|
lawyers and literature
Pete Dexter, Paris Trout (New York: Penguin Books, 1989)
 |
Dexter's Paris Trout won the National Book
Award
for Fiction
in 1988.
Paris Trout was made into a film
(starring Dennis
Hooper,
Barbara Hershey and Ed Harris)
in 1992.
[Internet
Movie Database] |
There is a dark, disturbing, dislocating realm of pathology that haunts
us as lawyers (haunts our profession and, perhaps, each of us personally).
Paris Trout offers an opportunity to more fully explore this
"shadow" side of lawyering.
Rosie Sayers
Rosie Sayers is fourteen years old. In her next reincarnation Rosie will be a lawyer. I will need
to say a few things about Rosie Sayers to defend this proposition.
Rosie is not an overly adventurous girl, possessing no beauty she might
parlay into a better life. "She was afraid of things she could
not see and would not leave the house unless she was forced."
[3]. But least we underestimate Rosie, there is the matter of
her inner strength. In the world Rosie inhabits, she has a commendable
sure footedness. She knows how to talk to foxes. She doesn't panic when
bad things happen. After the fox bites her, "[s]he stood up slowly,
collecting her breath, and dusted herself off. She was thorough about
it, she didn't like to be dirty. . . ." [5-6].
Rosie's fear, and who would not be fearful bitten by a fox, breaks through and she cries, but only when
she thinks she may have been poisoned. [6]
Rosie Sayers will not be the only person poisoned in this story. Paris
Trout, seriously paranoid, goes to extraordinary measures to ensure
that his wife, Hanna, will not poison him. Hanna Trout herself has been
so thoroughly poisoned in the life she has tried to make with Paris
Trout that she develops a tolerance for abuse. Even Harry Seagraves,
Cotton Point, Georgia's most prominent and successful attorney, will
fall prey to a poison of sorts.
Rosie Sayers is clever. Cleverness, if one doesn't become overly enamored
with it, is one of those God-given or fate bestowed talents one can
put to good use in a hard world. Perhaps cleverness, like the skilled
rifle shooting that Atticus Finch (in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (New York: Popular Library, 1969))
keeps hidden from his children, is one of those talents best used
by using it little. But then, how can one be clever and disguise it? Many
of us get along without much cleverness at all; as for me, I'm thankful
for the small portions of the good magic I've been endowed. Cleverness
is particularly handy when dealing with those in power, especially those
who have positions where power substitutes for skills.
With Rosie, we have a case study of cleverness. First, there's the
way she intuitively deals with her fear. She must comes to grips with
a fox that has her in its sights, but its her mother that will do the
real damage when she learns Rosie has been unsuccessful in her errand to
buy bullets Paris Trout's store. Rosie fears she will be blamed for what the fox
has done and her fear is well-founded. Rosie "rubbed both her hands on the ground, picking up
orange-colored dust, and covered her legs and her knees, not to draw
attention to the one that was injured." "She put dust on her
elbows and some on her cheeks and neck. Her mother would be angry, to
have her walk into the house dirty when she had a visitor, but she wouldn't
know about the fox." [6]
When the fox attacks, Rosie loses the rifle shells her mother has sent
her into town to purchase at Paris Trout's store. "She stood still
and waited, she didn't know for what. The sun moved in the sky. She
stopped crying; the scared feeling passed and left her calm." [6].
"Her thoughts turned again to the bullets. . . ." [6].
Rosie returns to the store in an effort to replace the lost bullets.
This calmness in the face of real difficulty reminds us again of Atticus
Finch, whose steadiness when the community around him grows turbulent,
leaves the reader with the conviction that Atticus Finch is an authentic
American hero (and one of the most notable lawyers in American fiction).
Scout Finch,
who has sneaked into the Tom Robinson trial along with her brother Jem
and their friend Dill, reports that Atticus argued emotionally charged
cases with calm detachment. In Tom Robinson's rape trial, "Atticus
was proceeding amiably, as if he were involved in a title dispute. With
his infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas, he could make a rape
case as dray as a sermon." [To Kill a Mockingbird, at 171-172]. Later, when Atticus gives his closing argument in the
Tom Robinson trial, he speaks "easily with the kind of detachment
he used when he dictated a letter. He walked slowly up and down in front
of the jury, and the jury seemed to be attentive: their heads were up,
and they followed Atticus's route with what seemed to be appreciation.
I guess it was because Atticus wasn't a thunderer." [205].
Scout, well-versed in the ways of the courthouse and in lawyering, observes
that other lawyers raise their voice, but "I never heard Atticus
raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness." [174]. Atticus, we are told, was not a "thunderer."
