1931 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica as my sum total usable education after high school. If I had a very special favorite author, looking back, it would have been Mark Twain. John Steinbeck would run a close second, but only second. And Rudyard Kipling third, and in his way, all by himself.

Q. What did you aspire to become as a young man?

A. An old man.

Q. When did you actually start writing?

A. I did some magazine writing quite early. I think I was probably eleven or twelve. My mother–in her effects when she died–was found to have the rejected longhand copy of a short story submitted to Liberty magazine called "El Lobo Que Llama," which at the time I thought meant "The Wolf Who Cried Out." Later on, I think somewhat interestingly to book writers, I took the original faded copy of this self-same story, nothing changed, and I simply typed it with the necessary cosmetic job regarding language and punctuation. Therewith, as "The Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain," it was published and sold rather steadily to anthologies ever since. Its formal debut was in the Will Henry/Chilton Books anthology, Sons of the Western Frontier.

Q. How did you react to the rejection?

A. Well, frankly, I was quite put off by it. I wrote a very angry letter to the editor of Liberty magazine and told him that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and that he should resign immediately, and take up some charitable work, preferably in Botswanaland or Upper Chad.

Q. Did your parents encourage your creativity?

A. My parents did a great deal to encourage my creativity, particularly my father, who was a Spartan administrator. And you cannot imagine, in this softer world that we have become, particularly for children, you cannot imagine the authoritarian reign of Dr. H. Wilson Allen, Sr. Oh, yes, I was a junior, wouldn’t you know? And the creativity came about–had to come about–inspired by this martinet who was our blood. And the lies I concocted, the fables, the stories, the inventions of the mind, which I used and employed to get around my father, would make a very handsome anthology in themselves.

Q. Did he tell you to go forth and earn an honest living?

No, no way. My dad told me, "Hank, for God’s sake, you’re twenty-three years old. You’ve been threatening to become a writer or do something with your brain since you were old enough to talk. You’re unreliable, lazy, you lack true grit, and I don’t want to recommend an honest living for you. I think you’d do better at a dishonest living. Why don’t you become a writer?

Q. Wasn’t he proud of you when you became a published writer?

A. My father–a great bookman–by that I mean that he loved great books and owned many shelves of them–but he was likewise a spirited reader and user of all literature with a major in poetry. He loved poetry. Particularly Burns and the great British narrative poets. He could recite Burns in the vernacular by the hour. I give him a hard way to go in some of my memories, but he was no ordinary man. Oddly enough, for a man with such a hot flame for reading and authors, his reaction to my emergence as a sometime writer of frontier and other fiction, was virtually nonexistent. That always puzzled me. Worried me, too, I had to ask him, after I sent him a copy of No Survivors, my first novel. He didn’t volunteer, and when I cornered him he was plainly at a loss for what to say. I always felt as though he thought I wasn’t a writer in those terms he used to define writers–world fame–and that he really didn’t know what to say to me and General Custer. It made me think, in view of his love of books, that it became quite possible that he was right, and I wasn’t a real writer. Pretty hard to argue, when you’re being measured against Wee Bobbie Burns and, oh, maybe Byron, Coleridge, Browning, and Sir Walter Scott.

Q. What kinds of jobs did you hold to support your writing habit?

A. I went to Hollywood and became a great, great star and made a lot of money, and then I shot myself and came back as an ordinary house mover in old, old Hollywood. I lived three doors up from Ace Cain’s liquor store over there off Sunset Boulevard. And I was one of Ace’s long-term customers. This was a case of economic necessity, not brotherly regard. I drank a vineyard, or three, of California wines before the world discovered them and ruined a good thing,. As I remember the prices, they were thirty cents per quart, twenty cents a pint. We used to go over there to Old Ace’s and he had a whole wall of the ancient winery oak barrels for the bulk trade, which was my friends and me. We would bring along a sauce pan or a milk bottle or whatever was handy that a quart could be measured in, and Old Ace would fill it to the mark for thirty cents. That was for the good stuff, muscatel, you know, and port. The weak stuff, the burgundy and claret and the watery-like, was only fifteen cents a pint. Muscatel was our choice. Of course, we always ceremoniously sniffed the essence and the ambrosia of it before swigging.

