Exit Interview

In a wide-ranging interview with this blogger, George W. Bush revealed today that he is black, and thus the first non-Caucasian President of the United States.

“I accept that, in the long run, I’m probably not going to get much credit for the stuff that I’ve done,” Bush told this reporter. “That’s the way this game is played, this history business. And I’m comfortable with that. But I’m not going to sit around while people say Barack Obama is going to be our first black President. I’m the one who broke the color line, and I want credit for that.”

President Bush has conducted a number of interviews in recent weeks, as well as giving several retrospective speeches, all designed to define his legacy as he leaves office. He has portrayed himself as a man of unyielding principle, who launched a just war in Iraq and who made “compassionate conservatism” the political philosophy of his eight-year administration. This is the first time he has admitted negritude.

Moreover, Bush says he is blacker than President-elect Obama. “His mother was a white woman. You can’t say that about either of my parents,” the President said. “I’m 100 percent African.”

Natural rhythm

Asked to square that assertion with the fact that his father was President, yet not the first non-Caucasian to hold that office, Bush explained that his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, had a brief affair with the family chauffeur during the early years of her marriage to George H.W. Bush.

“We kept it hushed up because Whitie didn’t want the scandal,” President Bush said, using a family nickname for the senior Bush, whom he also refers to as “Poppy Bofay” and “The Man.” For fear of embarrassing Mrs. Bush, and out of concern that publicizing his race might alienate conservative voters in the South and elsewhere, Bush continued to avoid questions on the subject until now.

However, he said, it has been no secret that he possesses natural ability in sports and dance, a weakness for snack foods, and an extremely large penis. He conceded that his race has been less apparent in his administration’s public policies, but he defended his record. “I have to be President of all the people, not just my own people,” he said. “You can’t show favoritism. That’s not what this job is about. It’s hard work.”

Bush’s natural father, Eustus Shexnyder, died in 1974. Surviving him is another son, Eustus Junior, who, upon learning that his brother is President of the United States, quit his job on the faculty of the Yale School of Law, and allegedly robbed a liquor store before leading police on a high-speed car chase. No trial date has been set.

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Class of 1979

Unusual suspects: Karen Strecker and Judy Horak, seated,
with Kevin Pask and Bill Madison, standing.
Richardson High School Senior Prom, 1979

“Fill this out about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be!! REPOST with name of high school and graduating year in the subject box. Send this to all your friends, but don't forget to send it back to me.”

A friend has forwarded to me this little questionnaire, of the kind that gets circulated endlessly in e-mails, always with the exhortation to pass it along to as many other people as possible. Ornery sort that I am, I usually let such things drop.

Today I’m trying a different tactic. Instead of ignoring the questionnaire, or alternatively clogging everyone’s e-mail with my responses, I’ll post my answers here. Yet as I answer, I’m struck by the lusterless flatness of these questions, their resolute failure to illuminate much of anything: this ain’t the Proust Questionnaire, alas. So keep scrolling. After I’ve finished with the original set, I’ll raise — and answer — a few questions of my own.

1. Did you date someone from your school?
“Date” isn’t the word to describe what happened. Enough said.

2. Did you marry someone from your high school?
Not yet.

3. Did you car pool to school?
No, I walked the three blocks to campus — with the result that I was hit by a car as I crossed Coit Road, my sophomore year. The William V. Madison Memorial Stoplight was erected shortly thereafter.

4. What kind of car did you have?
A yellow Dodge Colt station wagon, known widely as “The Banana.”

5. What kind of car do you have now?
None.

6. It’s Friday night...where were you?
Eating Mexican food, then going to the movies with Kevin Pask and Karen Strecker.

7. It’s Friday night...where are you? (now)
I’ve been asking myself the same question.

8. What kind of job did you have in high school?
I was an office assistant at my father’s engineering firm.

9. What kind of job do you do now?
I’m a freelance writer.

10. Were you a party animal?
Au contraire.

11. Were you considered a flirt?
By whom? I suspect most people considered me a rather hopeless case who’d never find love, much less lose his virginity; and my attempts at flirtation typically elicited the sorts of responses that a stray dog gets when he begins to hump your leg.

12. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir?
High school marked the end of my musical career. Though I performed in a musical play, Something’s Afoot, my one solo line was dubbed by another actor, David Arment, who hadn’t made his entrance yet; I retreated to straight drama. My activities were numerous, however. I was a member of the editorial staff of the high-school newspaper; I held office in the Italian Club (first in the history of the state of Texas) and participated in French and German Clubs; and in an advisory capacity to Jim Millerman, our senior-class president, I nearly got the poor guy expelled.

13. Were you a nerd?
Affirmative, Captain. Sensors detect signs of opera records in the subject’s bedroom. Setting phasers to say, “Ni!”

14. Did you get suspended or expelled?
No, but see above.

15. Can you sing the fight song?
Did we have one? I wouldn’t know. I never attended a single sporting event, and I sneaked out of pep rallies whenever possible.

16. Who was/were your favorite teacher(s)?
A long list — that includes many of the names listed on the right-hand side of every page of this blog. Though there were a couple of disastrous nincompoops on the faculty (are you reading this, Jim Mymern?), I managed to avoid most of them. I’m quite lucky to have studied with such a terrific group of people.

17. Where did you sit during lunch?
I honestly don’t remember. Did I begin my unhealthy practice of eating at my desk during this period? (That would have been a desk somewhere in the journalism classroom.) In any case, I was most likely to be found wherever other kids from the newspaper staff might be.

18. What was your school's full name?
J.J. Pearce Senior High School

19. When did you graduate?
1979

20. What was your school mascot?
A mustang, copied blatantly from Southern Methodist University.

21. If you could go back and do it again, would you?
Would I have to make the same mistakes?

22. Did you have fun at Prom?
Yes, beginning with a memorable pre-dance picnic dinner in a local cemetery. Because we went as a foursome, and because the girls attended a rival high school, we were able to attend two proms in one night. That proved sufficient, and I’ve never been to another.

23. Do you still talk to the person you went to Prom with?
Not often enough, in the case of Judy, but I know how to reach each of them when I need to — and I often do.

24. Are you planning on going to your next reunion?
I might go, but the word “planning” connotes a greater concentration of thought than any that I can claim on this subject.

25. Do you still talk to people from school?
Yes, including the recent and very happy rediscovery of the lovely Jean Dirks, after she stumbled across this blog. I’m also in touch with a few teachers: Carlene Klein Ginsburg and Anna Morini, and over the years I’ve been in and out of touch with Zona Ray and Melinda Smith.

Don’t we know each other so much better, now that we’ve shared? Let’s try a somewhat different approach.

What books read for class meant the most to you?
The Great Gatsby, by default, and Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire (which I not only read but enacted in both my French and drama classes). Outside the classroom, the first volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time formed all my expectations for young manhood, despite the fact that I was a middle-class suburbanite in Dallas and not an Eton and Oxford man on the go in London between the wars. I read Powell as a result of Kevin Pask’s shoving the books at me, in what I now recognize to have been a mostly futile effort on his part to foster in me an intellect worthy of his companionship.

What pop song do you remember most vividly, and why?
This is a cheater, because I didn’t begin listening to pop music until I was in high school — again, at Kevin Pask’s urging. I’d like to cite something significant, like the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” or amusing, like the Ramones’ “Teenage Lobotomy” (one of the late Keith Kaski’s enduring gifts to me), but I fear that the honest answer is Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” Less pop song than one-act opera, it dramatizes the thrills and risks of what I desperately yearned to spend my Friday nights doing.

It’s interesting to note that the pop songs I heard in high school are among the last for which I have no visual associations: MTV hadn’t started yet, so the mental images I retain of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra,” and Walter Egan’s immortal “Magnet and Steel” — all of which played endlessly on the radio in those days — are entirely my own.

Be honest: would you have made it into an Ivy League college if not for the influence of Kevin Pask?
Of course not.

