Novel Ideas
by Bob Tutt
 Young Eliza Allen Houston altered the course of
history when she walked out on Sam Houston, her husband of two months.
Houston felt so scandalized
that he abandoned his campaign for re-election as governor of Tennessee
that spring of 1829 and sought refuge with his friends, the
Cherokees.
Neither Eliza nor Houston ever revealed the
full story behind their breakup. Barring discovery of some
heretofore-unknown letters or diaries, the reasons almost certainly
will remain a mystery.
But mysteries invite writers of historical novels to
fill in the blanks. That is what Elizabeth Crook of Austin does
in her first novel, The Raven's Bride
(Doubleday, $19.95), her story of how the marriage of Houston and Eliza
came crashing down. She sidesteps all the theories offered in the
past.
The simplest theory always has been that Eliza's
father, wealthy landowner John Allen, pushed his 19-year-old daughter
into what seemed a promising marriage with the up-and-coming governor,
then 35, and that she became dreadfully unhappy.
Other theories held that Houston was appalled to
learn Eliza was in love with another man; that Eliza was repelled by an
old Indian war wound in Houston's thigh or groin that continued to run;
that she was shocked by Houston's use of Indian sexual practices; and
even that Houston engineered the split-up so he would have a pretext to
leave Tennessee and go west to promote a scheme to get Texas away from
Mexico.
When Crook uses her fictional skills to unravel the
mystery, the reasons lie in the characters' complex
personalities.
Crook explains that she had wanted to write about a
woman overlooked or misrepresented by history.
"Eliza was perfect," she said, "because she had had
an extreme effect on history and yet remained a mystery to
historians. I set out to solve the mystery. I didn't know
whether to write biography, fiction or history. The first draft I
came up with was a mess because it wasn't any one of these."
She is convinced the historical integrity of her
efforts was redeemed when she wrote an article for the scholarly
Southwestern Historical Quarterly summarizing her exhaustive research
on the breakup of the marriage.
"After I had done that article, I felt completely
vindicated in taking whatever liberties I needed for the sake of story
in the novel," said the 31-year-old Crook, who studied writing under
Max Apple at Rice University.
In a note at the beginning of her novel, she writes,
"I do not claim to have written the true account of Sam Houston and
Eliza Allen, but I believe I have come close to the truth."
This is not a paradox, Crook said, "because I think
I have approached the mystery differently from others. Most have
tried to figure out who was at fault, to vindicate one or the
other. Anybody who has been in a relationship knows that's
usually not easy to do. I didn't try to do that. I wanted
to understand Houston and Eliza."
Too often, she said, Eliza has been
reduced "to this child bride or some sort of vapid personality. There was no historical documentation to portray her that way. She obviously was a woman of great intensity.
"Before her death she requested that all likenesses
of her be destroyed, that anything she had ever signed be burned and
that her grave be unmarked. This compelling bid for anonymity is
not something a vapid person does.
"I think she was probably a very private woman, and
all of her life people had been prying into this unhappiness of
hers. In the end, she sort of pulled the wool over all our eyes."
About halfway through her research, Crook said, she
began to feel ambivalent about her probing. She began to think
that Houston and Eliza "were entitled to their secret and their
privacy, and I got nervous that I was going to solve the mystery. In the end, I can honestly say I don't know what the true Eliza was
like, and I'm sort of glad I don't know."
The Eliza in The
Raven's Bride is an intense young woman who has discovered she
never can please her stern, dour father, never obtain from him the love
and openness she craved. Willful, perverse and angry, she
strives, not to cater to power, but to capture it. And that can
prove frustrating.
After a wild gallop on one of her father's
racehorses, Crook writes, Eliza felt that the animal "had mocked
her. She had thought herself equal to his power and found she was
only a victim of it, carried along as far as it would take her and then
spurned."
She is a woman who in self-defense "resorted to
composure."
This Eliza marries Houston, not at her father's
behest, but because she is attracted by the strength she perceives in
him and because she thinks he can give her honesty and intimacy.
Has she possibly created an Eliza who is more a
woman of the 20th century than the 19th century? Decidedly not,
Crook maintains.
"We have this image of people in the past being less
complicated than we are, but it's not so," she said.
"They had the same feelings we do today. If
anyone were to say to me that Eliza is too much of a feminist, I would
reply that what woman who was not a feminist would have walked out on
the governor without giving an explanation or a reason. She
evidently was just unhappy with him."
The egotistic, flamboyant Houston in Crook's pages
mirrors the man who emerges in unvarnished histories. He feels
certain a "Conducting Providence" guides him toward a special destiny
and fires his wild visions and ambitions. At the same time
self-doubts torment him.
"I do not prefer humble women," he confides. "Serenity bores me."
Crook believes Houston owed his monumental success
as a womanizer to powerful feelings of insecurity. In trying to
combat these feelings, she said, "he made dramatic bids for affection
and affirmation from women and usually achieved it."
"I love Sam Houston," Crook affirmed. "As a
character he was so complicated and endearing. Even when you're
disgusted with him, you like the man. If he had been more
perfect, I think he might have been less interesting. But I feel
he is a hero to admire from a distance, not to embrace. I feel
that if I had been Eliza, I would have left him, too."
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