Splinters and doodles
Francis King
CRUISING PARADISE by Sam Shepard Seeker, £15.99, pp. 242 Afew writers — Chekhov, Pirandello and Maugham at once come to mind have achieved equal distinction in fiction and drama. But on the evidence of this collection of 'tales' (as the dust-jacket terms them), fiction is no more than a sub- sidiary occupation for the brilliant Ameri- can dramatist Sam Shepard, along with his other subsidiary occupations, acting, the directing of films and the playing of rock music.
Shepard has always been obsessed with barren lives in barren places. Out of the emotional desert in which his characters subsist, a geyser of violent feeling suddenly erupts, in most cases not to irrigate their existences but to obliterate them with its scalding force. The most memorable story, a model of terseness and audacity, about such a life is 'The Package Man', in which a cattle hand finds himself sitting at a bar next to a stranger who at once subjects him to a relentlessly rambling monologue. The cattle hand barely responds. The story ends with the sound of a shot from the lavatory of the bar. Unable to communi- cate with anyone and therefore alone in his private hell, the stranger has killed him- self.
There are three or four other stories almost as good as this, among them a daz- zling account of a terminal row between a man and his wife in a South Dakota hotel, and a brief, haunting anecdote about a man who unwittingly fathers a son for a lesbian couple. Most of the other tales, however, read as though they were sharp, glittering splinters from works either still to be completed or abandoned.
One guesses that there is a strong element of autobiography in the first- person accounts of a childhood and adoles- cence spent in the baleful shadow of an alcoholic father, a former wartime pilot, who is given to smashing up whole rooms during his drunken fugues. For Shepard, as for Hemingway and many other American writers, drunkenness is all too often an indication of manliness, even heroism. European writers tend to see it as an indication of social or emotional inadequa- - Fiction and reality all but converge in the vivid accounts, at the end of the volume, of filming in Mexico — where location scenes were shot for Thunderheart, in which Shep- ard gave a memorable performance. The show-business diary, mordantly successful in the hands of someone like Simon Gray, and messily unsuccessful in the hands of someone like Madonna, has become a commonplace in recent years. These Mexi- can pieces might well be worked-up jottings of the same kind.
A page or two long, sometimes no more than an overheard snatch of stage dialogue between two unidentified participants, all too many of these tales give the impression of being the literary equivalent of doodles executed by a highly regarded painter while awaiting his next sitter or his next social engagement. Of course one values Shepard's doodles, just as one would value doodles by Hockney or Freud. But a doodle is not really an adequate substitute for a true work of art.
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