George Sessions Perry: The Man and His Words

By Garna L. Christian

George Sessions Perry: The Man and His Words is the first biography of the Texas novelist, short story writer, and war correspondent in a generation and the first to use his personal letters and files to allow his words to tell the story. The story is an intriguing one, of a talented but troubled man from Rockdale, Texas who won the National Book Award for Hold Autumn in Your Hand and became one of the most widely read writers in the nation before his untimely demise by drowning in 1956. The biography commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of Perrys birth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469100784

Garna L. Christian

Garna L. Christian has written four published articles on George Sessions Perry, one of which won the best article of the year award from the East Texas Historical Association, and two encyclopedia articles. His book, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow, Texas, 1899-1917, won three awards including the T.R. Fehrenbach Award of the Texas Historical Commission. A native Houstonian, whose father was born in Rockdale, Texas, Christian is a professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association.

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Copyright © 2009 by Garna L. Christian.

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Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To Iola Avrett, my Rockdale cousin and confidant.

PREFACE

A visitor to Rockdale, Texas can strike up a conversation with virtually anyone on the street by invoking the name of George Sessions Perry, novelist, journalist, neighbor, and favorite son, born in the Central Texas community on May 5, 1910. By contrast, aside from college classrooms, the winner of the 1941 National Book Award, celebrated war correspondent, and widely read Saturday Evening Post writer will conjure up few memories elsewhere. Although his novels Hold Autumn in Your Hand and Walls Rise Up drew favorable, and sometimes superior, comparisons to the best works of John Steinbeck in the late 1930s and 1940s, his books are largely out of print and his name recognition low as the centennial of his birth approaches.

While a number of theses and dissertations, and occasional articles, analyze his contributions to literature, little exists in the form of a life history. Two brief books, written over a quarter-century ago, an unpublished dissertation, and biographical sketches in reference books make up the bulk of our knowledge of the author’s life. Lacking the ego to write a memoir, Perry has left little beyond morsels of personal information scattered among his professional writings. The stature of the man’s work and character demands more.

The following is the first comprehensive attempt to blend the life and works of George Sessions Perry. The author draws heavily on the virtually untapped resources of the Perry Collection at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. The biography illuminates the heretofore unpublished correspondence and early writings of the subject, utilizing little known autobiographical fiction to complement the limited knowledge of a famous, gregarious, and yet very private person. This unique biographical/autobiographical effort, told in large part in his own words, examines the unexplored areas of Perry’s life, contrasts the public with the private man, and the early writings and aspirations with the later successful writer. It is a courageous but tragic story of a gifted talent who captured the admiration of a vast number of readers while never living up to his rigid standards or sustaining the lifelong fight against depression that ended in his death in an icy Connecticut river in 1956.

INTRODUCTION

George Sessions Perry remained as much a part of his time and place as the small town and country people who fascinated him throughout his life. Witness to two economic depressions within twenty years, George enjoyed a slightly more advantageous financial situation than others, but that did not insulate him from the plight of his fellows. Only his deeply grounded knowledge of the neighboring landscape and familiarity with toilers of that land permitted Perry to describe the lot of sharecroppers so meticulously and compassionately in his most celebrated novel or to denounce the crop lien system in studied essays. The loss of both parents at an early age sensitized the young man to suffering and heightened a sense of inadequacy instilled in him from childhood. Writing brought a sense of direction, but he entered a declining profession in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Unable to establish an identity as a serious author in the shrinking literary market, George found success in escapist magazine fiction. The resulting popularity and monetary security enabled him to produce the classic Hold Autumn in Your Hand even as war clouds gathered. Obsessed with joining World War II, Perry threw himself into the role of war correspondent on the most dangerous western fronts. His proven abilities as a wartime reporter facilitated the transfer to peacetime journalism after the conflagration, though Perry felt unfulfilled in either capacity. The conforming dictates of his employer and his government during the Cold War and Red Scare narrowed George’s field of literary expression, though, paradoxically, his popularity soared and he reached the widest reading audiences of his life. Conversely, Perry’s sharply declining health in the 1950s, reorganization of the Curtis editorship in the face of declining sales, and public embrace of television gravely hindered his continued writing success.

CHAPTER ONE

GUILFORD, Conn., Dec. 14 [1956] (AP)—Heavy rains Tuesday hampered a search for George Sessions Perry, missing magazine writer.

Police Chief Joseph Quinlan said firemen and police tried to drain more water out of the stump-filled pond, partly on the Perry property here, but even though the dam was opened, it’s raining so hard that the water runs in as fast as the water runs out.

