Disposable Lit Reviews

The Penguin Group, 1924/2005
222 pp.
ISBN 0 14 30.3933 4

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Guest review by Dave DeMoss

For all Zorro’s continued popularity you’d think Johnston McCulley’s Curse of Capistrano would be an easier book to find. My edition (retitled The Mark of Zorro by the fine folks at Penguin Classics in some damn fool’s misguided attempt to make the book easier to find) leapt out at me from the Literature section and if I hadn’t turned my head at just the right moment, I would’ve missed it.

Zorro’s early career is rife with improbably coincidences. Because California’s history was well in the grip of a Gilded Age whitewash at the time McCulley moved there in 1908, Zorro was born. Because Douglas Fairbanks cracked open a copy of All-Story Weekly in 1919, the better kill a long honeymoon train-ride across the remains of Europe, Zorro won near-immortality at the movies. The rest, as they say, is history, and nowhere is history more- or less important than in the pages of historical novels.

That said, it’s painfully obvious why The Mark of Zorro is so hard to find…to say nothing of McCulley’s non-Zorro stories. As the introductory writers of my edition (by professors Katherine M. and Robert E. Morsberger) points out, historical novels are “influenced by three different time periods—the time about which they were written, the era during which they were written and the time in which they are experience”…i.e., two pasts (one real, one dramatized) and the present, the Now.

One of those pasts—the one McCulley creates around his swashbuckling, masked avenger hero—is instantly recognizable to anyone with even a subconscious inkling of who and what Zorro is. It’s a nebulous time-out-of-time, somewhen, say, in the early 19th century. A world of swaggering caballeros and shamefaced, scrambling commoners. Of Franciscan missions packed with good-natured frays and smiling “natives.” Of expansive, rural haciendas. All linked along the great chain of El Camino Real, the great road from San Diego to San Rafael, linking California to the rest of (Spanish colonial) civilization and providing the set piece McCulley needs for his action.

Because, as the limp-wristed Don Diego Vega constantly reminds us, these are “turbulent times.” The whole of the Real is abuzz with rumors of a mysterious, masked highwayman who calls himself Señor Zorro, scratching his mark—a Z—into the cheeks of his opponents with a flash of his sword. But unlike the other brigands and pirates who ply this far-frontier, Señor Zorro, “says he is no real thief, by the saints!” This from Sergeant Pedro Garcia, the book’s fat, oft-drunk antagonist. “His is but punishing those who mistreat the men of the missions, he says. Friend to the oppressed, eh? He left a placard at Santa Barbara saying as much, did he not? Ha!”

Indeed. Thanks to his grandiose Robin Hood-ish antics (he eventually claims to have robbed the “[H]is [E]xcellency, the governor” at gun point and given the money away to the missions) Señor Zorro has a price on his head and every soldier in the region on his trail…as Sergeant Gonzalas discusses…at length…with his good friend, Don Diego Vega.

Being a highwayman, Zorro appears and disappears at dramatic points throughout the story, always evading capture (often with a smile on his face). It is the spoiled, unmanly Don Diego who consumes most of our attention, for reasons (again) obvious to anyone who’s read, seen, or even heard a Zorro story whispered under cover of darkness.

Don Diego is the only scion of the powerful Vega family (masters of a grand hacienda estate and so much political influence even His Excellency the Governor hesitates to unjustly persecute them) Diego’s main concern revolves around his father, Alejandro Vega’s, recent insistence that he get himself married. Diego hates the idea, finding the ritual of courtship tedious and physically tiring…as he finds most “strenuous” exertions. His attempts to win the hand of beautiful Señorita Lolita Pulido consist of him asking, “Do you think I would make a proper husband?” Lolita is melodramatically nonplused by this shortest-distance-between-two-points attitude to love.

“The man who weds me must woo me and win my love,” she says. She wants serenades and ravishing glances and spirited dancing and romance. All the things that make Don Diego mop his brow. No wonder she finds him, “lifeless.” “Think you I am some bronze native wench to give myself to the first man who asks?”

Luckily for Señorita Lolita, Señor Zorro appears almost as soon as Don Diego departs, coming to her in the garden during siesta hour. It’s love at first sight of course, and suddenly here is Lolita Pulido, torn by her conflicted urges to romance and social responsibility. If only, she thinks, Don Diego were more like Señor Zorro…

And so it goes for the remainder of the book, Diego constantly excusing himself from the action, allowing Zorro to enter and dispense his own, high-handed brand of caballero justice. This embarrasses and humiliates Zorro’s enemies—particularly the evil Captain Ramon, who sets his sights on Señorita Lolita early on, determining to win her by force if she will not go with Don Diego by choice. When Señor Zorro interrupts Captain Ramon’s dastardly attempt to force himself on Señorita Lolita the jilted and injured Captain swears revenge, setting off an escalating serious of political machinations that imperil the whole Pudilo family…and, perhaps, the Vegas as well.

You can see all of this coming a continent away, largely because the writers of McCulley’s generation did so much to influence our (post)modern, popular forms of storytelling—especially serialized storytelling. The original Curse of Capistrano ran in a five parts through five months of 1919, and by all the gods, it shows. Characters throughout the book bring the plot to a grinding halt for a long, expository passage recounting what’s just happened…most often for (the recently reappeared) Don Diego’s benefit.

I’ll give him this, though: McCulley does do a remarkable job with his titular hero. Diego (not yet “de la”) Vega is quite the believable rich twit of his time and place, easily matching his immediate literary predecessor, Sir Percy “Scarlet Pimpernel” Blakeney, in blue-blooded foppery. Were the book’s central conceit (Zorro’s identity) not ruined by the intervening almost-century of remakes, rewrites and reinterpretations, I’d dismiss Don Diego as the Odious Comic Relief and who knows? The Big Reveal at the end (an end, to be sure, not written with a sequel in mind) might’ve even surprised me.

Unfortunately, we’ll never know, because each historical novel is bent and shaped by three time periods—the time it was written, the “real” past—the time it dramatizes, the fake past; and the time its experienced, i.e., Now. Thanks to a the radical, unsettled, media-saturated character of the Now, McCulley’s fantastical past no longer holds the punch it once packed, and his real past is like a black-and-white fever dream to us. Both have “moved on” in the language of another caballero from a different set of world’s altogether. And Zorro has moved with us, into the Now. Fans of the Antonio Banderas, Catherine Zeta Jones Zorro, the Disney cartoon Zorro or even the Disney live-action Zorro will probably be disappointed. There’s not here they haven’t seen before, and done better, with a more focused and more considerate eye—ironically enough, by people inspired to great heights by this pulpiest of pulp fiction. (Watch for Diego’s deaf-mute “native” servant, Bernardo, like a wax statue, eternally smiling.)

As pulp (that most disposable of “disposable” lit), this is a high and fine example of the form. I would hand it to the uninitiated, provided they show the least bit of interested. Don’t expect to be wowed, or even that surprised. McCulley wrote hundreds of stories and at least fifty books under at least five pseudonyms. This is not his best work by a long shot. It is important for the role it played the way most historical artifacts are. Vast swaths of modern American culture owe their existence to it. Its influence, largely invisible, breaks through the surface every now and then, but its actual content remains firmly rooted to its time and place. If that’s your cup of tea, then you go scare yourself up a copy.

You certainly can’t borrow mine.

Dave DeMoss occasionally reviews movies at And You Thought It Was Safe? as “Dr. Psy Chosis.”