Horton Foote's many roads home:

...Lily Dale is as neurotic as anyone--male or female-who appears in Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill, but she is neurotic not flamboyantly, but as we experience neurotics to be...

...Vaughn's view, alas - taught him to dance...

...The fifth play Of the nine, it is also the turning point of Horace Robedeaux's story...

...There is no reason, yet in complete confidence and with absolute serenity she knows, and she is right...

...The reticence of these characters means that when they do speak, what they say is wrenchingly moving...

...how, for that matter, has Horace become a man whom Elizabeth is right to trust...

...This quality of ordinary American-ness accounts for much of Foote's charm, and it goes a long way to explain why he contributed with such distinction to television, but it does not of itself justify my conviction that he is great...

...The exchange reaches its climax when he tells of his dreams - once almost hopeless - but which he can realize now because of ElizGroove Press plans to publish all nine plays in The Orphans' Home Cycle...

...Elizabeth Vaughn decides to marry Horace Robedeaux, though her family has good reason to frown upon him as a suitor...

...In Foote's eyes the odds against such a society are high indeed...

...There is serious scrubbing of the idyllic picture of our smalltown past...

...We ought to realize, too, the magnitude of Horton Foote's achievement...

...Or should be speaking about"rent houses'' instead of "income property,'' using "sweet" to express approval or sympathy, addressing their siblings as "brother" or "sister," practicing verbal cour- tesies like "ma'ams" and "sirs," and answering questions in complete sentences: "Yes, I am" and "No, I do not...

...The mythic figure particularly subject to debunking in the Cycle is the southern "good old boy," rough and ready, governed more by a sort of frontier chivalry than by the law, a free spirit who finds his strength in whiskey, the good, clear liquor from the old brown jug, central - as in Faulkner's "The Bear" - to the male ritual of telling hunting tales and finding therein the courage to hunt again...

...Horace has given her a ring she wears hidden on a chain, and she must decide whether or not she really loves him...

...MARIAN BURKHART has taught college English in and out of New York, is a book reviewer, and also writes an occasional literary essay...

...Vaughn's attempts to guard his daughters ends abruptly...

...Horace's mother sees virtue as preeminently a lack of bad habits because in her first marriage she suffered so much from the presence of bad habits...

...Looking down from the balcony, my Indiana husband and I found on the set pieces of furniture we knew from his western Pennsylvania grandmother's house and a table my Iowa stepmother had introduced into our Colorado home...

...It is the Lily Dales and the Jessie Maes who tell everyone always what they feel because nothing they can admit to feeling is worth being reticent about...

...Vaughn knows no way to protect the daughters he loves except by shutting them away from the violence he is too perceptive to ignore...

...Extraordinary persons are to grace and benefit the rest of us, not make us irrelevant...

...Yet the rugged individualist - the Horatio Algers, for whom pluck makes luck and anyone who works hard can succeed - remained so much an ideal that the poor had to suffer the further pain of being seen, and sometimes seeing themselves, to be at fault...

...Intelligent men of good family who drink themselves into irresponsible near-idiocy pepper Foote's plays, and a child, hungry for knowledge, is forbidden to read...

...In choosing to praise such gentle heroes, to give them the fame that is their due, Foote has assessed American character, American myth, and the American ambience more accurately than has just about any other figure in the American theater.ny other figure in the American theater...

...According to Foote, then, it is the unglamorous courage to persevere coupled with the undramatic courage to forego violence that begets the real hero...

...The themes mesh when the dance that is the play's counterfoil to Mr...

...How does she decide...

...Sadder still, Horace realizes that his mother will never permit her affection for him to upset the new husband (who hates her son) to whom she gives her highest praise: he has no bad habits...

...They are part of a community...

...In The Chase, Hawes, the central character (again a sheriff endangered by a psychopath and compelled to stand against the townspeople who should support him) is admirable not because of his cool prowess under pressure, but because he wants very much not to kill the criminal but rather to return him to prison, as the law requires...

...In these plays Foote's technique is at its most assured...

...The violence such dislocation imposes upon them is dramatized in Carrie's endless skirmishes with Jessie Mae, Ludie's appalling wife, who does not know that she is the victim of violence, too, for she is so wholly unaware of a world extending beyond her in either time or space or style that for her nothing really is except her whims...