The wife of the 46-year-old, six foot, five inch tall writer, who reported him missing Thursday afternoon, said she believed he became lost in the woods while looking for a lost dog.

Quinlan said he had no reason to doubt that explanation. The woods surrounding the Perry property were searched Thursday evening and again Friday.¹

The quietly foreboding and faintly naïve news article heralded a baffling two month’s search for the recipient of the 1941 National Book Award for Hold Autumn in Your Hand, wartime correspondent, and one of the most widely read writers of his time. Largely forgotten by the reading public today and posthumously categorized by some critics as a middle rung regional writer, Perry, in his prime, drew favorable comparisons to John Steinbeck as the voice of the depression’s common man. An exponent of the Southern tradition of Texas literature, in contrast to the Western, Perry held fast to his rural roots, even as his travels and reputation increased. He informed and entertained millions as a steady contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation’s leading magazines, for over a decade, essentially writing his own ticket on subject matter and travel. As unofficial spokesman for his native state, the tall Texan doubtless popularized the jovial image of Texas that he conveyed to thousands of readers.²

Modest, with a ready self-deprecating wit, Perry’s name was linked to leading literary lights of his time, though seldom in more than a professional capacity. With J. Frank Dobie, Texas’ most celebrated folklorist, he hunted and swapped political anecdotes. Novelist John Dos Passos visited him at a flight training base at the beginning of the war; Sinclair Lewis gave him tips on interviewing; Edna Ferber sought his advice on researching Giant; Margaret Mitchell offered to show him her beloved Atlanta, the setting for Gone With the Wind. Jack Conroy, while a struggling publisher, conversed with him on circulation techniques; Henry Nash Smith praised a novel; Katherine Ann Porter eagerly contributed to an anthology; Margo Jones produced his plays. French director Jean Renoir transferred his novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand to the screen as a popular movie, The Southerner, in which William Faulkner contributed to the screenplay. Perry helped script a successful movie, The Arkansas Traveler, for famed comedian Bob Burns. He apparently never met his literary idol, Ernest Hemingway, whose writing, and perhaps, life style, influenced young George. He knew editors and publishers on a first name basis and had open invitations to their social functions.

Nonetheless, Perry maintained a folksy small town persona in his writings and conversations. It was not a ruse; after his writing successes of the late 1930s and 40s, he could have lived anywhere, but kept the family house in his native Rockdale, Texas and bought a farm house for a summer home on the outskirts of Guilford, Connecticut. He remained surprisingly aloof from the literary world, except for his editors and agent of long standing and fellow Texan Dobie. The most accessible of celebrities, George was often seen chatting with passersby in the streets of his hometown. He routinely transformed first acquaintances into life long friends, probably, in the memory of one intimate, never saying an unkind word of anyone. Generous to a fault, he gave money to itinerants during his hard times and visited and regularly corresponded with prisoners in his successful years. He demonstrated sympathy for racial minorities in deeds and words, as a young man protecting a victimized African-American from a white bully. By every account, George and Claire Hodges Perry enjoyed an uncommonly happy marriage, seldom parting except for occupational demands. From outward appearances, George Perry was the master of his universe by his fortieth year.

Yet Perry’s personal letters, unpublished manuscripts, and other early works shelved in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas present an often tortured man, beset by moods of depression and later physical and mental pain that accompanied him to an apparent suicide in December, 1956. According to these largely unpublished sources, George suffered periods of anxiety and fear from early childhood, while appearing a carefree child. The deaths of both parents, the father by lingering illness and the mother by suicide, before he entered his teens, obviously exacerbated these traits. By adolescence Perry felt the need to prove his valor by testing himself at unpleasant or frightful tasks, such as engaging in contact sports against his instincts. He quarreled with his grandmother and uncle and adopted antisocial conduct. Casual observers saw only a student athlete beginning a writing career in the high school and local newspapers and a class favorite of the senior yearbook.

