Tender Mercies

[originally published in The Weekly, May 4, 1983]

The man has been around for some time; several days, a week — we can’t be sure. The guy he was traveling with moved on, leaving him among the cigarette butts and half-empty bottles in the clapboard country-roadside motel. Upon coming to and finding himself penniless to pay for the room, he offered to odd-job his way out of debt to the lady who operates the place. She accepted — “No drinking on the job,” though — and he stayed on. Now, one night at supper, her young son eyes him across the table and asks, “Mister, what’s yore name?”

That’s the way life gets sorted out in Tender Mercies. Nothing forced, no privileged information elicited or shoved into the foreground before its time. The characters and their collective life will not be butted and chivvied into artificial poses so that conventional rhythms of “story” can be satisfied. This drifter and the roadside lady come to care for each other (months have gone by now, we know from in-passing references in the dialogue), but we do not see them marry. We do not even see them agree to marry: He asks her whether she’s ever thought about marrying again, says he’s been thinking about it, asks if she’ll think about marrying him. She agrees to think about it. Next scene we see, schoolkids are taunting her boy, Sonny, about his mother’s new husband.

The slippage of scenes — the omission of conventional Big Scenes between scenes, as it were — does not imply that anything common-law has been allowed to develop (the lady is a good Baptist, after all; they’ve been married, legal and proper). What this narrative technique does imply is that life’s truest ceremonies are celebrated in the random minutiae of everyday experience. And that is right nextdoor to recognizing the film’s theme of “tender mercies”: that the pain of mortality, of being bound on a deathward journey whose purpose and itinerary often seem obscure, can be truly alleviated not by spectacular sunsets, exceptional interventions in the progress of existence, but rather by quiet moments of self-knowledge, of seeing oneself in perspective with one’s fellows and one’s environment, in the limpid light of day.

[Editor’s note – This interview appeared in a very different form in the November/December 1996 issue of Modern Maturity. The introduction was written specifically for this publication.]

Horton Foote died March 5th, 2009, at his daughter Hallie’s home in Connecticut where he was at work cutting his ‘Orphan’s Home Cycle’ from 9 plays into a 3-act version for Broadway in the Fall of 2009.Â Broadway theatres dimmed their lights in his honor for one minute that night.

Horton Foote at his New York apartment with some of his collection of Americana, reproduced with the kind permission of the photographer, Jeanne Strongin

I spent a week with Horton Foote in 1993, in Wharton, Texas, the town he had been writing about all his life, in one form or another. The calm, high-ceilinged house he lived in reflected a lifetime of collecting, at flea markets and country auctions, with a great eye and a gamblerâ€™s luck. Horton and his wife Lillian had gathered superb pieces of Americana, naÃ¯ve folk paintings and family silhouettes and mixed them with wit and sureness and a touch of the unexpected.

Coming down the steps in his trademark black suit, both arms outstretched, he was a mixture of warmth and Southern concern and for the week that followed, he had the knack of seeming to sublimate his densely packed schedule to mine. With his cherubâ€™s face and his thatch of silver hair, he was at the same time buoyant and optimistic, and deeply and intrinsically tenacious (that thread common to his finest characters.)

Directly next door, where he put up guests, sits the white bungalow-style house in which Foote was born. Unlike most of the rest of the country, thereâ€™s a sense of continuity in Wharton. It comes out in strolls around his slowly emptying town, where Foote is still a local celebrity and can tell the history of every family in every house, many of whom are kin, in varying degrees of closeness.

As deeply rooted as Foote is in Wharton, he has been equally entwined with his family: Lillian Vallish Foote, his inseparable partner of 48 years, and their 4 children: Hallie and Horton Jr. who are actors, Walter, a lawyer and Daisy, a playwright.

In August, 1992, Lillian Foote died, after a brief illness. In September, The Roads to Home opened in New York, the play on which her husband and daughter were working at the time of her illness. The following May, Hallie won an Obie for that performance, which her father wrote and directed.

Sheila Benson: Youâ€™ve written in so many forms, how do you think of yourself?

Horton Foote: I’m essentially a story teller, although the people that are hardest on me always say that I don’t have enough story. I guess what will get me going is the human condition. But what I do, through thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking, I try to get the essence of things.

Tag: Tender Mercies

“I try to get the essence of things” – An Interview with Horton Foote