Lauren Deitzer
'A TEDIOUS THING'
I’ll be the first to admit that even more than 80 years after its publication, The Inheritors hits a little close to home for a guy, a Fort Worth native, who has mixed with all of the divisions of Fort Worth society.
Whether those divisions are based on differences of wealth, inherited rank or privilege, profession or occupation, or race, I’ve associated with them from one degree or another, in business or as friends, perhaps even a little debauchery.
“Let no one think that the group herein described was atypical of youth,” says George Bellamy Jimble III, the lead protagonist of the book The Inheritors. “We were only a fringe, but there were a few of us everywhere. Many of our contemporaries, in the middle thirties of the 20th century, led admirably sane lives and had a brisk YMCA outlook. These are the ones who will undoubtedly save the country when the going gets toughest, but, as Cavin Jarvis said, they were damned uninteresting. I suppose the formation of character is a tedious thing.”
With that preamble, there begins the story of The Inheritors, a quite good, no, actually a great novel written by James Young “Jim” Phillips under the pen name “Philip Atlee,” which he used for good reason.
Like, for example, in case of some fatwa decree, though it didn’t take long for the city to know his true identity.
Published in 1940 by Dial Press of New York — though set in 1935 — the young Phillips takes the offensive with the most biting kind of commentary on the elite class he lived with in River Crest Country Club, what he identified as “the dollar aristocracy,” and his obvious distaste for both, as well as “country club Christianity.”
It’s as well-written a novel as you will find, a product of its time in the use of the language.
“The overlords of Fort Worth inhabited the quietest streets. Their large homes fringed the golf courses and had three- or four-car garages in back of them. The interiors of these homes were lightened by pictures the owners did not understand or care to understand, and, in some cases, actually disliked. The wives of the owners were well tended and usually apprenticed to the intelligentsia. They were women who bought Shakespeare in handsomely bound volumes. … The pages were usually uncut.
“Their husbands did nothing but make money, but they could not be blamed for that. It was all they had been taught to do, and most of them were expert in the field. They were, for the most part, patient men who had been so strongly indoctrinated with the virus of the dollar aristocracy that they could not enjoy themselves fully even when they were financially able to do so.”
Phillips was way before his time, a Fort Worth counterculture, revolutionary figure long before those were en vogue. If Marx had been as clever or witty, not to mention fun, communism would have had a better head start, albeit doomed to failure, nonetheless.
A.C. Greene included The Inheritors among his list of “The Fifty Best Texas Books,” initially published by Texas Monthly in 1981 and updated through the years. The Inheritors has remained on the list.
And set down in the heart of the town were the children of the country-club bludgeoners, the children who were being readied to catch the torch of Business. Not all of them were like us. We were well taught, but we were taught too much, and not of the right things.
We drove fast cars and we drank too much. The inference was given us, by well-bred curlings of the lip, that it was neither good nor desirable to be skilled in a trade. Instead, we were taught to prize the professions, which insisted on the profit motif in every conscious act of life.
Greene said the book was “30 or 40 years before its time.”
“Few Texas books have been able to repeat the harsh dismay, the inspired brutality, of ‘The Inheritor.’”
But that it found its mark — and left a welt — there is no doubting as the West Side’s upper crust, many of them descended from the cattle barons or the new-age oil tycoons, used its power to subdue its influence by suppressing its distribution, mostly by buying up all its copies.
In the parlance of the day, Phillips and his prose pissed off a lot of people.
Add The Inheritors to the list of literary works sacrificed by book burnings, so obsessed and single-minded were they to kill the book. So, we’re told. The Fort Worth Public Library was said to have kept its copy under lock and key, so vulnerable was it to theft and sabotage. I was also told that Phillips’ own mother, by 1940 a notable face in the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, went around town buying up copies so as to limit its reach. That story was more likely the convention of a would-be propagandist out to misinform and deceive.
Even his own mother wanted the book off the streets.
Hollace Weiner, author of River Crest Country Club: The First 100 Years, 1911-2011, included it in her book because “it’s part of the club’s lore.”