Rosie Sayers is not just calm and clever, she's something of a folk philosopher. We see something of a similar
sort in the case of Scout, Jem, and Dill, the children of To Kill
a Mockingbird, who must try to figure out who they are and where
they belong in Maycomb's scheme of things, an Alabama world where folks
can persecute and bring about the conviction and death of an innocent
man and justify it because he's black. I say Rosie is a folk philosopher
first because she's calm in "turbulent seas" and because she
does what philosophers do best--muse and reflect on abstractions like
time. Folk philosophers think about things the rest of us forget.
"Rosie Sayers could not tell time, and her sense of it was that
it belonged to some people and not to others. All the white people had
it, and all the colored people who owned cars." [7].
Later, when Hanna Trout takes Rosie to the clinic to look after her
fox bite, she sees uniformed boys at the military school hurrying about
as if "the same time that belonged to white people crawled all
over them." "She thought she would rather not know anything
about time than to have it crawling all over her." [10].
One pleasure in following the legal exploits and life
of Atticus Finch is that he doesn't have time crawling all over him.
Many lawyers do; it's not a pretty thing to see. But we lawyers (and those who aspire to be lawyers) let
it happen, but we promise ourselves that our troubled relationship with
time will someday (soon) right itself, that some day we'll be in a position
to get time right, to make time serve our true needs, and when we do we'll do only what we want to do, and do it when we want to do it. Even law students are prone
to time troubles. They often complain that law school
steals their time. For others, law school isn't so much a thief of time,
but be a "waste of time"; their time would be better spent, they claim, doing
what real lawyers do, less time studying the abstractions of law. But law students take solace in the fact that the
law school time-warp will eventually straighten itself out, that time
will crawl over them less when they put law school behind them.
I've learned from Rosie Sayers that I too am prone to this culture
dis-ease of time--letting time crawl over me. "When this up-coming
presentation is behind me, I'll have some time to do some reading."
"When I get this course out of the way I'll have time to finish
the book I'm writing." My wife tells people, "Jim is so busy.
I'm not sure he has time." It shocks me to hear her say it; my
first impulse is to deny it. I try to make lawyer-like arguments
to prove she's got it all wrong. "We go anywhere, anytime you want
to go." "Last month we spent the weekend in D.C." I then
try to reassure myself: "it's healthy to have worthwhile
work that gives our days a sense of fullness." I make these claims
to my wife and to myself because I'm fearful she may be
right. When I hear my wife, in her non-accusing way, say "Jim is
busy," I begin to see how astute Rosie Sayers is. Hearing my wife say, "Jim is busy," I feel time the
time crawl over me just like Rosie Sayers says it crawls over the uniformed boys at the military
academy.
Rosie thinks about jumping in front of a train and getting herself out
of a bad situation once and for all time. Will Barrett, the lawyer protagonist
in Walker Percy's The Second Coming (1980) is struggling with
exactly that same impulse--thinking about taking his life--even though
he has been a successful lawyer, respected in the community, and rich
beyond what most of us could imagine. Will Barrett's father,
a lawyer, had also attempted suicide, and eventually succeeded in taking
his own life. Will Barrett contemplates suicide and wonders whether
the world around him is not a bit mad--or farcical as he puts it--a
world in which one can't tell who is crazy and who is not, a world in
which the crazy convince themselves they are ordinary and we're left in doubt about the sanity of ordinary folks. Barrett,
sensing the craziness around him, ultimately finds a way to reject his
father's strategy for dealing with a world always ready to overwhelm
us. Rosie too does what can to survive.
Rosie doesn't jump in front of a train, she realizes that there
is "another person inside her . . . who wanted to jump." "She
wondered if other people had another person inside them too." [7]. I wonder, along with Rosie, about that. I wonder it about myself.
What other persons do I carry around with me, persons I have yet to
meet? I wonder whether lawyers, in order to be lawyers, doing what
lawyers are asked to do, have "another person inside them too."
Rosie, afraid, subject to "spells," seriously abused and mistreated
by her mother and her mother's lovers, knows about time, knows about people.
She knows how to think carefully about the situation she's in and how
to respond to it. When taken to the doctor to be examined for the fox
bite, she's asked by the doctor whether she's been bitten or is just
telling a story. Rosie knows what to
do, what to say: "No sir, I don't tell no stories." [11].
Rosie's certainty on this matter of truth and stories stands in stark
contrast to some of Cotton Point, Georgia's more established citizens.
Paris Trout and his lawyer, Harry Seagraves, for dramatically different
reasons, would have a far more difficult time with the question than
did Rosie Sayers. Neither Harry Seagraves or his client know the difference
between stories and truth; when they do know the difference they
ignore them.
