I'm looking for a metaphore. Diamonds in a cow patty isn't quite
it. Perhaps, garnets in a schist, or to take a cue from Daugherty's
title story, a producing well in a marginal field. No, no, a
pearl: something special in the center with hard, almost
impenetrable stuff at the beginning and the end.
The pearl is a series of four short stories which would be a
novella if it were all from the same point of view. It is on a
reliable theme: the rivalry of a son, Robert, with his famous and
estranged father, Frederick; and it has a few reliable clichés:
they both are attracted to the same woman. The novel thing is that
they are artists (that is to say, painters) and most of the story
is in Houston, where the combination of enormous wealth and modern
art has created a Byzantine of intrigues of one-upmanship.
That is a much richer story for anyone with the vaguest grasp of
Houston art history, but that story has been told for ages under
the title, "The Emperor's New Clothes."
We have met the father Frederick in New York (where somehow he
manages to obtain El Patio TV dinners) as he is diagnosed with
cancer. The son confronts the Times obituary which
makes clear that Frederick was not in the first rank of American
artists—not good news for Robert, who has not gotten so far
as the father. The son has never had much of the father. Frederick
left his wife and Houston early in Robert's life, and father and
son seem to have connected only twice: Robert at fifteen took an
art class Frederick taught and Frederick bedded the female student
Robert had his eye on; and again when the father returned to M.D.
Anderson for his final treatment and his death. The father's final
work, a collage, arrives from New York. It is representational,
meaning it contains recognizable images, and Robert who believes he
is being cuckolded finds all kinds of images of potency or the lack
of it in the work and goes mad—or else gets the flu.
It is all very sordid and artistic.
At any rate, it could have been a kunstlerroman, if it
had been set up properly from Robert's point of view. Why it
wasn't, I think, is revealed with an examination of the oyster
shell around this pearl.
The landscape of all these stories is bleak and barren.
Evidently this is the thing in experimental literature: to be
laconic to the point of incomprehensibility. Hardly any of these
stories is more sparse than "Akhmotova's Notebook: 1940." The story
line, although substantial enough to support a novel, has to be
discovered from the jacket notes. Akhmotova is the legendary
Russian poet, who has somehow offended Stalin sufficiently that her
son has been made a hostage. Who is she? What did she write? Why
doesn't Stalin simply dispose of her? What does she feel? We won't
learn any of this from Daugherty, who is content to rely on the
biographical background, outside the story to do his work for him.
Eventually the poet writes a suitable paean to the Party, the son
is freed, and we have one of the few glimpses of a flesh-and-blood
character in this whole collection: the son is not entirely
reconciled to suffering nobly for his mother's art. If only the
mother were as human.
I must admit that I am no fan of the Literary story, which is to
say, no fan of stories without stories. As for the school of
thought that a short story ought to be a character study, I think
that is all very well provided we do have a character to study.
Perhaps the idea of character development seems a little too
similar to the vulgar, bourgeois notion of plot, but if we are to
have character, sliced thin from time as if for electron
microscopy, then it seems to me we ought to have some insight from
the fine detail. So why isn't some of that here?
What the FBI wants to know, in "The Observatory," is why an
amateur astronomer in Houston is getting letters from a Middle
Eastern terrorist/freedom-fighter. A very good question. Yes, the
astronomer knew her, slept with her, but that is not the answer to
how or why anyone he could have met or known, anyone he could
describe as an American beauty is overseas and writing to him about
pipebombs.
I cannot help suspecting that the answer to all of these
unanswered questions is that the author does not know. He is not
being coy. He has no idea who any of these people are or what they
are doing. He doesn't know why one of them is crawling under cars
on a winter's night in Bowling Green, Ohio looking for cats with
supernumerary toes. He doesn't know why another is a poet, much
less a poet political enough to offend Stalin. Dialogue comes in
short, jerky snippets because the author doesn't know what the
characters are feeling and what they would say about their feelings
if they had any.
But there is a larger mystery, one that I doubt any author has
the solution to anymore, and that is: what is Texas literature? For
several generations Texas writing has been backward-looking. When
the oil boom was really on, Texas literature was about cattle
brands and cattle drives and cattle trails. We didn't have the oil
boom stories until the oil boom was history.
If there is to be anything of Texas literature when the nation
seems divided into only two regions—largely interchangeable
suburbs and inner cities—Daugherty is well placed to create
it. He is a Midland native, with two degrees from S.M.U. and a
Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Is there anywhere to look for
Texas except backwards? There is a bit of this question in the
title story of the collection.
Grandmother is in a nursing home and quite senile. She mistakes
our protagonist for his grandfather. In the modern world, legendary
times are but two generations ago, so family "legend" has it, that
grandfather ran off with a prostitute who was working the oil
fields. If there are any native Texans left, a skeleton in the
closet taking the form of an oil field woman will not seem
especially farfetched to them. But that's just it—Daugherty's
story never becomes anything more than the failing memory of an old
woman in a nursing home.
