Comanche Midnight is the second terrific collection of Stephen Harrigan’s essays published by
University of Texas Press (paper, $14.95), with topics ranging from the
poisoning
of Treaty Oak and the filming of Lonesome Dove, to the 75th anniversary
of Rocky Mountain National Park and gambling in Monte Carlo. For those of us
who are always letting our subscriptions to Texas Monthly lapse, we can
be grateful for the chance to catch up. But even if you’ve read all these
essays before (you’d have to be crafty because some appeared in places farther
afield like Travel Holiday and Audubon), there’s an ample and
leisurely quality about reading essays gathered together in a book – something
you just can’t get with a flimsy magazine.
I interviewed Stephen Harrigan in his writing cabin behind the two-story
Tarrytown house he shares with his wife, three daughters, two dogs, and two
cats. To call it a cabin makes it sound more rustic and backwoodsy than it is
with white sheet rock walls, a high sloping ceiling, and twin skylights. Not to
mention central air, laptop computer, phone, fax – all the necessary office
tools. But his fascination with Texas history is evident. A phalanx of plastic
horses and their riders stand guard on top of one book case; a Davy Crockett
doll slumps against the books, as if after a particularly exhausting battle;
and back behind an ugly lime green easy chair is a box containing the Alamo, a
small, plastic, build-it-yourself version.
Austin Chronicle: One of the most impressive things about
Comanche Midnightis how the historical research in each essay is so
neatly entwined with the present-day story – especially in essays such as the
title one which pairs an excellent brief history of the Comanche people with
interviews with tribe members on contemporary challenges, and in “Highway One”
in which you attempt to follow the Camino Real, the route Mexicans took north
into Texas and its northern counterpart that led settlers down into the region.
Do you feel a strong connection with the people who were in a place before you
or do you search for that connection?
Stephen Harrigan: I guess the easy answer is both. I think in one
of these essays – the Camino Real piece – I say… (he flips through the
book until he finds the passage and reads:) “It would be impossible to
follow the road now, and no point to it unless you were one of those people who
feel complete only when face to face with the vestiges and traces of a vanished
world they can never know.”
I do feel that there is something that motivates me, in a kind of ghostly way.
A typical journalist is interested in what’s in front of him, what’s happening
in the world right this minute. Every time I go out on a story I find myself
skewed away from that to what was there before. It’s certainly a failing I have
as a journalist – but it’s where my deeper instincts run: to find out what has
vanished. What has never quite arrived. What you can’t quite see. That sense of
mystery is what has always impelled me.
AC: I really loved your essay about Galveston Bay (“The Bay”).
I suppose it’s because I was raised in Oklahoma and then we moved to Houston,
so the first ocean I ever saw was Galveston. You captured the feeling that I’ve
always had about it – that it’s ugly and sad and yet so subtly pretty. And Port
Aransas was a very strong and compelling setting for your first novel
Aransas (1980). What’s your relationship with the Texas coastline?
SH: Very much the same as yours because I’m from Oklahoma, too.
My first experience with the Texas coast was not particularly endearing. I got
stung by a Portuguese Man-o-War and I kept saying I’d been stung by ants but
nobody could find ants anywhere on the beach. We had no idea there were such
things as Portuguese Man-o-Wars!
I think the Texas coast is so scruffy and corrosive, so funky, that it makes a
vivid impression on a young kid. I think it’s a very primeval world, unlike the
Caribbean or the Mediterranean where there’s sparkling, clear water. It’s much
richer in a lot of ways. The most significant factor is that you can’t see
what’s under there, so your imagination runs wild thinking about the creatures
that are inside this huge universe that you can’t know. Maybe that’s what
started me off as a writer, that overpowering sense of mystery and
unknowability.
AC:Scuba diving features largely in your second novel
Jacob’s Well (1984) and your non-fiction book Water and Light: A
Diver’s Journey to a Coral Reef(1992) was about diving. Were you diving
back then?
SH: I took scuba diving lessons and got certified when I was 14
in the pool at the Corpus Christi YMCA. But I didn’t really go diving until
years later. Once I had a fair amount of experience, I felt a need to
communicate the essence of entering a truly alien world. I’ve been diving at
Matagorda Bay when you literally could not see your hand pressed up against
your face mask. It’s kind of – in a strange way – intoxicating. It’s like being
in a storm.
AC:Your essay about the Battle at San Jacinto was much more
evocative of the battle than actually going to the place ever has been for me.
When did your interest in Texas history take root?
SH: I’m 46. The world is filled with 46-year-old males who at a
very impressionable age saw the Walt Disney movie Davy Crockett.
AC:I’m married to one! My husband still has his little
coonskin cap saved away somewhere in a closet. (laughter)
SH: I think the fascination that a lot of people my age have with
the Alamo in Texas begins with that movie because we were watching it at the
age of five or six and it was the first time we’d ever seen the hero die in a
movie – but he didn’t quite die. The last image in the movie is of him swinging
his rifle at all these Mexican soldiers who are charging him at the Alamo and
then the Davy Crockett theme song starts playing.
So, I think there was inculcated within all of us who saw that movie both a
fear and a hope: a fear that death could visit us and take away those we loved,
and a hope that death was not exactly a final thing.
