In Memoir, a Playwright Finds His Voice

In 1999, Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter, published his gentle “Farewell: A Memoir of a Texas Childhood,” the tale of his youth in the South Texas town of Wharton, where he lived with his parents, grandparents and many uncles, aunts and cousins of several generations.

In that book, Foote described the fertile ground he tilled over the next decades to produce his plays, 60 of them, such as “The Trip to Bountiful,” and movies, such as his screenplay for “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In “Beginnings,” Foote takes up where “Farewell” left off, as he is leaving his home on a bus, at age 16, for the Pasadena Playhouse theater school and the career he hoped he would have as an actor.

In the end, Foote did more writing than acting, but he was always deeply involved with the shaping of plays, the way they looked and felt on the stage and, later, the way live plays worked on television in the 1950s. A Pulitzer Prize and two Oscars came his way, and last year the President’s National Medal of the Arts, but what emerges in his two memoirs is not a writer’s thirst for fame but an artist’s hope to get exactly right whatever he was trying to present.

In “Beginnings,” Foote quotes with evident pride New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson’s review of his 1930s play “Texas Town,” put on by the struggling American Actors Company on West 16th Street in Manhattan: “ ... His play,” Atkinson wrote, “gives a real and languid impression of a town changing in relation to the world--the old stock drifting down the economic and social scale, the young people at loose ends ... Mr. Foote’s quiet play is an able evocation of a part of life in America.”

Later, after World War II (in which Foote took no part because he had a hernia), and after working five years running an acting school and little theater in Washington, he said he wanted to return to his earlier, simpler way of writing. He quotes Trepleff’s speech in the last scene of Chekhov’s “The Seagull”: “I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that it’s a matter not of old forms and not of new forms, but that a man writes, not thinking at all of what form to choose, writes because it comes pouring out from his soul.”

Chekhov’s unadorned simplicity, his natural way of revealing the depths and complexities of people’s lives through their casual speech, is Foote’s way, too. His account of the Pasadena Playhouse during the Great Depression evokes a time long gone. His fee for the first year was $500; for the second, $250. The school got him an elocution teacher to take the Texas out of his speech. When he went home the next summer, his little brother charged his friends 10 cents to come listen to him talk.

One Friday he went to the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles to see Eva Le Gallienne in Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler.” The next afternoon he saw her in “A Doll’s House” and that evening in “The Master Builder.” He writes: “Most plays, I realized after seeing these, were thin gruel, of little substance.”

Foote never brags about it, but it is clear from “Beginnings” that he, from his teenage years, believed in the theater as serious art. After the Pasadena Playhouse, he moved to New York and studied with Russian emigre Tamara Daykarhanova. She made him unlearn everything he had been taught in Pasadena.

Foote had five hard, poor years in New York until he, rung by rung, climbed up the ladder to skill and success. He met other young artists and writers in several fields, from Robert Motherwell and Malcolm Cowley to Agnes de Mille and Tennessee Williams. With de Mille, he put on works for the stage; they became friends for life. He and Williams were friendly, though not close. Foote was married to Lillian Vallish from 1945 until her death in 1992.

During his playwriting years, Foote returned annually to Wharton, the little town on Texas’ Colorado River, southwest of Houston, that gave him a lifetime of stories to write. Now, at 85, he lives there again.

His “Beginnings” nicely complements his “Farewell” as the lovely, modest reflections of a fine American writer faithful to his memories and devoted to his art.