Cooper's Town

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.

The upstarts he understood too: stable hand and automobile dealer; thwarted spinster and venom-tongued postmaster's wife; corrupt, plantation-snatching recluse and immigrant Irish lady's maid turned merchant prince's bride; the illegitimate mulatto boy who strives for a college education and his tap-dancing half-brother who runs away to a traveling show and returns to Sironia, only to be lynched. All are drawn with unsparing, objective exactitude. Yet as far as the citizens of his hometown knew, the aloof Cooper paid little attention to them. It wasn't until the eve of Sironia, Texas' publication that Waco's hoi polloi realized that he had been scrutinizing them for decades.

Cooper occupied an enviable position for a writer: a true insider who nonetheless felt the psychic freedoms of an outsider. The friction of such a split life might have generated the spark that eventually set his work ablaze. This grocery-store heir could never fall into lockstep with his peers: find the right girl and marry her; sink into a complacent rhythm of business, children, and grandchildren; join the chamber of commerce. He dated scores of women, escorting them to the movies (he owned a theater) and corresponding passionately with them. Yet he didn't trust female motives enough to share his fortune through wedlock. Like many an artist, his social skin didn't sit comfortably on his skeleton; his eye was too keen and skeptical to allow him easy solace. But what makes him an especially intriguing literary anomaly of the time is how he stayed put. Unlike so many writers who were his contemporaries, he didn't pack up and move away from his birthplace to reinvent himself in Manhattan. Instead he spent his entire life in the Italian baroque villa at 1801 Austin Avenue that his parents had built in 1905 and single-handedly reinvented the whole town surrounding him.

Cooper's thrift, a byword in Waco, was regarded as simply another of his eccentricities. Roane Lacy recounts how Mildred Rast, the secretary to the president of the Citizens National Bank, would save discarded carbon paper to give him when he visited the bank on his daily rounds, never dreaming how he would use it. Cooper's biographer, Marion Travis, wrote, "For years during his work week he appeared in the same dark sweater with leather-patched elbows. His shoes were repaired over and over until they would no longer take repair. . . . Before the church installed its air conditioning, Madison Cooper brought his own cooling device with him in hot weather—an improvised fan made from a cardboard pencil tablet back." During his party-boy youth, he was considered quite a dandy (his framed U.T. diploma still leans against a wall of his untouched, shrinelike office, a cartoon transparency of a flapper and her Charleston-kicking swain taped to the glass—a succinct comment on his college career). But after his parents died, the tailor-made tuxedos gave way to off-the-rack outfits for Sunday services and Goodwill candidates for everyday wear. The scrimped money eventually funneled into the Madison A. and Martha Roane Cooper Foundation, which now holds an endowment of more than $30 million and helps causes as diverse as Keep Waco Beautiful and the local Family Abuse Center.

Sad to say, thrift also showed up in a peculiar form in his otherwise plentiful story of Sironia. From the opening paragraph the reader senses that a certain something is missing from the prose. By paragraph number two it has become obvious what is lacking: Cooper used almost no articles or possessive pronouns. Whether he was hoping to pioneer a style that would catch the critics' eyes or merely trying to limit the word count, the results are maddening: "And brassily [the kerosene lamp] vaunted its newness from round, just-laid dining table beside old wood cookstove"; "She was helping Pop, tying navy tie, holding dark blue suit and overcoat." The trick that might be tolerable for a sentence or two becomes excruciating after a few pages. What Cooper spurned in verbiage, however, he made up for with a cornucopia of hyphens, dashes, and commas. He strewed italics so thickly that a paragraph of dialogue can resemble a wrought-iron balcony in the French Quarter.

Possibly these idiosyncrasies were what defeated Cooper's bid for immortality. He must have struggled hard to encase his spellbinding story in such spiky textures, perhaps seeing himself as a new Faulkner. Despite lavish, almost unprecedented prepublication publicity, the critics couldn't overlook the inaccessibility of Cooper's prose. The appearance of Ferber's Giant didn't help either. Then the rest of the competition took its toll: That same October greeted Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Hollywood, which had been excited about Cooper's book, immediately optioned all three of its competitors instead. Although Sironia, Texas stayed on the national best-seller list for eleven weeks, by the end of January 1953 it was as dead as an armadillo on the highway.

But Cooper had at last, at the age of 58, achieved his goal. He stood revealed to his world as an internationally acknowledged writer—translated into Danish, no less—not a tightfisted hermit who, according to some local speculation, had for three decades been spending his secretive attic hours deciphering codes for Army intelligence.

He immediately plunged into a new novel, The Haunted Hacienda, the first volume of an intended trilogy. Published in 1955, it met with a tepid reception. Over the next few months, Cooper turned his attention to the foundation he'd named after his parents, the other legacy that he could count on to outlast his own earthly span. He was 62 years old—no longer the Texas bard with rough-hewn movie-star glamour who had taken the literati by surprise and ambushed the best-seller list. Now he focused on increasing the foundation's endowment through the same canny stock investments he'd been husbanding over twenty years.

Carol Dawson wrote about Marshall, Texas, in the January 1999 issue of Texas Monthly.