A Worm in the Wood: The Father-Son Relationship in the Plays

of Sam Shepard

Henry I. Schvey

Modern Drama, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 1993, pp. 12-26 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr.1993.0014

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499519/summary

Access provided at 6 Jan 2020 20:11 GMT from UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich
 A Worm in the Wood:
The Father-Son Relationship in
the Plays of Sam Shepard
HENRY I. SCHVEY

In his illuminating essay "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," Georges

Gusdorf observes that "Confession, an attempt at remembering, is at the same
time a searching for a hidden treasure, for a last delivering word, redeeming
in the final appeal a destiny that doubted its own value. For the one who
takes up the venture it is a matter of concluding a peace treaty and a new
alliance with himself and with the world.'"
Implicit in Gusdorf' s essay on autobiography is the notion that confessional
literature is an attempt to heal a basic breach between the self and the other.
Nowhere is this search for redemption more obvious than in the late work of
America's most confessional dramatist, Eugene O'Neill. We know from his
wife, Carlotta, that the writing of his autobiographical family play, Long
Day's Journey ililo Night, in June 1939 was "a thing that haunted him. He
was bedeviled into writing it .. . He had to get it out of his system, he had to
forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his
mother and father. liZ
When asked by the New York Times whether it was the personal and
confessional nature of Long Day's Journey that gave rise to its enonnous
power, Carlotta replied, at first evasively, "That I couldn't tell you, I wouldn't
presume, I wouldn't know," then continued by saying ''The thing is he was
writing about something that came from his very guts ... he had to write this
play."3 O'Neill's biographer, Louis Sheaffer, goes even further by asserting
that the autobiographical impulse is not only germane to Lollg Day's Journey,
but to the playwright's work as a whole. Sheaffer persuasively argues that

O'Neill, clearly. never really "left" his parents. An eternal son, forever haunted by the
past, he was obsessed with the subject of familial relations, particularly those between
child and parent. For all his wanderings and varied experiences as a young man, he
.found his predominant, most fruitful theme at home. It can properly be said that Long

Modern Drama, 36 ( 1993) 12

 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 13

Day' s Journey had the longest gestation of any of his works; it was the play he,
unconsciously, was aching to write when he first turned pJaywright.4

Prior to the writing of his five "family" plays which began in 1978 ·with
Curse of the Starving Class, through Buried Child (1979), True West (1981),
Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1985), the notion of connecting
Sam Shepard with O'Neill might have seemed ridiculous. "I don 't want to be
a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star ... I got into writing plays
because I had nothing else to do" were his words in I97I.s Of his early work,
Shepard has said "The stuff would just come out, and I wasn't really trying
to shape it or make it into any big thing .... I would have like a picture, and
just start from there.,,6 Indeed, one critic has noted that these plays "seem like
fragments, chunks of various sizes thrown out from some mother lode of
urgent and heterogeneous imagination in which he has scrabbled with pick,
shovel, gunbutt and hands," lacking "the consistency of tone and procedure
that ordinarily characterize good drama, even most avant-garde drama,"7 while
another noted his signature " in what have been variously called arias, verbal
trips. rock riffs. volcanic monologues. ,,8
In contrast to the apparent spontaneity of his early work, his later plays
display a greater self-consciousness with their apparently realistic subject matter.
The following is Shepard 's description of the genesis of Foolfor Love:

I wrote about 16 versions of it, and every time I came back to the first five pages. I'd
write like 70, 80 pages and then bring it all the way back to the first five pages and
start again - throw out 60, 70 pages. So I've got literally at least a dozen different
version s of the play. but the first five pages are the same in every one .... They
weren 't just drafts. Every time I think this is the play. I'm not writing a draft - I
wrote twelve plays.9

Despite the evident disparity between the self-conscious artistry of the later
plays and the volcanic, improvisational strength of the early work, there are
at the same time important connections through the use of the autobiographi-
cal and confessional modes, so that like O'Neill, who wrote "bits and pieces
of his family story, crudely in 'Bread and Butter' , his first full-length work,
and subsequently with different degrees of skill and under assorted guises"'o
in various other plays, Shepard's early work contains significant elements of
the confessional mode which are fully explored in later works, reaching
fruition in Buried Child.
The thread which connects the various phases of Shepard's work, despite
their obvious disparity, is the image of the father. Occasionally a figure of
strength, virility, or rude wisdom, he is also frequently portrayed as distant,
weak, and manipulative. In the early poem "Power" from Hawk Moon he is
glimpsed through the eyes of a child engaged in a footrace with his father:
14 HENRY I. SCHVEY

