DIVIDING THE ESTATE - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Horton Foote has enriched American literature with his tender and forthright examinations of the human condition. He has written dozens of notable plays and screenplays, including The Carpetbagger’s Children, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful; he has won Academy Awards, Emmys, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man from Atlanta.

In Dividing the Estate, Foote explores the widening rifts in a family feuding over their estate and their disintegrating ties to the land. Ironically, as we examined the many conflicts in the play to discover the focus of this issue, we were overwhelmed by an outpouring of goodwill and admiration for its author. During his lifetime, Horton Foote personally has engendered a spirit of generosity and kindness that has enhanced the work of those around him. It became clear that our issue could not be about only one play and its conflicts; it had to be about this seemingly unconflicted man—his life, his work.

And we could not have achieved this goal without the help, grace, and deep knowledge of his daughter Hallie Foote, whom audiences will see in the role of Mary Jo in Dividing the Estate.

The play was produced to great acclaim last season by one of the city’s favorite companies, Primary Stages. Lincoln Center Theater is grateful to them for bringing this wonderful work to New York and happy to be partnering with them at the Booth Theatre this fall.

For this issue, we discovered a bounty of Horton Foote admirers to choose from. We have pieces from acclaimed playwrights and beloved actors who have encountered Foote in the theater, on the screen, and on the page—Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Lois Smith, Liz Ashley, and Robert Duvall. They share their stories about the quiet power of Foote’s work and the delights of working with him. William D. Zabel, an expert on trusts and estates law, sheds light on the history of estate planning. We spoke with the photographer Keith Carter, a decades-long friend, about his stunning photographs, portraiture, and Texas.The renowned American writer Reynolds Price has written about Horton Foote’s place in the pantheon of literature.

Conferring the National Medal of Arts on Horton Foote in 2000, President Clinton said, “Believe it or not, the great writer Horton Foote got his education at Wharton—but not at the Wharton Business School.

He grew up in the small town of Wharton, Texas. His work is rooted in the tales, the troubles, the heartbreak, and the hopes of all he heard and saw there.” Wanting to see the town where Foote has spent most of his life, our co-executive editor, John Guare, made a trip to Texas that resulted in a singular piece about Foote’s life and the place that has inspired so much of his work. And Charles Wright’s haunting poem speaks to our connection to the land in the face of mortality, which is one of Foote’s abiding themes.

His deceptively simple stories and understated language transform the mundane into the revelatory.

Horton Foote is one of America’s greatest treasures.—The Editors

Currency collage by Mark Wagner, Bouquet of Popular Flowers, 2008.

Courtesy of the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.

CAPTURING THE LANDSCAPE The art of this issue grew out of the landscape that Horton Foote writes about and the themes of his play Dividing the Estate.

The amazingly imagined collages of Mark Wagner, constructed entirely out of folded and cut-up dollar bills, reflect the divisive effects of money depicted in the play.

We’ve also featured four great American photographers—Keith Carter, Walker Evans, Frank Gohlke, and Edward Weston. Here are Carter’s compelling and magical portraits of his wife, Pat Carter, and of Horton Foote, which speak to relationships that develop over the course of many years

between an artist and a subject. The extraordinary, and surprisingly casual Polaroids that Evans, known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression, took between 1973 and 1974, capture the feel of the road and of rural America. Gohlke’s arresting photograph of the laundry line embodies the juxtaposition of the mundane with the profound portrayed in Charles Wright’s poem. And finally, Weston’s exquisite photograph of a shell displays one of nature’s most perfect forms; its simplicity reminded us of the unassuming power of Horton Foote’s work.

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TO DIVIDE OR NOT TO DIVIDE?

by WILLIAM D. ZABEL

1 Stella Gordon’s grandson is called Son. His name brings to mind the man whose holographic Will left his entire estate—“All to Mother.“ He died leaving his mother and his wife, whom he had affectionately nicknamed “Mother.“ Which mother wins?

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the foundation) attacking the Will, alleging the usual litany of grounds: testamentary incapacity, improper execution, undue influence, fraud, and duress.

For connoisseurs of Will contests, an interesting aspect of the Johnson case was the fact that Seward Johnson, in about thirty prior Wills and Codicils, had disinherited the attacking children.

Generally, if a Will is upset because of the decedent’s incapacity, then his prior Will is revived. His incapacity means that he could not legally revoke a prior Will by means of his last Will. (That is why, contrary to popular belief, you often should not destroy your prior Wills.)

One factor, among others, causing a settlement in the Johnson case was the possibility that the jury would find testamentary capacity on the part of Mr. Johnson (i.e., that he was competent at the time of its making), thus validating the Will but still invalidating the provisions for Basia Johnson on the grounds of her undue influence, fraud, or duress. If that happened, what would have gone to her instead would have all passed to the children—as if there had been no Will.

In any event, the parties decided to settle. The Will was, to put it charitably, totally rewritten by the contestants. The result: any resemblance to Seward Johnson’s actual last Will seemed purely coincidental.

Mr. Johnson should be a veritable whirling dervish in his grave, because all his expressed intentions were flouted. Basia received $300 million outright to do with as she wished and not in trust; five of the children received $5.9 million and J. Seward Johnson, Jr., received $12 million, causing death taxes substantially in excess of their legacies; and the Harbor Branch Foundation received $20 million. The U.S. government exacted, in total, additional estate taxes of about $86 million that would not otherwise have had to be paid.

On the other hand, Big Momma Stella can rest in peace in her grave, having prevented the dividing up of the family estate and bound her family to live together on it for the foreseeable future.

Or did she? Are the surviving Gordons finished? Remember the brooding aphorism of author-journalist Ambrose Bierce: “There’s death and then there’s the litigation.” It all depends on the family.

William D. Zabel is a senior and founding partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel, a leading expert on trusts and estates law, and chair of the Board of Human Rights First.

Currency collage by Mark Wagner, The Alleged Cherry Tree Incident, 2007. Courtesy of the Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York.

The primary goal of a good estate plan is to divide the estate equitably among the family. This fine and feisty play by that nonagenarian national treasure, Horton Foote, deals primarily with the issue of dividing a 5,000-acre farm estate among the Gordon family of Harrison, Texas.

Stella Gordon, the eighty-year-old matriarch, is surrounded by a group of parasitical children—none of whom, even though of middle age, have actually held a job. Everyone is already living off the estate. Stella makes it clear that she will not divide the estate “until hell freezes over.” And when she dies her children must deal with the chaos she left behind.1 If only the estate had been well planned.

A well-planned Will can be a kind of last hurrah. Thomas Jefferson expanded his creation: the University of Virginia. George Washington freed his slaves. A transplanted Englishman, John Harvard, about three and a half centuries ago, in his Will left his personal library and half of his estate to build a college on a oneacre cow yard in what was then the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and nitroglycerin, established by his Will the most sought-after prizes in the world. Cecil Rhodes created the famous scholarships that bear his name.

