One book often nominated as a candidate for the Great Texas Novel was The Gay Place, by Billy Lee Brammer. It’s actually three novellas pressed together, with a single towering figure, Governor Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker, based on Brammer’s real-life mentor, Lyndon Johnson. Billy Lee had worked for Johnson in Washington, when he was Senate majority leader.
Billy Lee had died of a methamphetamine overdose by the time I moved to Austin, so I never got to meet him. In the book, the only one he ever published, he captured a brief moment in Texas history, in the late 1950s, when liberals had a foothold in the capitol and Austin was a highly sexed beatnik outpost (that hasn’t entirely changed). It was the first novel to stake a claim on modern, urban Texas. Billy Lee was unfortunately too chaotic to produce another book that might have secured his reputation as a true Level Three artist. I once had lunch with one of his ex-wives, Nadine Brammer, who remembered the time she took Billy Lee to a hypnotist to try to cure his smoking habit. As they were going up on the elevator, she suggested that maybe Billy Lee should also try to get rid of his kleptomania. “No, I want to keep that,” he said.
Billy Lee wrote for the Texas Observer, the muckraking liberal rag in Austin that had been home to Willie Morris, J. Frank Dobie, and a number of writers I admired. In 1971, I drove down to Austin from Dallas for an interview. Roberta and I had just returned to the United States from Egypt, where we had taught for two years at the American University in Cairo. We were living with my parents while I searched for a job.
The Observer was a beacon for ambitious, smart-ass youngsters like me. It was co-edited by Molly Ivins and Kaye Northcott. Molly was six feet tall, red-haired and big-boned. At her side was a black dog named Shit. Molly could spin out resonant Texas witticisms that became classics as soon as she uttered them. Jim Mattox, the attorney general, was “so mean he wouldn’t spit in your ear if your brains were on fire.” Kaye was Molly’s physical opposite—diminutive, with small, fine features and large, scholarly eyeglasses. They were the Mutt and Jeff of Texas liberals, respected even by the politicians they lampooned, because the Observer made Texas politics into a recognizable genre, something to be savored. It set us apart. Perhaps because of Molly’s continental education, the Observer began to resemble a left-wing French publication, with its satire and scathing exposés. We all became a little more Parisian, more amused by ourselves, and disdainful of newcomers who couldn’t crack the code. I desperately wanted to be a part of the scene, but my interview with Molly went nowhere. I had no experience and nothing to show, so I drove back home, despairing of ever becoming a writer.
Molly refined Texas stereotypes into an art form, like a Jewish comedian in the Catskills. Her 1991 collection of columns spent twenty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, making her a national celebrity at the same moment that Ann Richards got elected as governor. They were lashed together in the public imagination, the pair of them defining a particular kind of Texas woman—earthy, progressive, sharp-tongued, and unafraid of men, no matter how big their belt buckles.
McMurtry hasn’t delivered another broadside on the current state of Texas letters, so I asked Steve what he thought. “The state of Texas literature is defined by writers worrying about the state of Texas literature,” he said grumpily. “Why is everyone in Texas so anxious about defining a regional literature when nobody else feels the need to do that? Anything you say reinforces the provincialism. Just let it be what it will be.”
* * *
AFTER I HAD BEEN WRITING in Texas for several years, I was nominated to be a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. All the best people were in it, I was told, and so I naturally wanted to be one of them. But the friend who had submitted my name reported that I had been rejected, at least at that time. When my name came up, one of the board members advised, “Let him spend another year on the cross.”
I had been a small part of a very minor literary scene when we lived in Atlanta, nothing so formal as the TIL. We were all regional writers, and whoever had a single nostril above the waterline of total obscurity was regarded with reverence and green-eyed jealousy. When my first book, City Children, Country Summer, came out, in 1979, an autograph party was held for me at the Old New York Book Shop on Piedmont Road, which was the unofficial hangout for the Atlanta literati. My book was about minority children from New York City—mainly, black and Hispanic kids from Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant—who spent part of a summer with Amish and Mennonite dairy farmers in central Pennsylvania. The venerable charity that sponsors the program is the Fresh Air Fund. The book got no notice at all, followed by zero sales. It was appropriate that the party took place in an antiquarian bookstore, because mine was a rare book from the moment it came off the press. A friend of mine aptly described the publication experience as “the calm before the calm.”
