This being a space where people are normally used
to reading about politics, I’ll start with a true story
concerning politics and the late John Fergus Ryan. In 1954, the 23-year-old Ryan,
an Army vet with a wife and baby, decided to have a go at what he might have
called, in that peculiar Runyonesque Southern vernacular of his, the “politics game.”
A scion of North Little Rock, Arkansas, Ryan became the all-purpose
factotum for an obscure no-name candidate for governor of his native state. He
set up shop one day in a rented room at the old Marion Hotel, a venerable
Little Rock establishment which was, and had been for decades, the center of
Arkansas politics. (It was later razed to make way for the Excelsior, a more modern
hostelry where a politician by the name of Bill Clinton would get in trouble with
one Paula Jones.)
Ryan — known to his family as Jackie and to his wife Carla (then as now
a looker) as Jack — went to work. He put out word on the street that would-be
officeholders should stop by the rented room at the Marion, make their
campaign contributions, and sign up then and there for the state job they
could expect to get when Ryan’s man was elected. It was a methodology which
cut out all the frills and differed from the actual patronage policies then in
place only by being unvarnished and direct.
Naturally, the main state newspaper, the old
Arkansas Gazette, got wind of the scheme and sent a reporter over to
pose as a job-seeker. The ringer would write up an account that made the paper’s
front page the next day and ended Jack Ryan’s career as a political mover and
shaker. Anybody looking at the old yellowed clip decades later would be forced to
conclude two things: that John Fergus Ryan, the author, could have written it better;
and that the details of the story were the sort that belonged to Ryan’s own
patented genre of down-home Gothic.
The latter point is key: John Fergus Ryan, one of those writers unique
enough to have invented a style, was in his own way a realist. He wrote some
nonfiction too, mainly for Esquire, but he was
at heart a fiction writer, and his outlandish plots and cartoonish characters
reflected his sense of the way things really were.
He was a pro. There was method and exactness in the way he worked — in
a cramped and windowless converted pantry space smack dab in the middle of
his modest Midtown house by the campus of Rhodes College. Back in the
’70s, when I used to teach creative writing at Memphis State University, I used as
one of my basic texts a weighty compilation of materials — donated by Ryan —
that started as a series of random notes: the kind of isolated quotes, details, and
plot sketches that originate in a writer’s notebook as elements in search of a story.
Another set of pages showed those notes as they went through a process
of development, embellishment, and elaboration into the first draft of a story.
Then a second draft. A third and even a fourth, all Xeroxed and replete with
marginal notes and handwritten line changes. Then the final product — the story,
titled “The Bazemore Gala,” as published
in Evergreen Review, a leading periodical
of the time.
Over and over, that series of progressions from beginning to middle to
end did the trick and actually got student writers to tackle what might
otherwise have seemed the implausible task of translating random thoughts and
aperçus into fiction. It was a kind of
how-to manual for them, and if you ask, say, Arthur Flowers, the distinguished
African-American author of several novels by now, how he got started, he would
probably cite that student exercise of 30 years ago as key to his development.
Hell, I know he would. Flowers is one of several flourishing writers out there
in the world whom I was lucky enough to help incubate, and he is on record in
several interviews as naming that class as his literary point of origin. He started
keeping a notebook there, and I well remember his first complete effort, a
Ryanesque piece that freely combined the comic,
the grotesque, and the nitty-gritty into a neo-Faustian saga of otherworldly
muckers called “The Devil’s Hell of a Plan.”
His literary model would have been — in fact, was — pleased.
Once he crossed the river into Memphis, where he earned his daily bread
as, first, a social worker and later as a probation officer, Jack Ryan became
simply John Ryan, the name he was known by to most of his friends. (It is also
these days well known as the name of his son, namesake, and kindred spirit, the
Memphis artist John B. Ryan, whose two siblings, Carla and Andy, round out what
is a remarkably good-natured and bright-edged clan.) The “Fergus” part,
though his by birth and certainly suggestive of the pagan Gaelic elements of his
psyche, was added on for literary purposes because the classic American authors he
had studied in school all had three names and he meant, at some point, to join
their company. He very well may.