Paris Trout is a novel about stories and truth. It's a story about telling
stories, the stories of clients and lawyers, and the story of a legal
trial where stories and truth collide, collide in a way that makes
it difficult for those telling stories to know whether they've been
bitten by a fox or spinning a tall tale. In a world with so many stories, the collision of sotries is inevitable; we need legal trials to figure out where
the fox ends and the truth begins. Without a trial, how could
we ever devise an agreed-upon-story, for it is stories that must serve
us until we nominate a King for truth-telling? Trials provide a way
to publicly and dramatically sort through the stories (creating new drama
and new stories as we do so) and determine which stories we want to live with
and which stories might bring shame and dishonor when they are told without sanction.
We learn about foxes, stories, and truth, long before we enter the
legal arena of a courtroom. In To Kill a Mockingbird,
Atticus and Miss Stephanie tell radically different stories about Boo Radley. Miss Stephanie's stories pure gossip. Atticus tries to teach his children that they cannot rely upon
all the stories that hear being told, either about Boo Radley or about
him and his representation of Tom Robinson. Atticus tells a different kind of story about Boo Radley by refusing to provide the particulars of his life. In the final pages of To Kill a Mockingbird,
a more dramatic sorting-out-of-stories takes place when Atticus and the
sheriff decide what kind of story is going to be told about Bob Ewell's
death.
In her truthful stance toward stories, Rosie Sayers says, "I don't
tell no stories." Rosie isn't being unimaginative or, like the
children in Miss Caroline's class in To Kill a Mockingbird, "immune"
to the effects of imaginative literature, she is being, again, wise.
Paris Trout, unlike the young Rosie Sayer, has created
as a substitute for truth, his own private reality, a set of working principles
that allows when to tell lies with complete conviction that they are the truth. Paris
Trout, notwithstanding his reckless disregard for the truth, becomes a man of power.
Rosie Sayers, in contrast, quite powerless, has a real sense of ethics when it comes to truth: "I don't tell no stories."
Paris Trout's principles and the story he has told of Rosie Sayer's
death, are contested by Ward Townes, the prosecutor, when he brings
Paris Trout for murdering Rosie Sayers. Harry Seagraves, Paris Trout's lawyer, seems
to move in different directions when it comes to Trout's principles.
Seagraves is a good lawyer, perhaps the best in the county, and he knows
how to represent a client and create a plausible story. "Harry Seagraves had the largest law practice in Ether County"
and "hundreds of clients.")[13]. Seagraves is good not simply
because he has plenty of clients but because, as he puts it: "I
take pleasure in the work I do, and I do it better than most."
[210]. Seagraves may be self-deluded about his skills, but I assume
otherwise. (See e.g., his cross examination of the prosecution witnesses at Paris Trout's murder trial.) I think it possible to be good at what you do, know it, and
still not suffer from arrogance. Harry Seagrave's problem is not arrogance. (One trouble with being good and
knowing it is that it often results in ceaseless self-promotion which
may, paradoxically undermine what one is trying to promote.)
It's possible that Harry Seagraves is a good lawyer
only in the sense that he can represent a man like Paris Trout and not
let his client's lies stand in the way of providing him legal representation.
You can be sure there's no love lost between Harry Seagraves and his infamous client.
Seagraves doesn't represent Paris Trout because he likes him, respects him,
or shares his world-view. It's hard to find in Paris Trout much to appreciate;
he's a peculiar, obsessive, paranoid, and violent man. Overly identifying with Paris
Trout will not be Harry Seagraves's problem. The problem, we want to say, is that the good lawyer Harry Seagraves has lost Rosie Sayer's desire to avoid untrue stories. Lawyers, at least some
lawyers, claim to be able to represent clients and not be saddled with
the client's questionable perceptions of reality and absence of morals.
Lawyers take on clients and assume they can erect a Chinese Wall between
themselves and the client, that they can shield themselves from a client's
poisoned view of the world. And, we know that the wall, too often relied
upon, will fail you. We know it failed Harry Seagraves.
Paris Trout could care less that a young
girl has been sent to town for a box of rifle shells and will be in
serious trouble with her momma when she returns home without them. When
Rosie explains to Paris Trout why she has returned for a second box
of shells--she has, after all been bitten by a fox--he suggests it must
have been a dog. When Hanna Trout tells Paris that Rosie needs to see
a doctor, Paris says, "Her people got doctors. . . ." [9]. Paris Trout creates a world in which the only truth is the sound
of his own speaking.
Rosie is taken to the clinic by Hanna Trout where she is treated no
better than the dog that did not bite her. The nurse, prejudice to the
core, deals with Rosie Sayers as a non-person, an object. "Rosie
could see from [the nurse's] . . . expression that she did not enjoy
to wash a colored girl's legs." [12]. "It
took her longer to scrub her hands than it had to clean the bites."