But I was a published author at last. A well-known Atlanta writer, Marshall Frady, who had just written a best-selling biography of Billy Graham, was my host and sponsor. Like most Southern writers I knew, Marshall was addicted to the bon mot. When we arrived at the party, he told Roberta, “You look positively lambent tonight”—a cherished compliment she’s never forgotten.
The party itself was memorable mainly because the police arrived with reports of an attempted homicide. The victim was a drunken lout, likely a poet, who had been amusing himself by pouring cheap champagne down ladies’ dresses. Marshall took him outside and administered some rough justice. “A mere schoolyard scuffle, officers,” he said, when the black-and-white pulled up, although Marshall had actually broken his own hand during his inexpert pummeling. Imagine what the cops thought when they learned they had stumbled upon an autograph party for a book about the Amish.
When it came to pass that the golden gates to the Texas Institute of Letters finally opened, I could see what McMurtry was complaining about, although he didn’t have Georgia as a point of comparison. McMurtry himself was the speaker at one of the first meetings I attended. He complained about the burdens of fame, eliciting little sympathy. At that same event, I also met Cormac McCarthy, a laconic Tennessean who was living in El Paso at the time and therefore qualified as Texan. He had already published Suttree and Blood Meridian, but I had not yet read him. None of his books had sold more than five thousand copies, despite impressive reviews. He didn’t even have an agent. When we were sitting on the carpet of the hospitality suite with a bottle of bourbon between us, I asked how he was able to make a living. “I’ve always been fortunate in that people have given me quite a lot of money,” he said. He first became aware of his good fortune when he was living in a barn, surviving on corn bread, and didn’t have enough money to buy toothpaste. One day, he went to look in the mailbox and found a complimentary tube of Pepsodent. “A few days later, a man came to the barn and gave me a check for twenty thousand dollars from a foundation I had never heard of,” he said. And only recently, he remarked, he had become a MacArthur Fellow. He really was a very lucky guy.
Sitting in an easy chair in that cramped hotel suite was the grand old man of Texas letters, John Graves, who wrote an extraordinary book, Goodbye to a River, in 1960. The river in question, the Brazos, runs from the high plains to the Gulf of Mexico, serving as the unofficial border between East and West Texas. The Spanish named it Los Brazos de Dios, the arms of God. Upon learning of plans to erect five dams along the Brazos, creating a string of reservoirs, John decided to travel by canoe down a twisty portion of the river in what he thought would be a fruitless protest:
In a region like the Southwest, scorched to begin with, alternating between floods and drouths, its absorbent cities quadrupling their censuses every few years, electrical power and flood control and moisture conservation and water skiing are praiseworthy projects. More than that, they are essential. We river-minded ones can’t say much against them—nor, probably, should we want to. Nor, mostly, do we…
But if you are built like me, neither the certainty of c
hange, nor the need for it, nor any wry philosophy will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that a river that you’ve known always, and that all men of that place have known always back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist. A piece of river, anyhow, my piece.
McMurtry had summed John up as neither journalist nor novelist but ruminator. He was an ex-Marine with a glass eye, the memento of a Japanese grenade on Saipan. He had grown up in Fort Worth and on his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas, but like most of us with any literary pretensions he had fled to where the writers and readers were—to New York, where he got a master’s degree in English; then to Europe, where he bummed around, aping Hemingway. “It’s heartening to think that he might once have been as uncertain as the rest of us,” Steve said, when he gave John’s eulogy in 2013, “that his majestic self-possession was something he had to earn and grow into.” John returned to Texas in 1957 to take care of his dying father. “It was in Texas that he finally found his voice,” his last editor, Ann Close (who also edited this book), observed.