At the time she was researching and writing the book, Weiner says, “I spoke with women in their 70s and 80s who remembered reading it by flashlight under the bed covers,” Weiner says. “It was scandalous. Everyone at the club tried to guess who the protagonists might be.”
It's later re-printings in the 1950s left out the preface describing Fort Worth and River Crest. And it’s indeed true that this book could have been written in any urban setting with the backdrop being any country club.
Lauren Deitzer
It has become the stuff of legend, The Inheritors, first brought to my attention by Judy Conrad a few years ago over rounds of cocktails at Oscar’s Pub, a popular gathering place for the subjects on the West Side.
I had never heard of it.
Google provided some of the answers I needed as well as the name of a distributor. The book is nearly impossible to find. In fact, when I purchased a copy for a mere $30, I was informed I had committed an act tantamount to armed robbery through the weapon that is a smartphone. The law of supply and demand favors the seller. Prices for it, if you can find it, reach heights only an airline pilot can get to.
My copy is most certainly not an original.
It was printed and bound, perhaps in the 1950s or 1960s, in India by an outfit called Pranava Books. Where or how Pranava Books got its hands on the copy of The Inheritors, who knows? But in all probability, they merely typeset it, printed it, bound it, and just waited for a cease-and-desist notice.
The company name, however, is full of irony.
Pranava translates to “cosmic sound” in Sanskrit, the classical language of India and of Hinduism. In the Hindu world, pranava is the name for the sacred “Om.” Meditating on pranava leads to liberation because it brings about unity with Brahman — a member of the highest Hindu caste, that of the priesthood — the ultimate reality.
The absolute truth.
Local writer E.R. Bills beat me to The Inheritors. He has done some really good research and writing on the book.
Bills uncovered a letter by Phillips to his mother, explaining the manuscript.
Phillips writes: “The characters are principally composite, but some situations are grounded on fact. I shall, in all possibility, create a tidy little corps of antagonists, and it may even be that you will not like what I have done. But remember that I write no line, salacious, embittered or pornographic, that I didn’t write truly.”
Om.
Well, his corps of antagonists were more than just a little irritated band of affluence.
Though The Inheritors received favorable reviews in the New York Times and New Republic, every newspaper in Texas panned it, if it mentioned it at all.
Lauren Deitzer
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram jumped on it like a mockingbird on a June bug, publishing a highly critical and, at times, harsh evaluation.
“As a first novel by a somewhat immature and confused young man, bewildered by his own task, The Inheritors is a flaming story of a group of overage adolescents, afflicted by their overstimulate instincts, their amorality, and a rather stupid, cruel inheritance not of their own making. Three youths revolt against an artificiality in life to which their elders have completely capitulated. Sins of the flesh and intoxication become inevitably a compensatory refuge for old and young alike.”
The story is really a fascinating pre-war contrast in the legend of the Greatest Generation, acclaimed for its perseverance during the Great Depression; its ridding the world of the great despots during WWII and later the Soviets; and its contributions to the greatest economic boon in world history.
Rather than a story of austerity and call to duty, this is one of overabundance and hell-raising.
George Jimble and his best friend, Cavin Jarvis, and their band of ne’er-do-wells reject the largess and expectations handed to them for what they believe is actual living.
That is, drinking, chasing girls, and driving fast cars. They also operate in grift to earn drinking money.
“Now we are moving into tomorrow, and before too many tomorrows, we will have inherited. You may pass us on the street or shoulder us in the elevator. We will be wearing the sack suits of business and thrusting our necks rebelliously inside tight collars as we join the dollar hunt. We will be whispering hosannahs to executive vice presidents, and we will be fretting over taxes. But our eyes will not be smiling. Too many Whitneys went down for that, too many evidences of cheating termites in the American woodwork. Too many senators have beamed their phoney benedictions on us, and a few too many unctuous prayers have been chanted over us. The times are bad, but the times are changing. Something has begun to move and go forward beneath the trim fit of the deacon’s coat and the banker’s choker collar and the old Weems’ cherry tree fable. Something … we are not smiling.”