[12]. The doctor, even more shockingly calloused,
scares Rosie into changing her story, doing what she says she won't
do--tell a story. She does what must be done and tells the doctor it was a dog rather
than a fox that bit her so she can avoid the torture of the long needle
the doctor proposes to stick in her stomach should it happen to be a
fox that bite her. [12]
Rosie's mother, confronted with a child who has failed to carry out
the simple task she was assigned, and got herself poisoned along the way, simply abandons her. In Rosie's mother's demented mind, Rosie is a child of Satan and must be banished from the house [15-16]; she is literally given away as a present to Alvin Crooms, a sometimes
lover, to do with as he pleases. [18-21]
Mary McNutt
In this dark hour of abandonment Rosie is rescued by a "woman
[who] took the girl into her care." [22].
Mary McNutt saves Rosie Sayers and provides her shelter in the house
where Rosie will be brutally murdered and Mary McNutt shot and left
for dead.
Mary McNutt is Henry Ray Boxer's mother. Henry Ray has taken it upon
himself to buy a car from Paris Trout, a car he can't afford, a car
he will pay for with money Paris Trout loans him. Paris Trout is in
the business of loaning money, in the business of using the dark skills
needed to collect on his loans when customers don't or can't pay. Paris,
a hard man, is not stupid, at least in matters of business. He tells
Henry Ray, "You can't pay for no car." [23].
But Henry Ray has a new job at the insane asylum and he's full of pride.
"I need a car." [23]. Paris Trout takes
the kind of precautions a man takes when he knows things may not turn
out well. He questions Henry Ray carefully about making this deal, and
Henry Ray assures him he does. But the reassurance is brought on by
pride, and the absence of the cleverness we found in Rosie Sayers. Henry
Ray is confident while Rosie is shy, full of himself, while Rosie is
a doubting child.
The first thing Henry Ray does with his new car is pick up Rosie Sayers.
He has in mind having sex with her, rape if necessary. Henry Ray knows
just enough about whose stories hold up in a community to know that
whatever he does to Rosie, its going to be unlikely that she'll be able
or willing to tell a story that will get him into trouble. Indeed, Rosie
Sayers, is beyond that space in which a story about rape would find
anyone who could hear it. There are some stories we are not allowed
by society to tell, regardless of whether they are true or not. Indeed,
in some instances, we do not have the ability to reach into the walled
off psychological space where the truth is known so it can be encoded
in a story. For example, we learn just enough of Paris Trout's relation
to his mother, his paranoia, and his business to realize that whatever
his story may be, it will never be told (barring some crime and a defense
of insanity).
Henry Ray, setting off to have sex with Rosie Sayers, to rape her if
she resists, has a fateful car wreck, in that ever so new purchase made
possible by a Trout loan. Henry Ray is no better prepared to deal with
the accident than he is to sexually assault Rosie Sayers. He tries to
walk away from both. Henry Ray isn't clever, nor does he have the basic
skills that Rosie Sayers has. With Rosie, Henry Ray is most concerned
about convincing her not to try to tell "stories" on him.
[29, 30]. As for the car, well in the confused
mind of Henry Ray, it's just a matter of returning the wrecked car to
Paris Trout and letting the "insurance" Paris gave him cover
the loan. Henry Ray doesn't know Paris Trout.
Of course, it's not going to work out for Henry Ray since his plan
requires a level of honest dealings unknown to Paris Trout. Rosie, powerless
and not a girl to cause trouble, is again caught in the middle of big
trouble. Henry Ray, having none of Rosie's street smarts and ability
to understand others, is hell-bent on causing trouble for himself. He's
so willful, full of pride, and not good at getting himself out of tight
spots. After the accident, "Henry Ray was a crazy man." [31].
Rosie, who was with Henry Ray at the time of the accident is still with
him when he attempts to return the car to Paris Trout. Rosie knows what
Henry Ray seem to have no capacity to understand--Paris Trout is not
a man to subject to boisterous, self-indulgent, cleverness. Henry Ray
tells Rosie, "I paid the man his insurest, he got to fix the car."
Rosie says, "You gone tell Mr. Trout that?" [33].
Rosie, with innocent wisdom, knows there is no future for Henry Ray
in trying to collect insurance from Paris Trout. She tells him, as they
enter Trout's store: "They ain't nothing in here for us. . . .
I been in here before." Henry Ray, willful, full of himself, proud
in the defensive way that creates nothing but trouble, thinks he can
take care of the matter. "You just tell him [Trout] what you see."
But Rosie knows. "He don't care what I seen." [33].
Henry Ray, being Henry Ray, "paid no attention" to Rosie Sayers.
[33]
Later, on the way home, after Henry Ray and Paris Trout have staked
out their respective positions on the car and the debit owed to Trout,
Rosie tells Henry Ray, "I wished we'd took the car home. . ."
[35]. But Henry Ray will hear nothing of the
sort. "Henry Ray Boxer don't drive no tore-up car." [35].