We were all mystified by him. His prose was incantatory, and his attachment to the place we lived in was so much keener and more revelatory than ours. He used the money from Goodbye to a River to buy four hundred thin-soiled acres in Glen Rose, fifty-something miles southwest of Fort Worth, that he aptly named Hard Scrabble. After that, he just seemed to disappear into the land. He wrote occasional essays that were collected and admired. He often showed up at literary events, where he was genial and not superior despite the reverence that always attended him. He wore heavy horn-rims that were purposely positioned halfway down his nose so he could tilt his head down and peer over the frames with his one good eye (the other one tended to wander), as he did while Cormac and I chatted at his feet, with his divided glance—I always had to remind myself which eye to respond to. He always seemed to be more like a fan or a contented spouse, never invoking the authority he had over us, preferring to listen. “You always felt that, in some quiet way, he was measuring you and recording your worth,” Steve observed. Perhaps his failure as a novelist kept him from venturing more deeply into the craft. Maybe he thought he could never match that first book, so why try. Maybe he didn’t care enough about his gift, even though those of us who admired him would often dip into his book for inspiration, when our own words refused to flow and his seemed to come so effortlessly.
Steve ended his eulogy by quoting John’s own report of encountering Hemingway in Pamplona during the San Fermín festival, surrounded by acolytes, “holding court at a sidewalk table in the main square, using his sport coat as a cape while still another collegiate American served as bull and charged him.” John held back. “I had not yet proved myself as a writer, a real one,” he wrote, “and until I managed that I didn’t feel I had the right to impose myself on established authors, however much I might admire their work.”
“It’s an introduction long overdue,” Steve concluded. “Mr. Hemingway, meet Mr. Graves.”
* * *
ACCORDING TO THE LEGENDS we tell ourselves, Texans get ahead by relying on luck, nerve, and instinct. These are good qualities. They might be sufficient in a culture of wildcatters and poker players, but not for engineers or city planners or educators—the kinds of people who actually build urban civilizations, but cities don’t fit comfortably into the Texas myth.
Central to this myth is bigness. I’m not talking just about the drive from Beaumont to El Paso. Texans themselves are supposed to be big people. I recall the 1960 Boy Scout Jamboree. I went there with a delegation of scouts from Dallas. Along with us came Big Tex, the fifty-foot-tall fiberglass statue that stood outside the State Fair in Dallas—or, I should say, Big D. Big Tex loomed over our tent city, and all of us, I believe, felt proud to be singled out and set apart from the scouts from other states and countries. Somehow we participated in his bigness.
Texas is a macho state. We love sports. We call our teams Cowboys and Rangers and Mavericks and Rockets and Oilers and Spurs—there are no Blue Jays or Dolphins playing ball in Texas. The downside of the machismo is that we turn away from the feminine side of our nature. It is evident in the indifference to beauty and a sort of loathing for compassion, as manifested in our schools, our prisons, our mental health facilities, and our lack of concern for the environment. I recall the panic that hit the Texas legislature in the 1980s when a bill was put forth to ornament our license plates with wildflowers. What could be more representative of our state than our native bluebonnets and primroses? But that proposal was buried as lawmakers turned to the important business of trying to get beef declared the official meat of the Olympics.
Hollywood adored the Texas myth. On the silver screen, “Texas” was not a real place, it was a symbol for the unbridled West, a playground for the frontier legend, made over and over again in the epic westerns of John Ford, William Wyler, and Howard Hawks. “Texas” was an arena of the soul, where a man comes face-to-face with death and destiny. It occupies the same emotional territory as the wilderness of Judea, only without God. When we’re in “Texas,” the actual film may be shot in Monument Valley, Utah (Stagecoach, The Searchers), or in the rolling Canadian wheatfields (Days of Heaven). There’s a forgettable thriller called The Swarm, in which a train crosses a range of mountains to enter the coastal city of Houston. Even in The Alamo, the archetypal Texas movie, San Antonio is set on the banks of the Rio Grande, which in fact is two hundred miles south.
