Lone Star Literature

LONE STAR LITERATURE: From the Red River to the Rio Grande. Edited by Don Graham. Norton.

733 pp. $29.95

David Crockett called it the “garden spot of the world.” Union general Philip Sheridan said that if he owned hell and Texas, he’d “rent out Texas and live in hell.” Crockett and Sheridan fairly bracket the reactions of outsiders to Texas; the feelings of Texans themselves are more complicated but no less extreme.

Don Graham, who teaches American literature at the University of Texas at Austin, has sampled the collective mind of Texans and gathered three-score pieces of writing about the Lone Star State. Most are short stories or parts of novels; several are essays. Though the Texas mystique developed during the 19th century, Graham largely restricts himself to the 20th. This leaves enough of the old Texas—including Andy Adams on a waterless cattle drive, O. Henry on the politics of cowboy art, and Walter Prescott Webb on the Comanches—to satisfy traditionalists, but allows Graham to illustrate how the Texas experience diversified after the discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1901. The voices are as varied as the people of the state.

Graham’s Texas is divided into four parts: the West, the South, the Border, and, reflecting the fact that Texas has become one of the most urbanized states, Town and City. Dorothy Scarborough writes of the wind on the West Texas plains, and how it blows away beauty and youth and dreams. Katherine Anne Porter looks east to find the memories that fill the region that was a salient of the Cotton Kingdom. C. C. White’s memories of the same district come from the other side of the color line. Ray Gonzalez watches immigrants cross the Rio Grande at El Paso, defying authority as immigrants to Texas have done since the Comanches and Americans pushed into Spanish and Mexican Texas during the early 19th century. Robert Caro—no Texan but a New Yorker on an extended visa—writes about the Hill Country, where Lyndon Johnson grew up without electricity and vowed to ease the burden of women like those who reared him.

Larry L. King ponders the oft-noticed habit of Texans to become more Texan after leaving the state. “Texas remains in my mind’s eye that place to which I shall eventually return to rake the dust for my formative tracks,” he writes, “that place where one hopes to grow introspective and wise as well as old.” Molly Ivins is less lyrical and more put out as she describes the varieties of Texas sexism: “They used to say that Texas was hell on women and horses—I don’t know why they stopped.”

Short stories and essays anthologize well; bits of novels are trickier. Mary Karr’s piece from The Liars’ Club (1995) is hilariously self-contained, but Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place (1961), the finest novel of Texas politics, is woven too tightly for clean excerpts. Brammer has to be included, and Graham does his best, but the ragged edges show. In this case, the plea of all anthologists applies with special force: Go read the original.

Graham is a gentle guide to what he calls the “archeological site” of Texas literature. He suggests themes but otherwise lets visitors ramble. “Readers may make their own discoveries and connections, and they are welcome to whatever insights may arise.” It’s a rich plot, worth returning to again and again.

—H. W. Brands