God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(30)
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.”
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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.