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Overview
The collection begins with a twist on book introductions that sets the tone for the essays to come—a self-interview conducted poolside at an eccentric Houston motel favored by regional rock bands. Over piña coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a vanishing era, and the way that artists in literature and film represent a state both infectiously grand and too big for its britches.
In “Fildelphia Story,” Graham remembers his Ivy League professorial stint in a city the small-town Texan who rented him a moving van looked up under “F.” In “Doing England” the Lone Star Yankee courts Oxford University and returns with a veddy British education. In “The Ground Sense Necessary” a native son journeys inward to explore the dry ceremonies of frontier Protestantism and to recount movingly his father's funeral in Collin County.
With his wide-ranging knowledge of classic regional works, Graham unerringly traces the style and substance of local literary giants and offers a sometimes irreverent but always entertaining look at the Texas triumvirate of Dobie, Webb and Bedichek. Other essays look at such Texas greats as Katherine Anne Porter, George Sessions Perry, William Humphrey and John Graves.
In a section he calls “Polemics,” Graham includes his best known essays, “Palefaces vs. Redskins,” a sardonic survey of the Texas literary landscape, and “Anything for Larry,” a tour de force that has already become a minor classic. The essay weighs the puny financial achievements of Graham against those of mega-author Larry McMurtry and never fails to bring down the house when Graham gives a public reading.
A recognized authority on celluloid Texas, Graham provides a rich sampling of his knowledge of Texas movies in pieces that blanket the territory from moo-cow cattle-drive epics to soggy Alamo sagas to urban cowboy melodramas.
In the larger-than-life state that is Texas, nobody sizes up the Lone-Star mythos, its interpreters, boosters and detractors better than Don Graham.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780875654874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | TCU Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Giant Country
Essays on Texas
By Don Graham
TCU Press
Copyright © 1998 Don GrahamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87565-487-4
CHAPTER 1
Places
Filadelphia Story
In 1971 I moved from a ranch outside Buda, Texas (population 498) to Philadelphia (population 1,949,996) to take a teaching job at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a big step for me, and like every step in my pursuit of what I had trouble thinking of as a "career," it was happenstance from the word go.
At the time I had almost no conception of the University of Pennsylvania, nor of its actual location. I knew it was somewhere on or near the East Coast. Many of my friends in Texas never did get it straight. They always confused Penn with Penn State. They believed that I taught at Penn State for five years, and occasionally, years later, one would ask me what I thought of Joe Paterno—the absolute extent of their interest in the whole idea of Pennsylvania. I told them that, overall, he seemed like a nice guy, despite the swarthy ethnic look and the incredibly ugly uniforms his team wore (which they still do). I tried once to tell my friends about a game at Penn, but they couldn't conceive of what I was talking about—the lazy afternoon, the smell of pot wafting through the stands, and down on the field, the Quakers playing like a bunch of hippies throwing Frisbees at a Sunday picnic.
I got the Penn job by the usual route, through interviewing at the Modern Language Association. Academicians remember their interviews the way combat veterans recall firefights. Two heavyweights from Cal-Davis, both of whose names I recognized from having read their publications, gave me a very hard time of it, and I felt like a piece of meat from Rocky when I staggered into the Hilton hallway afterwards. But the Penn interview was nice, even pleasant. Of the four interviewers on the Penn team, two were southerners, and that helped relieve my nervousness a bit.
What helped most was the tone set by the chairman, R. M. Lumiansky, a famous medievalist and a no-nonsense sort of fellow. He began by asking me to "tell us about that dentist in San Francisco." (He meant the title character of McTeague, a novel by Frank Norris.) It was very refreshing to hear a question about my dissertation on Norris posed in English because I was trying to write the dissertation in English instead of some special lit crit twilight-zone academese.
After gnawing on McTeague for a while, we moved on to a book I'd recently reviewed, a study of Ezra Pound by a scholar with a Chinese name. The other southerner made a crack about the name's sounding like what they'd had for supper last night. I really liked the joke—it was exactly the kind of humor that would get me in trouble more than once in the years ahead. The interview sped along, and I emerged with no serious hemorrhaging.
Back in Buda, early in January, the call came. Lumiansky was direct as always: "We've got a job—do you want it?" I said I had to check a couple of possibilities, and he said okay. Actually I didn't have anything else going except some state university in upstate New York where the chairman said he could see cows from his office window. Outside my window in Buda I could see a horse trying to bite the orange Plymouth sitting in the driveway. In time the horse managed to ripple the hood with his teeth.
