The Portrait of a Hero in a Novel
About Memory and Adolescence
“The story is not just what you remember but how it comes to mind,” wrote Max Schott in 2014. He was in the midst of trying to recall and imagine his adolescence and his hero of that time, the cowboy and horse trainer Ralph Camarillo.
Schott is a writer, born in Los Angeles in 1935, who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last six decades. After working as a horse trainer in Klamath Falls, Oregon, and in the Santa Ynez Valley, he attended graduate school in English at UCSB. He taught literature at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies from the late 1960s into the early 2000s, where I was his student.
He has published four books: the novels Murphy’s Romance and Ben and the collections of stories Up Where I Used to Live and Keeping Warm. From 1991 to 1992, he had a biweekly column in the Independent, “A Writer’s Notebook,” the concluding two pieces being his remembrances of Ralph Camarillo. Twenty years later, he began a novel based on this man, of whom he said: “If God had tailor-made a hero for me — he would have been a great deal like Ralph.”…