Texas Gushers

SIRONIA, TEXAS (1,731 pp.)--Mad/son Cooper--Houghton Mifflin ($10).

Time was, in Texas, when a man didn't have anything big to say that a shooting iron couldn't say better; but those days seem gone forever. In the last 30 years, a cloud of literary and artistic activity has been gathering over the Southwest, and in the last ten days it has grown large enough to look like the beginnings of a regional renaissance.

One of the newest novelists to arrive on the Texas landscape is Madison Cooper of Waco--and he has come in like an oil well and come in big. Novelist Cooper is crude, all right, and he is such a wasteful gusher that it seems scarcely worth while capping the flow between the covers of a book; but he spews out so much of the rich stuff that he is very likely to flood the U.S. book market in the weeks before Christmas--if he doesn't scare most of the customers on to higher ground.

Sironia, Texas is apparently the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published. Its 840,000 words cover 1,731 pages of medium-fine print. It costs $10 in the regular two-volume edition, and it can also be had in a de luxe $15 printing. Author Cooper, a 59-year-old bachelor, took eleven years to write it, during and after business hours at the desk where he manages a family real-estate fortune (TIME, April 7).

"I have a freak memory," Cooper says. "I can remember indefinitely anything that is not important." In his opus, Cooper recalls almost everything unimportant that happened in Sironia, a pseudonymous Texas town (Cooper has always lived in Waco) in the first 20 years of the century. He tells the important things too; but with the gift of the true gossip for pure indiscrimination he can tell about a rape in the same cozy tone he uses to describe a family evening at home --and, in Sironia, one seems to have been as common as the other.

In fact, to judge from Sironia, Texas in those days must have been a dang sight wilder than even now. In the lives of Cooper's 30-odd major characters, there occur a flood, several murders and suicides, and a castration party. One whorehouse burns down, one Negro is burned alive, one changeling is introduced into a childbed.

Girls are seduced and others are beaten; at times it seems as though the streets of Sironia must be paved with female teeth. Crowbars are swung in labor strife, horsewhips in political campaigns. Sex-crazed old women corner fresh-faced youths in locked bedrooms. Blackmail is a commonplace, miscegenation comes almost as natural as breathing, and the highest ambition of mankind, it would seem, is to own a real, live, spangly N'awlins "hoah."

In short, Sironia, Texas is just the same old small-town story, as it has been told in 50 sensationalized bestsellers--only this time it's in Texas, and so there's much, much more of it. Also, there may be still more to come. Says Author Cooper: "Well, I figure I've still got about three more novels in me."

THE DEVIL RIDES OUTSIDE (596 pp.)--John H. Griffin--Smiths ($4).

The Devil Rides Outside shows that it takes all grades of crude to make a literary Spindletop. It is the first novel of Dallas-born John H. Griffin, 32, a blind veteran of World War II. Author Griffin spoke his book into a wire recorder, and he talked far too much. He and his publishers (a Fort Worth firm whose first book this is) cut out 250 pages and could profitably have lopped off 200 more. But though Devil is crudely written as well as overwritten, it has some things relatively rare in U.S. letters: energy, earnestness and unashamed religious fervor.

Author Griffin writes in the first person in diary form. His hero is a young American musicologist in France who arrives at a Benedictine monastery to study Gregorian chant. Author Griffin did the same thing, admits that Devil is at least an "intellectual history." His hero is no Roman Catholic, but by the rules of the order he must live as a monk so long as he stays at the monastery. This is not easy. His unheated stone cell is bitterly cold, the food is execrable, and he must share such work as cleaning the primitive lavatories. Moreover, his brain is filled with images of his Paris mistress, his nights made maddening by dreams. "-

He becomes ill and the monks nurse him. As he comes to know them and to understand their search for God, he is first vaguely impressed and vaguely irritated, then troubled by his own spiritual emptiness. Gradually, the monks encouraging him, he begins an intensive self-search, is infected by a mounting desire to find God and live a life of the spirit. The stumbling block is sex.

When, after another illness, the musicologist moves into the town, Devil concentrates on life outside the walls. Now the assorted evils of everyday life in the world are seen in contrast to monkish goodness. Truly the devil rides outside, where spite, greed, hatred (and again & again sexual temptation) plague and disgust the hero.

Author Griffin's hero is a cardboard character in a contest of more powerful wills; the monks and most of the townspeople are mere symbols of good & evil. Nevertheless--and crude, awkward and febrile as it is--The Devil Rides Outside is kept bowling along by pure writing steam. It is often repetitive and frequently staggers to a stop, but it is saved each time by a fresh burst of vigor and intensity. At novel's end the musicologist returns to the monastery, and there is the promise that he will find God and inner peace. Author Griffin did not go back to a monastery. He chose a 40-acre farm instead. But the act of writing Devil led to a change of church. Once an Episcopalian, Griffin has become a Roman Catholic.

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