Rosie knows that "Mr. Trout gone want his money" and "will
come to get himself." [35]. Henry Ray seems
totally oblivious to what Rosie Sayers sees and knows.
Mary McNutt knows about her son, Henry Ray, what Rosie is so quickly
learning. Mary, like Rosie, is wise in difficult matters that often
elude a mother, her son's character.
"The problem with Henry Ray is partly in his blood," she
said finally, "and partly that he believe he got to be more than
he is."
The girl [Rosie] did not understand and was not even sure the woman
was speaking to her at all.
"They're some people walk around all the time taller than they
is,"
Miss Mary said. "They fool you and me, and sometime they fooled
themself, and then one day a thing can happen and they try and catch
up all at once to what they pretend to be. They go off blind to the
world. . . ." She closed her eyes and grabbed at things that
wasn't there.
"Henry Ray don't know how to look at nobody else and understand
them," she said, "because he don't know what he look like
himself."
Rosie did not interrupt--it seemed to her that Miss Mary was thinking
something out--but if Henry Ray didn't know what he looked like, she
didn't know who did. He spent more time in front of mirrors than anybody
alive.
Miss Mary took it a different direction. "Paris Trout is a weak
man," she said.
"Mr. Trout?"
"Inside," she said, and tapped herself on the chest. "Inside,
he's as weak as Henry Ray."
"He scart me," the girl said.
Miss Mary nodded and looked over at her in a slow, tired way. "That's
your common sense talkin'" she said. "That man scare anybody
got common sense."
Miss Mary closed her eyes and rested against the trunk of the tree.
She did not seem afraid of Mr. Trout or anything else.
"You stronger than Mr. Trout," the girl said after a while.
"The woman smiled without opening her eyes. "Yes, I am,"
she said.
"You ain't scart of him."
"Oh, yes," she said, "I am that too."
[36-37]
Rosie confides in Miss Mary her fear her mother will come to reclaim
her. Miss Mary wants to know if Rosie is still having bad dreams, and
Rosie tells her she doesn't.
The woman bit the corner of her lip. "I tell you what,"
she said, "whenever you get scart, you come to me."
"You keep me away from my momma?"
"I don't know," she said, "but I will be there with
you when she come." [38]
Two weeks later, Miss Mary and Rosie Sayers are gunned down by Paris
Trout. Miss Mary offers solace and the comfort of a shared belief that
they will go to a place with less sorrow than they have known on earth,
as she waits to die.
Harry Seagraves
The madness of Paris Trout's killing rampage is perfectly juxtaposed
against the life of one of Cotton Point's most successful lawyers, Harry
Seagraves. Harry graduated from the University of Georgia in 1934 and
has the largest law practice in Ether County; "there were hundreds
of clients." [131]
In the morning Harry Seagraves walked to work. He followed the sidewalks
to the college, speaking to everyone he met, and crossed the campus
on a diagonal to Davis Street. His office was half a block up, on
the second floor of the Dixie Theater Building, and you would never
know, looking at the building or the offices inside it, that his was
one of the richest and most successful law practices in the state.
[55]
When Harry Seagraves receives news of the shooting he "sat still
and tried to think of a way of removing himself from this before it
began." [45-46]. While Harry Seagraves
looks for a way to say no to this case (the kind of case a young lawyer
might take on for the opportunity it provides to make a name for himself).
D.T. Jones, the divorce lawyer in Stephen Greenleaf's The Ditto List
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), for example has fantasies of a "routine"
case
that would burgeon into a great litigious engine that would unearth
someone, somewhere, who could be directed by an appropriate court
to compensate D.T. for each and every minute of his time. . . . Then
he could live the way half the lawyers he knew were living--from the
proceeds of that one big case, a sinecure that had fallen into their
undeserving laps like a starling struck by lightning and had nevertheless
generated, despite their persistent lassitude and seamless incompetence,
a fee of an outrageous and easily sheltered six figures.
[19]
Paris Trout will prove to be no windfall and Harry Seagraves knows
it. This case, like one waiting for every lawyer, will test him.
This is the way Harry Seagraves defines the situation he finds himself
in:
Seagraves, DuBois, Clatterfield & Spudd, represented most of
the old and the rich families in Cotton Point, the families that lived
in the houses on Draft Street, families like his own. He was part
of their safety. Paris Trout was not of that group socially--he had
no social affiliations--but he owned property and lumber interests
and the store and was known to have money. His sister was a court
clerk. [46]
The problem is compounded by the fact that Seagraves has represented
Paris Trout in other matters. Paris Trout is no stranger to Harry Seagraves
and that is itself a problem. (Lawyers will, of course, do for strangers
what they would never do themselves. Lawyers are, in this way, well,
odd.) Since Seagraves had represented Trout before, "in half a
dozen civil suits," he "did not see how he could turn him
away now. The obligation was not so much to Trout as to the families
on Draft Street, who counted his protection as a constant."