...The play's action is deceptively simple...

...a man drunk enough to murder a cousin at a slight not to himself, but to the southern "tradition" of honoring womanhood - a southern good old boy simply does not allow even a whore to be called a whore to her face (Cousins...

...Courtship, the play central in the Cycle, reveals most effectively the themes central to that tapestry...

...She is anyone's insufferable aunt, the pain-in-the-neck down anybody's street...

...But what demonstrates most convincingly that Foote has an amplitude of vision that shapes itself into dramatically compelling plays and justifies the accolade I am giving him, is The Orphans' Home Cycle...

...He is a traveling salesman - a profession proverbially practiced by the unstable...

...Foote's characters are people we know...

...1962...

...And even in it, violence is undercut and discredited...

...An early version of Roots in a Parched Ground is in Three Plays (Harcourt...

...and Mrs...

...if he asks me...

...What serenity exists - and serenity is, in a sense, his subject-exists against a background of endless violence: economic dislocations that lead a man to murder the banker who foreclosed the mortgage on his farm, publicly, in front of the banker's daughter (The Roads Home...

...The social dislocations of the Civil War were in Texas neither forgotten nor resolved...

...when Elizabeth Vaughn agrees to marry him, he has for the first time since early childhood the possibility of a home...

...She succeeds even in freeing Jessie Mae, at least enough to enable her daughter-in-law to take one small step outside her selfishness, a step so large that if any of us took a comparable one, we would have so far advanced in charity that we would, like Enoch, walk with God and be seen no more...

...thus the action signals not success, but failure...

...Life from 1902 to 1928, the years the Cycle covers, involved twelve-hour working days sometimes for children nine- or ten-years-old, since fathers made a habit of dying young...

...Vaughn's haven is also a prison because he has found life ungovernable in other ways, too...

...We need as well to choose to live in spite of the fears chaos inspires...

...convict laborers murdering one another and being murdered by the plantation owner who exploits them (Convicts...

...Caution can be useless: Aunt Lucy, having married an older man not for love but for security, found herself at thirty-two a widow with four children...

...What permits her not to rebel but to ch6ose...

...HORTON FOOTE'S MANY ROADS HOME AN AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT & HIS CHARACTERS MARIAN BURKHART I realized that Horton Foote is quite probably America's greatest playwright when, after seeing both Lily Dale and The Widow Claire, I stepped out onto streets deep in the bowels of Manhattan and found myself disoriented because I wasn't hearing people speak in the southern cadences of the Texas Gulf Coast...

...If one recognizes that religion is a matter not of answers but of awe, one can see, in what way Foote is religious...

...Their manners are meticulous, so much so that Elizabeth makes sharply clear how angry she is with her parents merely by failing to call her mother "ma'am...

...Perhaps one comes nearer to explaining his impact if one notes that for all its ordinariness, Foote's world is neither calm nor orderly...

...Poverty, coupled with the anti-intellectualism that is as American as violence, made education past the fourth or fifth grades a luxury...

...Inadequacies we can in part understand...

...The surest means of spreading prosperity was the wartime boom that guaranteed high prices for cotton, but when prices fell or the crop failed, there was no social mechanism to protect the victims...

...For them, emotion is to be understood, to be mastered and channeled, not imposed upon those who do not share it...

...What is to keep Horace from drinking and drifting with his usually shiftless peers...

...They, like Sybil, "slip out" because they are allowed only rarely to date...

...The play, a commentary upon the American myth of the individual who achieves justice single-handedly through the courageous use of violence, is a gloss - conscious or not - upon one of the best embodiments of the myth, the film High Noon...

...Both Elizabeth and her sister Laura, home for vacation from boarding school, are well-dressed...

...That danger threatens their own generation they know because Sybil Thomas, six months pregnant, has just had a shotgun wedding...

...If they are brought to trial at all, they suffer at most suspended sentences and walk away from the courtroom to swill again the bootleg liquor that leads to further violence...

...A Trip to Bountiful is one of many notable plays...

...Convicts - usually black - replaced slaves as plantation laborers...

...To these questions there is no answer...

...Vaughn are happily married, yet the emotion almost palpably underlying all this order is fear, for Mr...

...He does shoot, but in a moment of panic...

...Not only must we not obey that in us to which violence appeals...

