God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (12 page)

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:

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.”

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 also 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?