I can remember racing with my father

The difference in our size and strength
The power in his legs
The quickness in mine
It almost killed him but he won
And afterwards I heard him puke behind the shed
That night I went to bed
And dreamed of power in a train I I

The deeply ambiguous and conflicted relationship between father and son
in Shepard's plays is clearly rooted in Shepard's childhood and adolescence.
Born on an anmy base in Fort Sheridan, Illinois in 1943 as Samuel Shepard
Rogers III, he was actually nicknamed "Steve" to distinguish him from his
father. Shepard's recollection of his name in Motel Chronic/es indicates a
revealing, even romantic preoccupation with the continuity of his family 's
history: "My name came down through seven generations of men with the
same name each naming the first son the same name as the father then the
mothers nicknaming the sons so as not to confuse them with the fathers when
hearing their names called in the open air while working side by side in the
waist-high wheat."I2
Shepard's father was a pilot in the Anmy Air Corps in Italy, having joined
the army after his grandfather lost the family farm during the Depression.
Returning from combat wounded and apparently emotionally disturbed,
Shepard's father became an alcoholic who left the family on numerous
occasions for a solitary life in the desert. Despite his son's increasing popular-
ity and fame, his father remained an enigmatic and reclusive figure living in
the desert surrounded by his Second World War flying mementoes, who spent
the food money his son gave him on bourbon. He died in 1983 after being hit
by a car near his home in Santa Fe. He only saw one of Shepard's plays
during his lifetime, Buried Child, and on that occasion was so drunk that he
stood up during the production and began talking to the characters on stage.
In addition to his alcoholism and reclusiveness, Shepard's father was a man
of colorful stories and poetry. He attended college on the G.!. Bill, taught
high school geography and Spanish, and even studied at the University of
Bogota on a Fulbright scholarship. Shepard has called his father "a poet
himself in a certain way . .. in a certain weird way. Because of circumstances
he never really had the chance to prove himself. Who knows if my work is
better than his? That has nothing to do with it. One thing that I'll always be
eternally grateful to him for was that he introduced me to Garcia Lorca when
I was a kid - in Spanish, no less ... He told me all about Garcia Lorca's life
with the gypsies and all that.,,13
However, despite the elder Rogers's influence on his son poetically, it is
clear that their relationship was also filled with conflict and the feeling of
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 15

perpetual abandonment even before the father left the house for good. "It was
always hit and miss. always hit and miss," Shepard's sister Roxanne has said.
"There was always a kind of facing off between them and it was Sam who
got the bad end of that. Dad was a tricky character. Because he was a charis-
matic guy when he wanted to be - warm, loving, kind of a hoot to be around.
And the other side was a snapping turtle. With him and Sam it was that male
thing. You put two virile men in a room and they're going to test each other. "'4
The conflict between son and father remained unresolved even after the
latter's death. When asked if his feelings toward his father had changed after
his father's fatal accident, Shepard commented: "My relationship with him is
the sarne. Exactly the same. It's a relationship of absolute unknowing. I never
,knew him, although he was around all the time. There's no point in dwelling
on it. I mean, my relationship with him now is exactly the same as when he
was alive. It's just as mysterious."'5
Unravelling the mystery behind his absent father has been a lifelong
preoccupation of Shepard's, and the driving force behind many of his most
successful plays. Surely it is revealing that Shepard tells us that his father
"was around all the time," since this is factually untrue. However, it is true
that he was around all the time in Shepard's inner world, even when the
young man tried to cast him off. Shortly after.arriving on New York's Lower
East Side in 1963, bussing tables at the Village Gate and exploring the
burgeoning off-off Broadway theater scene that resulted in the Cafe La
Mama, Caffe Cino, and Theater Genesis, Sam Sheperd chose to change his
name from Steve Rogers to Sam Shepard: "My name, Samuel Shepard
Rogers, was too long •... so I just dropped the Rogers part of it. It had been
in the family for seven generations and my grandmother wasn't too happy
over it.",6 In deliberate imitation of Sam Sheperd; the midwestern doctor who
murdered his wife in the early sixties, Steve Rogers chose to "murder" his
father by cutting himself off from seven generations of Rogers males.
The newly recreated Sam Shepard's earliest surviving play, The Rock
Garden (1964), depicts a Girl and Boy drinking milk at the dinner table.
Their father, seated at the head of the table, is completely immersed in a
magazine and pays no attention to the children. In the second scene, their
mother (Woman) lies upstage with several blankets covering her, and speaks
obsessively about the Man, her husband and the absent father of the opening
scene. She describes his picking mushrooms in the forest, his attempts to
build a tree house, and his isolation from the rest of the family: "Sometimes
he just stayed in the attic. He'd stay up there for days and days and never
come down. We thought he'd starved to death once because he 'd been up
there for ten days without food. But he was all right. He came out looking
like he just had breakfast. He was never hungry .... He would eat when we
weren't around. He always ate alone."'7 Later the Woman observes the
similarity between father and son: "Your legs are a lot like Pop's. Pop had
16 HENRY I. SCHVEY

