William Humprhey's best known novel was HOME FROM THE HILL, a book and a film that made a lasting impression on me fifty years ago. I saw the film first, with its sterling cast of Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, and the two Georges: Hamilton and Peppard, as young Theron Hunnicutt and his bastard half-brother Rafe, respectively. The film was so damn good I went right out and bought the paperback edition of the book. I was probably only 18 or 19 at the time, but it established a pattern that stayed with me, and I learned something. If the movie was that good, the book is probably better.

I read a couple of other Humphrey books, but HOME FROM THE HILL was always his best in my estimation. So I thought it would be interesting to read his memoir, even if I'd waited 35 years after its publication. FARTHER OFF FROM HEAVEN was something of a disappointment in that it only dealt with Humphrey's life up until age 13, which was the year his father - a fighting, drinking hell-raising shade-tree mechanic - was killed in a gruesome auto accident. The bulk of the narrative is mostly about that lost father, and all that Humphrey had been able to rmember and find out about him. Young Billy Humphrey claims he buried his childhood on the day his father was buried. Soon after he and his mother moved from his childhood home of Clarksville, and he didn't return for over thirty years. Besides being a family history of the Humphreys, FARTHER OFF FROM HEAVEN is also a respectful paean to the town of Clarksville as it was back in the 1920s and 1930s. It fact the book seemed more about Humphrey's parents and the town and the Red River region than it was about the author himself. The details about the Big Sulphur Bottom swamp, that figured so prominently in HOME FROM THE HILL, were interesting. I guess I just would have liked more about the man himself, and certainly SOMEthing about the rest of his life after the age of thirteen. Humphrey (who died in 1997) was, after all, over fifty when he published this autobiography in 1977.

Ironically, one my favorite books to come out of that region of Texas, William A. Owens' THIS STUBBORN SOIL, was highly praised by Humphrey himself, who called it "one of the best of all memoirs of childhood." And it was. Perhaps Humphrey's own life just wasn't quite as interesting. The Owens book I recommend highly; the Humphrey one, not so much. ( )