By the time of his death last week, of long-term complications from
diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, the ailments
that had made his once Falstaffian physique unwontedly frail, John Ryan had
compiled a body of work that had been published and read and admired on
virtually all the continents of planet Earth. Even before he
attracted the attention of American critics and readers, he had
been taken up by the British periodical press, where his
affinities with writers like the poet A.E. Housman and the
belles-lettrist P.G. Wodehouse did not go unnoticed.
A spate of published stories would be followed in the
past couple of decades by three well-received novels —
The Redneck Bride, The Little Brothers of St.
Mortimer, and Watching. Ryan also did a play
or two (one I remember concerned a patient at a mental hospital who ended
up taking over the institution and running it — as good a metaphor as any for
the circumstances to be observed during Ryan’s life and times). And there
were screenplays by others. Billy Bob Thornton, the actor/writer/director
from Ryan’s native Arkansas, announced plans to produce a version of
The Redneck Bride, and another entrepreneur
actually did make a movie in 1999 based on
Little Brothers. Called The White River
Kid, it starred Bob Hoskins, Antonio Banderas, and Randy Travis, and, though for
various reasons it never got released in theaters, it is available on DVD.
That John Ryan had gifts as an artist and that he leaves behind a legacy of
literary achievement are both givens. Those who knew him, though, will most
remember him not primarily for his tropes but for his friendship. It is ironic
that Ryan liked to see himself characterized by his wry and often-quoted
aphorism “People are no damn good.” The fact
is, as a person he was damn good. Let me count some of the ways.
He was the kind of guy who, when he heard you were moving house,
would come over to lend a hand. He did so for me when, as a
Gazette reporter and newlywed, I settled into a Little Rock
apartment in 1967. He was there moving furniture and yanking doors off their
hinges to create the illusion — and the reality
— of more space. (It is no accident that so many people remember him as
having been a “bear” of a man.) He was
the friend who lent me his typewriter when I rushed back to hometown Memphis
after hearing the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death in 1968 and
discovered I’d left my own machine behind.
It was that vintage instrument on which I wrote an account that,
illustrated with classic photographs from another master,
Ernest Withers, would appear 25 years later in a special King
commemorative issue of Memphis magazine. Never
did I feel myself so honored by multiple associations.
I went to the very moving memorial service at the Church on the River in
the company of several members of my immediate family Monday and heard
a number of graceful tributes, including one that made bold to
describe Ryan — a cynic and hard-boiled religious skeptic, to say
the least — as having been akin, in the warmth of his heart and in
the nature of his own special ministry, to Jesus himself. To that I
could say amen.
With me Monday was my oldest son Marcus, who almost three
decades ago was in a Memphis hospital undergoing exploratory surgery that
turned up a dreadful diagnosis and an even more dreadful — and immediate —
prognosis. Keeping the vigil along with me in a
waiting room had been John Ryan, and he was there when Marcus’ mother and I
got the news, helping to cushion the shock. He was always available in the months
that followed, in which treatment and convalescence were followed by a wholly
unexpected recovery for which the term “grace of God” is the only proper signifier, and
I could not help reflecting this week that Ryan’s goodwill had been among the
elements that accompanied that miracle.
I also could not help reflecting that Ryan, who had been consigned to years
of frailty by his own illnesses, was deserving of his own miracle. What he had
instead was the next best thing, an attitude that
— born of his own incorrigible hustler’s optimism — was literally one of never-say-die.
As he lay on his deathbed, semi-comatose, he was still thinking ahead,
according to his family, still trying to figure
the angles and asking about the mail, still waiting for a publisher or filmmaker
here or abroad to nibble at one of his overtures, still hoping to get news that he
had received one of those whopping
“genius” grants from the MacArthur
Foundation that he thought, not without reason, he was entitled to.
And he was still able to stay in touch with things and to keep his hand in,
even very late in the game. Once, last week or so, lying abed and seemingly
unconscious, he heard family members and friends grouped around him trying to recall
the punchline to a joke. Struggling to lift his head, he supplied the missing phrase:
“What’s time to a pig?” he said.
Next question: What’s time to a legend?