the same kind of legs .... Your feet are almost identical to Pop's. I mean the
way the middle toe is. You see the way your middle toe sticks way out
further than the other toes? That's the way Pop's toes was" (37).
In a later scene the Boy and Man sit together in their underwear, the Man
on a couch and the Boy on a rocking chair. The two do not communicate.
The Boy never turns to address the Man; he "delivers all his lines into the
air." The Man does most of the speaking, but his reveries are punctuated by
the Boy's nodding off to sleep from boredom and falling off his rocking
chair. The Man's favorite subject is his rock garden, which he describes as
a father-son activity. Suddenly, after a long pause, the Boy launches into a
monologue of his own, irrigating the arid wasteland of the Man's rock garden
with a sexual fantasy which literally knocks the Man off his couch at the end
of the play.
The Rock Garden is a simple dramatization of adolescent rebellion. Placed
in a world where none of the four characters can communicate, the Boy's
sexual narration (which begins "When I come it's like a river" [43] and
culminates in orgasm) serves to challenge the Man's fascination with the
bone-dry world of his desert rock garden. Like the young man who had
recently cast off his name to oppose a father who had len him for the glories
of the desert, the Boy acts out his puerile rebellion by getting his "rocks off'
against a hated father figure. Yet, this little play has a disturbing vitality born
out of its conjunction of realistic setting (dining room, apparently realistic
dialogue) and symbolic subtext. It also foreshadows in a remarkable way the
mature Shepard with its disconnected monologues and contrasting image pat-
terns of dryness and fertility which are especially reminiscent of Buried Child.
The relationship between father and son is handled in a far more sophisti-
cated and complex way in The Holy Ghostly (1970), a play set in the desert,
which handles the theme of the son's rebellion and search for identity in the
face of a powerful father. Pop has somehow called his son Ice away from
New York to help him in his struggle against the ghostly Chindi. The Chindi
appears, as does a witch, carrying Pop's corpse on its back. During one of
their endless arguments, Ice shoots Pop. To the sound of drums and bells, Pop
picks up his own corpse, holds it over his head and spinning around in
circles, throws it into the fire. The play ends with the whole theater "con-
sumed in flames" as Pop screams the word "BURN!" over and over and
dances in the fire. IS
In this play, Shepard acts out his combination of guilt and violent hostility
toward his father. Unlike The Rock Garden, which it resembles (the early play
begins with a reminiscence of Pop roasting marshmallows over a campfire,
the later one enacts the scene), The Holy Ghostly has now partly succeeded
in creating a powerful visual equivalent for Shepard's confessional subject
matter. The conversation between father and son is remarkably autobiograph-
ical:
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 17

I always li ked to think of the two of us as blood brothers. Va' know what [
mean? Not father and son but brothers. I mean ever since you was old enough to
learn how to shoot a thirty-thirty . ... What do ya' want to throw all that away
for, Stanley? I know ya ' set out to hurt me. Right from the start I knowed that.
Like the way ya' changed yer name and all. That was roUen, Stanley. I give ya'
that name .cause that was my name and my pappy gave me that name and his
pappy before him. That name was handed down for seven generations. boy. Now
ain't no time to throw it away. (184)