I waited a decent interval and called Lumiansky back and said yes. Months passed and then it was U-Haul time. In San Marcos where I rented the U-Haul, the man named Daryl—he had it stitched on his shirt in order not to forget—looked up Philadelphia in the U-Haul Book to see if there was a drop-off station there. Of course there had to be, but Daryl said,
"Nope, this truck don't go there."
"You've got to be kidding," I said.
"Lookee here, you don't see it, do you," he said with no small amount of pride in his competence.
"Why don't we try the Ps, Daryl?" He was looking it up in the Fs.
Arriving in Filadelphia in late August was a bit overwhelming. At ninety degrees, the heat surpasses Texas's 100-plus temperatures in sweat, odors, and discomfort. But unlike Texas, Philadelphia heat didn't hang on through October, and by early September, with the semester cranking up, I was thrilled by the crisp days and ready to begin what I assumed would be a gradual development of a new, urban, eastern self. It didn't turn out that way.
The week before classes started, my grandfather died, so I flew back to Texas for his funeral. He was a wonderful man, 6'4", a farmer, generous and kind and interested in all sorts of things. He loved to talk politics with me and never understood why I hadn't run for governor. But now he was gone, and in the small country cemetery in Allen, a tiny community north of Dallas, he was laid to rest. Being there with my kin, then flying back to Philadelphia, made me feel my rural southern roots intensely.
But then, nearly everything that happened in Philadelphia threw me back upon my southern origins. On my first day of class, I wore a pin-striped suit. After all, this was the Ivy League, wasn't it?—even if Esquire erred that year and left Penn off its list of Ivy League schools. (The campus newspaper worried about this slight the whole year. People were paying a ton of money and by god, Penn was a full-fledged member of the Ivy League!) But the suit didn't hide anything. One sentence out of my mouth and I was revealed for what I was, a Texan, a southerner. That first day set the tone for the next five years. Being from Texas made a difference. I began to understand Lyndon Johnson in a way I never had before. And Norman Mailer. I was why we were in Vietnam.
There were times when I liked the separateness and times when I didn't. In classes, with most students, the accent was an advantage—foreign but appealing. Also useful. I knew how Faulkner sounded, and they didn't.
And on the streets of Philadelphia the accent offered a certain advantage. Upon hearing it, people usually viewed me as simple-minded and would slowly explain, as to an idiot, where the bus stop was.
Sometimes the accent could lead to real misunderstandings, though. One night at a party in a gay district downtown, another Texan and I were sent to fetch some ice, and when Michael said to a couple of guys on the street, "Do you know where I can get some aaise?" it sounded like something else altogether. My habit of saying "ma'am" to women didn't work too well, either, so I stopped.
The thing is, Philadelphia was ethnic country, and Texas wasn't. Or hadn't been in all my years there. Now Texas is more like the rest of the nation; identity politics and ethnic consciousness have become much more pronounced in the last twenty-five years. In Philadelphia, I discovered that you had to declare yourself; people insisted upon it. Everybody was something: Italian, African-American, Jewish, Polish, Catholic, something. And what was I? An American, I thought. But what I really was, up there, was a Texan. I belonged to an ethnic minority whether I liked it or not.
I was also a cowboy. Because that's the other side of the Texas legacy. First, you're a southerner, and if you can prove you have renounced your membership in the KKK and are capable of reading something more challenging than the labels of Wolf Brand Chili, then you are a cowboy. At Penn I could not escape the western tag, the frontier baggage that every Texan carries round with him. Afternoons when the light filtered dimly through the high windows of the English building at 34th & Walnut, I'd sometimes find myself walking down an empty hallway when suddenly there would appear at the other end a man dressed in black leather pants who would, invariably, go into a gunfighter's crouch and mimic drawing his mythic pistol in an imaginary recreation of a thousand showdowns in a thousand western movies. I felt like an idiot (idjit we say in Texas), but I usually complied, giving my best impression of a slow-motion draw, the balletic figure of Gary Cooper flickering across my mind's eye. The man in the leather pants was a very hot ticket at the time, a young, hip, fast-track African-American who hated stereotyping based on race and ethnicity. He wrote about it all the time. His idea of The Texan seemed a bit stereotypical to me, but I suppose it was simply a pop cult icon and therefore fair game.
