THE SON: A Novel by Phillipp Meyer

Phillipp Meyer’s The Son, a sprawling multigenerational epic set in Texas (which is always a good place to locate epics, especially the sprawling variety), begins with the family patriarch, Col. Eli McCullough. 


COL. ELI MCCULLOUGH
“Most will be familiar with the date of my birth. The Declaration of Independence that bore the Republic of Texas out of Mexican tyranny was ratified March 2, 1836, in a humble shack at the edge of the Brazos. Half the signatories were malarial; the other half had come to Texas to escape a hangman’s noose. I was the first male child of this new republic.”

He grows up to become one tough hombre. He has not only seen it all, he has lived it. In his lifetime, he was a Comanche captive, Texas Ranger, Confederate colonel, cattle baron, and oil tycoon. Obviously, it had to be a long life -- and it was – one hundred years.  How a young helpless boy at the mercy of his Comanche captors eventually became a wealthy tyrant wielding almost absolute power is at the heart of the novel.

PETER MCCULLOUGH
“My birthday. Today, without the help of any whiskey, I have reached the conclusion: I am no one. Looking back over my forty-five years I see nothing worthwhile – what I had mistaken for a soul appears more like a black abyss – I have allowed others to shape me as they pleased. To ask the Colonel I am the worst son he has ever had….”

Ron Charles perfectly characterizes Peter in his review in the Washington Post as "a prairie Hamlet among the Texas Medicis." There is no way that the son can possibly surpass the father when it comes to achievements, or does he even want to. Instead, he is the novel's conscience and its critic. He deplores his father's status as a giant in the land, but most of all he hates how his father has achieved his status and the harsh measures he resorts to in order to maintain it. There is no reward for such views. In fact, most people see him as a weak man -- and that includes his father.

JEANNE ANNE MCCULLOUGH
“If she were a better person she would not leave her family a dime; a few million, maybe, something to pay for college or if they got sick. She had grown up knowing that if a drought went on another year, or the ticks got worse, or the flies, if any single thing went wrong, the family would not eat. Of course, they had oil by then; it was an illusion. But her father had acted as if it was true, and she had believed it, and so it was.

“…even as a child she’d been mostly alone. Her family had owned the town. People made no sense to her. Men, with whom she had everything in common, did not want her around. Women, with whom she had nothing in common, smiled too much, laughed too loud, and mostly reminded her of small dogs, their lives lost in interior decorating and other peoples’ outfits. There had never been a place for a person like her.”

If the Colonel had a soul mate, it was his great-granddaughter, Jeanne Anne. He had no respect and little love for his son, Peter, or his grandson, Charles, who was Jeanne Anne’s father. However, he doted on Jeanne Anne and she, who never knew her grandfather and also had little respect for her father, returned her great-grandfather’s affection.

As far as the Colonel was concerned, Peter was too soft and idealistic and in his own way, so was Charles, who was too tied to cattle and the land. The Colonel understood that down through the ages through war and conquest the land had been won and lost many times and he believed that it was subject to occurring again, that historical progress was a matter of destroying what had come before. Therefore, one should extract what one could from the land while one could. Charles wanted only to be a cattleman, but cattle ranching was a losing proposition. The Colonel’s solution – and Jeanne Anne’s – was to drill, drill for oil.

Spindletop, January 10, 1901; Texas' first big one

Comanche warriors, 1892

Despite his capture as a boy by the Comanches and their initial cruel treatment of him, the colonel learned not only to respect them, but also to view them as family.  They were practically the only people that he held in esteem. 

Certainly not the Texas Rangers, with whom he was forced to serve.
  
“Rangering was not a career so much as a way to die young and get paid nothing for doing it; your chances of surviving a year with a company were about the same as not.  The lucky ones ending up in an unmarked hole.  The rest lost their topknot. By then the days of the ace units … were over.  What was left was an assortment of bankrupt soldiers and adventure seekers, convicts and God’s abandons.”

Early Rangers

He viewed the poor  Mexicans of the area as people whose labor was to be exploited.  But he also believed that the prosperous Mexicans who owned land were to be exploited as well.  He believed that their time had passed and he viewed their property as fair game for the taking -- and he took.  

His opinion of most of the whites in the area wasn't much higher either, with one exception. He had good things to say about the German settlers living around the town of Fredericksburg:

"Before the Germans came, it was thought impossible to make butter in a southern climate.  It was also thought impossible to grow wheat.  A slave economy does that to the human mind, but the Germans, who had not been told otherwise, arrived and began churning first-rate butter and raising heavy crops of the noble cereal, which they sold to their dumbfounded neighbors at a high profit.