But what most people, even many lawyers, don’t know is that the best-planned estate can be totally changed by a litigation, with all the legally relevant parties agreeing on a settlement. Consider one example—namely, the notorious Will contest involving heirs to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune of J. Seward Johnson, Sr., who died at age eighty-seven in 1983. He was survived by his third wife, Barbara “Basia” Johnson (née Piasecka, forty-two years his junior and a chambermaid in his home prior to their marriage), and his six children from two previous marriages.

His Will and estate plan were not particularly complicated: (i) most of his $500 million estate was left in trust for Basia for her lifetime and then to charity; (ii) his six children were to receive no outright bequests, as he thought that he had provided amply for them many years before; (iii) his private oceanographic research foundation, Harbor Branch, was also out in the cold at the discretion of Basia, as, again, he thought he had provided for it sufficiently during his lifetime; and (iv) the plan eliminated all estate taxes at his death.

A titanic litigation ensued, with the children (and, belatedly,

C h e k h ov o f t h e S out h : A N I N T E RV I EW w it h Ro b e rt Du va ll

This past fall, our editors spoke with the incomparable Robert Duvall, who has known Horton Foote for nearly fifty years and has worked with him on Foote’s play The Midnight Caller and with him on such films as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983).

think I could try this?“ “Oh, go ahead, Bobby.“ Then he’d watch it and when they said, “Cut,“ he’d go back to reading or writing right below the camera. It was nice to have him around; he brought a supportive kind of energy, you know.

ED: Did you work on William Faulkner’s Tomorrow?

Editors: When did you first encounter RD: Oh, yeah. We did that Off Broadway Horton Foote? as a play. And it was wonderful. Herbert Robert Duvall: Well, the Neighborhood Berghof directed it, and then, about a Playhouse did a number of his plays, and I year later, we went off and did it as a knew of Horton. But I first met him when film down in Mississippi. It was a very he came to see The Midnight Caller. He complete experience, to do it as a play, came with Kim Stanley then as a feature film. and Robert Mulligan— He writes personally, It’s funny, years later, who ended up directing many years later, Gérard regionally, To Kill a Mockingbird—and Depardieu saw it and but then,without Lillian Foote, his wife. It saying it, it becomes liked it so much that he was a great evening. He distributed it in France. universal. was very friendly. One ED: There is something so time I went up to his particularly Horton about home in Nyack with Sanford Meisner. I the Tender Mercies screenplay. There’s think that was even before Hallie was born something Chekhovian about his work. (laughs). That’s a while back, you know?

RD: Yeah, I call it—not in a detrimental (Laughter) And he was just very open, way—Hillbilly Chekhov. Rural Chekhov’s a very warm and a very supportive guy. better way to put it. Very simple. You’ve ED: He and Lillian, I think, had a long and got to tread carefully. You don’t force anywonderfully creative marriage. Is it true thing, because it’s very delicate and you that it was Lillian who thought of you when need to treat it that way, but without they were casting To Kill a Mockingbird? treating it that way, you know? You have RD: Yeah. About a year or two later, when to just do it. they were casting the part of Boo Radley, ED: It’s very clear what’s going on emoshe brought my name up. She said, tionally, but very little of that is actually “Remember that boy who was in the happening in the dialogue. play….“ And Bob Mulligan remembered.

RD: Exactly.

And around that time I did Naked City. It ED: How do you get inside Horton’s charwas my first lead, and it was the first time acters? Do you talk with Horton, or with I walked down the street and people recogyour director? nized me. (Laughter) I had never thought RD: You just kind of do a number of of that before. things. One of the things that I did do for ED: Was Horton on set while you were Tender Mercies was go to this place called shooting Mockingbird?

Italy, Texas, which had a wonderful counRD: He was always on the set, and it was try band. I would go out and sing with great. When we did Convicts, he sat under them on weekends, to get ready for the the camera, reading. I said, “Horton, you part. I’d hang out and drive around, and

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they said, “What are you looking for?“ I said, “I’m looking for accents.“ (Laughter) I drove all around East Texas with these two crazy brothers. You just go with your instincts. And it was good to talk to Horton; he reinforced it. He’s immensely supportive, because he had been an actor. He’s always there if you want to talk with him.

ED: Any last insights into Horton’s style as a playwright?

RD: He’s one of our greatest. My wife has done several documentaries, one of which was on Horton. I remember he was in the lobby one day, and she was just filming.

She just let the camera run on him as he wrote. That deep concentration. Horton just in another world, as he wrote. It was wonderful to watch. And then to watch it again on film, and see that deep commitment, moment to moment. He writes personally, regionally, but then, without saying it, it becomes universal. And Horton is doing what he’s always done—just exploring new facets, new branches. His work is always connected to a certain kind of people, in the South, in Texas. It’s very sweet—I call it saccharine, but legitimate saccharine, legitimate sweetness—and then that translates into a universal theme that we can all understand.

ED: That’s something I think people are coming to appreciate about Horton’s work—it is spare and simple. It is Southern Chekhov, with all the depth of Chekhov. There’s a tremendous passion in his work.

RD: A lot of depth and humor. He has his own voice. A friend of mine, who is a playwright and scriptwriter, asked Horton for advice, and Horton said, “You find your own voice.“ And he can say that with authority because his voice is so specific, so absolutely unique.

My Trip to Bountiful

by JOHN GUARE

5 April 1953 A fifteen-year-old boy watches A Young Lady of Property on The Philco Television Playhouse. The fifteen-year-old Texas girl wants to go to Hollywood to pursue her dream of being a movie star, but gives that up when she must fight to keep her home. I am the boy. I burst into tears.

IF

I could only talk The young actress with the extravagant accent like that, I could be a and a cry of pain was Kim Stanley. playwright, too. I railed at the injustice of living in the barren, The playwright was Horton Foote. accent-free—or so I thought—Sahara of Jackson Heights, New York. Thanks to Tennessee Williams and now this Foote guy, a southern accent was In “Dividing the Estate,” a character the coin of the playwright’s realm. I saw says “There are fools that drive in every the movie of Death of a Salesman, which I day to Houston to go to work. I say you would have liked a lot better if Willy wouldn’t catch me driving sixty miles no Loman had a Southern accent. place just to work.”

When Lincoln Center Theater announced that it was doing Dividing the The land is flat. Shade trees grow in clumps.

Estate, I wanted to see the site of those Acres of rust-colored fields. plays Horton has spent over sixty-five years writing about. But I also wanted Horton: The drought’s got the corn. to hear the sound of those voices.

Imagine working those fields all year.

I arrive at Hobby Airport in Houston.

Horton and his daughter Hallie meet me We pass white Brahman bulls, sacred in by the baggage claim. We drive to WharIndia. Gorgeous birds fly around them. ton, which is fifty-five miles away on the highway.

