Waco used to whisper about Madison Cooper Jr. He was a wealthy bachelor who dressed like a vagabond in baggy trousers and faded flannel.
He would thumb a ride to the downtown YMCA to swim, and return to his family’s palatial Austin Avenue home, where year after year a light in the attic burned late into the night. The good people of Waco could only speculate why — until they learned he had written a thinly veiled tell-all about them.
“Sironia, Texas” was declared the longest novel in the English language upon its 1952 release, with a disclaimer that it was pure fiction.
That didn’t stop generations of Wacoans from the parlor game of finding their neighbors in Sironia’s checkered cast of characters.
The book, published by Houghton Mifflin, enjoyed a flash of national attention but was overshadowed by other multigenerational epics by the likes of John Steinbeck and Edna Ferber. It is now long out of print, and even in Waco, more mentioned than read.
Eric Ames is setting out to change that. The Baylor library official and local history author has created a podcast, “Oh, Sironia!” to read all 1,731 pages aloud, along with irreverent commentary. The podcast is available on YouTube, Apple and Spotify.
He calls the project “my personal Everest.”
“I crunched the numbers the other day, and if I maintain the pace I’ve been doing, which is basically two minutes per page, it’ll take about 57 hours of recording to do the whole thing,” Ames said.
At 15 to 20 minutes per episode, three times a week, Ames estimates he’ll wrap up in February 2028.
“I am committed to it,” he said.
Ames has been fascinated by the sprawling novel and its enigmatic author since he moved here a couple of decades ago to work in Baylor’s library system.
He decided to take on the podcast recently after Historic Waco asked him to speak on “Sironia, Texas” for the organization’s annual fall lecture. The event is set for 6:30 p.m., Sept. 22, at Lee Lockwood Library. Tickets are available here.
Ames realized he wouldn’t have time to reread the book, so he did the next best thing. He used Baylor’s library equipment to digitize the book and search for keywords and create a timeline. He even used ChatGPT to help him analyze the swarm of minor characters and backstories.
Along the way, he was inspired to start the podcast. It wasn’t easy to translate Cooper’s dense prose style into the audiobook format.
“There are a ton of these em-dashes that kind of hang with no follow-up, so characters are interrupting each other, or someone’s having a thought, and they’ll trail off. … That might explain why there hasn’t been an audiobook version of this yet.
“This was supposed to be a book that you would take your time with.”
A changing South
Behind the sometimes labored prose and complicated genealogies, Ames finds a novelist probing the social change he saw during his upbringing in the early 20th-Century South. His own perspective was likely also shaped by the horrors he saw as an infantry captain in World War I.
Cooper was the heir of a wholesale grocery fortune and was attuned to the class distinctions between “old money” and “nouveau riche” in a town like Waco.
For example, a matron’s pride in her aristocratic upbringing compels her to help someone down on her luck but not to be seen doing so.
The memories of antebellum plantations remain vivid to the novel’s characters, and the children and grandchildren of the enslaved are integral to the book.
There is an “East Sironia” that might resemble East Waco at the time, including segregated neighborhoods of struggling Black and white Sironians. Across the river are the upper-crust “Hill families” whose lives are more genteel than saintly.
“That’s a big through line that runs through this book, which is that so many of these guys that are supposed to be well-heeled pillars of the community are also out looking for action on the side,” Ames said. “There are definitely bawdy houses. I think not one, but two will be burned to the ground at some point over the course of the book.”
Cooper was a man of his time and place, and his stereotypes and attempts at dialect can grate on modern ears. But in general, Cooper presents Black characters sympathetically and doesn’t paper over the racial tensions in the community, Ames said.
A key scene details a public lynching, a rare if indirect acknowledgement of Waco’s ghastly past, such as the 1916 “Waco Horror” in which Jesse Washington was burned alive on the town square.
“This is very clearly his experience from either seeing or knowing people who saw and talking to people,” Ames said. “It’s very visceral, and you get the sense that he’s not celebrating this. The horror of this spectacle lynching comes through in the book. And I’m not sure that every author from that time would have seen it that way.”
Ames said he suspects one character, Lance Thaxton, is a stand-in for Cooper himself. Ames said he isn’t a Madison Cooper expert, but he is rereading Marion Travers’ biography of him.
At any rate, it appears Cooper preferred to remain a mystery, leaving a will that ordered his personal notes to be burned. Few today could personally remember Cooper, who died Sept. 28, 1956, after taking his customary jog at the old Municipal Stadium.
But while his literary contributions may be a footnote in American letters, his impact on his beloved hometown has been lasting. He left his fortune of more than $3 million to what is now known as the Cooper Foundation, whose endowment continues its original mission “to make Waco a better or more desirable place in which to live.”
Included in that bequest was the historic home where Cooper wrote “Sironia,” now Cooper Foundation headquarters at 1801 Austin Ave., where his attic office remains intact.
Disclosure: The Cooper Foundation is a financial supporter of The Waco Bridge, a nonprofit news organization that is funded in part by donations from individual donors, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Bridge’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
