Philip Lee Williams

I thoroughly enjoyed Williams' first memoir, CROSSING WILDCAT RIDGE, so was eager to read this one, IT IS WRITTEN. And I was quickly charmed by and absorbed in his description of his southern childhood in small town Georgia, the middle child of an educator and a social services caseworker. The author grew up surrounded by books and classical music. His college years are spent at the University of Georgia (UGA), where he met his wfe, Linda, and soon switched his concentration from music to literature and history, and began an early career in journalism, working at various small newspapers in the region around Athens. His stories of early, seedy apartments and social gatherings and drinking with friends and coworkers brought back memories of my own - BYO parties and potlucks with other financially strapped married students. And then more about his early years in the newspaper biz, newly married, learning his trade and experiencing small defeats and successes. And all of this time he also made time to write, first poetry, and then prose. His breakthrough came in his early thirties, with the publication of his novel, THE HEART OF A DISTANT FOREST, which enjoyed considerable success. And his next novel, ALL THE WESTERN STARS, promised even greater things when it was optioned for a film version. Sadly, the film never got made, although the machinations - scripts written and scrapped, actors like Lemmon, Newman and Garner in and out of the deal, etc. - dragged on for several years, giving Williams opportunities to run shoulders with Hollywood rich and famous and celebrities, a heady experience for a small town Georgia boy.

Indeed, from the time of his first novel 's publication onward, name-dropping of celebrities, from the world of letters, publishing and entertainment, often takes center stage, to a point where it became an annoying distraction from Williams' own story. There is, for example, a long, rambling section about a project he worked on with country singer-songwriter, Bill Anderson, that never came to anything, but he got to meet other Nashville stars and visit the Opry's Ryman Auditorium. And too much time is spent on his ongoing friendship with producer, "Dick" Zanuck.

Williams spends a lot of time telling of the writing of all of his poetry, stories and novels - some published, some not. He also speaks again about his various health problems over the years, some of it repeated from his first memoir. I stayed engaged through nearly 250 pages, but then the recital of numerous awards and honors received, as well as his pride in his work and family became repetitious and often tedious, reading almost like a eulogy for a prominent Southern writer. So, yeah, I will confess that I started skim-reading the last hundred-plus pages.

Bottom line: I enjoyed the heck out of Williams' story, until it went on a bit too long and became just a touch too self-congratulatory. Despite this, I will recommend it highly, especially to his fans (and I AM one, ever since reading those two first novels) and wannabe writers.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (plus d'informations)

I stumbled across a tattered copy of Philip Lee Williams' first novel, THE HEART OF A DISTANT FOREST, in a thrift store a few years back. Liked it enough that I ordered his second, ALL THE WESTERN STARS. Liked that one too. Noted at the time that he had written a memoir too - this one, CROSSING WILDCAT RIDGE: A MEMOIR OF NATURE AND HEALING. And now I've finally found the time to read it. It came along at just the right time for me, as it seems I'm attending a lot of funerals lately - some good friends gone. I'm in that territory now, at 75.

Because CROSSING WILDCAT RIDGE IS, among other things, a book-length meditation on the fragility of life and the certainty of death. Williams learned at a young age that he'd inherited a family problem, a bad heart. Both his grandfather and a favorite uncle had died young. So he was suitably scared when he was finally forced to have open-heart surgery in his mid-forties to replace a faulty mitral valve. He documents carefully the mechanics and technicalities of the operation (at the time he was science writer for the University of Georgia), as well as his own private thoughts, emotions and fears - and he was plenty scared, as anyone would be. You also learn of the deep "clinical depression" he slipped into during his lengthy recovery period, and how he got some professional help for that. His medical problems, however, make up only about half his story, as alternating chapters deal with his love of nature and of his home in the Georgia woods, shared with his wife and two children. Those parts, and stories of his childhood I enjoyed too, since I'm not too much older than the author, although he had a lot more exposure to the arts and culture as a boy (his father was a chemistry teacher), so knows a helluva lot more about art, science and especially classical music. (Williams is also a composer.) At one point he notes about his own accomplishments, "I have always known I will never go very high or very far, and I am content with it." Well, he ain't done all that bad for a country boy from Georgia, ya know? A slew of books and compositions to his credit, and he's not done yet.

