Sam Shepard often seemed more of an American myth than a man. His short, surreal prose pieces both unpack and undermine that frontier persona…
“He’s like a Sam Shepard character.”
This, somewhat recursively, is how I first heard Sam Shepard described.
I knew nothing of his work until I heard theatre critic Mel Gussow explain Shepard’s unique career and folk-hero appeal, back in July 2001.
That BBC Radio 4 profile, occasioned by the London revival of A Lie of the Mind, made Shepard sound fascinating and mythic.
He was a renaissance man: a playwright, director, Hollywood star, and rock musician, as well as a writer of poetry, essays, and fiction.
The specifics were equally impressive. Shepard was the only person to have both won a Pulitzer Prize and been nominated for an Oscar. He was married to a movie star, Jessica Lange. He owned a ranch and travelled everywhere by truck, even to opening nights. He wrote the first 25 pages of Simpatico on his steering wheel, while driving to LA on Highway 40.
The profile concluded with a brief, Keroucian reading by Shepard. To cement the drifter aesthetic, the sound engineers mixed in Ry Cooder’s ruminative slide guitar theme from Paris, Texas, and the sound of cars passing on a highway.
I love long-distance driving. The farther the better. I love covering immense stretches in one leap: Memphis to New York City; Gallup to L.A.; Saint Paul to Richmond; Lexington to Baton Rouge; Bismarck to Cody. Leaps like these. Without a partner. Completely alone. Relentless driving. Driving until the body disappears, the legs fall off, the eyes bleed, the hands go numb, the mind shuts down, and then, suddenly, something new begins to appear.
Cruising Paradise, Sam Shepard
I was spellbound. Was this autobiography or fiction? That sliver of vérité writing sparked my curiosity about the rest of his work.
There were a couple of things I had yet to discover about Shepard’s prose. First: that such a fragment often is the work entire. Second: that the line between autobiographical and fictional is usually beside the point.
After all, he’s like a Sam Shepard character.
Striking, vivid shards
Shepard, who died in 2017, saw his greatest success as a dramatist, with theatrical perennials such as the Pulitzer-winning Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983). The vast body of his work is reposed in this dramatic output: more than 40 plays.
His work is a little complicated to access for any reader more interested in prose, especially those hoping to encounter anything long form.
Shepard’s prose is fragmentary and impressionistic
The collections are comparatively few, and fragmentary: some are more like notebooks filled with impressionistic, paragraph-long stories and imagist poems.
The only long-form work he published in his lifetime (The One Inside) was described on publication as “less like a novel than a collection of prose poems, tied together not so much by plot as by theme and mood.”
His early collections seem to reflect a belief (apparent in his earliest plays) that rapid and minimally revised composition yields the strongest work – something like the ‘first thought, best thought’ ethos famously espoused by Allan Ginsberg.
In principle this approach produces some striking and vivid shards of writing, along the lines of the ‘long-distance driving’ fragment from Cruising Paradise. It also generates countless nugatory impressions – page after page of high-plains existentialism.
For the most part, the brevity and nihilism of that work only serves to buttress the romantic image of Shepard as the off-Broadway Marlboro Man, dashing off his best thoughts between truck stops.
However, the strongest moments in his earliest prose collections, Hawk Moon and Motel Chronicles, arise in those rare instances where an idea develops over a few additional pages, to poignant effect.
In one short story, three truants try and fail to bike 100 miles to Los Angeles via a dry aqueduct.
In another, a young man frees a pack of wretched greyhounds from an animal-testing facility and leads them, like a mechanical rabbit, on a wild ride through an immaculate, Stepford-style development.
These are the scenes that stay with you and that demand expansion on the page or on a screen.
In an oblique way, Motel Chronicles birthed just such an adaptation. The collection directly inspired film director Wim Wenders to collaborate with Shepard. Their partnership culminated in the classic 1984 Palm d’Or winner Paris, Texas – a film that leaves both the characters and the audience ample room for deep introspection.
Sad actors and psychotic cowboys
Shepard’s short, flinty prose often seems to validate his mythic persona. Yet he’s equally capable of rendering western masculinity as something absurd and factitious.