However, the play's excitement lies not in its autobiographical references, but
in its visual spectacle; in the images of Ice transformed by Indian war-paint,
of the witch entering with Pop's corpse on its back, and in the confrontation
between the ghostly Pop and his corpse. Prefiguring what he will do in both
Curse of the Starving Class and True West, Shepard uses the transformation
technique he learned from Joseph Chaikin 's Open Theater to suggest a role
reversal between father and son. As Pop sings, he grows younger while his
son becomes like his father. Eventually, Ice exacts revenge against the "dead"
father who has abandoned him for a life in the desert, yet his shooting the old
man resolves nothing. Ice pulls the trigger and walks off, but it is the "dead"
Pop who ultimately has the last word, just as the Old Man does in Fool for
Love.
Shepard's play of fire and ice concludes not with resolution but with a
celebration of conflict. As in Blake 's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, father
and son fann a "marriage of contraries" without which there is no progres-
sion. Pop calls after the departing Ice, reminding him that "Conflict's a good
thing! It keeps ya' on yer toes! Stanley! Yer pa is dying!" (194), but Pop's
dance of death is in fact a celebration of life through the principle of creative
energy, fire; "Ya' take the fire in yer hand, boy, in both hands. And ya'
squeeze it to death! Ya' squeeze the life out of it. Ya' make it bleed! Ya'
whip it and make it dance for ya'" (196).
The son may repudiate his father in the world of city sophistication, yet the
play suggests that there is a oneness that cannot be repudiated without loss
of identity. Early in the play Ice sarcastically refers to himself as the "Spittin'
image of his old man. Yessir. Why if it weren't for the age separatin' em
you'd think they was the same person" (18I). By shooting his father and
eventually leaving him for dead, Ice hopes to force Pop "To admit that you're
dead." However, it is clear that the "dead" Pop's comment that "But I'm not
dead! I can see! I can touch! I can smell! I can feel! I'm alive!" (188)
contains a terrifying truth to which the son is oblivious. As in O'Neill, who
believed in an hereditary curse. Shepard's dramatic universe is similarl y
controlled by the "unseen hand" of heredity, which renders true rebellion
ineffectual against the powers of an unseen father living in the desert as a
recluse. As Willie suggests in The Unseell Hand, "Whenever our thoughts
18 HENRY I. SCHVEY

transcend those of the magicians the Hand squeezes down and forces our
minds to contract into non-preoccupation . .. , Sometimes when one of us tries
to fight the Hand or escape its control, like me, we are punished by excrucia-
ting muscle spasms and nightmare visions" (8).
In the five full-length plays written between 1978 and 1985, Shepard's
focus has centered on the family. "I thought for years it was boring, uninter-
esting to write about the family, I was more interested in this thing being wild
and crazy. But the interesting thing about taking real blood relationships is
that the more you start to investigate those things as external characters, the
more you see they're also internal characters."'9 More recently he has said,
"What doesn't have to do with family? There isn't anything, you know what
I mean? Even a love story has to do with family. Crime has to do with
family. We all come out of each other - everyone is born out of a mother and
a father, and you go on to be a father. It's an endless cycle."'o
Interestingly, Shepard's preoccupation with the family allowed him to
acknowledge and openly embrace the seminal conflict of the father-son
relationships in his plays. Like O'Neill, who for decades rejected psychologi-
cal realism as "holding the family Kodak up to ill-nature," then embraced it
in his greatest works such as Long Day's Journey, Shepard has moved toward
a new realism which owes much to the family drama of O'Neill: "What
makes O'Neill's Long Day's Joumey into Night such a great work, for
instance, is that O'Neill moves past his own personal family situation into a
much wider dimension.,,2T
In Curse of the Starving Class Shepard similarly raises his private preoccu-
pations to the level of universal drama. Like Kafka's "Hunger Artist,"
Shepard's family is deprived of spiritual nourishment. Longing for emotional
food, they are at the same time loaded with inherited poisons passed from
generation to generation, from father to son. As father Weston, closely
mannered on Shepard's father, says to son Wesley,

WESTON .. . Look at my outlook. You don't envy it, right?

WESLEY No.
WESTON That's because it's full of poison. Infected. And you recognize poison,
right? YOll recognize it when you see it?
WESLEY Yes.
WESTON Yes, you do. I can see that you do. My poison scares you.
WESLEY Doesn't scare me.
WESTON No?
WESLEY No.
WESTON Good. You're growing up. I never saw myoid man 's poison until I was
much older than you. Much older. And then you know how I recognized it?
WESLEY How?
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 19

WESTON Because I saw myself infected with it. That's how. I saw me carrying it
around. His poison in my bocly,ll

As coyotes are poisoned by putting strychnine in the belly of a dead lamb,

Shepard's family is poisoned from generation to generation. As in the other
works, derelict father and son change places to no avail. There are images and
suggestions of rebirth, yet true regeneration is impossible. As the mother,
Ella, describes it:

