‘Shepard didn’t do hope, had a bleak worldview’

In Sam Shepard: A Life (Counterpoint Press, 2017), veteran journalist, critic and academic John J. Winters attempts, with great success, to put Sam Shepard in sharper focus. Winters says it was a “daunting subject” to undertake as a biographer. The reason: the many artistic fields in which Shepard triumphed, with a wide array of plays, short stories, and screenplays. “His acting career on its own is impressive enough to warrant a biography,” he says. Winters says he wanted to write about Shepard’s life and work, and to find the “connections between the two”. He says: “It was never meant to be an academic study of his work.” Shepard, says Winters, will be remembered as a singularly original playwright, and as a much-beloved actor. “The quintet of family plays — Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind — guarantee his place in the pantheon of great American playwrights. As an actor, The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, Voyager, Blackthorn and a handful of other roles will secure his place as an actor who brought something special and powerful to the screen,” says the biographer.

THE PUNCH: Your interest in Shepard was triggered by the song Brownsville Girl which Shepard co-wrote with Bob Dylan on the latter’s 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. Tell us about your first impression of the song and how it whetted your interest in Shepard?

JOHN J. WINTERS: It’s a great song, and it stands out on the album by its quality, length and production (some would say overproduction). As a devoted reader of music features and reviews, I remember how every critic who reviewed that album seemed to make a fuss over the fact that Dylan had co-written “Brownsville Girl” with playwright Sam Shepard. At first I wondered why Dylan, the greatest songwriter in the world, needed a writing partner. And if he did, why this guy? The name Sam Shepard was easy to remember, so I began keeping an eye out, and soon found out he was also an actor. When I began reviewing theater a few years later, I sought out his plays and found a great affinity for them. Ultimately, in my mind, Shepard completed a trio that included Beckett and Pinter. Not bad company. 

THE PUNCH: What traits of Shepard’s personality — you write that he was a “magnetic, enigmatic, and multitalented artist who drew on a deep well of loneliness and self-questioning, keen attunement to the zeitgeist, and penetrating insight into human nature”; — did fascinate you the most?

JOHN J. WINTERS: Most come to Shepard believing that the image is the man. I think Sam learned a thing or two from Dylan about creating a mystique, hence people’s idea of Shepard was of this cowboy poet who came riding in off the plain, put down these amazing plays and stories, and then rode off again into the sunset. When you peek behind the public persona, reading his letters and journal entries, it becomes very apparent that he suffers from the same feelings of inadequacy of the rest of us. Despite his accomplishments, he feels himself an imposter (Beckett also described himself this way). When Lange would leave him to go shoot a movie, Shepard reports being incredibly bereft and anxious. The other thing that fascinated me about Shepard is that he is a seeker. He had a keen intellect and throughout his life he sought the answers to the biggest — and most basic — questions. Gurdjieff, Beckett and altered states of mind are just a few places he searched.

THE PUNCH: What was his relationship with the three women — O-Lan Jones and Jessica Lange, both actors he married, and Patti Smith with whom he had a brief affair — like? How did the three women, and Shepard himself, view their relationship?

JOHN J. WINTERS: Actually he and Lange were never married. He’d proposed and given her a ring and once or twice set a date, but it never happened. Perhaps that should tell us something. As for O-Lan and Jessica, they must have known of Shepard’s womanizing. A handful of people I’d interviewed shared some of these details. This, of course, is part of being famous for many men, plus Shepard came of age during the Free Love era. O-Lan’s memoir is due out soon and perhaps we’ll get a better idea of her side of things. As for Patti Smith, she and Shepard were cut from the same cloth. Both were seekers who put great stock in books and art and the transcendent possibilities contained therein. They had a profound effect on each other: Shepard goaded her into singing her poems, and she introduced him to a world of global literature, including the French Symbolist poets.

THE PUNCH: When Shepard and Jones had briefly moved to London, he had met the director Peter Brook, who introduced his to the teachings of GI Gurdjieff, the philosopher, and encouraged him to think more closely about character in his writing. In what ways do you think Gurdjieff shaped his writing? Who are the other writers and playwrights who might have influenced the course of his writing career?

JOHN J. WINTERS: Shepard probably first heard of Gurdjieff from his in-laws. When he met Peter Brook around 1971 in London, he encountered a true believer, and he was smitten. Gurdjieff was a self-proclaimed mystic who taught that man is asleep and developed techniques to wake him up. These included self-observation and other exercises. Gurdjieff also believed that each individual has multiple “I”s inside, which Shepard read as man’s double nature. Gurdjieff’s belief system — known as The Work — goes into some pretty wild and abstract stuff. Shepard, I believe, never went further than the basics, and the belief that we sleepwalk through life and that every man has competing sides to his personality. These are manifest in many of Shepard’s plays: characters are said to be acting like zombies or sleepwalking, they are in trances or act disconnected from their surroundings. I think of plays like Angel City and Action. As for double nature, nowhere is this more apparent than in True West. The two brothers at the play’s center seem to trade places for a time, with the straight-laced Austin taking to drinking and stealing, and the n’er-do-well Lee giving up his old ways in order to try and be a screenwriter like his brother. Many lesser characters in Shepard’s post-London parade demonstrate shifting personalities and identities. These elements lend a strangeness and sense of mystery to Shepard’s plays. As far as other influences, Beckett and jazz basically sums it up. He also saw a few plays after arriving in New York from which he found inspiration: LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman, and Peter Brook’s American production of Marat/Sade.