Cooper's Town

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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.