[46]. Seagraves is honest on a point many lawyers want to deny;
he represents not just a single client but a way of life when represents
Paris Trout. Of course, the lawyer accused of this sort of thing has
a ready defense, he's representing not so much a way of life as a protection
afforded by the Constitution. But Harry Seagraves knows that his practice
has evolved to represent more than constitutional guarantees for a man
charged with a brutal murder; Seagraves represents the status quo grown
accustomed to its ways and its prejudices. When the law protects the
folk ways of a place and a time, it uses the law to protect privileges
which are being threatened.
Harry Seagraves knows that this is a case the town will be watching.
It may be that every town comes around, in its own way, to an O.J. Simpson
trial. "Draft Street would watch what happened to him and fear
for itself." [47]
Lawyers sometimes take cases and learn the full magnitude of what they
are being asked to do only as the case progresses. Lawyers take cases
for all kinds of reasons and sometimes for no reason at all. Whatever
the reason, a lawyer is expected to seek out those facts that, with
the active help of the client, make it possible to tell a plausible
story. Lawyers know how to engage in the fine art of legal story-telling
to insure that the client gets the possible reading of his situation.
Lawyers become so well versed in rearranging a client's story that they
sometimes push well beyond the principle of story-telling proclaimed
by Rosie Sayers: "I don't tell no stories." Lawyers often
become such fanciful fictionists that their work is something akin to
that of the novelists. For lawyers, foxes that bite clients become dogs
in exactly the same fashion as the fox that bites Rosie Sayer becomes
a dog in the eyes of Paris Trout and the doctor who examines her. Driven
by fear (and our clients are often possessed by fear), Rosie finally
tells a story even when she claims she will not. Rosie holds as best
she can to the notion--"I don't tell no stories"--but she
isn't able to live up to her principles when faced with the doctor's
long needle that will be used to puncture her body if she tells "no
story" and stands by her claim that she has been bitten by a fox.
Harry Seagraves knows enough about the other man involved in the shootings,
Buster Devonne, to know that his client's account of the shootings is
vulnerable. Buster, Seagraves knows, has been a policeman and "he'd
hurt a number of colored people without reason."
[46-47]. "Buster Devonne was a dog off his leash."
[48]. Buster and Paris may have both been involved
in the shooting but Seagraves assumes that Paris Trout is "principled,
in his way. . . ."[47]. Harry tells Ward
Townes, the prosecutor, "Buster Devonne is a known liar."
[56]. The story a lawyer tells on behalf of
his client is threatened by lies of various sorts, lies built-in to
the story told by the client, and the competing lies that others will
try to tell. Buster Devonne has already been relieved of his position
on the police force for assaulting Negroes. "He went from that
to cotton stealing. . . ." [57]. Buster
is simply no-good and everybody in town knows it. Buster is a real threat
to whatever story Paris Trout might tell that would absolve him of the
shootings.
Lawyers have a way--a professional skill--of trying to find some redeeming
feature in even the most behavior and the most unsavory of clients.
Ideally, they detect some out-of-the-way bit of character or humanness,
a fragment of a lost self, that will lend credence to the idea that
time spent with the client and work on behalf of the client's case represents
something beyond a fee for a service. Harry Seagraves represents Paris
Trout for all the reasons we might expect of a lawyer of his station
and level of success. But there may be more. "Harry Seagraves had
been around the law long enough to hold a certain affection for those
who did not respect it, but his affection, as a rule, was in proportion
to the distance they kept from his practice."
[47]. Paris Trout is a law unto himself; he's created a private
legal order.
Paris Trout would refuse to see it, that it was wrong to shoot a
girl and a woman. There was a contract he'd made with himself a long
time ago that overrode the law, and being the only interested party,
he lived by it. He was principled in the truest way. His right and
wrong were completely private. [47]
There are early signs and warnings that things will not turn out well:
-- Before ever talking with Paris Trout about the shootings: "Harry
Seagraves sat still and tried to think of a way of removing himself
from this before it began." [45-46]
-- Seagraves finds the "news of what he [Paris Trout] had done
was disquieting in a way. . . ." [49]
-- He is sexually attracted to Hanna Trout, his client's wife. [54]
-- When he imagines the trial that will follow "something in
it tugged at him." [58]
-- Meeting with Paris Trout to discuss the case; "he wished
Paris Trout was somebody else's client. This had a feeling he didn't
like, that he was drawn into something further than he ought to be."
[59]
-- Trout insists on knowing how much Harry Seagraves' services are
going to cost him. They talk, in a desultory sort of way, about money.