“Your German had no allergy to work, which was conspicuous when you looked at his possessions.  If, upon passing some field, you noticed the soil was level and the rows straight, the land belonged to a German.  If the field was full of rocks, if the rows appeared to have been laid by a blind Indian, if it was December and the cotton had not been picked, you knew the land was owned by one of the local whites, who had drifted over from Tennessee and hoped that the bounties of Dame Nature would, by some witchery, yield him up a slave.”

THE AUTHOR
Phillipp Meyer is one of those overnight successes whose success was not overnight.  His first published novel was the critically acclaimed American Rust, but it was his third novel.  The first he didn't attempt to sell and the second he couldn't sell.

Now, The Son has garnered even more praise than his debut, even to the extent of being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  What comes next?  In an interview, he said that he planned his next book to be combined with his first two in what he called "an American trilogy."  He gave no clues regarding the subject matter of the third book.

 

******
REVIEWS:

"The greatest things about The Son are its scope and ambition, not its strictly literary mettle. It’s an enveloping, extremely well-wrought, popular novel with passionate convictions about the people, places and battles that it conjures. That ought to be enough." -- Janet Maslin, New York Times 


"I could no more convey the scope of The Son than I could capture the boundless plains of Texas. With this family that stretches from our war with Mexico to our invasion of Iraq, Meyer has given us an extraordinary orchestration of American history, a testament to the fact that all victors erect their empires on bones bleached by the light of self-righteousness." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

"These are not heroic transplants from the present, disguised in buckskin and loincloths.  They are unrepentant, greedy, often homicidal, lost souls, blindly groping their way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." -- Will Blythe, New York Times Book Review


"Meyer's tale is vast, volcanic, prodigious in violence, intermittently hard to fathom, not infrequently hard to stomach, and difficult to ignore." -- Boston Globe

"The Son drives home one hard and fascinating truth about American life: None of us belong here.  We just have it on loan until the next civilization comes around." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"It may not be the Great American Novel, but it certainly is a damn good one." -- Entertainment Weekly

Now for an irritating fly in the soothing ointment of praise:

"On one level, this large-canvas family saga by award-winning novelist Philipp Meyer resembles nothing more than a patchwork of derivative fiction — sort of Edna Ferber meets Thomas Berger meets James Michener, with a dash of Dallas and a touch of The Big Valley thrown in for flavor.

"It’s also a none-too-subtle bashing of Texas history, myths and legends, with a derisive editorial condemnation of all things Texan or Western." -- Clay Reynolds, Dallas Morning News
  
I must add that other reviews that I read in other Texas publications were positive.  In fact, the above is the only negative review that I found anywhere.

THE BIG RICH: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough

I’ve been on a Texas binge lately.  I’ve always found the state, its history, and its people to be intriguing.  And the politicians?  Is there a state that can compare with Texas when one begins to list the people who have served as governors of that state?  Well, maybe next-door neighbor Louisiana comes close.

I read one time (and I would give credit to the source, but I don’t remember who wrote it) that, paraphrasing now, Louisiana governors had three primary responsibilities.  Listed in the order of their importance they are: 1). to entertain; 2). to govern; and 3). to stay out of jail.  (Piyush “Bobby” Jindal seems to have missed the memo.  He only seems interested in number 2.)  But, I digress.

Texas governors include the likes of Sam Houston and “Pa” Ferguson and “Ma” Ferguson and “Pappy” O’Daniel, and John Connally and Ann Richards and George W. Bush, and Rick Perry.  Top that, Louisiana.

And of course, there is the giant that overshadows them all: Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Never a governor, nevertheless he is one of only four people to serve in all four elected federal offices: Representative, Senator, Vice-President and President.  LBJ’s impact on American politics has been so great that it has taken Robert Caro five volumes to write his biography. 

And that’s where I began my recent Texas marathon, by re-reading Caro’s first two volumes (if I live long enough I plan to read the other three) as well as Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, written by young Doris Kearns, before Goodwin was added to her name.

Next came the Texas novels written by Billy Lee Brammer and Edwin “Bud” Shrake, especially Shrake, and a great study of those two writers and four of their fellow Texans in Steven L. Davis’s Texas Literary Outlaws. 

And I recently finished The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes.

