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.

 

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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