Proud Flesh (36 page)

He could no longer be reasoned with. Lester had tried again as they were starting in on this street. “Ballard?” he had said. “Bubba? Buddybud? Listen to me, Ballard. Ballard? Ballard, you're not listening. I'm talking to you, Ballard, listen to me. You hear? Ballard? Listen. Listen, Bubba. We can't go on like this, hear? Ah-choo! This is crazy. You hear me, Ballard? Can't go—ah-choo! Crazy. You know how long we've been doing this? You know what day it is? And we're not even up to where they start numbering them. And there are two hundred and fifty numbered ones. And they get wider all the time. This island gets wider all the way up. And there's two hundred and fifty numbered streets after the ones with names to them give out. And after Manhattan there's the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten—Ballard! Ballard, you're not even listening.”

“I heard every word you said. You through now?”

“No, I'm not through! Listen, Ballard, you know I love Ma every bit as much as you do, and I'm just as anxious as you are to—”

“Nobody's asking you to stay. Go if you want to. I can get along without you. Go. But not me. (cough) I'm staying. See? (cough) Son of a bitch if this goddamned town is going to make a monkey out of me.”

A Biography of William Humphrey

William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book
Home from the Hill
, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.

Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey's parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.

As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys' already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.

In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir
Farther Off From Heaven
(1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father's death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.

Humphrey exceled in school and was able to attend an art academy in Dallas on a scholarship. At the onset of the Second World War, Humphrey attempted to join the navy but was rejected for being color blind. Having seriously considered being an artist up to this point, Humphrey decided to focus on his writing instead. He attended the University of Texas and the Southern Methodist University for short spells during the early 1940s but did not graduate from either college. In 1944 he left SMU in his final semester and headed briefly to Chicago and then went on to live in New York City's Greenwich Village.

In 1949 Humphrey published his first short story, “The Hardys,” in the
Sewanee Review.
He was so excited to receive the letter of acceptance that he tripped and fell as he was running up the steps to his house to share the news with his wife, the painter Dorothy Cantine, and broke his ankle. On the strength of that story, Humphrey was hired to teach creative writing and English literature at Bard College. Starting around this time, renowned writer Katherine Anne Porter, Humphrey's contemporary and a fellow Texan, became a close friend and a firm supporter of his work, and remained so for many years.

The 1950s were a period of prosperity for Humphrey, who continued to publish stories in magazines like the
New Yorker
and
Harper's Bazaar.
These works drew on Humphrey's childhood in the Texan scrub, and many were collected in
The Last Husband and Other Stories
(1953). During this early stage of his career, Humphrey also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Theodore Weiss and mentored playwright and author Sherman Yellen.

In 1957 Humphrey's debut novel,
Home from the Hill
, rocketed him into modern conversation and defined him as an author. Previously regarded as a Western writer due to his Texan roots and their resonance in his work, Humphrey now became firmly grounded in the Southern literary tradition. Comparisons to Faulkner were constant throughout his life and long after his death.

Home from the Hill
was an instant success and was made into a motion picture in 1960 starring Robert Mitchum.
Variety
reported that the film rights sold to MGM for $750,000, to which Humphrey humorously responded, “Unfortunately, they had one zero too many.” Still, it was enough money for Humphrey and his wife to travel extensively in Europe, moving to England in 1958 and later to Italy. Humphrey also used this time to focus on one of his greatest passions: fly-fishing.

In 1963 Humphrey returned to the United States and over the next few years partially returned to the world of academia, taking up short-term positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Smith College, and Washington and Lee University. But he continued to publish short stories and essays in major magazines such as
Esquire
,
Sports Illustrated
, and the
Atlantic Monthly
and in 1964 was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story for his work “The Ballad of Jesse Neighbors.” In 1965 Humphrey bought an apple farm in Hudson, New York. Though he would travel extensively in the coming years, the apple farm was to be his home for the rest of his life.

During the same year, Humphrey published his second novel,
The Ordways
, which received extremely strong critical reviews and was compared to the writings of Mark Twain. A second collection of short stories,
A Time and a Place
, was published in 1968, and two essays
, The Spawning Run
and
My Moby Dick
, which first appeared in
Esquire
and
Sports Illustrated
, respectively, were eventually expanded and published as short books.

Over the next few years, Humphrey continued to publish with discipline, writing books that incorporated his signature microcosmically expressed theme of family values. These included
Proud Flesh
(1973),
Hostages to Fortune
(1984),
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey
(1985), and
Open Season
(1986). His last novel,
No Resting Place
(1989), was based on the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears and was heralded by the
Los Angeles Times
as “a novel every American should be required to read.”

Humphrey's final collection of short stories,
September Song
(1992), conveyed his mounting sense of frustration at his declining health. By his seventieth birthday, Humphrey had undergone treatment for skin cancer and was hard of hearing. Diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, he died on August 20, 1997, at his home in Hudson. He was seventy-three years old.

William Humphrey in the 1960s, shortly after returning to the United States.

The author in Alsace, France. The image was taken in 1965, the year
The Ordways
was published. Two years prior, the manuscript almost disappeared when Humphrey accidentally left it aboard an express train from Rome to Milan. He added a prefatory note in the published edition thanking “Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Terminal in Rome” for his efforts in recovering the manuscript.

By the 1970s Humphrey was well established within contemporary literature.

William and Dorothy Humphrey in August 1995 in Hudson, New York.

The author and his wife loved roaming through local thrift stores and modeling their finds.