Playwright’s Memoir Fails to Revive Small Town

“Miles and miles and miles of desolation, leagues on leagues on leagues without a change . . .” Anyone who’s driven across the great state of Texas probably knows the feeling described by Swinburne in his poem about the North Sea. You drive for hours and hours and hours of flat, unvarying landscape and . . . you’re still in Texas. Something of this feeling can be experienced by reading Horton Foote’s “Farewell.”

A prizewinning playwright, Foote has been writing for the stage and screen for half a century. Much of his work draws upon his memories of growing up in the 1920s and 1930s in Wharton, a small town in Texas somewhere in the vicinity of Houston. Foote’s memoir, “Farewell,” not only hearkens back to the world of his boyhood, but also recounts what he knows about past generations of his family.

Now, contrary to what some soi-disant urban sophisticates may believe, there is no reason why an unhurried, lovingly detailed evocation of small-town life can’t make for a richly rewarding, even fascinating, book--like Larry McMurtry’s reminiscences of his West Texas boyhood, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.” But “fascinating” is not a word that springs to mind when one is reading “Farewell.”

There are engaging moments. Anyone who sits down to recollect the way things used to be is bound to come up with some intriguing facts, a few good stories, the occasional home truth. We learn, for example, not only that schoolteachers back then had to be paragons of virtue, but any teacher who got married would lose his or her job.

We also hear of the hard times farmers had in those parlous days before government price supports brought a modicum of stability to the scene (the very programs now being eroded by politicians who don’t know history).

Foote’s maternal grandparents were such fine people, no one could understand why all three of their sons turned out so badly: “Brother, Speed and Billy were, in many respects, representative of a whole social class in . . . the American South. . . .” Their affluent father owned farms, “all of which were farmed by tenants or sharecroppers. Neither he nor his sons ever went near the land. . . . Unless you were a doctor, a lawyer or a merchant, there was no work for a young man to do. . . .”

This, however, makes the book sound more interesting than it is. The characters are sketchily drawn. Often, Foote will begin to tell a story but lack the information to develop or complete it. His narrative style is an added hindrance.

Perhaps as a result of his playwriting experience, he has a penchant for cumbersome stretches of dialogue, like this passage in which his grandmother stops by: “Do you mind a visitor?” she asked. “ ‘No,’ my father said, ‘you are always welcome . . . you know that.’ He got up then and said, ‘Sit in my chair, I’ll get another one.’ ‘I’ll get it,’ I said. I went into the house and brought out a small rocker. ‘Let me have the small chair,’ my grandmother said. ‘No, you stay where you are,’ my father insisted. ‘No, I really prefer the small rocker.’ ‘All right,’ my father said, and my grandmother got out of the chair and sat in the rocker.”

If you can read this and not scream with exasperation, “Farewell” might just be your kind of fare.