Q. What kinds of jobs did you hold in Hollywood?

A. I worked on moving van crews. That was good work in those depression thirties. Two dollars per day. And my room was only two dollars a week with my own bathroom. Also, a young hooker lived on the floor above me and she spotted my driven snow innocence and lack of defenses against her wiles, and did not honorably violate me or offer any of her wares at retail. So she was sort of a Hollywood mentor for me, and she kept me out of a hell of a lot of trouble. I always wondered what became of my shop-worn Modonna. She was something else. Happy trails, Muchacha!

Q. Didn’t you write some movie scripts while you were in Hollywood?

A. I never was a screenwriter in the feature-length sense. I worked for the short subjects department at MGM as a contract writer for several years. I had a few TV credits back in the fifties, but my assignments with Hollywood as a writer were mainly as author of books they bought to be made into movies, or a hired writer-hand on those ten-week contracts the major studios gave to writers to come in and develop a script from their novels. I learned a lot about "inside Tinseltown." But as to being a screenwriter, no, I was not that. Nor did I ever more than briefly aspire to be. The money was incredible, yes, but the terms for earning it were impossible to accept–the trashing of friendship, truth, and loyalty. So here I am starving under all those grand terms. Flat-tail broke, but uptight and loyal and full of truth and friendship.

Q. How did you break into screen writing?

A. I was first hired as a script writer by Dale Robertson on his old "Wells Fargo"series; next by Twentieth Century Fox to do the first script for "The Tall Men." Then on to Universal to do a takeoff–what we call a spinoff today–in other words a sequel, to "The Day Fort Larking Fell."

Q. How do you compare the two art forms?

A. I did consider screen writing to be a second cousin to novel writing. And still do. But it is a splendid art form in its own right. Did you ever stop to think that nearly all of the Western movies of major note were successful as published works only after the "great movie" had been made from them and released, to start the fire under published material which otherwise would be going along with old Will, down the trail to Wanagi Yata? Make your own list: Shane, Hondo, Red River, Statgecoach, True Grit, High Noon, The Way West. The list is endless. The movies have been the great savior of the Western novel, say Western story, period. I will pay ten cents for every movie title you send me that was highly successful as a published work, before the movie lightning struck and emblazoned upon it the miracle of "all-time classic."

Q. Do you have a regular writing schedule?

A. Yes, I do, and I did when I was in full production, and it went like this: I would get up in the morning–I’m a morning person–I would get up about five to five-thirty, and by six I am through with the first three or four cups of my justly famed bituminous coffee. By then I am dressed and out in the kitchen and it’s time to trudge up the hill. I have a little cabin up on the hill behind my house where I wrote a good part of the last twenty-seven years’ worth of work. I’d repair there with my coffee pot and my cup and, you know, find wherever I left the current script half-stuck in the machine the night before. I would then work through until two o’clock steadily, let’s say from seven to two every day. Then from two to four and five to six was rewrite time. Yep, so I worked ten-hour days for twenty-seven years, and got out about fifty books. On that kind of hard-scrabble schedule, believe me, three books a year was a big production. For me it was.

Q. Why do you write?

A. I write because it’s in me to write. I’m part poet, part creative liar, part apologist/historian, fair to middling creative romanticist. Not a real pro, though, I fear. That’s really why I write, you see, to get better. One day even to become better.

Q. Do you enjoy the actual process of writing or is it a daily grind?

A. God no, it’s not a grind! The most enjoyable and wonderful thing in the world to me–of which reading is only next–is the writing, the creative act; to sit down at the typewriter, or with pad and pencil and start drawing words out on the page that mean something, that are interesting, that are stirring, that are illustrative, even inspirational; there’s nothing like it, absolutely nothing like it.

Q. Why do you write Westerns?

A. I write Westerns because I’ve always loved the West, both as a land and an intangible mythology. I love the looks of the deserts, the skies, the mountains, the roll of the plains. There’s nothing like it. I can’t to this day take an automobile ride in prairie country, or mountain country, or hill country, or canyon country, that I don’t thrill to it, and feel its strangeness, and the pull of its mystique, and want again to write. Oh, yes, I love the West.

