“All Growed Up” in the True West, or Huck and Tom Meet Sam Shepard

Abstract

S U Z Y C L A R K S O N H O L S T E I N Carroll College “All GrowedUp”in the True West, orHuckandTomMeetSamShepard Cowboys are really interesting to me—these guys, most of them really young, about 16 or 17, who decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with the East Coast, with thatway of life,and took on this immense country, and didn’t have any real rules. —Sam Shepard (qtd. in Chubb 190) Although Huck Finn probably didn’t wear cowboy boots and chaps, Sam Shepard’swords neatly fit Mark Twain’s hero: the boy/man who resists being “sivilized” and who looks toward a natural wilderness to find escape and freedom from rules. Essentially, Huck’strip down the Mississippi symbolizes a yearning for the “West,”even if it aims east and runs aground south. Although Mississippi rafts, “Injun Territory,” and even the “Old West” had disappeared by the time Shepard wrote True West (first performed in 1980), the type of characters who roam the corresponding literary landscape have changed very litde. Indeed, my reading of the brothers Lee and Austin in True West is as contemporary (and slightly grown up) versions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. But Lee, the older brother of Shepard’s play, cannot possibly be Huck grown up, can he? Although like Huck he has avoided all conven­ tional life styles and survives, for the most part, as a loner in the wilderness,1he’sunpleasant and menacing, and he lacks Huck’scharm­ ing naivete. Yet ifwe try to imagine Huck after twenty years of being on his own in twentieth-century America, perhaps Lee’s connection to the young hero begins to come into focus. Although both Lee and Huck repeatedly demonstrate their discomfortwith conventional (and uncon­ ventional) family life, each character also reveals his concomitantyearn­ ing for the stability of home. As critics have noted, Huck at first cannot see past the Grangerford family’s glitter of respectability and comfort into its destructive, murderous core. He almost gushes as he describes 42 WesternAmerican Literature the details of their house: ‘There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing ‘The Last Link is Broken’and play ‘The Batde of Prague’on it. The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside. . . . Nothing couldn’t be better. And warn’t the cooking good, and just bushels of it too” (Twain 141). For a boy who had praised the “lazy and jolly”life of Pap’s cabin (Twain 30), such admiration seems odd. Yetwe see the same phenomenon in Lee, who prides himself on his indepen­ dence and ability to survive on his own but also repeatedly displays a wistful longing for connection, respectability, and even conformity. He appears at his mother’s Southern California house and finds his brother, Austin, working on a screenplay and house-sitting for the absent mother. Lee first makes an early morning “tour”of the neighbor­ hood. (Like Huck, he is a confirmed “borrower,” although Lee’s habit has a much more sinister aura than that of Twain’s young hero.) The drifter then describes his findings to a fearful Austin. Austin: See any houses? (pause) Lee: Couple. Couple a’ real nice ones. One of 'em didn’t even have a dog. . . -Just a sweet kinda’suburban silence. Austin: What kind of a place was it? Lee: Like a paradise. Kinda’ place that sorta’kills ya’ inside. Warm yellow lights. Mexican tile all around. Copper pots hangin’over the stove. Ya’know like they got in the maga­ zines. Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the rooms, talkin’ to each other, (pause) Kinda’ place you wish you sorta’grew up in, ya’ know. Austin: That’s the kind of place you wish you’d grown up in? Lee: Yeah, why not? Austin: I thought you hated that kind of stuff. Lee: Yeah, well you never knew too much aboutme did ya? (Shepard 12) Of course, Austin...