Bills made note of The Inheritors being the perfect bookend to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the Roaring ’20s.
“If we seem foolish,” Jimble says, “remember that we were young. Most of us were born with silver spoons in our mouths, and around 1935 the spoons began to tarnish. The taste of it was not pleasant on the tongue.”
Cars lined each side of the road and their headlights flung out brilliance, stabling lanes of light that people were hurrying through. The wrecked car was on its side, and in the glare of the headlights it looked like a smashed black bug. One wall was caved in, and the motor was in the front seat. It was a well-wrecked car, and the index to its condition was readable and simple. The road had turned but the car had not.
Three men were tugging at something through a partially opened door, and one of them cursed as his hat fell off. … The barehead man got a crank and smashed away at the windows, a task rendered difficult by the starred and shattered safety glass. After a few more minutes of breaking out the pin-pointed knives of glass, two of them lifted the driver out.
It was a limp body and small, in dress clothes. … The body was twisted a little, knees drawn up and shoulders flat, and half of the face belonged to Mumford.
I didn’t recognize the other half.
“Mother ’a God,” breathed Jarvis behind me, “it’s the Hot Horse!” His tone was amazement, but it seemed to me his tense was wrong.
“Cavin,” I said, “it was the Hot Horse.”
The Inheritors, James Phillips
Not all of this ends well. Rather than glorify, the story is grounded in more than hangovers. The wayward living leads often in dead ends and/or trouble and even tragedy, including the death of one of the guys, “Hot Horse” Mumford, on West Seventh Street. The book even addresses abortion, certainly a third rail topic in those days forbidden and dangerous to broach in social settings.
The crew also spends time at the expense of the county in jail after a rambunctious party.
Jimble’s mother instructs, paraphrasing only slightly: “Some people can drink and not get in trouble. You aren’t one of those people.”
One poignant early scene is Jimble and Jarvis, with “whiskey warming” the belly, watching and offering commentary on an outside dining scene at River Crest.
One was a man named George Sorrels, an attorney, “not a forensic flame before juries, and he was no genius in the more difficult matter of preparing cases for trial.
“Indeed, he was something considerably less, but he had a vague air of authority that comes to successful barristers, those surgeons of people’s affairs who operate with scalpels of paper writs and subpoenas.”
He had married a “cunning visitor from Virginia … who had managed for many years to spend at least twice what George made over any given period of time.”
“Think you’ll ever be a big man like George?” Jimble asks Cavin.
“Not if the Lord loves me at all,” Cavin replies.
Lauren Deitzer
In addition to Phillips as George Jimble — “a decadent Tom Sawyer” — E.R. Bills, the local writer and researcher, identified Roy Harris as Cavin Jarvis — “a chromium-plated Huck Finn.” Harris went on to become a Hollywood actor under the name of Riley Hill. Bills says that Harris actually presented a volume of The Inheritors as part of his acting resume.
Harris acted in 19 films under his given name but adopted “Riley Hill” after the war. Altogether, he appeared in more than 70 films and was a steady presence in TV classics such as “The Lone Ranger,” “Dick Tracy,” and “The Gene Autry Show.”
If Phillips, the author, seemed angry — the Star-Telegram review said of Phillips, “a poet who cannot quite turn realist without being nasty about it” — he might have been.
By the time of the book’s publication, Phillips was no longer in the inheriting class.
His father, Edwin T. Phillips, an oil and gas attorney, died in 1928. Phillips, born in 1915, would have been about 13. Phillips had three brothers: Edwin T. Phillips Jr., James Olcott Phillips — both later Fort Worth attorneys — and the youngest, David Atlee Phillips. The four have been described as “ruggedly handsome.”
Their mother was Mary Louise Phillips, the namesake of the elementary school on the West Side, and prominent in business, civic, and social circles. She left the University of Texas after her junior year to marry Edwin Phillips.