Being a cowboy had certain advantages, I'll admit. It meant that long-distance drinking, barroom hijinks, a fondness for the lyrics of George Jones, and a general rowdiness were permissible, even expected.
The oddest thing about the cowboy label, personally, was its complete irrelevance to the Texas I'd grown up in. My background was rural, all right, but my parents were farmers, not ranchers, and the Texas I knew as a child, in Collin County, twenty miles northeast of Dallas, was closer to William Faulkner than to Zane Grey. It was southern in manners, mores, and economics. Having lived on a ranch near Buda didn't mean I was a cowboy, either. I didn't own a pair of boots, a pickup, or a deer rifle, and I didn't ride horses. Never have liked horses and wouldn't ride one today on a bet. The more I said about my lack of qualifications to be a true gun-toting, murderous soul-of-the-American-killer-type Texan, the more I was disbelieved. Nobody paid any attention. Nor do they today. I can wear all of the Italian clothes I want to, and everybody mythically sees me in boots and jeans. A few years ago I finally gave in and bought a pair of cowboy boots, I got so tired of everybody expecting me to have some, but then I left them in a closet in an apartment in Montpellier in southern France where they had mildewed for six months and weren't fit to wear, which I hadn't been doing anyway. Now I own a pair of boots my late uncle left me. He always thought I needed a good pair of boots. As for the other accoutrements of the manly style in Texas wear, I possess neither a Stetson nor a big belt buckle with my name on it, and since there's nobody in my family left to will me the same, and since I don't intend to run for public office, the prospects for these tokens of Textosterone look slim.
At Penn the cowboy brand received a kind of official imprimatur in 1973 when the department, then under the chairmanship of Joel Conarroe, instituted two new courses in film: one in the detective film, the other in westerns. As the resident cowboy, I was the obvious choice for the westerns. Though I went into the course with some misgivings, never having thought of myself as a "film person," it turned out to be a bridge to many things that have made my career, such as it is, produce a small cactus rose or two. Forty students signed up for the first run of "Western Movies," and the next year, the enrollment went to one hundred. In an impressive, large old room in the administration building we saw many of the classics, including Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, High Noon, and The Wild Bunch.
Publicly, I taught the movie course and did my committee work and began to publish articles on Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and other mainline American lit writers. But by 1974–1975 the appeal of the western movies class was pulling me inexorably into a new field, popular culture, and an old area of reading, western and southwestern fiction. Owen Wister, Larry McMurtry, all that. I wrote an essay on The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, one of the films we studied in class, and I began to see that more and more, the western movie connection was a rich and personally rewarding vein to explore. It was my tradition, I discovered.
Privately, the lure was even stronger. One of the films that came to Philadelphia in 1971–1972 was The Last Picture Show. Larry McMurtry's vision of terminal bleakness in a small Texas town won critical plaudits and popular acclaim, but it just made me homesick for the high, wide, and empty spaces of Texas. The drab grays of that film seemed much preferable to the actual grays of Philadelphia. Imbedded in The Last Picture Show is, of course, a scene from Red River. Seeing Red River, a film out of my childhood, then teaching it as a "text" in class, I began to recover my entire past, a Texas past that I thought would be erased with the passage of time in the East.
There was also a wild trip to Waco that reawakened all my Texas longings. A friend invited me to give a paper at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association, held in Waco that year, and I worked feverishly on an essay eventually titled "Is Dallas Burning? Notes on Recent Texas Fiction." Landing in Waco at a small airport that gave upon a cow pasture, with the huge blue dome of the sky arching above, I felt keenly the sense of space I'd been missing. Then began the drinking. We started in the afternoon, in a bar downtown. At some point a large rat walked through the front door. We were sitting in a booth and saw the whole thing. This rat walked in, like he intended to get a drink or something, and it just happened that at the same time a large man wearing a beer distributor's suit with Lone Star emblazoned on it, walked in, saw the rat, and promptly dropped a case of beer on Mr. Rat. The bartender, without missing a beat, said, "We don't serve rats in here." This story never played in Philadelphia. Nobody ever believed it, when I tried to tell them.