Shrake’s Strange Peaches is a novel set in Dallas just before and just after the assassination of JFK.  When I read his descriptions of almost continuous parties, elaborate pranks and other excesses all fueled by booze, pot, and hard drugs, I thought that Shrake was probably guilty of employing his novelist’s license to embellish in order to punch up the story.  Wrong, again.  After reading Texas Literary Outlaws and The Big Rich I now know that practically everything he described actually occurred.

  

Bud Shrake

 I just read Shrake’s But Not For Love: A Novel About Men, Women and Money.  Well, after all, it is about Texas.  I am currently reading Phillipp Meyer's multi-generational Texas epic, The Son.  Furthermore, Minutaglio and Smith's autobiography of Molly Ivins is in the hopper. 

The Big Rich is a recounting of the life and times of four Texas oil wildcatters -- Hugh Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison and H.L. Hunt.  Burrough writes, “If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it.  A good ol’ boy.  A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.”

Hugh Roy Cullen, later a Houston wildcatter, grew up poor in San Antonio, and dropped out of school in the fifth grade.  After becoming a wealthy man, he would become an early champion of and contributor to ultraconservative causes.

H.R. Cullen

He was “stern, humorless, and a bit of a scold…a man who detested communists, pinkos,” and especially Roosevelt “and whose favored politician was the red-busting Joe McCarthy.”

Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison were lifelong friends from Athens, sixty miles southeast of Dallas. According to Burrough, “[d]espite their common backgrounds, they were a mismatched pair.  Murchison was energetic, impatient, independent, and like many country boys before him, intellectually insecure….Murchison was shy and would remain so all his life.  If he didn’t absolutely have to talk to someone, he avoided it.

“In sharp contrast, Richardson presented himself as the essence of the Texas good ol’ boy, joshing, laughing, and cursing in a thick backwoods accent.”

Clint Murchison

Sid Richardson

As outrageous as the conduct of these three, and their progeny, could be at times, neither they, nor their progeny, could hold a candle to H.L. Hunt or his progeny.

Burrough writes, “At a time when itinerant wildcatters like Sid Richardson couldn’t find time for a wife let alone a family, Hunt would build three, two in secret.  If they made a movie of his life, no one would believe it was true.”

The only non-native in the group, Hunt was born in southern Illinois, about seventy miles south of St. Louis.  “He was a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced – absolutely convinced – that he was possessed of talents that bordered on the superhuman.  He may have been right; in the annals of American commerce there has never been anyone quite like Haroldson Lafayette Hunt.”

 

H.L. Hunt

 The subtitle of the book, The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, is appropriate.  The “Rise” was accomplished by the Big Four; the “Fall” was engineered by the progeny, particularly that of Murchison and, especially, Hunt. The fall is a story of family feuds, lawsuits, scandals and bankruptcies – and it isn’t pretty.

I do recommend the book even though it is marred by inexcusable typos and misspellings (“Edmund” Murrow being only one example) and unexplainable factual errors.  The typos and misspellings could have and should have been corrected by a proofreader and Burrough and his editor certainly should have avoided the obvious factual errors.

How could he have possibly written the following: “… the champion steer, an eight-hundred pound heifer…?”  Huh?  Shouldn’t Burrough have known that a steer is a castrated male and a heifer is a young female?  How could a Texan be so confused about bovine gender? And shouldn’t he, a Texan, have known that The Longhorns, written by J. Frank Dobie, the prominent University of Texas professor and folklorist, was not a novel, but a work of nonfiction?

But here is the most egregious error of all:

“McCarthy’s subsequent ascension to Martin Dies’s old chairmanship of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and HUAC’s ensuing crusade against communist ‘infiltrators,’ transformed the senator into a polarizing figure across the country.”

Holy separation of powers!  A senator chaired a committee in the House of Representatives?

I still recommend the book even though it is impossible to overlook the errors.  They might have been understandable if the book had been published by some vanity press, but it wasn’t. We should be able to expect better from The Penguin Press.

Bryan Burrough earlier co-wrote a big best-seller titled Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco and was the sole author of Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934.  The description on the Big Rich book jacket erroneously (imagine that) describes him as a native Texan.  His family moved to Texas when he was seven-years old, but he was born in Tennessee.  In his introduction, he mentions that some of his young classmates referred to him as a carpetbagger.

