Biography
William Humphrey was very secretive about his life, saying once that he considered it bragging to fill out forms sent by Who’s Who and other dictionaries of biography. Therefore, the entries about Humphrey in such publications are limited to the kind of material found on dust jackets. In later years, he was slightly more forthcoming in interviews and published a memoir that covers the first thirteen years of his life, the years he spent in his native Clarksville, Texas.
From notes, hints, and “slips” by the author, it is possible to reconstruct some parts of his life. He was the son of working-class parents (his father was an auto mechanic), and he suffered an affliction as a child that required braces for his legs. He and his mother left Clarksville, never to return, after his father was killed in a car wreck in 1937. Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas, Texas. He attended Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin, apparently never receiving a degree.
He mentioned in an interview published in 1988 that he left Texas in 1943 during his last semester of college. He decided to leave while sitting in the middle of a German class, so he stood up and walked out, telling the professor that he was headed for Chicago. Where he went is not clear, but for most of the rest of his life he lived in the state of New York, residing in the city of Hudson beginning in the early ‘1960s. Humphrey, apparently without benefit of a degree, lectured at several colleges, but for most of his life he supported himself, his wife Dorothy, and his daughter Antonia by his writing.
Humphrey told interviewer Ashby Bland Crowder that he studied art between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Then he found, when he tried to join the US Navy during World War II, that he was color-blind. He gave up art and turned to writing, going to New York with a five-act play about Benjamin Franklin. The play was never produced, and Humphrey turned to the writing of fiction. The short-story writer he most admired was fellow Texan Katherine Anne Porter. She wrote her nephew, after reading two of Humphrey’s stories in Accent, that the young writer had taken two of her stories, “The Cracked Looking-Glass” and “A Day’s Work,” and turned them into his own. The Humphrey stories, “In Sickness and in Health” and “Man with a Family,” do indeed bear remarkable resemblances to Porter’s stories.
Later, in a letter cited in Joan Givner’s Katherine Ann Porter: A Life (1982), Humphrey admitted to Porter that he had stolen his first published story from “A Day’s Work” and that he always wrote with her stories open to the paragraphs that he most admired. There is no question that Humphrey’s stories owe a great debt to Porter’s works, especially in their irony and emphasis on place.
Humphrey, whose interest in hunting and fishing can be traced to his father, devoted much of his writing in later years to nonfiction stories about outdoor sports, though his interest in the out-of-doors did not produce a large body of work. The same can be said of his fictional output. In more than forty years, he produced five novels and more than twenty stories.
Humphrey’s best work is about Red River County, Texas, but after 1977, the year he published his memoir Farther Off from Heaven, about his childhood there, he wrote a number of novels about life in other places. Hostages to Fortune is set in Hudson, New York, and describes the effects of a young person’s suicide on his parents; No Resting Place is about the Cherokees being uprooted from the South and marched to Texas along the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830s.
In April 1997, Humphrey was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. Despite his illness, Humphrey continued to write almost until the end. He died on August 20, 1997, at the age of seventy-three.
Analysis
Novelist William Humphrey began his literary career in the late ‘1940s as a short-story writer, contributing to several the United States’ better magazines—the New Yorker, Accent, Esquire, and The Atlantic—and publishing a collection of stories before his first novel appeared. His stories have attracted favorable critical comment, but most commentators rate his novels above his stories. Of his novels, the best known are Home from the Hill (1958) and The Ordways (1965); he also wrote Proud Flesh (1973), Hostages to Fortune (1984), and No Resting Place (1989).
Many critics think Humphrey’s best piece of writing is Farther Off from Heaven (1977), a memoir of the first thirteen years of his life. In addition to his fiction, Humphrey authored several hunting and fishing stories first published in magazines and later reprinted as small books: The Spawning Run (1970), My Moby Dick (1978), and Open Season: Sporting Adventures (1986).
Most of William Humphrey’s stories are set in and around his native Red River County, Texas, which is located in the far northeastern corner of the state. The county borders the state of Oklahoma, and many of the stories take place across the Red River in “the Little Dixie” section of Oklahoma. Northeastern Texas and southeastern Oklahoma were settled by southerners who came west before and after the Civil War, Native American driven west when the South was being cleared of Indigenous people during the rapid expansion of the 1820s and 1830s, and slaves—later freed—brought in by both whites and Native Americans.