Do you know what thi s is? It's a curse, I can feel it. It's invisible, but it's there.
It's always there . ... And it goes back. Deep. It goes back and back to tiny little
cells and genes . ... Plotting in the womb. Before that even . ... We spread it. We
pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down, and then pass it down again. It goes
on and on like that without us. (174-5)

Set on a dried-up artichoke farm in California, Curse of the Starvillg Class

transcends Shepard's personal history with a broader vision of an America
destitute and damp with blood guilt. As Weston, the father, says after his
apparent rebirth, "And I felt like I knew every single one of you. Every one.
Like I knew you through the flesh and blood. Like our bodies were connected
and we could never escape thaI. But I didn 't feel like escaping. I felt like it
was a good thing. It was good to be connected by blood like that" (187). Like
the eagle holding the cat in its talons in mid-air, described by Ella and
Wesley at the end of the play, 'Shepard' s vision in Curse is of an endless
cycle of mutual destruction in which no one survives:

WESLEY And the eagle's being tom apart in midair. The eagle's trying to free
himself from the cat, and the cat won't let go.
ELLA And they come crashing down to the earth. Both of them come crashing
down. Like one whole thing. (201)

In his other family plays since Curse of the Starving Class, Shepard has
successfully combined his rage against the man who abandoned him with his
desire to solve the enigma presented by the image of the wise patriarch living
as a recluse in the desert, possessed of secret answers to the mystery of life
which the son cannot fathom.
In True West, Shepard transforms his conflicted sensibility toward his
father into the opposition between two brothers, Austin and Lee. Austin, the
successful Hollywood screenwriter, clearly represents the side of Shepard that
has accommodated itself to material success, the aspects that have moved him
from his counter-culture roots in the off-off Broadway theater movement of
the sixties to a commercially successful career as a film star. Lee, although
20 HENRY I. SCHVEY

presented as Austin's brother in the play, is in fact his alter-ego, the part of
Shepard's divided self that is rough and crude, lives outside the law, and is
drawn toward the elusive image of his father. The play, then, is not so much
a bout between two brothers as it is an externalized metaphor of the dialectic
between the dual aspects of Shepard's psyche. Although the play is set in
their mother's home in a Southern California suburb complete with green
synthetic grass floor, the yapping sounds of the coyote of Southern California
are continually present in the background, especially in Scenes Seven and
Eight, and in Scene Nine when the visual effect is described as being "like
a desertjunkYard at high nOOIl , the coolness of the preceding scenes is totally
obliterated."' 3 Thus the conflict fought out between the brothers is also
projected into the stage setting.
In the confrontation between Lee and Austin, the playwright battles with
the ghost of his father every bit as much as in the less realistic Holy Ghostly.
Austin's complaint to his Hollywood agent Saul Kimmer about Lee is the
central question Shepard has always asked about his father: "He's been
camped out on the desert for three months. Talking to cactus. What' s he
know about what people wanna' see on the screen! I drive on the freeway
every day. I swallow the smog. I watch the news in color. I shop in the
Safeway. I'm the one who's in touch! Not him!" (35).
Despite this apparent hostility toward Lee, Austin is envious of his choice
to live alone in the desert. "You're right about the lights, Lee. Everybody else
is livin' the life. Indoors. Safe. This is a Paradise down here. You know that?
We're livin' in a Paradise. We've forgotten about that." Lee comments. "You
sound just like the old man now" (39). Austin's response that "we all sound
alike when we 're sloshed. We just sorta' echo each other" is an indication
that Shepard's play is, in a sense, monodrama.
If Austin romantically longs for Lee's freedom, his derelict brother is
equally attracted to prosperity and bourgeois conveniences, as his obsessive
theft of the toasters suggests. Although he argues out of frustration, trying to
make a phone call, saying that "This is the last time I try to live with people,
boy! I can't believe it. Here I am! Here I am again in a desperate situation!
This would never happen out on the desert. I would never be in this kinda'
situation out on the desert" (46-47), he later quietly confesses, "Hey, do you
actually think I chose to live out in the middle a' nowhere? Do ya'? Ya' think
it's some kinda' philosophical decision I took or somethin'? I'm livin' out
there 'cause I cail't make it here! And yer bitchin' to me about all yer
success!" (49).
In the play's final tableau, Shepard creates a miraculous image of the
"connectedness" between these opposed aspects of a single self. Austin,
finding the physically more powerful Lee about to go back to the desert from
whence he came, strangles him with a telephone cord to·make him stay. The
play ironically ends with their mother's departure, as the two sons square off
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 21