What was your greatest success? Greatest disappointment?
I regret to inform the various North Dallas businessmen’s lunch groups who bestowed fancy plaques on me that winning prizes for essays on “What It Means to Be an American” no longer seems worthwhile to me, though I’m sure the admissions officers at Brown were duly impressed, and it didn’t hurt to know already how to strike the patriotic nerve when I wrote for Dan Rather. My greatest triumph was, in all likelihood, interviewing Beverly Sills for the school paper, simultaneously meeting my idol and launching my journalistic career. The greatest disappointment may have been not winning one of those fancy plaques for a performance of Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone, in which I played Creon. We poured our very guts into that show, but the judge gave the trophy to some competent repetition of frippery by Neil Simon instead. This prepared me only a little for the failure of Rags, seven years later.

The more personal successes and disappointments I shall save for another time. Maybe.

What was your mood in those days?
At the time, I thought I was melancholic to the extreme, and bragged about it, for it seemed a sort of intellectual achievement; but in retrospect, I was a resolute optimist. All the world seemed possible then.

What or whom do you miss most?
My potential.

Snapshots! Cite a few moments when you glimpsed a larger world.
a) Along with Margaret Guttes, I raked leaves in Mrs. Morini’s yard one autumn afternoon. Though I’d always been a teacher’s pet, this was an exceptional experience, inviting me into a teacher’s home and entrusting me with responsibility. Mrs. Morini rewarded us with home-made chicken soup, with pasta and grated parmegiano cheese in it. I think she must have paid us, too, but it’s the soup I remember.

b) Kevin and I went to New Orleans at Spring Break, without a chaperone. Wine! Women! Song! Et cetera! We attempted (and failed) to find Walker Percy; on the way back from Covington, the Banana broke down in the middle of the Lake Pontchartrain Bridge. And the waiter at Antoine’s corrected my French: what I wanted, he insisted, was “petty poise,” not petits pois. In like fashion and at the same restaurant, Kevin, fed up with my constant pointers on etiquette, loudly reminded me to “Be sure to slosh it around in your glass a lot” when it came time to taste the wine.

c) One day I visited the staggeringly beautiful Laura Semrad at the cheese shop where she worked. I sampled every variety on display, primarily as an excuse to linger in her radiance, before buying one rather pathetic little Gouda. “Come back soon,” Laura’s boss said, less kindly than you might assume, because she added, “Next time you’re hungry.” At the time, I knew nothing about cheese. Now I know too much.

That should do, for now. I expect it’s a sign that I’m turning into an old crank: get me started on memories of my bygone youth, and I don’t know when to stop. Sort of like Proust, don’t you think?

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The Purr and the Pause

My single encounter with Eartha Kitt consists entirely of a hurried backstage introduction, in the course of a commemoration of the March on Washington, in 1993. My encounter with Harold Pinter was even less direct: I happened to be in Sayles Hall when Brown University bestowed on him an honorary degree, a decade earlier. There was considerable question at the time whether Mr. Pinter would address us formally, his nose being out of joint over some public controversy. The inevitable joke was that he would offer instead an especially prolonged and pregnant Pinter Pause.

In all likelihood, I’d never have thought of them in the same breath, if their obituaries hadn’t appeared on the same day. Yet as artists they both achieved the highest goal: the creation and maintenance of a distinctive and durable, immediately recognizable and ultimately influential voice. As Pinter had his pause, so Kitt had her purr. You could no more mistake a Terrence Rattigan play for Pinter’s than a Pearl Bailey recording for Kitt’s. (And that’s no insult to Rattigan or to Bailey.) In the theater, each artist applied the voice to disparate ends, but each voice was heard in the outside world, too, speaking out on matters that had slight connection to conventional art. In matters of politics and social injustice, the purr and the pause were not without claws.