Horton: The Brahmans were brought here early in the 1900s. They’re the only Horton: It used to be half a day’s trip, animals that can stand the heat. Those but Houston’s getting closer every day beautiful white birds came from India to where we live. with the bulls. They feed off insects on the bulls’ bodies.

between a drawl

Some people had all the luck.

Hallie: I saw a blue heron today. A gift of the Brahman bulls.

Horton: Look! See the cotton over there?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Samual J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest of Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994 (1994.245.12). © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We pass low green bushes. White balls.

Is this all cotton country?

Horton: No. Oil-well space. Rice farms.

Grass farms. Sulfur mines. Wall Street ran Wharton County. Bankers invested in sulfur mines here. One day the sulfur dried up and the investors abandoned the fields. French companies wanted to buy this land to store nuclear waste, but it was stopped. The Colorado River, the Brazos River water the rice farms. San Antonio is trying to buy up the rights to our water, which

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We pass over the Colorado River, which made the town so fertile.

SNAPSHOT: A grand stone house on Richmond Road, with pecan trees in front.

Horton: That’s the Dividing the Estate house.

I turn around!

Horton: It’s also the house of the Carpetbagger’s Children. The last remaining heirs wanted to tear down the house and sell the two lots, but the town said the house was too beautiful to tear down, so there it sits, empty.

Houston Street, lined with pink flowered bushes.

frightens the local farmers. See the pecan trees. They’re the last ones to shed their leaves and the last ones to bloom.

JOHN: I never imagined Wharton being so grand.

Horton: You haven’t seen the country club.

Horton: Crape myrtle. The only plant that can withstand the heat.

JOHN: The Brahman bulls of the flower world— Horton: Yes—and me. We three can stand the heat.

We pass a row of fantastical tepees.

Horton: The TeePee Motel from the 1920s. A woman came into money and restored it. In that last movie of Lolita, Jeremy Irons and Lolita stopped there while crossing America.

I see a good-sized building. The Wharton Museum. Next to it is a small white frame house.

Horton: Dan Rather was born there. They moved his house to the museum. The same doctor who delivered Dan delivered me. You’ll meet Dr. Davidson’s grandson tomorrow at the country club.

The temperature is in the nineties.

“Entering Wharton, Population 9,237.”

SNAPSHOT:

Horton: San Antonio is South Texas.

Marfa is West Texas. But Wharton was known as the heart of the Gulf Coast, which is forty miles away. When I grew up, Wharton had twenty-five hundred people and half of them were black. The whites were mostly kin to each other.

Horton’s house at 505 Houston Street. One-story bungalow style.

The air conditioner is on high.

HALLIE: The electrical bills are astronomical, but you have to have it.

JOHN: Were you born in this house?

Horton: I was born over at the corner of Gallagher and Burleson. My grandparents, whose house is directly through the backyard, built this house as a present for my parents when I was born, in 1916. We moved in in 1918.

SNAPSHOT : Horton shows me an ancient Bible that came into his possession only two days ago.

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A woman in another town said to someone, “Do you have a friend in Wharton?

I came across a Bible in an antique store that he should have.”

JOHN: You’ll take me there.

Horton: Tomorrow.

Milam Street. Horton points out a beautysupply shop called Razzmatazz.

The town square. The imposing courthouse.

Horton: This was the site of my father’s clothing store.

Horton opens the yellow pages.

Columns written in ink:

Horton: They’d have lynchings here in front of the courthouse if a black person got out of line.

“Albert Horton Foote born Wharton, TX 17th day of June, 1890.”

“Lily Dale Foote born On October 26, 1891 in Wharton, TX.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Samual J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest of Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994.

Photo top left: (1994.245.44) and right (1994.245.63).© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Horton: My father and my aunt. Imagine a stranger finding this somewhere not around here.

JOHN: How did it get there?

Horton: Families come apart. Families lose things.

SNAPSHOT: An after-dinner walk.

Horton: Breathe deep. My father would say, “That’s the Gulf you’re tasting.“ You asked me where Wilma lived in A Young Lady of Property. See those fire trucks? They tore down Wilma’s house for the fire department.

JOHN: What happened to Wilma?

Horton: I’m afraid Wilma grew up to become the very sad Bertsie in Last of the Thorntons.

Photo bottom left courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Why Harrison?

Horton: My grandfather’s middle name.

I realize I’m in two places. I may have come to Wharton, Texas, but my real destination is the place Horton called Harrison.

Horton: “It’s so quiet, so eternally quiet.

I’d forgotten the peace and quiet.“ That’s a line from Trip to Bountiful.

No one to get out of line now.

Horton: On a Saturday, when I was a boy, you could not walk here for all the cotton workers, blacks and whites, filling the streets, having a good time.

Then machines started picking the cotton, which killed Wharton. The Plaza Hotel used to be there. Next to it you see the Plaza Theater. They don’t show movies anymore. They do plays.

We look in. I can’t see anything.

JOHN: We’ll go in tomorrow?

Horton: No need to go in tomorrow.

Nothing’s the same.

HALLIE: The tin ceiling is the same.

Horton: The tin ceiling is the same, but I don’t go in there. When I was a boy working here, I told a black customer who’d come to buy a shirt how we dreaded the oncoming of the new cotton-picking machines. He said, “Have you ever picked cotton?“ I said, “No.“ He said, “Then you’ll never know how

The season’s poster: “Dracula.” “Grease.”

Wait! Mr. and Mrs. Frank Sinatra present “The Traveling Lady,”

by Wharton’s own Horton Foote, for six performances.

JOHN: What an unlikely combo. But isn’t Frank dead?

Horton: It’s Frank Sinatra Jr. HALLIE: Frank Jr. lives here off and on with his sometimes ex-wife, Cynthia, who’s from Wharton and works as a public defender of war criminals in Bosnia.

She met Frank Jr. when she was singing in Las Vegas.

Horton: This corner restaurant that’s closed was where Outlar’s Pharmacy was.

Outlar’s had soda-fountain curb service.

You’d pull up in your car and order an ice-cream soda. The counter man would bring it out to you. It was the height of sophistication.

happy the invention of those machines makes me.“ HALLIE: See that corner? That’s the bank in The Roads to Home where Mr. Hood shot Mr. Gifford.

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SNAPSHOT: Horton’s study.

Horton shows me an old book, A History of Wharton County, that lists townspeople who were slaveholders in 1860. He points to Albert Clinton Horton.

hoods and carrying torches. Where were they going? Years later, I was looking through my grandfather’s things in the house on Richmond Road and I came upon a white robe packed away. “What is this, Grandmother?“ I knew it was a KKK outfit. She took the robe from me and told me my grandfather had gone to a meeting once, but the meeting was all about hating Jews and Catholics, which had nothing to do with the victory of the North or improving the South. He never went to another meeting.

To East Columbia.

