Still Looking

I

I felt a strong sense of apprehension about attending the reading by Elroy Bode which was part of a book tour for his eighth volume, In a Special Light (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2006.).  Bode always struck me as such a virile and energetic figure that I was afraid of seeing him in decline, of destroying the ideal picture I had formed of him.  A while back, I had heard that he was retiring from teaching after forty-eight years in the high school classroom.  Bode seemed middle-aged three decades earlier when I was one of his students, so I was afraid that he had retired due to ill-health or frailty.  It was unthinkable to me that he would ever retire from teaching; he was one of those types who would only leave the classroom carried out feet-first.  I had seen him on a few occasions since graduating from high school, but they, too, were in the distant past.

     As the large, mostly young audience waited for Bode to ascend the podium in the cozy library auditorium, I wondered how many of them even knew who he was, and what he had represented to his students and readers over the years.  (As it turned out, many in the audience were ex-students of his.)  When he was finally introduced by several individuals, one after the other (as seems to be the rule at all college speaking events), and I saw him take his place behind the podium, his classroom stance for all those years, I was shocked at how little he had aged.  His hair was completely white, but his face was the same.  So, too, was his rail-thin body.  There was no hesitation in his movements; he stood straight as a young soldier, and his voice sang out with the same strength and expressiveness that it had possessed when he mesmerized us with it back in my days as a cocky, smart-aleck student at Austin High School.  He had lost none of his power to draw listeners in—that skill that had made him everyone’s favorite teacher.  He had been for us an almost magical figure who made his students members of a select society: the Bode alumnus.  In his classroom, Bode was the consummate performer, the consummate motivator.  His energy was boundless.  It was as if he got up every day in front of five or six classes and performed Hamlet, or an entire symphony, all by himself.  His performances left us breathless and exhausted for his sake, but above all, they impressed us with the belief that we could write—that everyone had something to say.  He fiercely defended every student’s right to write, and write about what was important to that student—I remember that at one point he took me aside and told me to knock it off when my critiques of other student’s writings became coarse and viciously sarcastic.

II

     As I sat there in the audience thirty-two years later, listening to Bode read from a variety of his works, and speak about his life and literary journey (the two major themes of his writing), I found myself a teenager again, half-worshipful of the author who was also my teacher, half desperate to prove that I was worthy of his recognition (I was mentally cataloging my own work and hoping for a chance to offer to send him something I had published over the years that would meet with his approval).  His basic philosophy had changed little since I last spoke with him, although it had been deepened by personal tragedy.  The basis of his writing and outlook on life were still the same.  As Bode himself wrote in the preface to Home Country: An Elroy Bode Reader (El Paso, TX: Texas Western Press, 1997, xiv.), writing, for him, has been an attempt to answer the most fundamental of life’s questions, to get at those messages with which even the most mundane events of existence seem pregnant.

I was stunned by the knowledge that I was alive on the earth and didn’t know what to do about it; it was as though I had been reborn, wide-eyed and vulnerable, into a world of gigantic, hidden meanings.  Others seemed to know, almost serenely, what they ought to be doing; I did not.  I was haunted by memories and almost paralyzed by the awesome shapes of reality.  What was the purpose of my life, I wanted to know—the purpose of anything, for that matter?

     As I walked through the days, as the years passed, I kept trying to find satisfying answers to the questions that plagued me.  I wanted values I could believe in, and I thought if I looked hard enough, long enough, I would find them.   I was on a quest—a private, intense search for truth, for God, for myself—and I was determined to discover, or perhaps create, some kind of order out of the chaos around me.

     Listening to him speak, so many years after he had asked those same questions, and challenged us to ask those same questions, in a high school classroom at the twilight of an America where everyone was asking those questions—almost casually—at parties, on college campuses, in tiny inner-city apartments filled with books and God’s eyes and tie-dyed sheets hanging on the walls, I realized that if Bode had still not found the answers, he was at least still asking the questions.