The most notorious story of Eartha Kitt is that of her cornering Lady Bird Johnson at a White House function and upbraiding her for the Vietnam War. Kitt brought the First Lady to tears, and she was convinced that LBJ picked up the telephone that very day and blacklisted her. A black list is of course a conspiracy: it requires both instigation and complicity. I can black list George Lucas, and I have done so, but no one else cooperates, and so he continues to earn a handsome living and to do as he pleases. In Kitt’s case, we can’t be sure of a conspiracy, since no one admitted such a thing, and since the sudden decline in her performing engagements coincided with the rise and dominance of rock, an art form for which she showed scant affinity. As a self-styled sex kitten, she was already long in the tooth. In short, as others have observed, she might have had trouble finding work even if she hadn’t spoken out at the White House that day.

But speak she did, despite the professional risks, which were considerable. She presents a striking contrast to Barbra Streisand, who with atypical demureness and hardly a cross word accepted a Kennedy Center Honor this year from the hand of George Bush. Kitt at the top of her game might have accepted such an award — but to a President who stood for everything she opposed, she’d have given a scorching, seething piece of her mind in return.

The case of Pinter is different. Associated first with the “Angry Young Men,” British playwrights who blasted through the hoary gentility of English theater in the 1950s; and then established as a public intellectual, Pinter could speak out with the backing of likeminded friends and committees, and with little risk to his career. Receiving a Nobel Prize during the Bush years has been tantamount to an invitation to denounce the American President, and Pinter accepted readily.

Victor Hugo and Emile Zola suffered exile for their political views. Pinter did not, and yet he showed a certain kind of courage, and defied a certain risk. To write, even for the stage, is an introverted process, and one sits alone in a room to do it. To engage in the affairs of the outside world requires propulsive gumption and the recognition that, by attending the protest rally, you will miss the boat of your inspiration and never complete, or begin, the scene that might have hoisted you toward Parnassus.

The character of Pinter’s work is less clearly linked than Hugo’s or Zola’s to progressive social beliefs; he more nearly resembles Samuel Beckett, his friend, whose politics remain stubbornly submerged in all but one play. Pinter may be a transatlantic descendant of Mark Twain, whose work betrays little hint of his fervent, outspoken anti-imperialism. (American culture ignores Twain on every social issue but race, and with rare exceptions — Susan Sontag, John Kenneth Galbraith — it doesn’t admit public intellectuals at all; perhaps for that reason I was late to grasp the concept.) Yet despite the relative comfort of the platforms from which he spoke out, Pinter serves as a reminder: it is not enough to write.

One could argue that neither Eartha Kitt nor Harold Pinter managed to change the world. But I would argue that it’s too soon to tell — and that, in any case, there’s no reason not to try, as they did.

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Majel Barrett Roddenberry

Smart woman, foolish choices: in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, Christine Chapel fell for a robot, long before she fell for Spock.

In my adolescent heyday as a Star Trek fanatic, I got to meet most of the principal crew of the Starship Enterprise at sci–fi conventions in Dallas, but the Big Three eluded me: Kirk, Spock, McCoy. Nurse Chapel was in most regards a minor recurring character on the series, but Majel Barrett, the actress who played her, boasted a credential that other cast members couldn’t match. She was married to Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the series. Only the biggest conventions could afford to invite Roddenberry, not least because he was a two-fer, accompanied by his wife. She never made it to Dallas while I was growing up, and my autograph collection remains incomplete.

Christine Chapel wasn’t a terribly compelling character, in my young eyes. Really, Barrett’s other roles on the series — as the voice of the ship’s computer, and as the second-in-command, Number One, in the pilot episode — seemed more dimensional. In retrospect, that’s curious. Nurse Chapel is an ostensibly brilliant medical professional, but her outstanding character trait is a completely goofy, hopeless crush on Mr. Spock. She of all people should know that the kind of romantic passion she seeks is biologically impossible in Spock. And yet she pines on. What teenager doesn’t, at one point or another, do something similar? We know, on some level, that we’re acting like fools, but we can’t help ourselves — especially where love is concerned.