Horton: My great-grandfather owned a hundred and seventy slaves. My greatgrandfather was the lieutenant governor of Texas and the second-richest man in Texas. He invested all his money in Confederate bonds. He always believed Jefferson Davis would return to power after the Civil War and set up the Confederacy in Mexico and the bonds would be redeemed.

Horton: Johnson grass and Baptist churches take up most of Texas. Johnson grass is a weed.

JOHN: Are the people in Dividing the Estate Baptists?

Horton: No. The Gordons are Methodists, who thought themselves a little better than Baptists. But no one was as grand as the Episcopalians.

Horton and Lillian may have contemplated a new profession, but while there he started writing the nine plays of “The Orphans’ Home Cycle.”

I asked Hallie if she felt that her father had gone out of fashion.

HALLIE: No. People in town thought Dad was a crazy rich New Yorker who’d stay up all night writing and then walk on our dirt road wearing his pajamas, figuring out his plays. People thought he must be an alcoholic. My sister, Daisy, would say, “Daddy, put on some clothes.“ Horton: Did they say that?

HALLIE: See, he never knew.

We enter Brazoria County.

Breakfast.

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Horton: The last time I saw Bill, he blamed his agent, Audrey Wood, for not sending out his plays, not being supportive of his new work. He killed himself a month later. Tennessee felt the same way about Audrey. That she was letting time pass them by—they weren’t in fashion.

Horton: This landscape belongs more to Louisiana than Texas. See those live oaks? Something’s happened to the Spanish moss that grew on the live oaks. It’s not there anymore.

JOHN: That’s the spooky moss?

HALLIE: Yes. It’s a parasite.

Horton: What are you calling a parasite?

HALLIE: Spanish moss.

Horton: Don’t say that.

HALLIE: It is. Spanish moss is a parasite.

Horton: Then it’s a very pretty parasite.

Photo top left and right courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

JOHN: Last night I read your first Broadway play, in 1944.

Horton: Only the Heart. Terrible title.

JOHN: You mention the KKK in it.

Horton:[A pause]. My grandfather came over here to get me one night. I was asleep, but my grandfather said to my parents, “The boy has to see this.“ He bundled me up and took me through the yard to Richmond Road to see a parade of men riding by silently on horseback wearing white sheets and

We talk about William Inge, who told Horton that they wrote about the same country.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Samual J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest of Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994. Photo far left (1994.245.133).© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We pass a Baptist church with a sign out front: “Where Hearts Are Healed and Minds Transformed.”

JOHN: Did you feel the same way?

Horton: Of course.

JOHN: But you didn’t kill yourself.

Horton: No. I moved to New Hampshire. I had to consider giving up a theater which by 1965 no longer existed as far as my talent knew it. My wife and I talked about becoming dealers of Early American antiques.

HALLIE: Moving was fine for them. It was hell for me. I had to leave my junior year in high school, in Nyack, New York, and say goodbye to my friends and become a stranger. Everybody else in the family liked New Hampshire.

East Columbia is twenty-five miles from the Gulf and ninety miles from Houston.

There’s a community of beautifully restored houses here now, some of the residents commuting from Houston. The air smells green and lush. This can’t be Bountiful.

We are met by Mrs. Griggs, who is “kin to Horton through the Munsons.” She leads us to a beautifully restored two-story white farmhouse of some grandeur. The Ammon Underwood House, built in 1834. She opens it for us. I see photos from the 1870s, ’80s, ’90s of boats on business and pleasure, boats clogging the Brazos River, the shores crowded with life. The whole site is Edenic.

A photo of a beautiful two-story house with verandas on both levels. People stand proudly in front of the house.

Horton: That’s my great-grandfather John W. Brooks, and my great-grand-

The air smells green and lush.

This can’t be Bountiful. mother Harriet Gautier Brooks and their children standing in front. That boy there is my grandfather Tom Brooks. We always called him Papa Brooks. The house stood over there, behind the Underwood House. Then the railroad came through and killed the river business. This house deteriorated to such a state that people tore it down. Then the river took the land and everything was gone. Papa Brooks died in 1925, leaving a family of seven. His family always talked about life here in East Columbia as a kind of paradise. I don’t come here now to mourn the grandeur but only to think on what happened to our family.

Not only is this Bountiful but I realize that the Brooks property was Horton’s Belle Reve whose loss haunted Blanche DuBois

and her family. Horton has an actual lost family home in his past, whereas Tennessee’s Belle Reve was only in his imagination. Horton’s feelings about this place inspired “The Trip to Bountiful;” he’s always trying to get back here.

JOHN: I thought of Bountiful as bleak.

Run-down.

Horton: Bountiful is two places. The Bountiful of my play feels like East Columbia but looks like the town of Glen Flora. We’ll go there tomorrow.

JOHN: I thought your life was idyllic.

Horton: Not so. I had three uncles— Brother, Speed, and Billy, who was only six years older than me. Brother joined the Merchant Marine and got married. They had a boy, Tom. One day my grandmother got a call from Arizona that Brother had died while working as a fruit picker. She went out there and brought him back and buried him here in Wharton. He was the first of her boys to die. Speed was very personable. My grandmother set him up here with a cleaning business, but he went off to Houston and got arrested for drugs and went to San Quentin. My mother’s sister, who was a social worker in Houston, said the minute it was announced that Speed was being released and coming back home the phone began to ring. The drug dealers got him. He’s buried here. Billy drank and drank. He went to Dallas to become a lawyer. My grandmother set him up with a law office here in Wharton.

He came to it for one day and left town the next. He mar-

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Horton must have X-ray vision to see what is imperceptible on the surface. ried an alcoholic in Houston, and they had terrible rows. After one of her beatings, he was never the same. He’s also buried here. Brother’s son, Tom, was a finalist for the role of the boy in the 1947 MGM movie The Yearling, with Gregory Peck. But a boy named Claude Jarman Jr. landed the part. Tom was a lost boy. We got word he died about ten years ago. No one could ever help him. I don’t think there’s anything worse than not being able to find someone who can diagnose what’s wrong with you. It’s just total destruction.

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Dinner at the Wharton Country Club with Charles Davis, a burly rancher, whose grandfather delivered Horton and Dan Rather and Charles himself. Betty Joyce, who must have looked like Arlene Dahl, the red-haired movie star. Myrtis Outlar, whose family owned the pharmacy with the curb service, is “soignée,” very Upper East Side. They’re two decades younger than Horton and became friends with him and Lillian when they’d come back on visits.

Maggie, whose last name I’m trying to get, is the exdaughter-in-law of Eppie Murphree, Horton’s highschool drama teacher. Maggie’s daughter, Lisa, who teaches acting in Orlando, Florida, grades two through twelve, produces a book that she found at home: Boleslavsky’s textbook, “Six Lessons in Acting.” On the front page of the book, in florid handwriting, are the words “Property of Horton Foote.”

JOHN: Horton, you’ve received two lost books in the past forty-eight hours. Is nothing ever lost in Wharton?

The waiter appears. Catfish? The others have theirs fried. Grilled for me. Mistake.