  

Bryan Burrough

FOUR FACES WEST (Sherman/UA, 1948)

DIRECTOR: Alfred E. Green; PRODUCER: Harry Sherman;  WRITERS: screenplay by C. Graham Baker and Teddi Sherman;  adaptation by William and Milarde Brent; based upon Eugene Manlove Rhodes novel, Paso Por Aqui;  CINEMATOGRAPHY: Russell Harlan

CAST: Joel MCrea, Frances Dee, Charles Bickford, Joseph Calleia, William Conrad, Martin Garralaga, Raymond Largay, Dan White, Eva Novak, Sam Flint, Forrest Taylor, William Haade, Gene Roth, Paul Burns


THE PLOT.
On the day that Pat Garrett (Charles Bickford) is being introduced to the citizens of Santa Maria, a cowboy by the name of Ross McEwen (Joel McCrea) robs the bank, which is easy to accomplish because every bank employee but one is down the street listening to Garrett give a speech.  A polite outlaw, he first asks for a loan of two thousand dollars.  When Frenger (John Parrish), the banker, asks him for collateral he pulls his six-gun and declares it all the collateral he needs.  He then writes out an I.O.U. for the money and signs it "Jefferson Davis."

Later we learn that McEwen in desperation has resorted to robbery so that he can send the money to his father who is about to lose his ranch. 

He forces the banker to ride out of town with him.  Once they have traveled several miles he leaves the banker without a mount or his boots and forced to walk back to town.  After arriving in town and announcing the hold-up, the incensed banker places a reward of three thousand dollars, dead or alive, on the head of McEwen.  That amount of money leads to a frenzied manhunt all out of proportion to the crime committed and includes not only Garrett and his deputy Clint (Dan White), but also members of a deputized posse as well as free-lancing bounty hunters.

While making preparations to board a slow-moving train, McEwen is bitten by a rattlesnake.  In a weakened condition, it is only with the aid of Monte Marquez (Joseph Calleia) that he is able to board the train.  Luckily, one of the passengers on the train is a nurse, Fay Hollister (Frances Dee), and she is able to treat McEwen's snakebite.  Fay feels an immediate attraction to McEwen and  senses that he is in some kind of trouble.  The attraction is clearly reciprocal.

Eventually, Ross and Fay arrive in Alamogordo where Fay will be working in a hospital.  Alamogordo was also Monte's destination.  He owns a saloon in that town.  He has befriended Ross on their journey and has helped the outlaw out of several tough spots along the way.  Now he helps Ross get a job working on a nearby ranch.  Ross sends some of the money that he earns on the job (and gambling) to the bank in Santa Maria to pay off part of the I.O.U. that he gave the banker.  However, he is forced to flee when Garrett and his deputy ride into town.  But before leaving, he gives Fay a ring.

Ross says goodbye

As he makes his way southward in an effort to reach the border, McEwen resorts to an unusual mode of transportation to escape from his pursuers.  He saddles a steer and rides it across New Mexico's White Sands.  The scene is wonderfully filmed by Russell Harlan, who had worked with Sherman on the Hopalong Cassidy series, which was the best photographed B-Western films of them all, and also on Sherman's other post-Hoppy Western, RAMROD (Sherman/UA).  In fact, Harlan's photography is one of the best qualities found in all of Sherman's exceptional productions.  He would go on to an outstanding career as one of Hollywood's best cinematographers.

McEwen is on the verge of making his way across the border when he stops to steal a horse.  Inside the house, however, he discovers a Mexican family of four, all stricken with diphtheria.  Does he ride on and escape into Mexico?  Or does he stay and do what he can for the family?  

  
Well, the answer is obvious, isn't it?  This is Joel McCrea after all. During the hold-up, he writes an I.O.U. and gives it to the banker.  Later, he even begins to pay the money back. He doesn't even fire a shot in the entire movie, but does neither Pat Garrett nor anyone else.  In fact, that is the one thing the film is noted for: a Western in which there is not a single gunshot.  Weapons are pulled and aimed, but never fired.

Of course he stays.  Eventually he even lights a bonfire in an attempt to attract help.  It works.  But guess whom it attracts.  How does it all end?  Revealing that would spoil the story.


THE PRODUCER.
In the history of Western movies, Harry "Pop" Sherman (1884-1952) was one of the more interesting producers.  Throughout most of his career, he was able to produce independent films that were then released and distributed by major studios.

He is best known for creating the production company that in 1935 began filming the Hopalong Cassidy B-Western series.  During those years, however, he also produced a number of one-shot B-Western specials that were always entertaining.  In the mid-40's, he turned over production of the Hoppy series to its star, William Boyd, and ventured into A-Western territory.  He produced BUFFALO BILL (1944) for Fox.  What followed was even better, two superior Westerns made by his production company and released through United Artists: RAMROD (1947) and FOUR FACES WEST (1948).  The three films, all starring Joel McCrea, are the last films produced by Sherman.  All in all, it was quite a good track record.