in a "vast desert-like landscape" (60). Trapped by the umbilical cord of their '
connectedness, neither brother can escape, and they are doomed to continue
their struggle indefinitely.
Fool fo/' Love continues Shepard's inner, unresolved conflict with his
father, yet the play actually went through eleven drafts before the Old Man
appeared in the script just before the play went into rehearsal at the Magic
Theatre in San Francisco. Although he was a late addition to the play, I
would argue that it is the presence of the Old Man, a figure who exists only
in the minds of his children May and Eddie, which elevates this work from
becoming a rather pedestrian play about a love triangle (with its own autobio-
graphical implications - Shepard had just left his first wife, a-Lan, for Jessica
Lange) to the level of a significant work of art.
The Old Man treats both Eddie and Mayas though all three existed at the
sarne time and place, even though he only exists in their imaginations. Since
this play is about the power of the imagination to create something more
lasting and true than what may be real, the character of the Old Man allows
Shepard to move from a realistic struggle between half-brother and half-sister
who "will always be connected" to a meditation on the very nature of passion.
Pointing to an imaginary picture on the wall, the Old Man provides a lesson
to his son:

THE OLD MAN ... Ya' see that? Take a good look at that. Va' see it?
EDDIE (staring at wall) Yeah.
THE OLD MAN Ya' know who that is?
EDDIE I'm not sure.
TIlE OLD MAN Barbara Mandrell, That's who that is. Barbara Mandrell. You
heard a' her?
EDDTE Sure.
THE OLD MAN Well, would you believe me if I told ya' I was married to her?
EOOtE (pause) No.
THE OLD MAN Well, see, now that's the difference right there. That's realism. I
am actually married to Barbara Mandrell in my mind. Can you understand that?
EODlE Sure.
THE OLD MAN Good. I'm glad we have an understanding. 24

At the end of the play, after the children have left the stage, Shepard boldly
confronts us with a work that makes us intensely aware of its own
theatricality. Yet by doing this he is not merely playing with theatrical forms,
but attempting to force the audience into a clearer notion of the meaning of
human passion which may have no other existence than in the imagination.
Significantly, the play's final image has the Old Man reminiscing about his
lover Barbara Mandrell , and pointing off into space: "Ya' see that picture
over there? Ya' see that? Ya' know who that is? That's the woman of my
22 HENRY I. SCHVEY

dreams. That's who that is. And she's mine. She's all mine. Forever" (77).
These words are accompanied by the glowing fire from Eddie's burning horse
trailer, so that the visual image. of Eddie and May's uncontrollable and
mutually self-destructive passion is counterpointed by the Old Man's hymn
to the powers of fantasy to breed and sustain desire.
However, having created the passion between Eddie and May, the father
typically refuses to accept any responsibility for their incestuous passion. As
his children stare at one another in a suspended moment of recognition, the
author of their woes (and joys) again abandons his children:

Amazing thing is, neither one a' you look a bit familiar to me. Can't figure that
one out. 1 don't recognize myself in either one a' you.... Totally unrecogniz-
abl~. You could be anybody's. Probably are. I can't even remember the original
circumstances. Been so long. Probably a lot at things I forgot. Good thing I got
out when I did though. Best thing I ever did. (49)

When Mary Tyrone is counselled by her husband James Tyrone to "forget

the past!" in Long Day's ]oumey, her response is a revealing portrait of
O'Neill's dramatic universe in that play, honed down to its barest essentials;
she replies, "Why? How can I? The past is the present isn't it? It's the future,
too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.""
Set in the midwest of Shepard's birth, Buried Child is his most successful
effort yet to retell his family history, from the lost farm of his grandparents,
through his father's mysterious abandonment, down to his own attempts to
become reconciled to his own past.
Through three generations, the play weaves its spell. From the patriarch
Dodge, we come to learn of the famil y's previous prosperity: "The farm was
producing enough milk to fill Lake Michigan twice over.",6 Yet the farm is
anything but prosperous now, and has not produced a crop of corn since
1935. The farm ' s failure is mirrored in Dodge and his wife Halie's offspring
as well; their three sons, Ansel, Bradley, and Tilden, are all dead, maimed,
or "profoundly burned out" (69). Ansel has died, and his mother wants to .
erect a statue in his honor with "A basketball in one hand and a rifle in the
other" (73). Yet the suggestion is clear that his death was anything but heroic,
and that "he'd still be alive today if he hadn't married into the Catholics. The
Mob" (73). Bradley is an amputee, and Tilden, the oldest son, is described in
the stage directions as "displaced" (69), having had trouble with the law and
been reduced to a state of childlike dependency by the machinations of the
patriarchal Dodge. It is also suggested that he and his mother have had an
incestuous relationship, the result of which is the buried child of the play's title.
Into this world of .arid sterility, suppression, and deception (it is not for
nothing that the head of the household is named "Dodge") arrives Vince with
his girlfriend, Shelly, on their way to New Mexico to go and see Vince's
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 23