Where no woman would go thereafter:
Number One, second-in-command
(She wore trousers instead of a miniskirt, by the way)

Though I might have identified with Christine Chapel, I identified with Dr. McCoy instead. Among the women on the show, I infinitely preferred Nichelle Nichols, as Lieutenant Uhura; and I was drawn to the stunning Grace Lee Whitney, as Yeoman Rand, sensing in her a pained vulnerability that turned out to be real, and that somehow evoked my nascent impulses to gallantry. The women of the Enterprise were a strange lot, running around in those miniskirts, seldom speaking, and never commanding so much as a landing party: this was the Sixties, after all, and even in a socially progressive futuristic fantasy, some possibilities — such as feminist empowerment — remained unimaginable. Except perhaps to the fans of the show, who yearned to see Uhura in the captain’s chair. (A black woman in charge! Now that would have been impressive. Instructive, too.)

Barrett married Roddenberry shortly after the original Star Trek was cancelled, and she participated in every subsequent incarnation of the series, whether playing the cat-woman M’Ress in the animated version or Deanna Troy’s mother (a nice comic turn, in most episodes) in The Next Generation. She remained the voice of the ship’s computer, and according to her obituary in The New York Times, she recently completed recording the computer’s lines for the next Star Trek movie.

Barrett represents a kind of continuity, then, that dovetails nicely with the overall optimism of the Star Trek universe. It depicts a future in which human beings haven’t destroyed each other in nuclear war on Earth, where similarities among races and species are more important than differences, where science geeks and computer nerds are the heroes — and yet, where men and women go on acting much as they always have.

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Listening to ‘Grey Gardens’

When Scott Frankel first told me he was writing a musical based on the Maysles Brothers’ film, Grey Gardens, I was skeptical. Make a musical out of a documentary? Why not start with something easier — like Nanook of the North?

I’d never seen Grey Gardens at the time. But one look was all it took to make me a believer. The film depicts Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith, in their ramshackle, eponymous mansion in East Hampton. Reclusive, eccentric, possibly mad, Big Edie and Little Edie sing constantly — to music no one else can hear. Scott’s score (to lyrics by Michael Korie, with a book by Doug Wright) permits us to enter into the madness, and to locate ourselves within the Beales.

‘Grits’ in the worst possible taste: Ebersole as Big Edie in Act I

The show ran both Off- and on Broadway, and I saw it both at Playwrights Horizons in 2006 and at the Walter Kerr in 2007. In both productions, I marveled at the powerhouse performances of its leading ladies, Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson, both of whom won Tony Awards for the show. Now Albert Maysles has produced a new documentary about the making of the musical; it airs Tuesday, December 23, as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series, and I urge you to watch.

The Beales came to public attention when the town of East Hampton tried to condemn Grey Gardens, which had fallen into disrepair and squalor, and was overrun with cats and raccoons, besides. Big Edie’s more glamorous niece, Jacqueline Onassis, bailed them out, but not before the story hit the New York tabloids. By the time Albert and David Maysles filmed the Beales in 1975, the scandal had died down (though the house was still a wreck), and the women reminisce, bicker, and philosophize with élan. It’s one of the oddest pictures I’ve ever seen.

The success of the documentary rekindled Little Edie’s dreams of a career in show business. Ultimately, she never quite managed stardom in any conventional sense, but she set trends in the fashion world with her highly distinctive style, and her “staunch” character in the face of adversity has made her a role model for generations of gay men. She explains both style and substance in “The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” the opening number of Act II.

The musical begins on the eve of Little Edie’s engagement to Joe Kennedy, in the summer of 1941 (a reminder that the Kennedy–Bouvier connection got off to an early start). Big Edie is portrayed in Act I by the same actress who then plays Little Edie in Act II, set in 1975. The tangled similarities between mother and daughter — the qualities that unite the women and drive them to distraction — are made flesh for us. Scott’s score pretty much traces the development of the Broadway musical, as Big Edie prepares numbers to sing at the engagement party in Act I; my favorite, “Hominy Grits,” is pitch-perfect in its utter lack of taste. (In the old days, such numbers were called — brace yourselves — “coon songs.”) The music gets more complex as the show progresses, and by the time we get to the emotionally charged “Around the World” and “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” in Act II, Scott reveals a raw lyricism that leaves few unmoved.

