Literary Houston (review)

In 1952, more than a decade before Houston became designated “Space City,” novelist George Williams grasped its propulsive energy: “Houston, that fabulous city, growing explosively—with skyscrapers shooting up like rockets, industrial areas rolling out from it like smoke, wide patches of ugly residential sections dropping like shattered fragments all about its perimeter, great mansions glowing within like flameflowers, and people, people hurling themselves through it” (375). Williams was a longtime creative writing teacher at Rice University; his students included Larry McMurtry and William Goyen. He is among the fascinating voices brought together by editor David Theis in Literary Houston, the latest installment in TCU Press’s distinguished “Literary Cities” series.

The selections in Literary Houston are excellent throughout, and Theis includes several forgotten treasures, such as 1950s newspaper columnist Sig Byrd and nineteenth-century humorist Alexander Sweet, who wrote perceptively of the seaport-fueled rivalry between Houston and Galveston. He also covers most of the city’s well-known qualities: its vigorous capitalism and lack of zoning, its congested freeways and air pollution, the Ship Channel, the Astrodome, NASA, Enron, and the Hurricane Katrina refugees. Numerous Houston personalities are profiled, including Howard Hughes, Barbara Jordan, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Dominique de Menil. As editor, Theis proves to be an excellent tour guide. He provides concise, helpful introductions to each selection, and the book is very well organized, making it easy to navigate despite its rather impressive bulk.

In the section titled “Visitors,” Theis offers glimpses of Houston through the eyes of notable personalities such as H. L. Mencken, Norman Mailer, and French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. During her visit, de Beauvoir attended a wrestling match and then went out for a drink, finding that, “the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with huge photographs of prize bulls and cows . . . It seems that most of the cafes are decorated in this style” (183). De Beauvoir concludes, “This evening I’ll go to sleep with no regrets. I don’t think that any of Houston’s seductions remain hidden from me” (183).

While Ms. de Beauvoir was undoubtedly too quick to dismiss Houston, other notable cultural figures were greatly enriched by their experience. Willie Nelson, for example, spent a significant portion of his early career in Houston, where he struggled mightily and wrote some of his greatest songs: “Crazy,” “Night Life,” “Mr. Record Man,” and “I Gotta Get Drunk.”

The portraits assembled by Theis are mostly affectionate, and he sidesteps the more critical writings on Houston. This kinder, gentler approach is represented in the Larry McMurtry excerpt, which avoids the novelist’s crude description in his 1970s novel, Moving On. There, McMurtry has a character sniff the air and proclaim, “Houston smells like a crotch.” (Moving On, 221) Instead Theis relies on a milder metaphor, excerpted from a later novel, Anybody Can Whistle: “I touched a button and my window went down, letting in the old fishy smell of Houston, moist and warm, a smell composed of many textures.” (384)

As Theis freely admits, an anthology is not an encyclopedia, and inevitable gaps exist in the coverage. Literary Houston provides relatively little information about the city’s petrochemical industry, its legendary business and civic leaders such as Jesse Jones and Roy Hofheinz, and its burgeoning multiethnic character, which has transformed the once redneck-hearted place into a buoyant international metropolis. Taken as a whole, however, Literary Houston is an excellent collection, illuminating the spirit and history of this “swaggering, flamboyant city” (143).