A Hollywood actor sees his costume as ‘a deflated version of himself’
In an early sketch in Motel Chronicles, a Hollywood film actor arrives for a day of shooting to discover that his costume looks ‘like a deflated version of himself’. Driving a motorcycle during a climatic scene, the actor loses all faith in his character’s motivation and the authenticity of his own performance.
Searching vainly for religious significance in the movie’s narrative and in his own life, he overtakes the camera car and crashes the motorbike, realising at the moment of impact “there was no more doubt who the character was.”
A morbid little satire from Hawk Moon sees a psychopathic protagonist lay out his favourite cowboy clothes on a hotel room floor, including a Gene Autry shirt, Roy Rodgers bandana and a Lone Ranger mask, so that “they looked like the shape of a man. The Super Cowboy Man.”
This ludicrous moment of empty cosplay prefigures the burning, in a bath, of a corpse: a fully objectified woman, naked but for a patina of dollar bills.
Shepard’s examination of empty Hollywood tropes and absurd pop-cultural props recalls one of his most famous works, True West. Here the American West is romanticised, first as the subject of a hackneyed ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ screenplay and then as a frontier sanctuary, where men might eke out an authentic hardscrabble life. Both ideas are debunked as the story unfolds.
This theme of romance vs reality isn’t spelled out quite as explicitly in Shepard’s short, sharp prose, but acknowledging it feels critical to making a healthy appraisal of him as a cultural figure. Idolising Shepard as the Cowboy Playwright requires that we take the unglamorous truths along with the rugged artistry.
He may have played Chuck Yeager convincingly in The Right Stuff but he hated flying as much as he loved driving. And if his beatnik cowboy lifestyle was authentic, then so was the familial alcoholism.
Driving into purgatory
As the critic Mel Gusso noted in that 2001 profile, some of Shepard’s most enduring theatrical works pivot around sorrowful returns or reunions, which follow significant periods of separation.
It’s a recurring theme that animates one of his strongest prose pieces, Indianapolis (Highway 74), which was included in his 2010 collection, Day out of Days. Author Dave Eggers performed a terrific reading of the piece for The New Yorker following Shepard’s death.
It’s the story of a man in late middle age named Stuart, who has been driving aimlessly across America. In the lobby of a Holiday Inn, he tries and fails to secure a room amid a growing snowstorm, and encounters a former lover, Becky.
She offers to share her room for the night but, like so many of Shepard’s characters, Stuart reacts to emotional uncertainty by striking out for an inhospitable frontier, driving away on Highway 74.
The story is seeded with surreal details
He is soon forced to retreat in the face of the impassable blizzard. Returning, shaken, to accept Becky’s offer, Stuart breaks down at the simple innocence he hears in her voice.
The story is superficially straightforward, but Shepard deftly seeds it with surreal detail. A hotrod convention is taking place in town, in the dead of winter. The hotel lobby TVs are set permanently to a programming block of loud and graphic surveillance footage.
The strongest dissonance is felt in Stuart and Becky’s reunion. They lived together in an apartment during the tumult of 1968, yet initially he neither recognises her face, nor remembers her name, nor recalls the specifics of their shared lives in a New York apartment.
In Stuart’s tortuous acknowledgement of these crucial details, you can feel the inexorable gravitational pull of dream logic: to preserve the integrity of the experience, all new information is accepted and canonised unquestioningly, no matter how strange the implications. Of course you used to live with this red-headed woman that you don’t recognise.
Shepard’s uncanny embellishments could have undermined the story’s power, yet they enhance its themes of redemption and reconnection. The uncanny atmosphere supports the notion that Stuart’s limbo is, if neither real nor the content of a dream, then perhaps celestial.
It’s that rare and precious short story that I’ve revisited on multiple occasions to experience its strange atmosphere of transition, memory and providence.
Crucially, the story could not be told more effectively on stage or screen, or when reduced to an oblique paragraph.
The long road ahead
I have a long distance to cross before I make any significant progress through Shepard’s daunting half-century of output – especially in terms of his theatrical and movie work.
As with so many other authors and artists who were prolific across genre and media, scanning through Shepard’s back catalogue – some of it mainstream, some of it obscure – creates a feeling of excitement and impatience. You feel a readerly hunger to strike out for undiscovered frontiers by way of Amazon and eBay.
But, 20 years on from first encountering his prose, I now feel a little more like Stuart on Highway 74. I wonder if I might be driving in search of something I’ve already found.