The bleak moods, which Perry shared with such prominent literary figures as Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, ebbed and intruded throughout his life. Public recognition after 1937, following six frustrating years of largely receiving publishers’ rejections, seemed to lift his spirits. Perry became more cordial, adopted a relaxed style of writing and speaking and never again mentioned the demons of his youth. Success provided only a thin veneer of protection, however, as the impending world war initiated an inner struggle between his inherent pacifism and loathing of Fascism. When refused induction in every armed service, due to an injury, he finally succeeded in becoming a war correspondent. Cited for his journalistic reporting and participation in the deadly Allied assault on Anzio, Perry, nevertheless, brooded over his noncombatant role, dismissing himself as a slacker. While maintaining a reassuring persona at the height of his reportorial career after the war, he suffered increasing bouts of desperation. His failure or disinclination to return to novel writing likely weighed on his feelings of guilt. Spinal arthritis, unyielding, devastatingly painful, and untreatable, crushed his spirit and body in his final years.

Now wracked by excruciating pain, dulled by medication and alcohol, and beset by commanding inner voices, Perry, on that bleak winter’s day, hardly seemed a man in search of a dog.

Twenty years or so earlier, a then unknown George Sessions Perry prefaced a never published autobiographical novel, written between 1931 and 1937, with somberness that continually challenged a lively and vigorous personality for control.

Darkness. There is no other beginning. From darkness and fear and combat man’s emergence is slow, for the weight of the old shadow, so long in making, is still in the blood . . . we occasionally sense the dark volume of our heritage from a hundred brigands, and executioners, and overseers of slaves, and naked brutes armed with clubs . . . and a thousand organisms unto the veritable slime itself . . . Is even the morning of a day begun in pure light[?].³

Born at eleven a.m. on May 5, 1910 in an unremarkable central Texas farm county, Perry introduced thousands of readers to his native Rockdale through his published writings. At the peak of his popularity he told a young interviewer that he would rather live in Rockdale than anywhere in the world, even after dividing his time with a small New England town, Guilford, Connecticut. The Northern climate spared his wife, Claire, and him the merciless summers that inspired General Philip Sheridan’s oft-quoted comment that if he owned Hell and Texas he would rent out Texas and live in Hell. It also placed George closer to his Eastern based agents and publishers. Still, it was to the hometown that he never really left, despite an early repugnance and later extensive travel itinerary, that he constantly returned in word and thought. As his friend J. Frank Dobie acclaimed the rugged southwestern environment the crucible of the legendary Texan, so Perry in the last twenty years of his life extolled the virtues of the farm community in southern Milam County as the source of his direction and, indeed, a kind of moral compass for the entire nation. Distant readers became as familiar with the shenanigans of off-centered uncles, aunts, and others of a quirky nature as the Rockdalians who recognized and laughed with the characters. Among these affectionate residents, a drunken uncle routinely reveled every Saturday night in the conviction that his knowledgeable horses would carry him and the buckboard home; an equally ingenious husband forwarded his separated wife’s furniture to her by throwing it in the river and floating it downstream. Perry immortalized both his grandmother and hometown in the same title, My Granny Van, The Running Battle of Rockdale, Texas.⁴

Ironically, Perry’s early unpublished impressions of Rockdale and its inhabitants differed dramatically from his later published works, such as Texas, A World in Itself (1942) and articles in the Saturday Evening Post after 1937. Narrow minded bigots and racists vied with lovable rubes for the heart and mind of the town, alternately fictionalized as Hackberry and Blackjack. In "After Many Days," an unpublished autobiographical novel from the 1930s, located in the archives of the Harry Ransom Research Center in Austin, Texas, he saw the stage for this conflict as a community plainly in decline with scant future prospects.

Once, in the last century, Hackberry was the end of the railroad.Men came from scores of miles to hold commerce with her . . . .

It was not unusual for the two wagon yards to be crowded by those who would stay the night before returning to their inland homes . . .

The railroad has long been extended. Her advantage gone, Hackberry remains, waits, gently reclines . . . Nothing has recently been or is soon to be.⁵

Rockdale, the object of Perry’s conflicting opinions, dated informally to 1873, when a group of settlers migrated to the designated site of the International and Great Northern Railroad’s future railhead. Pioneers George Green, B.F. Ackerman, and Frank Smith sold 400 acres of land to the railroad, which was driving toward Austin and, subsequently, Laredo. By the time the company’s tracks reached the terminus in January, 1874, the new town was blossoming from a tent city to a bustling community. The Galveston Weekly News lauded the town, in the heart of one of the best agricultural districts in Texas, which was destined to become the great shipping point for Texas stock. Town adulation was a staple of local presses in the nineteenth century, but such commentary from the state’s leading newspaper warranted consideration. Supposedly, Mrs. Ackerman derived the town name from a huge rock, variously estimated at ten to twelve feet in height and twenty in diameter, a few miles to the north. In any case, Rockdale seemed to take spirit from the Galveston newspaper’s prophecy. It incorporated in 1878, developed into a shipping and supply point for cotton, wool, vegetables, fruit, grain, and livestock. A lignite coal industry followed the discovery of several mines, and the San Antonio and Aransas Railway connected the City of Rockdale to north and south transportation in 1891. As banks, mercantile businesses, and churches competed with the ubiquitous saloons for elbow room, the population advanced accordingly. The 1880 census listed 1,185 residents, the 1890 count increased to 1,505, and the 1900 tabulation topped out at 2,515. The year of Perry’s birth, 1910, noted a decline to 2,073.⁶