Humphrey’s ancestors came into his part of Texas following the Civil War, and it is this part of the world that Humphrey always understood best, even though he left Clarksville for good in 1937. His best stories and novels are about the people and places he knew when he was a boy growing up in Clarksville. His first book of stories, The Last Husband, and Other Stories, shows clearly how much Humphrey is dependent on his homeland for the success of his work.
The six best stories in the volume are Texas-based. Five take place in and around Clarksville, and one is about a transplanted Texan isolated in a northern city and longing for home. The four stories set in the East, where Humphrey lived during his writing apprenticeship, lack the life found in his Clarksville stories. It is not that the themes are deficient or that the style suffers in his eastern stories. There are excellent scenes, and some of the characters are as well developed as those in his regional works. Something is missing, however, and it is very clear that it is a sense of time and place that Humphrey must have to tell his stories and develop his points. He understands the people of Red River County and can make them speak a language that is real. When he shifts to New York, his “other” setting, place becomes unreal for him. The sense of kinship with the people who speak his language and share his customs disappears. The stories and novels suffer. Even his later works—produced after a lifetime as a fiction writer—lack the immediacy of his earlier works, his works about Clarksville.
The non-Texas stories, written while he was still in his Katherine Anne Porter phase, are technically correct and usually well written. They are typical of the pieces published in highbrow magazines in the years immediately following World War II. The people are modern and sophisticated, and their lives in the suburbs are as hollow as up-to-date social critics and old-fashioned moralists would like one to believe they are. Furthermore, following the modern mode of fiction, the stories are ironic and ultimately depressing.
The book’s title story is about a man named Edward Gavin who has a series of mistresses in a desperate attempt to get his wife, an unsuccessful artist with a successful sister, to pay attention to him and live the kind of life that married people are traditionally supposed to live. Edward, whom the reader knows only through a narrator, loses his battle with his wife of two decades, proving that his infidelities netted him nothing. His wife’s winning gets her nothing either. They are as dead as people in a wasteland always are.
“The Last Husband” is not a bad story until one begins to compare it to Humphrey’s best regional work. His early story “The Hardys” makes a nice contrast to “The Last Husband.” The Hardys are an old couple closing their home to move in with their children. Mr. Hardy was widowed before he met his present wife, and Mrs. Hardy has spent years being jealous. The reader learns, in this story, told first from one point of view, and then from another, that Mr. Hardy has long since forgotten his first wife and that Mrs. Hardy has no need to be jealous. (Interestingly, Edward Gavin summarizes “The Hardys” for the narrator when the two are riding the train home from Grand Central Station one night.) “The Hardys” is filled with the homey regional details and carefully rendered speech that make for excellent fiction.
“Quail for Mr. Forester” is a typical Humphrey story in that the reader sees the changing ways of the South through the eyes of a young boy—a method Humphrey uses again and again. Mr. Forester’s family once made up the local aristocracy, but in recent years the Foresters have come down in the world. The narrator’s father, a top-notch hunter, kills some excellent quail and invites Mr. Forester to dine. The dinner conversation is all about the decline of the Old South, which, ironically, is felt much more keenly by the narrator’s family of working-class people than by Mr. Forester. At the end of an evening talking about the glory days before the Civil War, the boy, still awed, muses, “I felt that there was no hope for me in these mean times I had been born into.”
The mean times of the North also trouble the southern woman in “A Fresh Snow.” She married a man from outside her region and is now sitting sadly in her room watching the flakes fall and thinking how far she is from home and how different the customs are. When her young son comes home and speaks in the harsh dialect of the industrial East, “she sat him on her lap and rocked him softly, his head against her breast, while she told him all about the South, where he was born.”
The stories in William Humphrey’s second volume A Time and a Place are all set in Depression-era Texas and Oklahoma. Heavily ironic, as most of his stories are, these narratives depict the harshness of life during the years of the Dust Bowl, the oil strikes, and the closing years of the Old South in Texas and Oklahoma, a world eradicated by World War II. There are several good stories among the ten in this volume.
