Absent Details

...Absent Details Farther Off from Heaven By William Humphrey Knopf 241 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Richard King Associate Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College, author, "The Party of Eros" Like so much Southern writing, William Humphrey's book is about the experience of loss The modern world came later and less enthusiastically to the region than to other parts of the country, and perhaps that is why Southerners have been obsessed with lost places, times and people In particular, the fictional worlds of some of Dixie's most accomplished writers have been haunted by the absent presence and present absence of the Father and the patriarchal tradition he represents Clarence Humphrey's death in an automobile accident in 1937 was young Bill Humphrey's fall into time and adulthood It shattered the family romance that William felt himself the focus of and revealed in a quite literal way his father's mortality The 13-year-old and his mother had no cushion of kin or family to fall back upon, relatives in and around the east Texas cotton town of Clarksville were too poor or indifferent to take the two in Humphrey left Clarksville shortly thereafter and did not return for over 30 years Farther Off from Heaven is as much about William Humphrey's own education into a culture partly mastered by his father and partly never acceded toas it is about his father per se What the author remembers learning and loving the ways ot the woods, the small competencies of everyday rural and smalltown life - seem the more freighted with meaning the less they accomodated to the using middle-class ethic Humphrey s parents embodied the contradictory tuggings of the old and new Nell, his mother, came from a solid, rather dull clan whose parents' continued love for one another was inspiring, but to young Bill mightily boring To her parents' horror, Nell fell for a restless young man of sharecropper origins According to the son's proud account, Clarence Humphrey was "socially a piney-woods-pore-white, personally a rebel and a loner " He loved cars and escaped his origins by opening a garage in Clarksville Significantly for Bill Humphrey, his father never quite sold out to the gods of respectability and "breeding," the presiding presences of much small-town life Clarence loved hot food and strong drink, like Huck Finn, he took to the woods to hunt when things got to be too much at home or at work during the Depression A mean little banty rooster who fought at the drop of a hat, this violent man gave his son only one whipping and had tears in his eyes afterward In retrospect, it seemed to Bill Humphrey that his father simply disliked the idea of acting the way a parent or an adult was expected to If the father stood for the untamable old frontier virtues (and vices) and the allure of the still novel automobile, the mother grew tired of the helling about that first attracted her to her husband and set her mind on "higher things " (According to her son, she became something of a snob ) When Bill proved to be a good student, she lived out her ambitions through him She also tried for the first (and last) time to tame her husband, but it didn't work By and by the couple drifted apart, and it was rumored that the accident happened on Clarence's way home from drinking or wenching or both Given his background, we inevitably wonder how William Humphrey became a writer He knew, he says tew households where books were read, let alone written Certainly Clarence Humphrey s spirited, self-lacerating life offered little to point the son toward a writing career, though it did provide some of the raw materials His mother was hardly an intellectual either, she encouraged her son's obvious intelligence mainly so that he would escape the closed world of the small-town lower middle class Moreover, it was only while bed-ridden one summer with a broken kneecap that a neighbor's boy brought him books he actually enjoyed reading Humphrey never really tells us how he became what he is, and that is a reflection of the weakness of Farther Off From Heaven The author does not fully engage his material or his theme, there is a certain abstract quality in what should be the most personal of books This work offers neither the bared-nerve pain of Richard Wright's Black Boy, the exquisitely attentive sensibility of James Agee's A Death in the Family, nor the high spirits and anecdotal genius of Willie Morris' North Toward Home The range of emotions the memory of his father elicits is not deeply explored The mother is a blurry figure None of the friends of Humphrey s youth, the town characters or his teachers lodges firmly or affectionately in our minds And the sights and smells of Clarksville appear in full force only occasionally At times in the account of his father and a black friend hunting alligators, and of a harrowing Sunday dinner that ends in a literal tree-for-all involving father, mother and son the prose comes alive, the narrative gathers force But all too often Humphrey seems to be merely going through the motions, the prose is frequently slack and careless coming from such a tine writer The impact ot the Depression notwithstanding, the volume has relatively lit tie historical texture In The Ord-ways, Humphrey's earlier line and generous novel, he clearly identified himself as a Southern writer unlike some writers from Texas The state was a kind of 19th-century California for main Southerners a place where riff-raff fugitives from the law, the restless and diffusely ambitious, and those who were simply tired of the stifling past could escape to Clarks-ville itself was Texas writ small, looking backward to the Southern past and forward to the Texas of the future In The Ordways, the town's history is skillfully rendered as a vital part of the story, in the present work, Clarksville exists in a vacuum Finally, Farther Off from Heaven has a typically American flaw As D H Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler among others have stressed, ours is not a culture very congenial to "maturity " Having romanticized our national and personal pasts, our maturings are always disillusioning, expulsions from Eden Adulthood has recurrently been synonymous with selling out, since nothing could live up to the promise we remember was ours The men particulary have often been too inflexible to learn the new language of middle-class respectability The women have generally been more flexible and pragmatic They espied the inadequacy of the way of life their husbands clung to and thus "snobbery" and "social climbings," despite what Humphrey thinks, are simply unfair terms for the desire that their children have it better than they did Perhaps we will have reached cultural maturity when parents can merely hope their children will have it as well they did Meanwhile, the interesting story of how William Humphrey became a writer and why he waited 30 years before returning to Texas remains to be told Such a story would be a fitting tribute to his father's spirit and his mother's ambitions...