Finally: "He did not want to be in the room with Trout and what
he had done. . . ." [61]
-- When Paris Trout finally gets around to giving Harry Seagraves
a full account of what happened in the house [61-65],
Trout tries to justify the violence by telling Seagraves that Mary
McNutt and Rosie Sayers had guns. Harry asked Paris about the guns
and Paris tells him yes they had them. "Seagraves heard the lie
in that." [62]. Later, when asked about
whether the women touched the guns and is told yes, "Seagraves
heard the false sound in that, and Ward Townes would hear it too."
[64]
-- Later, when Seagraves and Trout are discussing the matter and
Hanna Trout overhears them, she muses that her husband, Paris, "was
not a good liar" and his words in describing the events that
took place in the house sounded "unnatural and practiced."
[98]
-- Visiting Rosie Sayers, at the clinic, and seeing her condition
close up: "Seagraves felt a panic loose somewhere inside himself."
[69]. When Seagraves visits Rosie Sayers at
the clinic he has the gun Trout has used in his pocket; he wants to
turn the gun over to the prosecutor personally. When he is told that
Rosie Sayers has just died: "He felt the gun then, a secret in
his pocket. And the secret settled on him with a weight, distinct
from the gun." [70]
-- Visiting the McNutt house where the shootings took place: "He
imagined Trout, stooping to fit himself into this place where he did
not belong." [71]. "Paris Trout had
come into this room, where there wasn't anything, and taken a child's
life." [71]
-- He can't get the picture of Rosie Sayers out of his mind. [74,
75, 82, 129, 200, 202, 203, 218]
-- Shown photos of Rosie Sayer by Ward Townes, photos he will introduce
at trial, Seagraves finds himself with "a taste in his mouth
that would not wash out." [130] [On
the "taste" of bad times, see The Death
of Ivan Ilych]
-- Even after a gun has been found at the Mary McNutt house and Harry
Seagraves has begin to put together a defense for Paris Trout, "there
was something resilient in the nature of what had happened--perhaps
in the nature of the girl herself--that returned again and again as
Seagraves prepared his case and informed him that something was headed
wrong." [132]
-- During the trial, after the appearance of Thomas and Henry Ray
Boxer as witnesses: "Something was wrong with the case, the same
thing was wrong with him. There was a confusion that defied order,
and Paris Trout was in the middle of it, getting clearer all the time."
[157]
-- Talking with Hanna Trout, after the trial and an unfavorable decision
in his appeal of Trout's guilty verdict:
"I am bothered by the case I tried for your husband,"
he said. "Aspects of it have transcended the courtroom and
have not left me alone since." [202].
Explaining the "aspects" to Hanna Trout:
'The girl herself." . . . . "Somehow I've obligated myself
to her. The meaning of what has happened will not settle one place
or another. It moves, again and again, so I never know where to
expect her or when she will intrude on my thoughts." [202].
"There was a moment today," he said, "when I felt
a remorse as strong as if I had shot her myself." [202]
-- On his dealings with Paris Trout, after the trial: "I dread
to see him, without knowing why." [210]
This is one of those stories in which the reader knows what Harry Seagraves
does not and we are left to ponder how, with some many intimations along
the way, Seagraves could have let himself be pulled into this situation.
Finally, however, he is able to articulate what has plagued him: "What
I overlooked with you," Seagraves said, "is what you did."
[220]. This is exactly what Seagraves tries to
overlook in his work as a lawyer on Paris Trout's behalf. We see most
clearly how he is able to overlook what his client has done when Seagraves
tries to explain himself and his actions to Hanna Trout:
"My husband is an aberration. It is not normal to shoot children.
Whatever effort is made to lend that appearance, it does not change
the perversion itself but only asks that the perversion be shared.
I will not be party to the shooting of children."
He said, "What if I proved that your husband was defending his
life by discharging those shots?"
Her expression turned unfriendly. "You can't prove what didn't
happen," she said.
"It's for a court of law to determine."
She shook her head. "There is no story you can tell in your
court that will change what happened in that house." . . . .
"That is a misperception," he said, "that an act is,
of itself, a crime or a perversion. It becomes such only after it
is judged." He had no idea why he was explaining this to her.
He saw that she had begun to smile again, as if she were judging
him. "The misperception," she said, "is that the law,
and lawyers, decide what already happened." [136]
Notes <1> Paris Trout (1998) was Pete Dexter's third book. It won the National Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A comment on the writing of Paris Trout, by Pete Dexter: "I hate computers. Paris Trout, I lost that whole long middle section, one hundred ten pages. It was replaced by one line of bright yellow smiley faces at the end of it. I had to rewrite it all. But I didn't even like computers before that. That was the first book I ever wrote on one, thinking, Oh boy, this is great. I don't have to retype. I don't have anything against computers, but I don't like reading about them; I don't like reading about cell phones, all the technical stuff." Pete Dexter's L.A. Noir, an interview by Dave Weich, Powells.com.