One of the best and most often discussed is “A Voice from the Woods,” which flashes back from the undefined present to the time when the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd were heroes to the poor people of Texas and Oklahoma. The narrator, who grew up in Clarksville, lives in the East. His mother is visiting him and his eastern wife, and as they sit drinking beer, they hear the cooing of a mourning dove. The sound recalls to the mother the time that a man she once loved and considered marrying robbed the bank in Clarksville and was killed in a gunfight on the street. She and the son, a very small boy at the time, witnessed the death of the robber. She sits thinking how different her life might have been had she married Travis Winfield, who died in the arms of his latest love, a redheaded woman. The mother recalls how she had a good life with a good husband, but she says, “And yet, thinking of that red-headed woman...I felt, well, I don’t know what else to call it if not jealousy.” There is a certain sentimentality to the story, but Humphrey evokes the time and the place and the attitude of the people as well as anyone writing about Texas in the 1930s ever has.
An equally effective story at evoking the era is “Mouth of Brass,” about a brief friendship between a small boy and a black tamale vendor. The vendor travels all over town during the week, but on Saturdays he sets up his tamale boxes in the town square, where “the population doubled—in ginning season tripled—as country folks poured in....” One Saturday, Finus, the vendor, sells a dozen tamales to a little boy who is buying them for his family waiting just off the square. When the boy wolfs down five of the tamales on the way back to the family, the father thinks Finus took advantage of the child’s age to cheat him, becomes enraged, and confronts the vendor. One thing leads to another, and the man knifes Finus. Naturally, in the Deep South of the 1930s, it is determined that the white man was provoked, and he is let off on self-defense. The little boy, who was once allowed to make his rounds with Finus, experiences an epiphany about race relations and will never be the same.
These stories and many others in Humphrey’s collections paint vivid pictures of the South as it was when Humphrey was a boy and was learning about the injustices of life. His works are filled with the ironies to be encountered in a merciless universe devoid of justice and quick to plunge human beings into misery. His stories are often bleak and hopeless: Men are forced into crime by circumstances and then are punished unmercifully; the underclass is beaten down by the rich; children are jerked suddenly into adulthood by death and destruction. Bad as it is, however, there is a richness to the life found in northeast Texas. Traditions and stories and customs are passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Moments of unsurpassed joy balance—at least partially—the violence and cruelty found there and are well described in the writings of William Humphrey.
September Song’s collection of twenty stories was also Humphrey’s final published book, appearing in 1992, five years before he died. These stories revolve around themes of aging, from the frustrations of dealing with one’s declining physical capacities to the need to attach meaning and purpose to one’s life. Their quality is uneven but included here is some of Humphrey’s best writing.
Not surprisingly, the stories assume a somber, sad tone, yet they are also full of humor. In “The Dead Languages,” for example, hearing loss is both amusing—as the protagonist, a retired reporter, confuses words, such as “cows” with “clouds”—and poignantly tragic in the accuracy and detail with which both the physical loss and other people’s reactions to the reporter are described. In the opening story, “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man” (allusion to the novel by James Joyce, who enjoys other allusions in Humphrey’s work), an aging Texas-born writer fabricates wild stories about his life during an interview with the young journalist who has been asked to prepare the writer’s obituary.
Human beings’ ultimate lack of control over the outcome of life, despite best-laid plans, is a recurring theme, perhaps best developed in the longest story of the collection, “The Apple of Discord.” Here, an apple farmer hopes to be able to pass his land to one of three daughters but instead is compelled to sell the land to a developer. The farmer then attempts to give the money to his daughters and follows that with a suicide attempt to spite his girls. One daughter, however, upsets his plan.
The title story is one of Humphrey’s best, featuring a seventy-six-year-old protagonist who decides to divorce her husband and reunite with a former lover. The very decline in her husband that has partially prompted the decision is what forces her, in the end, to stay, as she realizes that “he could not look after himself.”
Molly Giles, reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times and observing that some of the male characters could easily be “the same boys in Mr. Humphrey’s Texas novels, grown up,” noted that their older counterparts serve to remind readers that “there isn’t such a long long time between May and September.” Jonathan Yardley, in a review of the collection appearing in the Washington Post, summed up not only September Song but also Humphrey’s work in general when he described the stories as “interesting and admirable” achievements in serious fiction rather than commercial success and “fashionable glitz.”