In the mid-1970s, two other cowboy associations coalesced in Philadelphia, both from out of my past, both curiously memorable to someone undergoing the kind of imaginary journey that the combination of Philadelphia and western movies had set me off on. Roy Rogers came to town for the grand opening of the Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon—or some such thing—a fast-food venue on Walnut Street, around 38th or 39th, as I recall. Anyway, what Roy was selling was phony barbeque, something you could slip past easterners as barbeque—a dab of thin meat, a fall-apart bun, and a thin, tasteless sauce. Local TV covered the festivities, and there Roy was on the tiny silver screen, the first time I'd seen him in twenty years. He looked exactly the same, lean and kind of oriental. There beside him, in delicious parody, was the Cowboy, a local West Philadelphia character who frequented the streets around the university. (Those streets were full of wacked-out people. One of them, Duck Woman, quacked nonstop. She quacked on the street and she quacked on the bus—a pathetic but maddening figure.) The Cowboy wore cheap, ill-fitting duds and always walked ten paces in front of a woman following dutifully in his wake. Seeing Roy and his serendipitous sidekick was a highlight of my Philadelphia years.
The second real-life movie memory was even stranger. Tex Ritter died on his way to Philadelphia in 1974. His name was on the marquee at a local theater, but Tex never made it to town for that performance. Although Tex was never in the same box-office class with Gene or Roy, he made a lot of B movies that I saw and liked as a kid, and he always had the most authentic Texas voice of them all, a voice my students and I had heard recently at its mournful best, singing "Do not forsake me, oh my darlin'," in High Noon. When Tex talked in the movies, you knew you were hearing the real thing. He sounded like all the people I'd grown up with.
When I left Penn in 1976, all the old associations with the South and with Texas were coming to the fore. On the southern front, Jimmy Carter was making his run for the presidency. Up there, he looked pretty good to me, and I spent much of my last semester at Penn trying to explain to skeptical Yankee friends that Carter was not a variant spelling of Cretin and might even make a good president. I'm thankful I wasn't in Philadelphia later on, when the Carter presidency began to unravel. The point is, while I was in Philadelphia, I felt I had to be loyal to Carter. He talked funny and came from the sticks, two reasons why my friends distrusted him. But hadn't they ever seen the Waltons, the television drama that made Carter viable in the first place? Back in Texas, I could take a critical view of Carter without worrying about feeling disloyal to Dixie.
On the Texas front, things began to move about the time I arrived in Austin to teach at the University of Texas. The department wanted me to develop a western movie course and to teach J. Frank Dobie's famous course, "Life and Literature of the Southwest." No turn of events could have surprised me more, because I had taken my Ph.D. at Texas and had never thought of returning. But being at Penn had detoxified my too local credentials, and voila, here I was, back in Texas. And Texas, as I say, was on the move, culturally speaking. In 1975 Atlantic Monthly devoted an entire issue to Texas, and Texas Monthly, founded in 1974, was beginning to attract attention nation-wide. The Austin progressive country music scene, especially Willie Nelson, was exploding, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Dallas, and Urban Cowboy were just around the corner.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Giant Country by Don Graham. Copyright © 1998 Don Graham. Excerpted by permission of TCU Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Greed, Creed, and Me: The Author Interviews Himself by Way of an Introduction,Places,
Filadelphia Story,
The Ground Sense Necessary,
Texas in 1940: The WPA Guide,
Doing England,
American Narratives,
Giant Country,
Pages,
Cotton and Classicism: George Sessions Perry's Farm Novel,
Katherine the Great,
William Humphrey: Last of the Southern Belle-Lettrists,
Pen Pals: Dobie, Bedichek and Webb,
John Graves and the Regionalist Enterprise,
"Urban by God": Billy Lee Brammer's Texas,
Take My Sequel from the Wall: The Lonesome Dove Cycle,
Polemics,
Palefaces and Redskins: A Literary Skirmish,
Land Without Myth, or, Texas and the Mystique of Nostalgia,
Anything for Larry,
Paris, as in Texas,
Puerto Vallarta Squeezed,
What the World Wants to Know,
Pictures,
Moo-vie Cows: The Trail to Hollywood,
The Big Show: Autry's Artful Oater,
Remembering the Alamo: The Story of the Texas Revolution in Popular Culture,
Nowhere Else but Southfork: What Texas Looks Like in the Movies,
"Time-Traveling Through Texas": A Half-century of Lone Star Movies on Video,
Acknowledgments,