Shrake’s Progress
Bud Shrake has written sports stories, screenplays, and novels. He’s hobnobbed with the rich and famous, raised some hell, and searched his soul. Now he has crowned a colorful 49-year career with The Borderland.
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Fiction writers deal routinely with the fate of their characters but are often blindsided by their own destinies. The Borderland started as the story of the battle of Plum Creek and evolved into what Bud half-jokingly calls a story “about Austin in the days when real estate developers wore their guns outside their pants.” And though this was never his intention, The Borderland could be read as a prequel to another Shrake novel, Blessed McGill. Published in 1968, it begins in Austin just before the Civil War and recounts the adventures of a hard-drinking, irreverent frontiersman and how he got to be our first North American saint. Blessed McGill, in turn, can be viewed as a prequel to Bud’s first published novel, Blood Reckoning, written more than forty years ago. Blood Reckoning is a fictional account of the Comanche’s final battle against the U.S. Army, which was a continuation of the battle of Plum Creek, which is the climactic scene of The Borderland. While he himself was moving forward, Bud’s imagination was actually working back in time, searching for larger truths about God and man, and perhaps trying to solve the riddle of his own life.
Bud was 27 when he began working on Blood Reckoning in the secrecy of his kitchen in the dead of night, between the hours of three and five. He and I were both young sportswriters for the Dallas Times-Herald, living with our wives and children in an apartment complex near the SMU campus. Joyce taught English literature at SMU and was becoming increasingly devoted to Catholicism. In those days all self-respecting sportswriters were expected to have an unfinished novel and a pint of Old Crow in their desk drawer, but nobody was expected to write in the middle of the night. Bud struggled out of bed at that ungodly hour, I discovered later, not because he believed that writing was his destiny (though he suspected it was) but because he needed the money to support Joyce and their two sons. Three to five was his only spare time.
Poverty and deadlines are said to be a writer’s two motivators, but I’ll submit that the agony of love ought to be added to the list. Bud was feeling the crush of all those motivators in 1960. His marriage to Joyce was floundering — again. They had married and divorced when they were students at TCU in 1953, a pivotal year in Bud’s life. The previous summer, after his sophomore year at the University of Texas, he had returned to his hometown of Fort Worth broke and expecting his Army reserve unit to go to Korea. His long-range plan was to attend UT law school, but fate intervened. Jenkins, his old pal from Paschal High School and a fellow student at TCU in the early fifties, had landed a job writing about sports at the Fort Worth Press and introduced Bud to Blackie Sherrod. For Bud, it was love at first sight. “The minute I walked into that old Press building on Fifth and Jones and heard the Teletype machines, I knew that this was where I belonged,” he remembers. Under Blackie’s spell, a phenomenon that would eventually affect Jenkins and me too, Bud’s literary talents began to flower. “If I hadn’t been Dan’s pal and met Blackie,” Bud says now, “I’d probably have been a lawyer.”
In 1958, three years after Bud and Joyce remarried, Sherrod moved to the Dallas Times-Herald, taking Bud with him. By the early sixties Sherrod had added Jenkins and me to his staff. Prima donnas all, we saw ourselves as fledgling Hemingways. “I knew I could never write like Dostoevski or Dickens or Thomas Mann,” Bud says, “but Hemingway made it look easy. Hemingway is like a Matisse painting that you look at and say, ‘I can do that.’ Well, of course you can’t paint like Matisse, any more than you can write like Hemingway, but they don’t overwhelm you at first sight.” As had been the case at the Press, the Times-Herald under Sherrod was the perfect training ground. Blackie set the tone with his irreverent, cold-eyed humor and mastery of the language, and he cultivated our talents as patiently and craftily as a Zen master, allowing us ridiculous amounts of freedom to make our own mistakes. We wrote to and for each other — not merely sports pieces but satires, parodies, and epic poems that were assembled in a fat volume called “The Pinch Papers” (allegedly the work of a made-up sportswriter named Jim Tom Pinch, who later appeared as a character in several Jenkins novels). The results were wild and occasionally wonderful. Bud once began a story about a junior track meet with this unforgettable sentence: “This is no golden legend, this is the plain unvarnished tale of youth.”
After about a year in Dallas, Bud and Joyce were again having marital trouble. Part of it was the hard drinking and erratic existence that sportswriters in those days believed necessary to their profession. While he was finishing Blood Reckoning, Bud was covering the Dallas Cowboys, which required hanging out with club owner Clint Murchison, Jr., and other Dallas high rollers. The rich and famous were always drawn into Bud’s irresistible gravitational field. Among Murchison’s coterie were Miami millionaire Dick Fincher, his actress wife, Gloria DeHaven, and two raucous priests, fathers Higgins and Mulligan, who traveled to all the Cowboy games with Fincher. The priests took a keen interest in Bud, and vice versa. “I was fascinated by their contrasts of life,” Bud remembers. “They got up every morning at four to pray and work in their gardens and live the monastic life. Then on weekends they’d get drunk as pigs and argue religion with guys like me.” Higgins constantly advised Bud to “stop kicking against the bricks” — a phrase that appeared in Blessed McGill seven or eight years later. Bud had his own notions about God and faith. Though raised in Fort Worth’s Travis Avenue Baptist Church, he had intellectually rejected the churchgoing experience years earlier. Whatever the truth about salvation, Bud believed that artistic genius was the great absolution of wretched behavior.
Joyce was a Shakespearean scholar and a true intellectual. “Half the time I didn’t know what she was talking about,” Bud confesses. “But I knew that Joyce knew.” She was beautiful, sexy, and brilliant, but also temperamental and dangerously vulnerable. You were never sure where you stood with Joyce. Later, under her professional name, Dr. Joyce Rogers, she wrote a book exploring an anomaly in Shakespeare’s will, which left his second-best bed to his widow. The Second Best Bed: Shakespeare’s Will in a New Light is undoubtedly a work of superlative scholarship, but for most of us it was unreadable. It was a metaphor for the constantly expanding universe that was separating Joyce from the recognizable world. Her Catholic faith was at times obsessive, as though she was on a vector toward sainthood. A second divorce seemed inevitable, though I never imagined that the publication of Bud’s first book would hasten it along.
To his surprise, not one but two publishers submitted offers for Blood Reckoning. He chose the larger of the two, a $3,000 advance from Bantam, which was double what the prestigious hardback publisher Harper and Row was willing to pay. With the difference, Bud bought a spectacularly gaudy status symbol, a used four-door white Cadillac El Dorado. Joyce hated the Cadillac and refused to ride in it. “It embarrasses her,” Bud told me at the time. “She’s afraid her friends at SMU will see it.” I never knew what Joyce thought of Blood Reckoning. I’m sure she was pleased that Bud had published, but the content may have disgusted her: The book is rich with the savagery and redemption that have become hallmarks of Bud’s fiction. Jay Milner, a friend and colleague of ours, noted in a review that on the first page there were three shootings, a rape, and an Indian who pissed in a water well. Jay dubbed the book “Bloody, I Reckon.”
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