A combination of factors prefaced the town’s economic recession. The railroad terminus moved on, cotton prices and the quality of the soil dwinded, and the Panic of 1893 exacted a local as well as a national toll. Frustrated by low farm prices, increasing debt, and the growing power of industrial interests, Milam County farmers embraced the Farmers Alliance and the People’s Party, although Rockdale itself remained loyal to the Democratic Party. Along with other small town Americans, Rockdalians steadily trekked into nearby cities, such as Houston, Dallas, and Austin, for better paying work. The town’s population remained below the 1900 level in four of the next five censuses and many who lived on the outskirts tilled other people’s land. At the turn of the twentieth century, tenant farmers worked sixty per cent of the county’s farms.⁷

Perry’s forebears were among the restless and optimistic migrants who pushed ever westward. George’s paternal grandfather and grandmother were born in Kentucky, from which they moved to Missouri in the first half of the nineteenth century. There, in 1845, Alvin P. Perry was born. The latter moved to Milam County, Texas, sometime before the 1880 census, which listed him as a 35-year-old farmer. His wife, Ada, of Mississippi origin, was five years his junior. Her parents were originally from Tennessee. Alvin and Ada’s children, Ema and Andrew, were native Texans, eight and six years old in the census year. Subsequently, Andrew married Alabaman Laura Van de Venter, eleven years younger than he. George’s parents were 36 and 25, respectively, when he, an only child, was born in 1910.⁸

George arrived into middle class respectability. A robust child of 9 ¼ pounds at birth, he enjoyed the comforts associated with a businessman father, a socially graceful mother, fawning relatives, and the satisfaction of not having to share affection with siblings. According to his Baby’s Book, his first visitors included a grandmother, four aunts, and an uncle. His maternal grandmother, who would play a large role in his life, recorded his first smile. George’s mother took him on his first outing to his paternal grandmother at five weeks of age and discovered his first tooth at seven months. He had already appeared at the dining table and begun to crawl. He had mastered bye bye at ten months and took his first step at one year. George’s parents enrolled him in Baptist Sunday school, an environment that made him increasingly uncomfortable.⁹

George’s selection of parents seemed exemplary. Andrew Preston Perry stood above the masses of fellow citizens as the holder of several business properties, including one of the town’s two drugstores, which he managed. The prefabricated two story family home, at the corner of Green and Davila streets, reflected the gentility of the neighborhood, dubbed Puddin’ Ridge by envious locals. His success modestly mirrored the popular Horatio Alger stories in that he had left school early to work as a delivery boy and clerk before purchasing a pharmacy, largely on credit. Known for his generosity, he claimed the respect of the community’s leaders, including C.H. Coffield, perhaps the most powerful man in Rockdale, and Dr. I.P. Sessions, from whom George received his middle name. His peers elected him chief of the volunteer fire department, and he involved himself in fraternal organizations. A family friend attested to George’s description of his father as a kind man, also possessing good humor and diligence: A quiet man with a world of humor and dry wit, and never in a hurry . . . but he did not seem to get around so much . . . His duties always kept him tied down . . . Andrew had to stay at the store. Apparently, Andrew briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan, at a time when many small town Americans mistakenly identified the secretive group with patriotism and morality.¹⁰

George described his mother as not just pretty . . . [but] strikingly pretty and . . . charming, who played the piano and sang beautifully. Family and friends agreed on Laura’s charm and talents. The friend recalled her playing a big square piano, by ear, and swaying, singing, surrounded by the very young. She performed Indian songs, rag time, cake walks, and old folk songs long before we ever heard of rhythm, jazz, or boogy woogey . . . . Although not considering Laura what one would call beautiful, she was so friendly and so gay. Everyone was her friend, white and black, rich and poor . . . [and she gave] light and life to an otherwise soddy little country town. Her love of dancing prompted her expulsion, along with a dozen other fun loving members, from the local Baptist church. By all accounts the couple enjoyed their marriage; George certainly never expressed the contrary. Yet, there is a curious unpublished short story, written during Perry’s morose period, in which he depicted a young wife, evidently bored with her older businessman husband, waiting for him to go to work.¹¹