THE WRITER.
The screenplay was based on a short novel by Eugene Manlove Rhodes that was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1926.  Its title, Paso Por Aqui (I passed here), was a reference to an inscription on a huge sandstone formation located in New Mexico.  The Spaniards had named it El Morro (The Headland) and the Anglos christened it Inscription Rock.  Today it is a national monument.

The National Park Service finds itself in the somewhat ironic position of protecting the old inscriptions while attempting to prevent any modern additions.
 
As a result of his days as a cowboy and rancher, Rhodes had an intimate knowledge of this part of New Mexico.  Not only did he live there, but he is  buried there in the San Andres Mountains. 

The inscription on Rhodes gravestone reads "Paso por aqui"

Of course, the screenwriters, which included Harry Sherman's daughter, Teddi, took liberties with Rhodes' original story.  They modified the ending and added the romance angle.  There was a nurse in the original story, but there was no romantic attachment.  The screenplay also makes Pat Garrett something he was not, a U.S. marshal.  The real Garrett was a county sheriff as he was in Rhodes story.  Rhodes would have known that since he was personally acquainted with the lawman.

Pat Garrett

Eugene Manlove Rhodes

The title was changed, too. Monte explains the meaning of the paso por aqui inscription on El Morro to Ross and Fay, but it was not retained as the title.  It is impossible to explain the title that was selected.  I suppose the four faces are represented by Ross, Fay, Monte, and Pat Garrett.  However, the movement in the film is not toward the West, but always southward.


THE CAST. 
McCrea made his first film appearance in 1924 and was given his first lead role in THE SILVER HORDE (RKO, 1929), an outdoor adventure yarn set in Alaska.  For the next fifteen years, the versatile actor went on to star mostly in comedies and melodramas, but also an occasional Western.  But beginning with BUFFALO BILL in 1944, McCrea would star almost exclusively in Western films.

In a 1978 interview, McCrea was quoted as saying: "I liked doing comedies, but as I got older I was better suited to do Westerns. Because I think it becomes unattractive for an older fellow trying to look young, falling in love with attractive girls in those kinds of situations...Anyway, I always felt so much more comfortable in the Western. The minute I got a horse and a hat and a pair of boots on, I felt easier. I didn't feel like I was an actor anymore. I felt like I was the guy out there doing it."

 

Mr. and Mrs. Joel McCrea

Frances Dee and Joel McCrea were one of Hollywood's great romantic teams.  No, not because of the films they appeared in, but because they were married to each other for fifty-seven years.  They met during the filming of THE SILVER CORD in 1933.  They married that year and went on to appear together in three other films, with FOUR FACES WEST being the last one. Dee made her final film appearance in GYPSY COLT in 1954.  

McCrea died in 1990 on the date of the couples' fifty-seventh anniversary.  Dee lived another fourteen years, dying at age ninety-six.

Bickford and Dee

Charles Bickford was one of Hollywood's greatest supporting actors.  He received nominations for an Academy Award for his supporting roles in THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943), THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER (1947), and JOHNNY BELINDA (1948).  He gave strong performances in Western films such as DUEL IN THE SUN 1947), THE BIG COUNTRY (1958), and THE UNFORGIVEN (1960).  

In fact, his last film role was in a Western: A BIG HAND FOR A LITTLE LADY (1966).

He was at his peak as a supporting actor at the time that he appeared in FOUR FACES WEST.  In it, he is one of the screen's best Pat Garretts.    

Joseph Calleia was not Hispanic, though he was often cast as one.  He was born Giuseppe Maria Spurrin-Calleja on the island of Malta.  His other Western roles include THE BAD MAN OF BRIMSTONE (1937), MY LITTLE CHICKADEE (1940), WYOMING (1940), BRANDED (1951) and John Wayne's THE ALAMO (1960).

Joseph Calleia

*****
THE REVIEWS

Brian Garfield wrote in Western Films: A Complete Guide that FOUR FACES WEST is "a splendid example of what a low-budget Western can be; its excellence is such that it can make you feel as if you've never seen a Western before."

A reviewer with the New York Times wrote that "FOUR FACES WEST emerges not only as a surprising film, but as an adult and edifying film."

Both FOUR FACES WEST and Sherman's earlier film, RAMROD, received generally good reviews.  Today they are considered to be two of the best Westerns of their era.  Unfortunately, however, neither did well at the box office and Sherman never produced another film.