Like mother, like daughter, like us:
Ebersole (Little Edie) and Wilson (Big Edie) in Act II

I’ve known Scott since 1986, when he was a rehearsal pianist for Rags, and his success is thrilling to me. Like the women and the movie that inspired it, Grey Gardens is defiantly odd; at times, it was hard to believe that such a strange piece was playing in a commercial theater. But, by golly, there it was, and it was glorious to see that Broadway still could find room for individuality, amid all the mass-produced entertainment machines that clog that fabled artery today. Scott’s got a new show, Happiness, coming in February to Lincoln Center Theater. I can’t wait.

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Horst Tappert

I suspect the murderer drank wine:
Wepper and Tappert in Inspector Derrick

Horst Tappert has died, at the age of 85. Although unfamiliar to most U.S. audiences, who have television detectives of their own to fetishize, Tappert is known the rest of the world over as “Inspector Derrick,” a level-headed sleuth who kept safe the streets of Munich. John Paul II was a fan; so were my in-laws, and so am I.

Derrick is in most ways the antithesis of an American detective series. It relies more heavily on music than on noise: one memorable episode concerned a murderous gigolo who seduced his victims by playing a recording of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer.” If there was ever a chase scene, during the 25 years of the show’s production, I missed it; guns were present but seldom if ever fired, except by bad guys, who inevitably were held accountable. Stephan Derrick is a man of few words, and fewer actions; he pursues the guilty by fleetness of mind but at a measured pace of foot. Like a less talkative version of his contemporary, Peter Falk’s Columbo, Derrick ensnares his prey with shrewd attention to the evidence and an infallible understanding of human psychology.

Derrick’s foil and faithful sidekick, Harry Klein (Fritz Wepper), is younger and more excitable, and he was known on occasion to sleep with a suspect — something that Derrick would never, ever do. The series recognizes that other points of view exist, but it confirms that they are inefficient. Derrick is always right, and Klein is right only when he heeds Derrick. This became awkward as Herr Wepper aged, and was expected to know better, but such is life.

Derrick was a symbol of the New Germany: calm, reasonable, determined, successful. Tappert himself was drafted into the German army and held as a prisoner of war during World War II, but all of that past was forgotten in Derrick’s quest for justice. As the series was produced, Germany might be divided, and beset by the Bader-Meinhoff group and its copycats, but Derrick remained unified, as it were, in his purpose. He never talked of politics, and he was wonderfully accepting of others, so long as they obeyed the law.

He spoke excellent French, when dubbed for the audiences of my adopted homeland, but he needed little translation in the booming European economy, simply because he got the job done. He looks more like the manager of a bank (and Tappert was a bookkeeper by training) than like the hero of a television series, but that is the point. Crime in the real world is more often banal than melodramatic, and it is by banal means that crime will be punished. My advice to politicians in Germany and throughout Europe is to be more Derrick-like whenever possible: shut up, pay attention, and do what’s right. I wish he were Chancellor right now.

For many years, Derrick ran just after the lunchtime news on France 2, and it’s still running in that time slot on France 3. It’s shameful perhaps to admit, but I often watch the news while I’m eating lunch, and I continue to watch while Derrick does battle with the forces of evil. Though I may sometimes nod off after a good meal, I do so in comfort, knowing that Derrick will prevail. That is Horst Tappert’s enduring gift — to all of us.

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Horton Foote

Hallie Foote (the playwright’s daughter), James DeMarse, Devon Abner and Maggie Lacey in Dividing the Estate

On my return to New York next month, I hope to see Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, currently on Broadway. (Such is my luck that, now that I’ve written this, the show probably will post a closing notice.) Mr. Foote’s writing fascinates me. It speaks so eloquently of my own background that it’s a wonder I manage to write anything at all: almost anything I could possibly say about Texas, Mr. Foote has said already, and profoundly. Maybe that’s why I was the rare student who didn’t write about family, when I was in graduate school.

