Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic and Other Sketches of Life in the Southwest ed. by Ronald B. Querry (review)

Reviews 77 Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic and Other Sketches of Life in the Southwest. Edited by Ronald B. Querry. (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1983. 277 pages, $18.50.) There is a definite formula for the production of books like Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic etc. One can almost visualize the steps that are gone through: the promoter sends a letter to a university press offering a cut-andpaste book that will “bring together diverse voices that speak to and from the Southwest” (Introduction). The editor/promoter promises to reprint the classics of the region’s writing, along with some new works that “celebrate a common theme” (dust jacket). The press agrees, and after a great deal of arguing about what should go in and what stay out, the book appears and is bought by newcomers to the region who want to send copies to relatives who have visited here. Books like Growing Old etc. appear about every five years. They used to have titles like Southwesterners Write (Pearce and Thomason), Round-Up (Perry), or 21 Texas Stories (Peery). But now, in a cleverer age that names rock bands “The Police” and “Culture Club,” we get titles like Growing etc. None of this is to suggest that there is anything wrong with Querry’s collec­ tion. But neither can it be said that there is anything especially distinguishing about it. It is pretty much what old hands at Southwest writing have come to expect from such productions. Old Southwest hands will recognize the mildly unparallel categories that Querry has divided his selections into: “Legacies,” “Borderlines,” “Live­ stock,” “Ceremonies,” “Diversions,” “Art,” and “Tales.” Equally predictable are the “standard” authors included: Momaday, John Graves, Larry King, McMurtry, Waters, D. H. Lawrence, Eastlake, and Leslie Silko. These writers are among the obligatory contributors to books like Growing. And I will bet that most oldtimers can predict exactly which cuttings from Waters, Eastlake, and Momaday are used. If you guessed passages from The Man Who Killed the Deer, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-six Horses, and The Way to Rainy Mountain you were right. And if you bet that Larry King’s entry was “My Old Man,” you win that one, too. In addition to the old standbys and the ubiquitous trail herd entry — no, not Andy Adams this time — there are some “new voices” : Clancy Carlise’s Honkytonk Man provides a cutting, as does John Davidson’s book The Long Road North, a narrative about illegal aliens and their hard lot. Then there is Gary Cartwright with a piece on football; McMurtry’s snide and satiric essay on a Texas fiddlers’ contest; A1 Reinert’s Texas Monthly story on the Fort Worth Stockyards; and the title piece, also from Texas Monthly, William C. Martin’s “Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic.” In all, there are twenty essays or stories in GOAWNP etc. All of them give some “insight into the richness that is the region” (dust jacket). Or, to put it another way, “Taken as a whole . . . they come together in a montage of features that form the basis for the unique richness that is the Southwest” (Introduction). I said earlier that there is nothing much wrong with the 78 Western American Literature book. I take that back. The two quotations above — and a couple I used earlier — show what is really bad about Growing etc. The pompous intro­ duction and the vapid headnotes spoil what would otherwise be the usual sort of once-a-lustrum collection. Oh, one other thing. Why do anthologizers of the Southwest feel obligated to include something by D. H. Lawrence? I hope that custom can be honored in the breach and not in the observance when next someone throws together a “book of imaginative responses to the distinctive qualities of the land, the people, and the historical experiences. . .” (Introduction). JAMES W. LEE North Texas State University Shane. By Jack Schaefer. The Critical Edition, edited by James C. Work. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. xviii + 432 pages, $8.95 paper, $24.95 cloth.) One does not have to agree with all that Jacques Barzun says in “Scholar­ ship Versus Culture” (The...