What’s fascinating is that there’s this huge to-do right now over whether Davy
Crockett died fighting at the Alamo or was executed after surrendering. It’s a
tremendous academic tussle that has a lot to do with the need to believe in the
childhood hero that Walt Disney presented.
AC: Another essay in Comanche Midnightthat caught my
eye was the one called “The Tiger Is God,” about a Houston zoo keeper who was
killed by a tiger. What struck me was that though the piece was a pretty
voyeuristic account of the accident, it ended with a compelling and poetic
paragraph about an 18th-century Indian leader whose symbol was the tiger and
whose motto was “The Tiger is God.” That theme of negotiating space and power
with animals is quite prominent in your body of work – tell me about it.
SH: I think it’s a huge thing in my imaginative life – I don’t
know why. A lot of my thoughts about animals have come from reading and
observing, but basically I think that very early on I just lost patience with
the idea that humans are the highest pinnacle of creation, that we’re worth
more when somebody dies than a June bug is. We’re worth more in our own eyes
and that’s absolutely valid for us, but in a cosmic sense it’s a worthless
notion. I feel like a fictional world is not complete unless a writer takes
stock of all those other forms of awareness out there and acknowledges them
somehow.
In both of my novels the characters were incomplete and were searching for
completeness. In Aransas that quest was represented by the dolphins. In
Jacob’s Well animals don’t figure into it so much, but geology does. The
earth is a kind of being that’s waiting to be discovered, its interior life is
waiting to be deciphered.
AC:Since your second novel came out in 1984, besides writing
articles for Texas Monthlyand other magazines, you’ve been pretty
involved with screen writing. What sort of writing do you enjoy the most?
SH: I would rather write novels than anything else. Of the things
I can write – screenplays, magazine articles, non-fiction books, and novels –
novels pay the least. But that’s what I want to do more than anything.
AC: I had a vague memory that you were the Austin writer who
wrote the O.J. StoryTV movie. When I rediscovered it, in light of your
essays, your novels, I was very surprised. Tell me about that project, how it
came into your life, how you accomplished it, how you feel about it.
SH: I had written an HBO movie called The Last of His
Tribe and one of the producers, Robert Lovenheim, is a highly regarded,
first-rate television producer. During the famous Bronco chase, Fox TV called
him and said “We’d like to make a movie about O.J. Simpson and have it on the
air in two months.” And he said, “Sure.” He called me and I was sort of amazed.
I mean, I had just written a book about fish! I didn’t know anything
about football. I said “no” for reasons of practicality – they wanted a script
in three weeks and I didn’t think I could do that.
But from the minute I said no, I became the only person they wanted. They kept
calling and I kept thinking about it. I had another movie, another deal about
to close, so it wasn’t really a question of money – I got about the same amount
I would have gotten for the other one. But there was something about the O.J.
project that really interested me. It was a nervy thing to do, risky in a
logistical way and in a legal way, and in an ethical way. Though you could take
those as negatives, I looked at them as real interesting challenges. Also, I’ve
been a journalist for 20 years and here’s the biggest story in the country, and
they say “Would you like to be in the middle of it?” And it seemed perverse to
not want to be in the middle of it, frankly.
I knew that this movie, the concept of it, would be subjected to a huge degree
of criticism, but I wanted to examine my own conscience and make up my own mind
about it. I believe in drama, in story-telling. I don’t think it’s an inferior
or unseemly form of expression. And here was an opportunity, in an absurdly
short period of time, to take these events that were happening right in front
of our eyes and put them into this instant context and fill it with some degree
of artistic and moral integrity.
My goal was to surprise people with it. It’s not a perfect movie – it was made
in two months! But I’m not in the least ashamed of it and would do it again in
a minute… And I do I think it’s one of the most restrained pieces of
programming on the O.J. Simpson case there’s been! (laughter)
AC: What are you working on now?
SH: I just finished a movie for the Disney Channel, a true story
about a Vietnamese girl who lost her family during the evacuation of South
Vietnam in 1975 and found them 17 years later. And I wrote a script for a movie
about Rin-Tin-Tin which may finally develop into something. But I’m trying to
concentrate on the novel as much as I can.
AC: That’s what I wanted to hear about next … How long
have you been working on it?
SH: Five years. Most of that time has been research, working
around other projects. It’s a historical novel about the Alamo, a huge
panoramic novel. The main character is a botanist working for Santa Anna; other
characters are Mexican soldiers, slaves, Tejanos…With a historical novel you
have to know what clothes they were wearing, what turns of phrase they used.
What the political situation in the Coahuila y Tejas state government
was in the spring of 1835, what kind of money they used, how to fire a musket.
It never ends. Stuff you know right off the top of your head when you’re
writing contemporary novels takes years to research.
AC: Most of your work has had a contemporary setting. What
drew you back to the Alamo?
SH: I’ve wanted to write a novel about the Alamo since I was a
teenager. We went on family trips to San Antonio all the time. You know, Texas
doesn’t have old buildings. The Alamo looked ancient. It’s a remarkable
building and it had this tremendous power to me. And then you know what
happened there; that a terrible human tragedy took place. It’s a haunted house.
It’s one of the great ghost stories of American history.
AC: I can’t wait to hear you tell it! n
Stephen Harrigan expects his novel about the Alamo to be published in
two years.
This article appears in August 25 • 1995 and August 25 • 1995 (Cover).