November 2000
Books
Cooper's Town
Madison Cooper's Waco saga, Sironia, Texas—the longest novel ever published in the U.S.—is eccentric. So was he.
It should surprise hardly anyone that the longest novel ever published in the United States was written by a Texan. And if some Texans are reputedly larger than life, then it stands to reason that it might take a Texan to make life larger than itself, to craft a story as huge as the landscape that bred it. That's exactly what Madison Cooper did when he wrote Sironia, Texas and astonished the world with Texas' own Gone With the Wind.
It took him eleven years, one year more than Margaret Mitchell's opus reportedly cost her in sweat, scrawls, and research. Unfortunately for Cooper, the month that Sironia, Texas was published, October 1952, was also the month that saw the debut of Edna Ferber's Giant. But what Ferber, a Northern observer, merely suggested in her title, Madison Cooper delivered in the detail, psychological truthfulness, and sheer size of his tale of a Texas town that begins at the cusp of the twentieth century and stops in 1921 with the local rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The difference between the Ferber caricature and Cooper's genuine article is the result of a deep rootedness in the subject, a knowledge born of blood and bone. And when you couple Sironia, Texas' leviathan bulk (1,731 pages) with the multiple facets of its author's life—his inherited wealth, his disregard for convention, his notorious eccentricities and rock-solid business sense—what you get is genuine Texas character.
Everyone in his hometown of Waco knew who Madison Alexander "Matt" Cooper, Jr., was. The wealthy philanthropist and dashing ladies' man made a familiar sight, stalking briskly along the downtown sidewalks in his beat-up old felt hat, moth-eaten lumberjack shirt, and torn britches, lugging a battered briefcase with notes clothespinned to it as he made his rounds collecting rent on his business properties. Or he could be spotted running on the cinder track at the municipal stadium after an afternoon spent toiling in his mansion's dingy attic office. If locals wanted financial help with a civic project, they knew they could visit him in that attic, ascending by the back servants' stairs. He would seat them in a chair beside the cardboard boxes and filing cabinets, wind up a kitchen timer to measure exactly ten minutes, and listen attentively to their plea. When the timer rang, he would summarily escort them to the door, but afterward the supplicant could often expect a check.
Matt Cooper was born in 1894, the only son of Madison Alexander Cooper, a successful wholesale grocer with warehouses sprawling over a multitude of counties, and his wife, Martha. Regarded by his childhood schoolmates as a sickly, wheezing mama's boy, he grew into a handsome, fun-loving young man who was celebrated for his grand parties. After graduating from the University of Texas in 1915, he returned to Waco to join his father's business as the produce and candy buyer for the Cooper Grocery Company, with a two-year hiatus during World War I, when he served in the Army as an assistant intelligence officer. Everyone assumed that he would succeed his father as company president. But they weren't aware of Cooper's new love of literature and his aspirations to be a writer, both of which he diligently concealed. Over the next ten years he would dutifully occupy his clerk's desk at the company's Waco headquarters, ostensibly grooming himself for advancement, meanwhile teaching himself touch-typing at home. His parents and his older sister, Lucile, didn't know that he was taking three correspondence courses in creative writing from Columbia University and that his annual trips to New York, rather than mere vacation flings, were more concerned with literary hobnobbing and theatrical introductions. Slowly and painfully he stretched his wings with a series of short stories and a philosophical nonfiction book. The book's manuscript wound up in a garbage can on West Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan after his agent told him it would never get published. But in the twenties several of his short stories were sold to magazines. Cooper refrained from announcing these first tender triumphs to either neighbors or kin. He bided his time, longing for the moment when he could resign from the company and declare himself a full-fledged professional writer. And lurking in the back of his mind were the seeds of an epic, planted by Waco itself.
Over the course of his lifetime, Cooper watched the Little Athens on the Brazos change drastically, from a center of cotton culture ruled by a handful of aristocratic families to a booming mercantile metropolis whose workers and managers became the new dominant class. This was the panorama of flux he eventually recorded in his novel, a 21-year chronicle inscribed in secrecy so absolute that, according to his nephew Roane Lacy, even his sister had no clue as to his labors. "In my opinion, I don't think anybody in or out of the family knew he was writing the book," Lacy says. Not since Dickens had an author portrayed such a dense panoply of human drama, charting every stratum of the community, from black field hands and bloodstained butchers to old-money millionaires and a violin-playing senator, with equal depth and insight. Certainly the Victorian Dickens avoided the blunt language, brothel scenes, and graphic descriptions of sex that illuminate Sironia with authenticity and help make it a remarkable social document. Like Dickens, Cooper knew what he was talking about. During his boyhood the brothels occupied an infamous four-block area of town. The settlers' log cabins, the shacks of freed slaves, the storekeepers' middle-class cottages, and the antebellum manors of the ruling families were all familiar stomping grounds. He knew those leading families well because he belonged to one of them. He understood what made them tick, where their hungers and joys and jealousies resided, where their stubborn Southern pride came from and why it was both a strength and a weakness. When a character in Sironia named Carietta Storrow considers herself too genteel to expose her nakedness, even wearing muslin slips in the bathtub, Cooper has prepared us by vividly describing her ancestral history, early religiosity, and inner torment. The muslin chemises proclaim her peculiarity to the town, hanging out on the clothesline to dry, three or four per day. As one wag puts it when he hears a report that her small son is "measly and doing poorly," "[the boy is] doing doggone well to've been strained through cheesecloth—twice." Mrs. Storrow's cousin-by-marriage and social rival, Millicent Thaxton, is afflicted with a different form of repression: She has borne a "feeble-minded" son whom she reveres as a handsome paragon of wit, publicly declaring him to be the most eligible bachelor in Sironia. Although her denial of his condition is cloaked in delusional and pretentious rhetoric, it fails to tarnish her standing. She may make a fool of herself, but no one is going to say so; the compassion she stirs endears her to the local populace more than any of her strictly maintained hallmarks of good breeding, which include a generous and charitable heart. Cooper's descriptions of early Texas' upper class move us because the people are so thoroughly realized. Each personality stands in three-dimensional relief.