Q. How would you categorize your work?

A. I consider myself out of the mainstream of Western traditional writing. This fact, more than any other, has operated against my achieving the wide popular readership I lament never having had. Category traditions are sacred in the Old West. If an author wants to travel his own road, he better be prepared to walk lonely through its dusty shadows. Because that will be his pay, and he with only have himself to blame for dreaming to be different, or trying to be separate and still equal. That’s a toe-dance that will damage your tootsies every time. But I have had fun. And great rewards from colleagues’ respect and affection.

Q. Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

A. No, I’ve suffered from being just damned lazy and letting the days and years slide by, when I should have been writing books.

Q. What advise do you give aspiring writers?

A. Keep at it. That’s all. If it’s in you, it will come out. If it’s not, you’ll get a lot of fun thinking it is.

Q. What kind of money can a young, talented writer expect to earn in the current marketplace?

A. Not much! Not enough to keep life in the body of a single human being. You must have other sources of income.

Q. What improvements would you make in the publishing business if you could?

A. I would outlaw the participatory clause wherein the hardcover publisher shares fifty-fifty in the reprint monies of any author’s rights. This is an evil and an outrage, and it ought to be summarily eradicated. The author should split with the publisher in the first edition, be it paper or cloth. Beyond that, there should never be one single solitary right pertaining to the original publisher in that work. When it goes into reprint, the monies should all be the author’s or some arrangement that the author makes for himself with the reprinter, so that the author gets the original publisher’s split on the reprint sales.

Q. What do you admire most in other writers?

A. The gift, the gift, if they really have the gift.

Q. Who, in your opinion, has been the most effective writer in the business?

A. The most effective writer in the business ever was Mr. Louis Dearborn L’Amour. He was an absolute phenomenon. I cannot believe the man’s talent for what he did. It is absolutely beyond my comprehension. I know of his endless work ethic. I held him to be an honorable man. But I just can’t see how he did what he did. He was the most effective at it, and in light years.

Q. Have you been affected by his work?

A. Let me tell you, have I been affected? Louis L’Amour, for the past many years, worked for the same company Will Henry has worked for, namely Bantam Books, and if you think standing second in line to Louis L’Amour is any great riot of fun or delight, try again. After Louie, the fall to number two place would kill anyone; would kill an ant or an elephant. And yes, Will Henry has certainly been affected by the presence of Louie L’Amour at Bantam Books. There are, or have been, other authors: Luke Short, Jack Schaefer, all types of name brand authors at Bantam Books through the years–the Louie years–who have been affected by him. But that’s inescapable. Not just at Bantam, either. If you are in the western writing business retail sales points, looking for a copy of your novel, and you have one little single copy in the last part of the rack, farthest from the front, where, if you don’t have your flashlight or a cigarette lighter with you, you can’t even see it. Now, that’s being affected.

Q. Any tips for a writer approaching an editor for the first time?

A. Yes, for God’s sake, get your manuscript set up in a professional manner before you go to the editor with it. It never ceases to amaze how amateur writers will not listen to people who try to help them; who tell them how to prepare a professional manuscript in the visual and actual sense, not the creative, but simply the appearance of knowing what they’re doing on paper. So new writers, listen when old writers talk.

Q. Do you plan to meet the "great white scribe in the sky" while seated at your typewriter, or will you retire someday from writing?

A. The sense of that is, are you going to die in harness, or are you going to retire as a normal person? You know, act as though you belong to the rest of the community. I’m going to keep writing, sporadically. I’m going to consider myself a writer. I don’t advertise it. I never will, and I don’t know how God and I are going to make out on the last confrontation, but I believe that I’ll come up one book short and the till empty. And the Lord will eyeball me and shrug. "Better luck next time, Ace. Remember what your father told you: ‘you never were a real writer.’" And so a parting word about the great white scribe. I think the great scribe is not white for me. Having spent my western writing life telling of Indians, heroic for the most part, magnificent for the most part, wonderful people–I rather romantically believe that whatever great scribe would sit in judgment of me as a writer would be a red scribe: an American horseback Indian, a fighting Indian of the Western plains. The sort of stuff of which a Red Cloud, or a Crazy Horse, or a Touch the Clouds is made; the stuff of myth and wonder and legend and history. So whenever the scribe comes to write against my name, I pray it will be Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph or Looking Glass or Gall or Hump; the marvelous red chieftains in my sky who speak for me.

Woyvouihan, my scribes. H’g’un!

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