OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: No golden light

I met Werner Trieschmann in 1989.

I was starting over at Spectrum, the Little Rock alternative infrequently remembered by newspaper war veterans. He'd just returned from Boston, from studying with Derek Walcott, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright who'd founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.

Werner used to take his work to Walcott's Cambridge apartment on Sunday mornings. The great man would sit at his kitchen table in his robe with a cup of coffee and an unfiltered Pall Mall and go over it with him. Walcott had a big laugh, but mostly, he was quiet, scratching away with his professorial red pen.

Werner attended Wolcott's graduate seminars in the same room where Robert Lowell had taught Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. This intimidated me, a product of a land grant university who'd decorated the back rows of vast lecture halls. But there was nothing haughty or presumptuous about this credentialed kid; what I noticed first were his manners, a certain deference that could pass as humility, and a restrained, chipmunk smile that shined in his eyes.

Werner had been a playwright since his sophomore year at Hendrix College. He knew theater, but as I remember, we mainly put him to work at Spectrum writing about music, though he also wrote about television, movies, and other arts. I could look up some of those early stories now, but there are rules about crying on deadline.

Steve Buel and Cindy Fribourgh hired me to beef up Spectrum's arts coverage. Bill Jones, Spectrum's de facto arts editor, and I both wanted fierce and original voices with deep feelings for their subjects to populate the back pages of our publication. We wanted a room full of Werner Trieschmanns.

We never got that, because Werner was a singular talent. He managed the trick of being both quirkily funny and unabashedly honest. He had a genuine style: humane, gently subversive, and naturally unpretentious. He quickly became part of the band, a core member with kid-brother energy.

We assumed he wouldn't be around forever. Someone would make a movie from one of his plays; he'd take whatever next step successful playwrights took. He'd move to L.A. or New York and be too busy with his real work to bother writing $50-a-pop reviews for us. We might be remembered in a warm paragraph in his memoirs.

There was a second part to the worry; Werner was born with Gaucher's disease, a severe enzyme disorder that's expensive to treat and, in his case, manifested as skeletal problems. About the 15th or 16th thing you'd notice about him was that he walked with a limp and wore a compensatory boot on his right foot. (Hence the name of his KABF radio show "Big Shoe Radio.")

We knew it was serious, but Werner wore his big shoe lightly.

My memories are flash cards. There's a snapshot of a late-night drive through the Heights with Werner and Doug Blackmon, the future Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. I don't know who was driving (maybe me), or whether we were going anywhere. Blackmon, who was working at the Daily Record at that time, directly across the hall from my office above the old Juanita's restaurant, hung his head out the window and roared anti-capitalistic slogans at the sleeping burghers. (There might have been adult beverages involved.)

I remember playing golf with Werner, him hopping over a fence to retrieve an out-of-bounds ball and tossing it back into the fairway.

"That's how we did it when I played for Hendrix," he said.

Werner played intercollegiate golf. Big shoe and all.

As it turned out I was the one who left. Then I came back to work for this newspaper, and my wife Karen and Jack Schnedler hired Werner to do pretty much the same thing he did for Spectrum. Karen (and a crew of volunteers), in part, designed the Arkansas Weekend tabloid section as a showcase for his "Information Overload" column and the quick-hit interview feature "15 Seconds of Fame" he came up with. After about a year, Werner started editing Weekend. He later became editor of our Sunday Style section.

He didn't leave. It turned out there were things more important to him than getting out of Arkansas. Paul Greenberg admired his work, recognizing that Werner was a "real writer," which is rarer around newsrooms than you might expect. (Good thing, too; were newsrooms full of "real writers," newspapers would never get published.) It made sense; growing up, he'd spent long stretches reading and developing a rich interior life in hospitals. He thought about cadence and how words carried shadows and produced overtones when knocked against each other.

Werner received honors and awards, won a Porter Prize, and had his works produced all over the country. But playwrighting isn't the most remunerative occupation, and he was not especially careerist. He had his day jobs and, eventually, a wonderful family.

In 2002, in his Information Overload column, he talked about coming home from Boston after graduate school:

Many feel like they aren't complete without making a mark in a big city, without at least trying to make a mark . . . Arkansas, after all, is still Arkansas. It has charm and your heart, but you must earn your stripes in the big towns and away from your parents.

It doesn't/didn't take long to discover that, in the end, the city doesn't care about you unless you have lots and lots of money or you are very young and tireless. You decide that you don't want to worry about what side of the street you need to park on. You don't want to drive around for 30 minutes looking for a parking space . . . Really, you want your own space. That's really the bottom line.

Werner found his own space with his friends and neighbors.

In his 1995 play "The Muscadine Trellis," a character says: "There's nothing wrong with having a small little life. That's what I have, and there's nothing wrong with it at all. Keeping things simple and straightforward is what's best. You want some kind of golden light to shine down from heaven and explain everything to you and heal everything, and it doesn't happen that way. It never will."

Billy Bob Thornton used to call me, maybe three or four times from 1997 to 2002. These chats were off the record, but I don't think he'd mind me sharing one thing he said at the end of one of them. He said: "Tell that Werner kid I like his stuff."

I did. And Werner smiled, as you do when a famous person--an artist you admire--indicates he has read and admired your work. He took it in stride--he didn't punch the air or whoop--he just smiled that chipmunk smile.

Werner never left. He built his life here--not out of resignation but out of choice. He taught us that life doesn't have to be loud or sprawling to be meaningful. I will remember his humor, his resilience, and his example. There's nothing wrong with a small, beautiful life. It's not a golden light shining down to explain everything, but it has to be enough.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].