<2> Commentary: Robert
Batey, Alienation by Contract in Paris Trout, 35 S. Tex. L. Rev.
289 (1994)
<3> Lawyers are offered an opportunity and a
justification for leading a compartmentalized life. Lawyers claim to
have their own brand of ethics, a professional morality (gounded in
an "adversarial ethic") that permits them to avoid moral censure
for violation of the tenets of ordinary morality. Hanna Trout tells
Harry Seagraves to drop her husband as a client. Harry tells her he
can't and that it would be unethical. "You can't just get rid of
a client because you don't like what he did. Not after a guilty verdict.
The time for that is before you take the case."
Hanna Trout points out that he has gotten rid of Paris. Seagraves responds
with the rhetoric that so many lawyers use: "That's personal, this
is business." Hanna responds, "We're all only one person.
. . . You can't separate what you do one place from another." Harry
tells her, "I have to . . . I'm a lawyer." [203]
<4> Paris Trout was adapted for the screen by Pete Dexter, and the film turns out rather well. ["Paris Trout" (1991) -- Rotten Tomatoes]
<5> Pete Dexter and the authors which his readers read. [Literature-Map]
<6> Rosie Sayers, the wise-beyond-her-years 14 year old, in Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout sees the soldier boys in their uniforms, sees them running around the Georgia Officer Academy and thinks: “she would rather not know anything about time than to have it crawling all over her.” Peter Dexter, Paris Trout 10 (New York: Penguin Books, 1988) (Dexter tells us: “Rosie Sayers could not tell time, and her sense of it was that it belong to some people and not to others. All the white people had it, and all the colored people who owned cars.” Id. at 7).
We see this problem of time, the problem we have with time, as a motif in several Lowell Komie stories. The lawyer in Komie's "The Cornucopia of Julia K.," Julia Latham Kiefer, is a thirty-two year old trial lawyer, involved in a securities litigation case. We know something’s astray early on in the story when Julia tells us she feels like she’s “fallen into some kind of time trough.” The previous week she’s been “ten minutes late for everything” and now it’s twenty minutes, “an irretrievable twenty minutes.” But we’re all time stressed, time deprived, time obsessed—this is a condition of modernity—there’s no deep-lying neurosis to be prescribed based on the fact that we seem constantly to be running late. Or maybe there is. The question is: “what do we do with time and what does time do to us.” Mark Strand, Hopper 25 (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press,1994)(meditations on the paintings of Edward Hopper).
I’ve long admired the graceful writing of Robert Grudin which I first discovered by way his book, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation. In The Grace of Great Things, a book about creativity, Grudin's chapters include meditations on: inspiration, discovery, analysis, imagination, beauty, integrity, pain, courage, self-knowledge, freedom. One might wish that Grudin had given us, in The Grace of Great Things, a chapter on the “problem of time.” But then, if you have amassed a good working library, it's always possible find someone who has addressed your "problem." James Ogilvy, came to my attention with his 1977 book, Many Dimensional Man, and then, it was almost twenty years later that Ogilvy took up Grudin’s concerns—“Finding the Freedom To Live a Creative and Innovative Life”—which turns out to be the subtitle to Ogilvy’s 1995 book, Living Without A Goal. [See James Oglivy, Living Without A Goal: Finding the Freedom To Live a Creative and Innovative Life (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995)]. For lawyers (students of law, their professors, friends of same)(anyone deep into the morass of the modern day problem with time), we might prescribe Oglivy's book.
After I wrote this note, I was puzzled that it was thinking about time that lead me to Grudin, and my disappointment at finding that his book, The Grace of Great Things did not include a chapter on time. It would be several days later before I found a reference to Robert Grudin's
Time and the Art of Living (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). It seems that Grudin had indeed written the chapter I sought in his work, only it was in the form of still another book. I can, knowing the book exists, picture it perfectly well, and I'm confident I read the book somewhere along the way. I've searched my idiosyncratically shelved library on several occasions now and can't find the Grudin book.
And then, a sunny winter day in early March--03.07.06--I'm reading Walker Percy's The Second Coming, and find, Allison, the young woman who shares the spotlight with Will Barrett, the lawyer in the book, observing that there are "two kinds of people." The two kinds, according to Allison: "There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeeded." [Walker Percy, The Second Coming 30 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980)]. Later Allison says tha like the "youngish people" she's observing: "For her, too, it was a question of time. What would she do with time?" [Id. at 31]
 The
Burden of Truth: Reconciling Literary Reality with Professional Mythology
exploring John Grisham's The Rainmaker
Violence in American Myth, Imagination & Lit.
[an essay, by Jayne Anne Phillips, who was born &
raised in West Virginia and attended
West Virginia
University]
Pete Dexter
Wikipedia
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