...Witness Horace Robedeaux's cri de coeur to Elizabeth in On Valentine's Day, the sixth play of the Cycle, an outburst that almost tears from his soul the envy, of which he is ashamed, for those who are successful, for those who have been parented...

...To recount this aspect of experiencing Foote is to stress the ordinariness of the artifacts and the speech he uses, for Foote's lifelong meditation upon what it means to be American focuses upon the ordinary...

...Vaughn feels compelled to subject his daughters to Aristotelian violence...

...For even if Foote's plays are based upon events in the life of his own family, his work turns outward to a world Americans know, an unex-aggerated, uninflated world where most of us live...

...Vaughn's view...

...He gambles, but one dollar only, and nothing can keep him from going the next day to Houston for a six-week business course that may help him order his life...

...He drinks, but does not get drunk...

...Tender Mercies deserves the praise it has received, and The Roads Home, though not so well known, is equally well wrought...

...Brace...

...They are not passive, nor are they stoics...

...He just is, as Elizabeth just knew and just chose...

...Hawes redeems himself in the end, for he determines to try again to serve the law by helping someone else escape entrapment in violence...

...Sybil Thomas, who once danced with her seducer, has gone unexpectedly into labor to bring forth a dead child and has herself met death - the expected end to any dance in Mr...

...If American ideals mean anything, and if a government structured democratically is to accomplish anything, it should be a world in which the ordinary live well and achieve decent lives, providing indeed a seed-ground for the extraordinary, but only accidentally so...

...That is little with which to counter not only his heritage, but the influence of his uncle, who not only drinks and smokes but is a compulsive gambler as well...

...In Lily Dale his attempt to return to his natural place as his mother's son and his sister's brother ends when he learns that only her fear that he, too, will die allows Lily Dale for a few moments to share their common past...

...But however valid and, in these days of Rambo and Ollie North, however necessary Foote's theme is, it does not yet constitute his greatness...

...The only moral support he regularly receives is from the aunt who gives him Sunday dinners, but who has also - and in Mr...

...Pete Davenport, Horace's stepfather, is narrow, joyless, and ungenerous because, fatherless from the age of eight, he has found life to be narrow, joyless, and ungenerous...

...His reasons for seeing his family as an island of order in a sea of chaos are made clear through the play's wholly realistic dialogue - principally between Elizabeth and Laura, as they catch up on the year's news and try to see what lies outside the haven their father has taken such pains to build for them...

...But although Foote is aware that violence is as American as apple pie, violence, as such, is not his subject...

...M B. abeth's love, a love which fills him with awe:''I adore you, I worship you . . . and I thank you for marrying me...

...And Elizabeth would be a widow now had she succeeded in running away with Syd Joplin, her first love, since the wildness she found attractive has already killed him...

...Foote's characters had so established themselves as real that it seemed people around me should have names like Sarah Nancy, Annie Gayle, Gladys Maude, or Irma Sue...

...not just their fellow non-dancing Methodists, but everyone in town respects Henry Vaughn...

...He has lived on his own since he was twelve, when his father died"of too much liquor and too many cigarettes...

...Foote, like Horace when he thinks of Elizabeth, is in awe before the mystery of human goodness...

...That they say little, that for the most part they listen and think is part of what makes them matter...

...So far, only the three plays shown on PBS's American Playhouse-Courtship, On Valentine's Day, and 1918-are in print, plus an acting edition of Lily Dale...

...Thus, Mr...

...But how did Horace, who suffered more and received less than any other of the Cycle's principal characters, find his way to compassion, to joy, to generosity...

...The demythologizing Foote began in The Chase goes on in the Cycle, as it did, for that matter, in A Trip to Bountiful...

...In the Cycle's first play, Roots in a Parched Ground, Horace suffers at twelve total aban-donment when his father dies and his mother immediately remarries...

...The only difference is that Foote has elucidated the roots of her arrested development, her frightening need never to be anything other than narcissistic, and in doing so has done something to explain all those other aunts, too...

...I am indebted to Wall Bode from Grove and to Horton Foote for allowing me to read the unpublished plays from drafts...

...Foote's plays generate an atmosphere so widely and intensely American it seems that even citizens for whom the West begins somewhere around the Hudson River could find in it something of themselves...

...Those murderers - except for the convicts - incur no punishment...