When asked what she thought about the book, Mary Louise Phillips told the Star-Telegram that, “I didn’t know he knew such words.”
After Edwin’s death, she took a job with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, eventually rising to manager of the civic affairs department. At the time, she was the only woman in the U.S. serving in such a commercial post. Moreover, she earned national distinction when in 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt and Newton Baker, the onetime Secretary of Defense and sometime aide to FDR, named her to the national women’s committee for the Mobilization for Human Needs. She was the only Texas woman on the national committee and later she was the state chairperson.
In 1934, she was appointed a member of the Fort Worth Board of Education.
According to David Atlee Phillips, Edwin left the family a portfolio of oil stocks which “turned to ash in the market crash of 1929.”
“We were the poorest rich people in Fort Worth,” David Atlee Phillips recalled in The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service, a book detailing his days in the CIA.
However, as a founder of River Crest, Edwin also left us “a life membership and the deed to a house on the fourth green.”
David Atlee Phillips rose from a $50-a-month CIA contract agent to the title of chief of the Western Hemisphere. His name has turned up in JFK conspiracy theories, something he steadfastly denied up until his death in 1988. David has also been identified as “Maurice Bishop,” the man supposedly working with counterrevolutionary elements seeking to dethrone Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 1970s.
There is some speculation that Jim Phillips, later a writer of spy novels, might also have been an agent. Whether he was or he wasn’t, Phillips’ life was unmistakably mysterious.
Historian Lonn Taylor a few years ago tried to tackle the elusive figure that was Jim Phillips. Though he made no connection with Phillips and the CIA, he noted that Phillips’ career during WWII and in the postwar years “is hard to document.”
“He put his flying skills at the service of the Allies, but it is difficult to tell exactly what he was doing. One source puts him with the Tahitian Free French forces in North Africa; another with General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China. He may well have been in both places. For a while he ran the Chinese national airline, Civil Air Transport’s, offices in Rangoon, and then he took a job with a Burmese airline, Amphibian Airways.”
Weiner, the author of the River Crest centennial book, describes Phillips as a “pulp-fiction writer, a pilot, and a Marine … who never settled down.”
Though he went to three universities, including TCU, he never graduated, though he was obviously influenced by at least one experience. He dedicated The Inheritors to acclaimed TCU English professor Lorraine Sherley.
He met Joyce Clayton in 1938 while working in the oilfields of Jack County. They married and had a son, Shawn Phillips, who became a folk-rock musician of note. The marriage ended after 17 years. Phillips married twice more.
At the time of his death in 1991 at age 76, Phillips had written 30 novels, including 22 as part of “The Contract Series” that dealt with mystery and espionage. Those were all written under the name “James Atlee Phillips.”
He also had written a series of poems about the oilfields called the “Metal Forest” and the screenplay for the 1958 movie “Thunder Road,” which starred Robert Mitchum. He had also worked in public relations for the Billy Rose agency in New York.
Whatever one thought of him or his book, Phillips was quite clearly able, a giant among us in the realm of words.
“When he was working, he was traveling,” son Shawn said at the time of his death. “He would be here one week and Hong Kong the next because he always wrote his novels on location. He didn’t want someone to write him and tell that the hotel in his book was on the other side of the street.”
In 1954, Phillips made a pass through Fort Worth to visit his family. He was then living in one of the remotest places on the planet, the Canary Islands. The
group of islands off the northwest coast of Africa are not easily accessible.
He was living there with his second wife. He noted to the Star-Telegram that brandy sold for 70 cents a quart and fine table wines could be bought for only a few cents a bottle.
It was in the Canaries that Phillips crossed paths with another Fort Worth author John Graves. Graves recounted in Myself and Strangers that the two talked about Fort Worth.
Phillips, Graves said, was still angry with his experiences in youth and the reception of his book, saying he had one wish.
“To buy a pretty little atom bomb and at cocktail hour one afternoon, I would drop it down the chimney of the men’s bar at the River Crest Country Club.”