father, Tilden. Shelly's first impression of the home is that "It's like a Nor-
man Rockwell cover or something.... Where's the milkman and the little
dog? What's the little dog's name? Spot. Spot and Jane. Dick and Jane and
Spot" (83). However, the two outsiders soon realize that Vince's "heritage"
is quite different from this idyllic first impression.
Not recognized by either his grandfather or his father, Vince wonders
"What is this anyway? Am I in a time warp or something? Have I committed
an unpardonable offence? ... How could they not recognize me! How in the
hell could they not recognize me! I'm their son!" Dodge replies (glued to the
television), "You're no son of mine. I've had sons in my time and you're not
one of 'em" (97).
As the play develops it becomes clear that the family's refusal to recognize
Vince is connected to a deeper failure to acknowledge one of their own. The
buried child, we learn, is presumably the product of Tilden and Halie's
incestuous relationship and has been killed by Dodge and buried in the back
yard. Of the child, Dodge says that "It lived, see. It lived. It wanted to grow
up in this family. It wanted to be just like us. It wanted to be a part of us. It
wanted to pretend that I was its father. ... We couldn't allow that to grow up
right in the middle of our lives. It made everything we'd accomplished look
like it was nothin'. Everything was cancelled out by this one mistake. This
one weakness." When Shelly asks Dodge, "So you killed him?", he replies "I
killed it. I drowned it. Just like the runt of a litter. Just drowned it" (124).
Having suffered the pain of being a stranger in his own family's home,
Vince leaves, supposedly to buy a bottle for Dodge, but with a deeper intent
of escaping: "I was gonna run and keep right on running" (130). Instead, in
a monologue delivered directly out to the audience, Vince reveals his connect-
edness with the past:

I studied my face. Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at an-
other man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy's
face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time . .. . And then his face changed.
His face became his father' s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same
breath. And his father's face changed to his Grandfather's face. And it went on
like that. Clear on back to faces I'd never seen before but still recognized. Still
recognized the bones underneath. (130)

Following this epiphany, he returns to the house of his forefathers to claim

his inheritance. In a brilliantly constructed visual metaphor, the now drunken
Vince crashes through the screen porch and knocks the door off its hinges
precisely on his mother's line "What's happened to the men in this family!
Where are the men!" (124) and, unfolding a large hunting knife, carves a
circular hole in the screen door through which he crawls, symbolic of his
spiritual rebirth back into the family. Resorting to the transformation tech-
 24 HENRY I. SCHVEY

