Pulitzer Prize-winner Shepard’s final message is one of a changing America
The Pulitzer-winning playwright Sam Shepard died of motor neurone disease in July, leaving a formidable legacy of nearly 50 plays which often put forward unwaveringly bleak critiques of American ideals.
From the late-Seventies, he also had a parallel career as a character actor in the classical mould, from his Oscar-nominated performance as the astronaut Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff to his autocratic patriarch in the Netflix family melodrama Bloodline. He also wrote novels, short stories and screenplays for films such as Wim Wenders’ haunting Paris, Texas.
He was working on another novel right up to his death, writing by hand and then dictating into a tape recorder with the help of his daughter and sisters. Friend and former girlfriend Patti Smith helped him edit the final manuscript.
Clocking in at just over 80 pages, Spy of the First Person is clearly partly autobiographical, narrated by a man in his later years being treated for a crippling illness. Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of his house in southern California’s Colorado desert and being cared for by his family, he looks back over his life and reflects on a changing America.
Spy of the First Person captivates in its distillation of many of Shepard’s enduring themes — the death of America’s frontier, identity and loneliness.
The old man reflects that in the surrounding desert “there used to be orchards as far as the eye can see”. But even in his parents’ era such a landscape had turned to “black plastic blowing from barbed wire” and “dead pigeons in the road”.
But amid the conflicted nostalgia, the old man confesses to his son in his mind to a secret criminal past and a deranged act of violence. Memory is, for him, “like a scab that you pick at”.
There’s foreboding amid the wistfulness, but it’s tempting to read this novella as Shepard looking at America in a more elegiac light.
There’s a wonderful reference to an organisation called the Shriners, a branch of the Masons where “guys from the Midwest” dress up as Arabs, “full of Arab pride” — a baffling, but wonderful concept which goes to the heart of America’s strangeness.
Shepard illuminates loneliness beautifully in this slight, but rich and moving final work. In the final lines, the old man sees “the moon getting bigger and brighter ... two sons and their father, everyone trailing behind”.