Seeing these movies made me feel special as a Texan, but in a fraudulent sort of way. I imagine that every Texas man of my age has experienced the dissonance of failing to live up to the legend in people’s minds. Once, when I was teaching in Egypt, I went horseback riding in the desert near the Pyramids. When the owner of the stables learned where I was from, he exclaimed, “Oh, Texas! Have we got a horse for you!” Three handlers led out a rearing stallion, with pulsating nostrils, who pawed the air as if he could rip it apart. He hadn’t been ridden in two years. I was no John Wayne, but to save face I mounted this brute, who rocketed past the Sphinx and took me halfway to Libya before I could coax him to turn around.
The Kennedy assassination put an end to the era of heroic Texas movies; after that, the state represented everything Hollywood thought was vile and wrong with America. “Texas” was Slim Pickens as Major “King” Kong, riding the hydrogen bomb to apocalypse in Dr. Strangelove (wickedly written by Texas native Terry Southern). Now “Texas” was an asylum of rednecks, yahoos, drifters, and chainsaw massacrers.
The Texas I actually lived in finally did break into the movies, first with Hud, based on McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By. The book was about the end of the western frontier and the men who made it. The movie, with Paul Newman in the rapscallion title role, made the antimythic story into a legend of its own. A few years later, there was a terrific film called Midnight Cowboy, which opens on the Big Tex Drive-In, in Big Spring. The hero, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), works as a dishwasher, but he has a poster of Newman in Hud on his wall. Joe Buck tries to live out the myth by dressing up in movie-cowboy clothes and seeking stardom in New York, where he becomes a failed gigolo. I was teaching in Cairo when the movie came out, and one night during Ramadan I took my class to see it after the evening meal. To me, Midnight Cowboy was about the neurosis of wanting to live up to a myth. I came out of the film exhilarated, but my students were shaken. For the first time, I realized how much the rest of the world valued “Texas,” what a rich legacy it is, and how universally appealing the myth is. Perhaps Texas really is a place that exists more fully in film than in real life.
The fear besetting Texans, including its writers and filmmakers, was that, by leaving the myth behind, “Texas” would be crushed by ordinariness. And yet, it’s exactly that quotidian quality of life in the small towns and featureless suburbs that becomes so luminous and heartbreaking in the plays and films of Horton Foote, such as Tender Mercies and The Trip to Bountiful; it als
o awakens the comedy of Mike Judge’s animated series King of the Hill and his cult classic movie of the corporate software culture in Austin, Office Space. Richard Linklater became the chronicler of the ongoing dialectic of the Austin streets with his first commercial movie, Slacker (1991), and then in Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, and many other independent films. His tour de force Boyhood follows a child who actually grows up in Texas during the twelve years it took Rick to make the film, tracing the evolution of the boy’s consciousness as he approaches maturity. The myth has diminished, assuming a more modest place in the Texas psyche. It may never disappear entirely, nor would I wish it to. The myth has gone through hard times before and come back to life—although each time, I think, with a little less reality. The danger in holding on to a myth is that it becomes like a religion we’ve stopped believing in. It no longer instructs us; it only stultifies us. And besides, what do we want with a myth that makes us into people we don’t want to be?
Level Three requires shaking off the mythic illusions and telling new stories about who we really are. The noble quality of Level Three is that it returns us to the familiar. The songs we heard as children, the sounds of our labor, the primal smells of the kitchen, the legends of our ancestors, the phrases and intonations we cling to in our language, the colors of our land, the cloud shapes in our sky—all are folded into the art of Level Three. It feels like home. And isn’t that the point of culture, to come home again with a clear and educated eye?
FIVE
The Cradle of Presidents