nique he had used so successfully in his early plays, Shepard's Vince is now
a wholly different character, aggressive and determined to claim his inheri-
tance: "Just getting rid of some of the vermin in the house. This is my house
now, ya' know? All mine. Everything. Except for the power tools and stuff.
I'm gonna get all new equipment anyway. New plows, new tractors, every-
thing. All brand new" (131).
Sniffing the roses in an image suggestive of his awakening, Vince proceeds
to drag the blanket off Bradley's shoulders Gust as he had removed this
mantle from Dodge) and place it on his own. In a play literally strewn with
images of patricide and castration (Bradley clipping Dodge's hair, the cover-
ing of Dodge's body with husks of com, Bradley's amputated leg), Vince has
removed the blanket symbolic of rule from his crippled uncle (whom he
. simultaneously tortures by moving his artificial leg further and further out of
reach) and crowned himself the new head of the family. Indeed, as Vince
strides across the stage exacting his revenge and claim of ownership, he
discovers that Dodge has died. Dodge, the quintessential patriarch who is
responsible for killing the child and concealing the crime, is directly con-
nected with the family curse. It is he who boasts to Shelly of the lineage of
unremembered children he has sired: "You know how many kids I've
spawned? Not to mention Grand kids and Great Grand kids and Great Great
Grand kids after them? ... How far back can you go? Who's holding me in
their memory? Who gives a damn about bones in the ground?" (II2).
With Dodge's unnoticed death, Vince has now become the head of the
family. But despite these suggestions of rebirth and renewal, Shepard's
closing stage directions make it clear that instead of being revived, Vince is
in fact trapped by the legacy he has inherited. Placing the roses on Dodge's
chest, he "lays down on the sofa, arms folded behind his head, staring at the
ceiling. His body is in the same relationship to Dodge's" (132). In this
tableau vivant, Shepard clearly indicates that Vince is not reawakened but
entombed by the poisons of a deadly past, just as the position of his body
suggests death, not life.
In the play's final moments, we hear Halie refer to the rain in images of
fertility, as Tilden, who has previously entered the house with annfuls of com
and carrots, now mounts the stairs with the rotting corpse of the buried child.
As he mounts the stairs to reveal to her his secret treasure, her uncom-
prehending words brilliantly underscore the play's terrible irony, that it is
death, not new life, that has been harvested from this barren soil: "Tiny little
shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong though. Strong
enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle, Dodge. I've never seen a crop
like this in my whole life. Maybe it's the sun. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the
sun" (132).
In this concluding moment, Shepard masterfully manipulates the imagery
of fertility to reveal its opposite, the tragic paradox of the Unseen Hand, of
 Father-Son Relationship in Shepard 25
the fact that the past is the "present and the future too," and that the son (not
"sun") that has brought this change about is himself a victim of the events of
a brutal patriarchy. Alluding to the conclusion. of Ibsen's Ghosts, where
Osvald Alving is similarly trapped by the hereditary curse of his father' s
venereal disease, Shepard's play ends not with triumph over the past but with
the acknowledgment of its dreadful power, a power which can be seen in his
work from The Rock Garden through A Lie of the Mind: "every once in a
while I'm just amazed when I catch a glimpse of who I really am. Just a little
flash like the gesture of my hand in a conversation and WHAM there's my
old man. Right there, living inside me like a worm in the wood."'7

NOTES

I Georges Gusdorf. "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography." trans. James

Olney in Olney, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton,
1980),39.
2 Ciled in Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill: SOli alld Artist (London, 1973),505.
3 Ibid., 509.
4 Ibid., 506.
5 Cited in Richard Gilman's introduction to Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New
York, 1981), xi.
6 Cited in Bonnie Marranca, ed. American Dreams: The Imag ination of Sam
Shepard (New York, 1981 ), 191.
7 Gilman, Introduction, xv-xvi.
8 Ruby Cohn, "Sam Shepard: Today's Passionate Shepard and His Loves," in
Albert Wertheim and Hedwig Bock, eds., Contemporary American Drama
(Munich, 1981), 161.
9 Ciled in Don Shewey, Sam Shepard (New York, 1985), 147-48.
10 Sheaffer, 506.
II Sam Shepard , in H awk Moon (New York, 198 1),70.
12 Cited in Ell en Oumano, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American
Dreamer (New York, 1986), 13.
13 Cited in Kevin Sessums, "Sam Shepard: Geography of a Horse Dreamer," in
/IIIerview, 18:9 (September, 1988), 76.
14 Cited in Samuel G. Freedman, "Sam Shepard's Portrait of the American Fam-
ily," Imel'llationai Herald Tribune, 6 December 1985: 7.
15 Sessums, 75.
16 Oumano, 22.
17 Sam Shepard, The Rock Garden, in The Unseen Hand mid Other Plays (New
York, 1986),36. Subsequent page references are to this edition and will appear
in the text.
18 Sam Shepard, The Holy Ghostly, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays. 196.
Subsequent page references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
26 HENRY I. SCHVEY

19 Freedman, 9·
20 Cited in Jennifer Allen, "The Man on the High Horse," Esquire (November
1988), 143·
21 Cited in Jonathan Cott, "The Rolling Stone Interview: Sam Shepard," Rolling
Stone, 18 December 1986: 172.
22 Sam Shepard, The Curse of the Starving Class in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays,
168. Subsequent page references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
23 Sam Shepard, True' West, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 50. Subsequent page
references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
24 Sam Shepard, Fool for Love (San Francisco, 1983), 27. Subsequent page refer-
ences are to this edition and will appear in the text.
25 Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night (New Haven and London,
1974), 87·
26 Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 123. Subsequent
page references are to this edition and will appear in the text.
27 Shepard, in Hawk Moon, '7.