...Carrie Watts and her son, Ludie, have been uprooted from the farm they loved, to live in Houston in a cramped apartment on a noisy, concrete-covered corner...

...and a kind of madness that leads to violence, as Aristotle defined it - an interference with the natural, a perverse refusal to be or to allow others to be what they ought...

...How is it that in The Widow Claire Horace is at twenty-one his own man...

...Because Foote knows so well the people of his own region, he knows well the rest of America, a fact confirmed by the beautifully appropriate set for Lily Dale...

...Around Harrison, Texas, the center of Foote's personal Yoknapatawpha County, such men are unmitigated disasters who ruin their families, waste their fortunes, kill others, and addle their brains, and there is no solution for this rampant alcoholism other than the Keeley Cure, the inefficacy of which is a thread running wryly through Foote's tapestry...

...He forbids them to dance because it is the most seductive of the steps that lead to marriage, or worse, to involvement with the risks life entails...

...Carrie's longed-for trip to Bountiful appears at first to lead merely to bitterness, for Bountiful is now a ghost town...

...Their goodness, their wisdom, remain a mystery...

...They've heard whispers about Uncle Billy Vaughn and his two no-good wives, the second of whom, Aunt Asa, shocked family and neighbors by being clearly drunk as Billy lay on his deathbed...

...He descends into hell in Convicts, in which, now thirteen, he" is compelled on Christmas Eve to watch his vicious employer die in a fit of delirium tremens and is cheated of the $11.50 he has worked six months to earn...

...Brother Vaughn drinks because he cannot in his own eyes measure up to his father...

...I think Foote's awareness of Aristotelian violence, of the twisting of the natural, informs a play far greater - A Trip to Bountiful...

...They themselves are vulnerable...

...In only the earliest of the twenty-odd plays I have read, The Chase (1948,1952), is violence central to the action rather than the background against which what really matters takes place...

...Foote's admirable characters have the language and the intelligence to speak well, but they are reticent...

...The Vaughns live with civility in a gracious house...

...It is an understanding that permits her to be again the woman she thought herself to be - someone large-souled enough to extricate herself from Jessie Mae's power-games, to be generous enough to turn aside from the pettiness such tactics have forced upon her...

...A series of nine plays based upon his father's life, the Cycle is Foote's most original, most profoundly unflinching consideration of how some of us manage to live in ordered decency in a world violently indecent...

...Why is he scrupulously honest when in his need as a child he was cheated and cheated again...

...As her parents turn away, persuaded that they have taken the steps necessary to end the affair, she says to herself, "I'm marrying Horace Robedeaux...

...Freeing herself, she frees Ludie, too, enabling him to accept his memories of a richer past, instead of turning away from them, embittered and as much entrapped as Jessie Mae in the narrowness of the present...

...Since he is concerned not with violence but with how people cope in response to violence, the most significant action is inward, not overt, and it is quite as often suggested as declared...

...Such perversion is systemic...

...Demythologizing western-movie violence, after all, merely begins to assess correctly what makes America succeed almost in spite of itself...

...physically based madness that leads to suicide...

...The longer speeches tend to come, usually comically, from the emptier heads, and there is as much between the lines as in the lines themselves, for what Foote has to say requires him to externalize inner action in a way consistent not only with the stage conventions of his time but with the character of the Americans who people his plays...

...We can answer, of course, the grace of God, but if we have any understanding at all of what those words mean, we ought to realize that they merely restate the mystery theologically...

...On this night when almost every word, every memory is of sadness or of tragedy or of mistakes, when the principal event is Sybil's pathetic death, how can Elizabeth know not only that she loves Horace but that he is worthy of her love...

...But the land, freed long enough from the violence of misuse that twisted it to sterility, has renewed itself in its "ghostliness" and is green enough to give Carrie the bountiful gift of understanding the strength of her roots in this strong earth...

...The play opens up Foote's world and makes clear his central preoccupation: When so much in human nature seems to relish chaos, how do some people succeed in achieving lives orderly enough to permit a civilized society to exist...

...Foote turns the premises of High Noon inside out in his play, in order to sever the connection between heroism and any kind of violence, even the justified violence of the film...

...Elizabeth is quiet and preoccupied, except when she protests vehemently her parents' attempts to thwart their children's natural desires...