God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(29)

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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 bestselling 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 change, 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.