But there's plenty here I could relate to. I've had a few brushes with heart trouble myself, so there's that. But little things too, like the household division of labor between his wife ( a teacher) and him - "Every night for more than twenty years she's cooked and I have washed." Us too, Phil, but over fifty years for us now.

Or this perfect summary of boyhood in the fifties -

"I would take off in the morning for the woods and stay all day, and my mother never worried for my safety one moment. We boys thrilled to the re -creation of cowboy movies and combat newsreels. "

Yeah, me too, Phil - all those long days in the woods, playing cowboys, or digging foxholes and trenches in the sandpit, playing "war."

This was a damn good book, painfully honest, moving and entertaining, by turns. It was also a comfort at this late stage in my life. Thanks for sharing, Phil. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (plus d'informations)

Where to start, what to say about a novel like Philip Lee Williams's ALL THE WESTERN STARS (1988)? Well, it was a book that meandered along at its own steady episodic pace, and it was fun. That's a start. I suspect it's a book that's been pretty much ignored by the general reading public, as so many good books - even fine books - are. I would never have found it, except that I recently enjoyed reading another (better) novel that Williams had written earlier, THE HEART OF A DISTANT FOREST.

This book is nothing at all like that one. I would call it more of an "entertainment," as there is a lot of humor and a picaresque adventure quality about it. But it does deal with some pretty serious subjects too, most notably the problems of growing old and beginning to consider one's own mortality. This is a buddy-road-trip tale. The narrator is Jake Baker, a septuagenarian who is telling his own life story, while at the same time relating the journey he makes with his new best friend, Lucas "Kid" Kraft (a formerly famous, award-winning author). They meet as "inmates" at Fieldstone, a nursing home in Georgia. The picture Jake draws of the place implies that it might just as well be called "gravestone," since it serves mainly as a warehouse for folks waiting to die.

But Jake and Lucas are not ready for that, and one night they bust outa the joint and head west for Texas, where they plan to become cowboys. Along the way they have all manner of adventures and meet numerous and sundry "characters." Think Tom and Huck heading down the Mississippi, because this book is kinda done in that manner. There are stopoffs along the way, perhaps most notably a visit to Jake's former hometown where he visits his parents' graves and considers his own advancing age.

This theme of aging and death and how we deal with it runs throughout the novel. In fact the title is a line from Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses," which also contains the lines: "Death closes all; but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done ... 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world ..."

Which is just what Jake and Lucas are trying to do, although there is something tongue-in-cheek in the way Williams points them west (seeking that "new world") to become cowboys "work of noble note"?). And herein lies yet another way of looking at the novel's title. They end up as extras in a bad western being shot in Texas, which is a kind of dream come true for ol' Kid Kraft. He may be someone who has written some very notable books and is educated in the classics, but he shares a fascination with Jake for the cowboy life and all the B-western movie stars of their youth. In fact, at one point, Jake thinks about "all my old cowboy heroes, Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, William S. Hart, Lash LaRue, even Roy Rogers, though I thought a real cowboy shouldn't ever sing. I thought about Hopalong Cassidy and John Wayne, who was my biggest hero of all." (Hmm, didn't he ever see the Duke in any of those "Singin' Sandy" one-reelers he made earl in his career?)

As I was reading this book, I was reminded often of another obscure, yet really good "docu-novel" from decades ago," Darryl Ponicsan's TOM MIX DIED FOR YOUR SINS, which featured that famous silent-film cowboy in a story told by a fictional sidekick, Kid Bandera - which also brought to mind Twain's Tom and Huck books, with the many lies and tall tales told. Williams even has a little fun in regard to the writing profession, when Jake innocently notes what a liar Lucas could be.

"... I never did like lying. Lucas could tell stories because he was sort of like a professional liar, being a writer ..."

There's a certain art in being able to delve into important and serious things like the importance of friendship and love, as well as the inevitability of death, and yet provide some real belly laughs along the way. Philip Lee Williams is practicing that art here. Maybe ALL THE WESTERN STARS is not a great book; not deep and moving like THE HEART OF A DISTANT FOREST; but it's well-written and by golly it's fun to read. I'll recommend it.… (plus d'informations)