The fried is delicious.

JOHN: Do you all come to New York to see Horton’s plays?

MYRTIS: You bet we do.

CHARLES: We saw Young Man from Atlanta.

BETTY JOYCE: We’re coming to Lincoln Center for Dividing the Estate.

MAGGIE: I don’t get out of Wharton.

I ask them about their lives, but they want to know what Burt Lancaster was like to work with in “Atlantic City.”

Was everyone in Wharton this nice?

Horton must have X-ray vision to see what is imperceptible on the surface.

Driving home.

JOHN: Horton, none of those people sounded like Kim Stanley.

Horton: I don’t know if anybody ever did.

JOHN: Did you ever have an accent?

Horton: When I got to Pasadena Playhouse, my instructors pointed out that my accent would make it difficult for me to get acting jobs. I used my lunch money to go to a coach and learned what passed for proper English.

We’ve passed the train station, which looks in good repair.

Horton: Except there’s no tracks running anywhere near it.

JOHN: Did you leave for Pasadena from that train station?

Horton: No. My family drove me to Houston, where I took the bus. They cried and cried.

JOHN: You were seventeen. Did your father give you any advice?

Horton: Yes, “I’ll always love you no matter what, but if you vote Republican you’re no son of mine.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Samual J. Wagstaff Jr. Bequest of Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1994. Photo left (1994.245.56). Photo right from top (1994.245.17) and (1994.245.15). © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

JOHN: And what saved you?

Horton: I had a built-in something that said stay away from certain things.

And I was ambitious to be a wonderful actor. In my heart, I didn’t think I really was going to be. But I sure wanted to be.

And I was very obedient.

JOHN: Why haven’t you written about these uncles?

Horton: I can’t write about everything.

But he has. Outlaws, irresponsible men at the heart of so many of his plays.

“The Traveling Lady.” “The Chase.”

Talking Pictures.” “Dividing the Estate.”

Hallie takes me to the scene of “A Young Lady of Property.” I look at the abandoned house and can still feel the 1953 power of Kim Stanley sitting there and revealing to Joanne Woodward her plans to move to Hollywood and become a star.

(Years later, I wondered if this tale of someone seeking salvation in flight to California planted the seed for my play “House of Blue Leaves.”)

JOHN: What’s happened to this sad house here?

LUPE: Some guy from El Campo’s got it.

I asked him to sell it, but he got it for tax-exempt or something.

JOHN: Your house is so full of life.

LUPE: I’m still remodeling a little bit. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

SNAPSHOTS Driving to Egypt.

I ask Hallie to photograph me here. A Latino leans out of the house next door.

JOHN: I’m doing a story on a great writer who wrote a play that was set in this house.

MAN: Oh, man.

HALLIE: And he was born two houses down.

MAN: In what house?

HALLIE: That house right there.

MAN: That’s my mamma’s house.

JOHN: Your mamma lives there now?

MAN: Yes. JOHN: What’s your name?

MAN: Lupe Guerra. That means “war“ in English.

JOHN: You look very peaceful.

LUPE: We get along with all the neighbors. What’s your name?

JOHN: John Guare. My name sounds like yours, but it doesn’t mean “war.“ LUPE: Glad to meet you.

JOHN: Wait a minute. I want to record you.

LUPE: Oh, no.

JOHN: Tell the folks in New York who you are.

LUPE: I’m Lupe Guerra.

JOHN:Your mama lives in a famous house.

LUPE: That’s what you’re telling me.

That’s a great house inside, man. It’s still neat.

A large factory appears.

HALLIE: That’s the plastic factory they talk about in Dividing the Estate. It’s owned by Taiwanese, who, I hear, are the worst polluters in Asia.

The factory’s too big to capture in a coherent photo.

SNAPSHOT: Glen Flora. What Bountiful feels like.

I feel we’re Cary Grant in “North by Northwest”, and a crop duster will come out of the blue and fire machine-gun bullets at us.

Horton: That emporium was the clothing store that my father walked to six miles every day before he got his own shop in Wharton.

Bountiful, indeed.

Egypt.

Horton: See that house. The young boy tried to shoot his mother. His father got in the way. He died from his son’s shot. The son ran out across the prairie in his underwear. They put him away. After she buried her hus-

band, the mother tore down the house.

That portico is all that’s left of the old house.

My last morning, I open Boleslavsky’s “First Six Lessons.” The third lesson:

“The only real rules in art are the rules that we discover for ourselves.”

Years ago, I berated fortune for not letting me live in a town like Wharton, speaking with a fantastic accent like the one people there used to have or maybe only Kim Stanley ever had. I apotheosized Horton’s life, discounting where I lived as an injustice. Horton’s reverence for his life made me find reverence for mine. We all live in our own Wharton, Texas, a.k.a. Harrison.

The places that live in our imagination and our bloodstream are sacred.

13

In the Company of Horton Foote

Photograph by Keith Carter of Horton Foote taken during the filming of The Habitation of Dragons, which aired on TV in 1992. Courtesy of the artist and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

EDWARD ALBEE

TONY KUSHNER

I was at a writers’ conference a few years ago at which a critic demeaned a rather good writer as a “regional writer,“ as if this were a limitation of some sort.

Well, I began to wonder to myself, must I now reconsider my uninhibited admiration of Proust—perhaps the most regional of all writers, or Kafka—the Jew in Prague, of Joyce and Beckett— Irish green to their toes, Faulkner and Tennessee Williams—all drawl? Was regionalism somehow a crutch to be borne?

Certainly, with lesser creators there can be validity to regionalism as a negative thing—if the writer cannot find the transcending general in the specific, cannot let us see that “where“ is “wherefrom.“ There are critics like that, of course.

Horton Foote is a regional writer. The majority of the characters in his fine plays have not strayed far from their homes, but this does not make them any less than three-dimensional, does not render their failures and sadnesses very much different than Chekhov’s people—very similar, in fact.

Indeed, whenever I experience Horton’s work I am reminded of Chekhov—of his foolish, trapped, funny and poignant characters, how, if we cannot translate their situation to those of people we know, wherever we abide, then the “regionalism“ which inhibits us is most likely our own and not Chekhov’s—or Horton’s, for that matter.

Gentleness, charm, wit, quiet dignity and decency are not attributes one immediately associates with drama, unless one is familiar with the work of the dramatist Horton Foote. In these great plays by one of our greatest playwrights, no tricks or gimmicks are used, nothing is done to shock, to wheedle or extort powerful feelings of terror or pity. We encounter instead disarmingly unforced representations of human beings inhabiting a past, magically resurrected by the playwright’s precise, generous, joyful, grieving imagination. We encounter, in unexpected moments, tragedy, frailty, stunning endurance and grace. These are plays of a painful and uplifting honesty, constructed by a master with flawless craft. That they are profoundly poetic is all the more remarkable for their perfect fidelity to the language of everyday life. These characters, absolutely plausible in their ordinariness, so specific to their region, become, as we watch them live their lives, indelible and universal. There’s no gift more valuable that drama can give.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HORTON FOOTE Tony Kushner quote was taken from Three Plays by Horton Foote, with a forward by John Guare, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning and Tony-nominated playwright and Academy Awardwinning and Emmy Award winning–screenwriter, Horton Foote is known as “the Chekhov of the small town” for his subtle, life-affirming stories about everyday people. At the age of ninety-two, he continues to be one of the “strongest, most individual and most abidingly relevant voices in theater.” (The New York Times)

[Brooks] was true to [the] best tradition [of the South]. His place will not be filled in our community life in this generation.”

