FOR MUCH OF my adult life I’ve been tempted, sporadically, to visit fortune-tellers, just to get their opinion on my prospects, as it were. My favorite of these seers and far-seers was a French woman in Tucson who kept a rather ill-tempered old goose by her side as she worked.
Over the years I’ve been to probably fifty fortune-tellers, in many cities and several countries. Their opinions about my romantic prospects were mixed, but about my economic prospects their opinions never varied: you’ll never be rich and you’ll never be poor, they always insisted—they being card readers, hand readers, seers who went into trances, clairvoyants and hypnotists.
So unvarying was this assurance that I’d never be either rich or poor that I took the fortune-tellers at their word and mostly give little thought to money. I have, at times, made a lot of it, though never enough to allow my money to support me. It never has and it ain’t gonna, but I’ve always hung on to just enough to validate the judgment of the many seers I have listened to.
Money has played a fairly minor part in my career decisions, a fact I attribute to one particular piece of luck: my novels attract good filmmakers, and they have from the first. Nearly a dozen of my books have been filmed, four of them very successfully: Hud, The Last Picture show, Terms of Endearment , and Lonesome Dove .
The success of these films, whether or not I took any part in their production, has enabled to me to get work as a screenwriter—and get it consistently for over fifty years.
Screenwriting, not novel writing, has funded my rare bookshop and, to a large extent, my so far comfortable life.
My transfer, in January of 1955, from Rice Institute to North Texas State Teachers College (as they were then) could not easily have been less auspicious. The weather in North Texas, where I was heading, had been warm and drizzly, but then the temperature took a forty degree plunge, turning the road to Dallas into a sheet of ice. Such storms are not uncommon in North Texas, and the closer one is to Amarillo the worse they get. On this trip I slid off the road twice, but managed to slip and slide back on.
When I reached Dallas I was navigating through a two-inch ice-free hole on my windshield. There was then no arching confluence of freeways to guide me through Dallas—in fact there was nothing to guide me anywhere. By some miracle, while right downtown, I managed to spot the Hotel Adolphus, where I took a room for the night. The Adolphus—where, later, I would make a speech or two—was the most elegant hotel I had ever stayed in, although the famous Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, where my rich Panhandle uncles wintered, ran a close second.
In the morning I slipped and slid into Denton, quickly found a room, and took myself off to the registrar, where the first thing I did was register for a creative writing course taught by a professor named James Brown. North Texas State was, at the time, a big messy school, with a student body drawn from the suburbs of Fort Worth, Dallas, and Oklahoma City. Lots of veterans were about, finishing their education on the GI Bill. There was a flourishing jazz school there, and the faculty was filled with smart young professors from the great Midwestern universities.
In this case there was no “upperclassmen only” policy. Jim Brown, who became a friend, let in such students as wanted in; a good many did but the room where Jim taught was never full.
Most American creative writing programs in that time proceeded from an obviously mistaken theory, the theory being that it is easier to write something short than to write something long. The exact opposite is true: the lyric poem remains the most difficult form, with the short story next; the novel is, for most writers, the least difficult form.
I’m sure Jim Brown knew this, but the class only ran one semester and very few novels are likely to be written between January and May—although I have written four in less time than that.
So we wrote short stories, a form I never came close to mastering. I couldn’t write them and I seldom read them. The only short story I could claim to have read at the time was Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Such masters as Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, or distant giants such as Chekhov, Flaubert, Maupassant, and D. H. Lawrence, were as yet completely beyond my ken.
Despite this dreadful lack of background I nonetheless produced sixty-three short stories during my two and a half years in Denton. All were dreadful and all were destroyed the week before I graduated in 1958.
I did later publish, in the Texas Quarterly , a half-decent short story called “There Will Be Peace in Korea,” a title I stole from the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The story was in fact a kind of précis of The Last Picture Show. The actor Tommy Lee Jones has done a reading of it that is very fine; it makes the story seem better than it is.
Jim Brown, like all creative writing teachers, read and listened to a vast amount of bad student writing, a fact that didn’t seem to disturb him—it surely came with the territory. The only comment I can recall him making on something I turned in was to mildly chide me for an inaccuracy—I had used the phrase “soft white hands of a dentist.” Jim pointed out that while most dentists’ hands were white, few were soft, their main function, after all, being to yank or wrench resistant teeth out of their sockets.
Other than Jim Brown three other professors at North Texas attempted to awaken me in their various ways. One, the philosopher and film theorist Bill Linden, is still alive and still a friend. Bill guided me through the giddy heights of Hegel, and seemed to be the only person around who knew something about Existentalism. Eventually he glided back into the University of Illinois system, his perch being at Edwardsville.
Such American literature as I was taught arrived via the flamboyant personage of Martin Shockley, a Coloradan who insisted on keeping the classroom windows open no matter what the weather.
A somber professor named Ballard taught us what most of us were to know about the continental novel; we read Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and maybe Gogol. I think I even read a few easy pieces—Daudet, perhaps—in my stumbling French, which still stumbles in about the same degree. I would never try to employ it in conversation, or on a hard text such as Proust.
During my stay at North Texas three poets came to visit: Paul Engle, May Sarton, and the poet-publisher Jonathan Williams, who created and ran the wonderful Jargon Press. As a bookseller I handled many Jargon books, all of which appealed to me more than the Kelmscott Chaucer . (Engle and Williams I’m sure about—I may have hallucinated May Sarton, who may not have been there at all.)
From this period, precisely, I date my entrance into the scrappy, variegated world of letters. None of these poet-visitors were then very famous—if they had been famous they probably would not have been visiting this scruffy little teacher’s college. But they were writers. Engle, at the time I believe, ran the famous writing program at the University of Iowa; Sarton eventually enjoyed a substantial readership; and Jonathan Williams’s Jargon was one of the two or three best small presses of our time.
To a beginning writer such as myself even the slightest literary ferment was good. Professors, book editors, reviewers, journalists, book salesmen, fellow beginners, authors of first books, girl (and boy) friends and mistresses of all the above, drew me in and made me believe that this was a game I could have a part in; at the very least I could teach.
It was Jim Brown’s creative writing class that led me into this diverse world, and I was lucky to study under him just when I did, because I think he was teaching that class for the last, or maybe next to last time.
While I’m at it, I should emphasize that my path to authorship was a long, stutter-step affair. Nothing about it was predetermined—I had no vision on the Damascus road. I hoped to be a writer, but it was not until I had published my fifth book, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers , that I became convinced that I was a writer and would remain one. The year before that book came out I taught my last class at Rice, where I was awarded a tenure I never really used. Marcia Carter and I had just opened our rare bookshop in Washington, D.C., and the academic life dropped behind me, forever as it turned out.