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Doghouse Roses by Steve
Earle
(Secker & Warburg. Pbck. 207pp. ISBN
0-436-27605-4)
by Mark
Mordue
Anyone witness to a recent solo live tour by the rock musician Steve Earle
would have no qualms telling you about the greatness this aching bear of a man exuded on
stage. Drawing on elements of folk, country and blues, this 'roots' performer summoned up
a peculiarly troubled form of American heroism and its troubadour, protest spirit, echoing
a lineage from Lightning Hopkins to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
A lot of fans were prone to read between the lines of his maverick tales for the personal
shadows that motivated them: the wandering teenage years; the drug problems and time spent
in jail that all but destroyed his significant early promise; the six ruined marriages;
and the way the 45 year old had gone straight in the last seven years to produce what Nick
Hornby in the New Yorker called "the relaunch of... one of the most creatively
successful careers in contemporary American music," noting this "renewed version
of Earle gives every impression of wanting to claw back the years he wasted."
Aside from his dedication to the cause of ending capital punishment in the USA, Earle also
teaches songwriting, runs an independent record label, writes for theatre, and here has
produced his first collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses. With a dash of black
humour perhaps these tales are offered much like the antagonist's gifts of flowers in the
title story - as compensation for bad behaviour and emotional damage. As expected certain
stories feel like fleshed out and over-extended versions of his songs, but even in the
weaknesses one still senses the same lyrical drive that Michael Ondaatje described, in
almost awestruck terms, as "his songs of furious loss".
Doghouse Roses begins powerfully enough with a clearly semi-autobiographical tale about a
country musician addicted to heroin and crack cocaine, being ferried out of L.A. by his
emotionally exhausted record company girlfriend. There's a striking sense of silence and
space to this depressed road story, the existential apartness of the self-absorbed junkie
who can't rise from his habits, well captured in the metaphor of a desert drive at night
and a lingering sadness that can't be resolved. It's a knockout.
Elsewhere though Earle telegraphs his conclusions, their obviousness and forced neatness,
way too easily. This spoils 'Wheeler County', the tale of a drifter who sets down roots,
with an unnecessarily clichéd last ride and mars the post-Vietnam War encounter story,
'The Reunion', with some tidy coincidences that do nothing for what otherwise might have
been a fine two-hander about veterans from opposite sides of the fence coping with the
culture of death, duty and damage from which they spring.
There's also a sizeable ego at work in Earle's stories, a self-romanticizing that can get
laborious and surprisingly self-oblivious - especially from an otherwise acute observer of
human nature. There's a less surprising anger underlining that ego as well, but it doesn't
finally carry what I'd call the repulsive puritanism in 'Billy the Kid', the story of a
Nashville Jeff Buckley meets Gram Parsons who is never discovered because of a tragically
premature death and the friends who elect to destroy his recording tapes to protect him
from industry corruption. It reads as an Earle revenge fantasy, an aesthetic suicide wish,
and the beatific tone doesn't wash it clean.
Earle is also prone to undramatic expositions of fact - sometimes in the guise of rather
stiff conversations - that lay undigested within certain stories and break the mood
completely. But I feel like I'm being terribly harsh when this book also offers so much.
It ends with a devastating story about the husband of a murder-victim witnessing an
execution, Earle moving through the details of character, crime and punishment like a
smooth-idling long black limousine. As in 'Doghouse Roses', 'The Witness' rings with
semi-autobiographical intensity (Earle witnessed the execution of a friend on death row)
as well his tough poetic eye:
"The last six miles of the drive from the city out to the state penitentiary was a
dark, lonely stretch of two-lane blacktop winding through a no-man's land of second-growth
timber and fallow farmland - a kind of airlock between the prison and the free
world."
If this was the first book of an unknown writer, you'd be watching to see how he developed
and mark him into a territory still in the shade of Hemingway, Carver, Ford and Banks.
It'll certainly be interesting to see if Earle can both elaborate on and resist the
sketch-point power of his songwriting in his story telling on the page and take it up
another notch. The signs are he can.
For the moment we have a very flawed, at times annoying collection with a few killer
punches and the need for a much tougher editor (arguing with Mr Earle would be no easy
task to be sure). Beyond that we might contemplate the way Earle's stories still have an
emotional impact even when they show so many flaws. The reason, simply enough, is a highly
committed voice, surprisingly political, behind the tales - a sense of belief that more
refined writers could do well to consider when the smoothness of their words overruns the
heart they've left behind. Fortunately for us, Steve Earle still wears his on his sleeve.
~~~
Mark Mordue is the author of
‘Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip’ (Allen & Unwin Book Publishers; Sydney 2001).
He has been published in The Nation, Interview, Salon and Planet.
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