From appearances, the family life of the youngest Perry proceeded in its unremarkable routine through his first decade. By 1912, the later successful Perry wrote in the typical breezy fashion that became his literary trademark, after interminable sieges of colic and a few spasms induced by eating banana skins, the baby began to have a little smudge of personality of its own. The father and son, in particular, shared fond experiences. Since George’s birthday coincided with the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, Andrew annually took the boy into the Hispanic section of town to feast on tamales as part of the celebration. George particularly enjoyed his father’s gift of a pony, which he often rode, shirtless, through the town. He hoped to enter a goat roping contest with his pony, but was forbidden by my father . . . since he felt sure I’d probably break my neck. He apparently had the requisite number of household pets, according to his recollections, and frequently hunted and fished.¹²

After attaining literary success, Perry nostalgically recalled for a newspaper readership an exceptional Christmas, from which a photograph still survives. He described Santa Claus as a best pal in George’s childhood.

In those days I had a hankering to play Indian, and I shan’t ever forget how happy I was one Christmas when, besides the stuff I found in my black, ribbed, cotton stocking, there was an Indian suit, complete with feathered headdress. There was also a cap pistol. I decided then and there to declare myself Chief Rain-in-the Face, though where I’d heard the words I don’t recall.¹³

Then, in his twelfth year, George lost his father to Bright’s disease. Through an autobiographical character, Jim Cowan, in the unpublished Story of Jim, a young and frustrated Perry expressed his conflicting emotions at the wasting away of a heretofore idolized figure. The lingering illness of Jim’s father not only took a toll on the elder, but also on the boy. Jim and his father had loved each other even more than they loved Jim’s mother, and the two enjoyed good times together. However, the man’s stories about knights, and cowboys and Indians had turned to sad stories as his health failed.

Then for the last few weeks his father had had to stay in bed all of the time. He was so sick and so changed that it only made Jim feel bad to see him, and Jim would not know what to say and would sit awkwardly holding his father’s hand and wishing he were out playing . . . [then was] terribly miserable and had wanted to cry and to be away from this terrible half-living thing.¹⁴

A letter from Laura Perry to Dr. Sessions, four months before her husband’s death, validated George’s early fictional account of his father’s deterioration. From the Van de Venter family home in Lafayette, Indiana, Laura wrote Dr. Sessions at Rockdale that Andrew had passed out while getting out of bed and had left with her brother John to visit a specialist in Minneapolis. He told me to write you he wishes he were back with you, she informed the medic on July 3, 1922.

The doctor took him off your medicine. He has failed so much. I will leave immediately for Minneapolis if the doctor there helps him or encourages him even. Otherwise . . . we’ll all go home. He has given up but willing to try. Please write him at Loring Park Sanitarium. Letters are the only thing that will help him.¹⁵

Andrew Preston Perry died on November 28, 1922, at age 47. George’s early literary account, Story of Jim, placed the boy in geography class at school when an aunt delivered the dreaded message. George was happy to leave class until he learned the reason for his departure.

He wondered why he did not cry. He knew he had loved his father more than anybody in the world. But still he could not cry. He did not even want to cry.¹⁶

Jim, the fictionalized George, was beyond consolation. When his grandmother tried to embrace him, he screamed, ‘Keep away from me,’ dry-eyed and hating. Then he remembered riding with his father on the volunteer fire truck and playing ball together in the back yard. And now the tears came in a rush, and Jim’s daddy was really dead now. Not just that awful sick man, but Jim’s daddy.¹⁷

The death of George’s father, followed by his mother’s suicide after a failed second marriage two years later, doubtlessly traumatized him. He apparently brooded over the extended alienation between him and his mother and contempt for a step father thrust upon him. Although an outwardly happy child, a sense of guilt and foreboding lay near the surface through much of Perry’s adulthood, even in happier times. A close friend remarked that his face always seemed sad in repose. Passages in Perry’s unpublished autobiographical novels from the early 1930s, Story of Jim, After Many Days, and Portrait of the Morning, suggest the negative feelings dated to earlier childhood. The lad once burned down a fence out of sheer boredom, not realizing the implications of his whim until the fire brigade, led by his father, noisily arrived at the house. Jim