Foote recalls, “Until my grandfather’s death, life seemed to me just magic... back then, death had no reality for me.”

1927

Horton Foote is born on March 14, in Wharton, Texas, to Harriet Gautier Brooks and Albert Horton Foote.

Foote receives his “calling” to become an actor: “When I was eleven, I got a call, so to speak, not to be a preacher but an actor....And I never wavered from that call either until I began writing, some ten years later, and the desire to act left me as suddenly as it had arrived.”

1925

1929–1941

The death of Foote’s grandfather Tom Brooks marks what Foote sees as the end of the Old South and the beginning of modern Wharton. According to the local Wharton paper, “Springing from the chivalric environs of the Old South,

The Great Depression. Foote works parttime in the men’s clothing store owned by his father until 1933. Together, they support their family during the Depression.

1916

1933 One year after graduating from high school, Foote attends acting school at Pasadena Playhouse in California.

1936 Foote moves to New York City to begin his career as an actor. He becomes a founding member of the American Actors Company (AAC).

1939 After a series of improvisation exercises with dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille, Foote writes his first one-act play, Wharton Dance: “I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d ever be a writer.”

1940 Foote returns to Wharton, where he writes his first full-length play, Texas Town. It is produced by AAC.

15

HORTON, AGE 6

HORTON AND LILLIAN FOOTE, 1956

HORTON AT HIS DESK, 1988

THE FOOTE FAMILY, WITH HORTON SITTING IN THE ROCKER WITH HIS AUNT LAUREL, 1921

1941–45

1952–54

World War II. Foote’s brother Tom Brooks, a radio pilot in the Air Force, is shot down in 1944.

Under the direction of Fred Coe, Foote writes a number of television plays with The Philco Television Playhouse. This process leads to the creation of the fictionalized town of Harrison, Texas.

Foote has revisited this town throughout his literary career.

1944 Foote’s first published play, Only the Heart, premieres on Broadway, starring Mildred Dunnock as India Hamilton, Will Hare as Albert Price, June Walker as Mamie Borden, and Maurice Wells as Mr. Borden.

1945 Foote marries Lillian Vallish. He had appeared in a living tableau called Railroads on Parade at the 1939 World’s Fair and recalls, “That’s how I got the money to write my first play. My wife came to see that, actually. She didn’t know that she was looking at her future husband.…

We were very much in love.”

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1953 Foote writes The Trip to Bountiful teleplay for The Philco Television Playhouse, which stars the film star Lillian Gish as Carrie Watts. Gish was famous for roles in more than 120 films that spanned the silent and the “talkie” eras.

1956 The Foote family moves to Nyack, New York.

1962 Foote writes the script for the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill

a Mockingbird and wins an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

1965–73 The Vietnam War leads to the politicization of the New York theater scene. Foote falls out of critical favor, and moves his family to New Hampshire. There, he writes the screenplay for Tomorrow (1972). Meanwhile, in London he writes the book for the West End musical version of Gone with the Wind (1972).

1972 Foote’s parents move from Wharton, Texas, to New Hampshire to live with their son until their passing a few years later.

1974–1978 The death of his parents inspires Foote to write The Orphans’ Home Cycle, a series of nine plays set in Harrison, Texas.

HORTON, 1939

LOIS SMITH I know it’s not a new idea, to say that collaboration, working together, is one of the necessities and glories of theater with Horton Foote. I had a most particular experience.

I was privileged to play Carrie Watts in Horton’s play The Trip to Bountiful, first at the Signature Theatre in New York and then at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Horton was in near-constant attendance at rehearsals and performances. His nourishing presence provided auspicious conditions for planting and growing: seeds of character, trust, action, interaction, event. I felt free to try anything.

Sensitive to director Harris Yulin’s fluid design and keen grasp of Carrie Watts’s journey, Horton said one day in rehearsal, “We could do this without an intermission.“ Then he worked with his colleagues—Harris, designers, all of us—to make that happen. In its first stage production on Broadway, in 1953, it was a three-act play. I was thrilled and impressed with the continuous flow and unity the new form brought to the play.

In performance, at the end of the play, he would be there, speaking with me, watching the process, grateful as discoveries, changes, nuances, and differing emphases occurred.

There was a particularly challenging passage, late in the play, when Carrie is at last, briefly, in Bountiful. The intimacy of Carrie’s pain moves to an expansive understanding, about this earth we live on and are part of. We worked on it, wondered at it, night after night. It was his play, which he had first seen produced over fifty years ago, and many times since. But he made me know that he and I were working on the play together, and kept on doing so until the last curtain call.

HORTON, LILLIAN, AND THEIR CHILDREN, 1957

Photograph by Keith Carter of Horton Foote at his desk, 1988.

Courtesy of the artist and the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

1983 Foote writes Tender Mercies, for which he wins a second Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Robert Duvall also wins an Academy Award for his portrayal of Mac Sledge.

1985 The Trip to Bountiful is produced as a film. Foote is nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, and Geraldine Page wins an Academy Award for her portrayal of Carrie Watts.

Family photographs courtesy of Hallie Foote.

Foote’s play The Road to the Graveyard premieres Off Broadway as part of Ensemble Studio Theater’s One Act Play Marathon.

Frank Rich writes in The New York Times, “Foote has been writing about a changing Texas for decades. This work may be among the finest distillations of his concerns, accomplished with a subtlety that suggests a collaboration between Faulkner

and Chekhov.” After almost a twentyyear absence, Foote is once again embraced by the American theater.

1986 Off Broadway, Molly Ringwald stars in Lily Dale, while Matthew Broderick and Hallie Foote co-star in The Widow Claire, the third and fourth plays in The Orphans’ Home Cycle.

1987 PBS’s American Playhouse premiere of three plays from The Orphans’ Home Cycle: Courtship, On Valentine’s Day, and 1918, under the umbrella title The Story of a Marriage.

1989 Dividing the Estate premieres at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre and is subsequently produced by Great Lakes Theater Festival in 1991.

1991 Foote writes the screenplay for the adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, starring John Malkovich and directed by and starring Gary Sinise.

1992 Lillian Vallish Foote dies. Not only were the Footes happily married for forty-seven years; Lillian Foote was also her husband’s co-producer on The Orphans’ Home Cycle and other productions. “My wife I miss enormously, which will be a constant for the rest of my life,” Foote says.