Mr. Foote’s characters resemble my family, both in general attitudes and, sometimes startlingly, in specific traits. My mother had the same impression, and she seized the opportunity a few years ago to ask Mr. Foote whether his family had known hers. Possibly so, Mr. Foote believed; some of the names rang a bell. The distance between Goliad, my mother’s hometown, and Wharton, Mr. Foote’s, isn’t great, yet what strikes me as more important is the proximity between Goliad and Harrison, the name Mr. Foote gives to Wharton in all of his writing. One needn’t drive to get from one town to the other. One needs merely to listen.

Mr. Foote has written a great many plays, and several films, and I can’t claim to know more than a fraction of them. Just keeping up with the newest plays is a busy job. The gentleman is 92 now, but very much active. While in New York in October, I spoke with Roy Harris, the production stage manager for Dividing the Estate, who reported that Mr. Foote, requested to revise a scene, submitted the requested changes the very next day. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that: he’s been playwriting a very long time, and he surely knows what he’s doing.

New York critics tend to compare him to Anton Chekhov, and I understand the comparison. His plays are witty, not comic, and though his characters talk at length, it very often appears on its surface to be piffle. With Mr. Foote as with Chekhov, one has to listen between the lines to hear the truth. Yet the analogy goes only so far. Mr. Foote’s work is more firmly grounded in place than Chekhov’s: very few of Mr. Foote’s plays could be transplanted from 20th-century Harrison, in the way that productions of Chekhov’s plays often are set far from 19th-century Russia.

In some respects, Mr. Foote’s plays are closer to Greek tragedy than to Russian naturalism. Actual dramatic incident is kept offstage; plot developments are more likely to be announced by a messenger than enacted before the audience. And though Mr. Foote has yet to employ a chorus (to my knowledge), his characters do comment at length on a given predicament; they recount old stories and invoke heroes long gone.

A Horton Foote play unfurls gradually, subtly. I’ve encountered critics and “civilian” audience members who find that pace to be tedious; they grow impatient with the characters’ refusal to speak their minds directly. Welcome to the South, folks.

Mr. Foote’s Wharton/Harrison, like my Goliad, is more Southern than Southwestern. It depends on a practiced gentility to hold together the straining social fabric. We have made a habit of not coming to the point, of prettifying our feelings, of obscuring our desires and resentments. This applies to race, obviously, but also to other big subjects, particularly money and sex, and in all of Mr. Foote’s work that I’ve seen, from the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird to The Young Man from Atlanta, at least one of these topics is central.

It was during the production of The Young Man from Atlanta that I got to know Mr. Foote a little — which may help to explain why I refer to him as “Mr. Foote.” He’s a Southern gentleman, and I could no more address him by his first name, or even as “Foote,” than punch him in the nose. I helped to produce a profile on him for CBS Sunday Morning, and I sat in on the interviews conducted by his fellow Whartonian, Dan Rather. (Over the course of their time together, they discovered that they’d been delivered by the same doctor.)

Mr. Foote’s physical resemblance to Clarence the Angel, the character played by Henry Travers in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, is at first startling and then endearing. He may be an angel, or close enough, in his gentleness and wisdom, and I’ll always remember his kindness to me and, above all, to my mother. Their conversation seemed to bring him as much pleasure as it did her. She reminds me that he told her how he learned to write dialogue and to tell stories: by listening to the conversations of his lady relatives.

(Her implication may or may not be that I need to spend more time listening to her. She is a Southern lady, after all, and unlikely to come out and say such a thing directly; I must guess at her meaning.)

Much of Mr. Foote’s concerns a past I don’t know, yet it chimes precisely with the stories I heard from my grandmother and from my Great-Great Aunt Letitia, stories that are repeated now by my mother and her sister, and that may be repeated by my cousins and me, in our turn. One of Mr. Foote’s most memorable characters is Mrs. Carrie Watts, the protagonist of The Trip to Bountiful, a lonely old woman in search of her girlhood home and of a past that, if it ever existed, she can’t find. Because Mr. Foote has written so much and so well, I have a better chance of being nothing like Mrs. Carrie Watts. I can always find my Bountiful in the pages of his plays.

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