III

     Elroy Bode has, like so many other great American writers, been pigeon-holed as a regional writer, an unfortunate label that lies most heavily for some reason on Texas writers who write about Texas.  Some years ago, Larry McMurtry chastised Bode and others for what he saw as a deliberate cultivation of their “Texas provincialism” in his now famous (or infamous) essay, “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature” (The Texas Observer, Oct. 23, 1981, 8-9.).  The furor his polemic created has long since died down—although McMurtry has never fully withdrawn what he wrote at the time—but the attitude behind it strikes me as similar to the way in which the claim of provincialism is now being used to justify the under-representation of minorities in literary magazines, MFA programs, and publishing in general.  To my mind, the attitude, perhaps at times unconscious, that certain types of environments are by nature limited, ingrown, unimportant, and most of all unable to contribute anything to a universal understanding of the human experience, is still very much with us.  That is not to say that certain Texas writers (including, on occasion, McMurtry himself) have not generated a stereotyped, “horse opera,” kind of Texas literature (or that certain Chicano writers, for example, especially those associated with academia, have not created a picture of the Mexican-American experience that would have you believe that all Chicanos are low riders or gang-bangers).  The mistake is to believe that, in writing about Texas, one must necessarily fall into stereotypes.  Bode writes about ranch life and small Texas towns, dive bars on the Texas-Mexico border and Friday night football games, but the freshness with which he describes the smallest thing: drinking a Cuba Libre after wandering the hot and dusty streets of Cd. Juarez, Mexico, an old and stunted fig tree that stands, seemly useless, at the edge of a vegetable garden, a ceiling fan in a diner blowing a Dr. Pepper sign attached to the end of a string, is such that no one could ever mistake his words for the work of J. Frank Dobie or Chad Oliver or Elmer Kelton; or any other writer, Texan or not, for that matter.

     Part of the magic of his work comes from the fact that he seems to lack the filter which allows most of us to separate the humdrum from the exceptional in our everyday lives.  In Bode’s work, Walt Whitman’s “The Commonplace” finds an echo.  He makes literature out of irrigation canals, red bricks placed diagonally around front yard flower bed, a kitchen window shining through trees at night, and a million other living pictures that most of us miss as we go about, half-awake, through our everyday lives; but it would also be a mistake to think of Bode as simply the master of the moment, the prose-poet of places and things.  His work does not exclude the human heart in all its complex confusion.  If his writing at times seems like an attempt to realize Whitman’s “Rounded Catalogue Divine Complete,” he also follows the advice of Robinson Jeffers in his poem “Not Man Apart,” where he (Jeffers) sheds for a moment his misanthropic image and reminds us to: “Love that (nature), and not man/Apart from that” (italics added).  Those writings of Bode’s where he displays the full arc of (usually tragic) human emotion, works like “Suzy,” “Anais,” and “Looking for Byron,” pieces filled with the suffering and perversity that play such an enormous role in the fundamental human experience, are the ones that truly haunt me the most. 

     Besides falling prey to the label “provincial,” the majority of Bode’s writing didn’t fit into any widely accepted category of literary form in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, during what was perhaps his most prolific period.  The fact that his work could not be easily categorized by type (i.e. short story, essay, novel), made it hard for him to find markets in magazines, and remained a difficulty for many reviewers as his books began to appear in print.  The award-winning essays that he wrote for The Texas Observer such as “Requiem for a WASP School,” or “The Making of a Legend,” could be categorized as highbrow journalism, and Alone: In the World: Looking (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1973.), a must-read for aspiring writers, is clearly a journal.  The question was: what to make of the rest of his work?  He himself didn’t know what to call it, finally settling on the term “sketches” to describe the tiny, perfect gems that were his natural form, as smooth and innate to him as breathing.  Ironically, there was a long tradition in Europe of that sort of writing. In this country, however, it took longer to recognize the literary genre to which he belonged, and continues to belong, and give it a rightful place both in print and in the critical mind: a style which we today call “creative nonfiction.”  Bode’s work was written in large part before its time.  Were he beginning his writing career today, he would probably be seen as one of the masters of that genre by a much wider audience than the one he now enjoys.

     Although I have not seen Elroy Bode since that reading, I continue to return to his books time and time again, for his clarity, his depth, and his profound thoughtfulness.  Elroy Bode’s world is alive.  The simple things that he loves are also the people, places, and things that I love.  And I love him for his passion, his relentless questioning, and the way that he loved and empowered us, his students.