The Roads to Home opens at the Lamb’s Theater, with Rochelle Oliver, Jean Stapleton, and Hallie Foote.

1994–1995 Off Broadway, Foote’s play The Young Man from Atlanta premieres as part of a season-long tribute to his work at Signature Theatre Company in New York. The play wins Foote the Pulitzer Prize.

17

ELIZABETH ASHLEY I’ve lusted to be in a Horton Foote play for twenty-five years! Ever since I didn’t get the part in Tender Mercies (damn that Betty Buckley!). It was worth the wait.

If it was within my power to gift the theater with the very best thing I’ve learned in my fifty years on the stage, I would give every young (and more than a few old) playwrights a week in rehearsal with Horton Foote. He is on site all day, every day— totally involved with the director and the actors. He doesn’t just listen, he actually watches! Beware of “radio writers,“ who close their eyes and listen to their words—they tend to want a recital.

(It’s true, it’s true. You know it’s true!)

Horton is extremely attuned to the nuance, struggle, and painful journey of actors. You know how we do, picking our way through, trying to find the center of the middle of the marrow of our characters—often to the dismay of playwrights who “don’t see why all that’s necessary—just say the damn lines!“ When I was in previews with Dividing the Estate, I had one two-word line: “Too bad.“ I was having a terrible time saying it.

I just couldn’t discover where it was coming from; I always felt false and filled with dread as that moment approached. So I went to Horton with every intention (in my actorette’s little black selfserving heart) of getting him to cut it.

Now, you just don’t say to Horton Foote, “I don’t know how to say it, so please cut it.“ NO NO NO NO! You go through this

The Young Man from Atlanta, in a Goodman Theatre production starring Shirley Knight, William Biff McGuire, and Rip Torn, and directed by Robert Falls, returns Foote to Broadway for the first time since the 1954 production of The Traveling Lady. Matthew Broderick, Ellen Burstyn, Hallie Foote, and Polly Holliday star in the premiere of The Death of Papa, the ninth and final play of The Orphans’ Home Cycle. The production is directed by Michael Wilson.

1998 Foote wins the Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama.

2000 President Clinton awards Foote the National Medal of Arts.

Foote’s play The Last of the Thorntons premieres Off Broadway in a Signature 18

Theatre production starring Hallie Foote and Estelle Parsons and directed by James Houghton.

2006

2002

2007

Foote’s The Carpetbagger’s Children, starring Hallie Foote, Roberta Maxwell, and Jean Stapleton, and directed by Michael Wilson, has its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater.

Foote’s Dividing the Estate has its New York debut at Primary Stages. The play earns Foote an OBIE Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off Broadway Play.

2004

2008

Foote’s The Day Emily Married, starring Hallie Foote, William Biff McGuire, and Estelle Parsons, and directed by Michael Wilson, has its New York premiere at Primary Stages.

The Goodman Theatre produces the Horton Foote Festival, featuring the production of four plays—celebrating Horton Foote’s illustrious career.

2005 Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, starring Devon Abner, James DeMarse, Hallie Foote, and Lois Smith, and directed by Harris Yulin, is revived Off Broadway by Signature Theatre. The play garners a Lortel Award for Outstanding Revival.

Foote receives a Drama Desk Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Lincoln Center Theater, in association with Primary Stages, presents Dividing the Estate on Broadway.

At the age of ninety-two, Horton Foote is still writing and remains involved in the theater community. He has no thought of retiring.

A version of this timeline appeared in the Goodman Theatre program for the Horton Foote festival.

1997

endless rigmarole of explaining, justifying, blah-blah-blah. Horton listened patiently, then said, “Well, she’s always been a ruler, so she knows how.…“ And there it was, the totality of my character. Like magic, I was inside her. Horton knew I was standing on the edge, and he gave me permission to fall over into that golden place where you know your character and your character knows you.

Way back when I was young—about a thousand years ago— I was, for a short time, madly in love with a brilliant young novelist who was having his first screenplay produced by a major Hollywood studio. The screenplay was an outrageous, radical piece of American heresy, and my writer was obsessed with having the great Robert Altman direct it. But the studio (in its infinite wisdom) said, “No way, Altman is too creatively demanding. He’s not hot anymore, and his career is probably over.“ (This was the early 1970s.) Of course, the studio got its way. A pedestrian (manageable) director was hired, and my writer was heartbroken.

When I asked why it had to be Altman, he said, “Because he has such hard affection for his characters.“ Along with Horton’s wisdom, truth, understanding, joy, storytelling genius, outrageous humor, and beautiful language, there’s that hard affection he has for the human animal. On the stage, hard affection beats love by a Mississippi mile!

t e xa s li g h t AN INTERVIEW with Keith Carter

Because Texas is so integral to Horton Foote’s work, we turned to an extraordinary photographer, Keith Carter, whose work is deeply rooted in the Texas landscape.

Photographs from top of Patricia: 1972, 1983, 1991, 2007 by Keith Carter.

All are courtesy of the artist and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

Editor: When you decide to photograph someone, what’s your process?

Keith Carter: I always look for light first, then background. People are generally more comfortable in their own surrounds, so I use them if at all possible.

ED: How does that process change when you’re photographing a place?

KC: It doesn’t change radically. For me, the portrait is the ultimate calling. I try to treat everything, including “place,” like a portrait.

ED: Your work seems to hint at the mythologies behind the everyday. What do you look for when you go to take a photograph?

KC: I look for oblique angles and awkward pauses, those momentary glimpses of occasional askew moments when flashes of heaven appear as readily as your own reflection in water.

ED: When did you first meet Horton Foote? When did you first photograph him?

KC: I first met Horton at a Galveston dinner party, held in his honor, at the Horton Foote Film Festival in the late eighties. I told him his work had inspired what was to become my first book, From Uncertain to Blue, which was a look at small towns and for which he later wrote a lovely introduction. I first photographed him a year or so later, when he and Lillian invited my wife, Pat, and me for a visit.

ED: What is it like to take photographs of the same subject over time?

KC: It’s a pleasure for me to participate in the relationship we all have to the passage of time, ideas of place, and, ultimately, to memory. On another note, I’ve been photographing my wife for over thirty years now. It’s a festival of changing beauty and hairstyles.

(See photographs of Pat Carter from 1972 to 2007 at left.)

ED: Both you and Horton have maintained a deep commitment to Texas—its landscape, its people, and its stories. Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with Texas and its relationship to your art?

KC: Horton’s work helped me to realize that a small town (and Texas itself) is a mythological place where everything that happens in the greater world at large also happens, but on a more intimate scale. His work also helped me to value the idea of putting down roots, and not be sentimental about doing so. Texas has always had great history, characters, people, and stories. I’m never quite certain if people define a landscape or it’s the other way around.

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NEW TREASURE

by REYNOLDS PRICE

Simplicity of means and lucidity of results may not be the universal aims of art throughout the world, but they’re very nearly so. The brute suavity of French cave-paintings, the mathematically sophisticated but visually spare shapes of Greek temples, the calligraphic and encoded elegance of Oriental scroll-painting, the Bach Prelude in C, a William Blake lyric, the final movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata (opus 111), an Appalachian ballad—who doesn’t love them all?

Millions may resist the polyphonic magnificence, wit, and ecstasy of Bernini’s Saint Teresa; but who has not surrendered to Michelangelo’s youthful Virgin of the Pietà?

Yet how to describe, or discuss, any such masterpiece? How—in Chesterton’s joke—to play the Venus de Milo on a trombone? It’s a famous and lamentable limitation of modern aesthetic criticism—whether of the graphic and plastic arts, literature, music, or performance—that it has proved generally helpless in the presence of apparent “simplicity,“ the illuFrom Courtship, Valentine’s Day, 1918: Three Plays from The Orphans’ Home Cycle by Horton Foote.

Introduction © 1987 by Reynolds Price. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

sory purity of means and ends toward universally comprehensible results. Where is there a genuinely illuminating discussion of Blake’s “Tyger,“ Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits,“ or Joan Baez’s traversals of the Child ballads?—one that helps us understand how and, above all, why such complex but supremely satisfactory ends are achieved in such small and evidently transparent vehicles. As readers’ minds are most engaged, in narrative fiction, by wicked or at least devious characters, so the mechanistic methods of modern critics require complexity of means before their intricate gears can begin to grind.

Thus (since I’m here to celebrate three plays) Shakespeare is the critic’s darling among dramatists. Apart from questions of relative depth and durability of interest, he provides the critic an apparently infinite parade of artifice—one which anyhow shows no sign of exhausting in their multitudinous hands.

In Europe at least, other dramatists—Racine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw—have elicited memorable and still useful studies. But what American dramatist has yet received similar treatment? Admittedly, our first great playwright has been dead fewer than forty years. But again, Eugene O’Neill worked with sufficient awkwardness of means toward his broad and deep effects to make him unattractive to a tribe of critics energized primarily by technical adroitness. An almost identical assertion might be made for our second internationally significant dramatist, Tennessee Williams. The straightforward urgency and eloquence of his best early work—the lean balladic lament of Glass Menagerie or the arpeggiated rising howl of Streetcar—have yet to receive sustained helpful attention from critics.

Photograph by Edward Weston, Shell, 1927. Collection of The Center for Creative Photography. © 1981 Arizona Board of Regents.

Any sympathetic viewer of the recent films and plays of Horton Foote is likely to share the critics’ dilemma. Were you as deeply moved as I was by his Tender Mercies (1983)? Then can you tell me why? Explain to me how actors—even as perfect as those he found, even so resourceful a director—could employ so few and such rhetorically uncomplicated speeches toward the flawless achievement of such a calmly profound and memorable face-to-face contemplation of human degradation and regeneration. I confidently suggest that even St. Augustine in his Confessions went no farther toward the heart of that luminous dark mystery than Horton Foote. And I—a novelist, poet, playwright, and critic—cannot hope to begin to tell you how he has made that longest and hardest of journeys. I can only urge you to look and then agree or disagree.

In the case of The Orphans’ Home, this monumental cycle of nine related plays, I’m in better luck—though only to this extent. Though two of the plays have been filmed and several others performed on stage, no one has yet seen all of them

21

in coherent productions, and given the scattered disorganization of the American commercial theatre and the poverty of the lively regional companies, no one is likely to see all nine any year soon. But soon all will be readable, and the black-andwhite outlines of Foote’s large scheme will be at least discernible.

For what these texts—and his recent films—demonstrate is how unquestionably Foote is the supreme musician among our great American playwrights. More even than with Tennessee Williams, Foote’s method (and his dilemma) is that of the composer. His words are black notes on a white page—all but abstract signals to the minds of actor and audience, signs from which all participants in the effort (again all those at work on both sides of the stage or camera, including the audience) must make their own musical entity.

Take the case of 1918, the third play here. A careful reading of its printed text will provide the pleasures we expect of well–made and intensely felt drama—the gracefully attenuated line of suspense, the nearly devastating crisis, the unexpected but credible and warm resolution. Despite

...Even St. Augustine in his “Confessions” went no farther toward the heart of that luminous dark mystery than Horton Foote.

the scarcity of stage descriptions or directions to the actors, we can (if we’re ideally cooperative) construct our own series of pictures of small-town early twentieth-

century Texas, not that different from small-town America anywhere else—or small-town bourgeois France of the same time, for that matter. But nowhere can we point to speeches of an extraordinary or heightened eloquence, language of an “unreal“ intensity or rhythm. Memory is allowed to flow and blossom (for all the plays are loosely based on the history of Foote’s own families) into universal emotion but only within the strict verbal channels of the quotidian, the daily norm. Language is pruned and shaped but not visibly transformed.

See the film of 1918 though. And there, within the physical confines of a modest budget, a small company of beautifully restrained and emotionally transparent players perform the minimal text with such grave musical skill as to achieve a final effect of genuinely transcendent volume. From the bare lines of Horton Foote’s original text—and from nowhere else really, except the voluble faces of the actors—there pours finally a joyful and unanswerably powerful psalm of praise: Suffering (to the point of devastation) is the central human condition and our most unavoidable mystery. Yet we can survive it and sing in its face. The only tonal parallels that come easily to mind—for similar findings, wisdom, and credibility— are the conclusion of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night or the rapturous final claim of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Yet even they, for all their grandeur of human love and pardon, are not bolstered by such a glacial weight of evidence as Foote provides in the prior and succeeding plays of his cycle, rich as it is in all the emotions from farce to tragedy to transcendence.

Courtship and Valentine’s Day are parallel achievements—indeed, the three are grouped as numbers five, six, and seven in the cycle of nine. When all three volumes of the series have appeared, and The Orphans’ Home can then be seen whole and entire, I’m confident it will take its rightful earned place near the center of our largest American dramatic achievements—a slowly generated, slowly won, apparently effortless, surprisingly wide vision of human life that flowers before our patient incredulous eyes with an opulent richness of fully communicated pleasure, comprehension, and usable knowledge: a permanent gift.

Reynolds Price received the William Faulkner Award for his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel Kate Vaiden. Price is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new memoir, Ardent Spirits, is forthcoming from Scribner.

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YA R D W O R K

by CHARLES WRIGHT

“Yard Work” from Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems

by Charles Wright. © 2000 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

I think that someone will remember us in another time, Sappho once said—more or less— Her words caught Between the tongue’s tip and the first edge of the invisible.

I hope so, myself now caught Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute, Which is the same place, and the same sound,

© Frank Gohlke/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

That she made.

Meanwhile, let’s stick to business.

Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.

My job is yard work— I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.