Notes From Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State

10. From Wit to Wisdom: The Irony of the Artistic Journey

C L AY R E Y N O L D S N A T I V E T E X A N Clay Reynolds is the author of more than 800 publications ranging from critical studies to short fiction, nonfiction, poems, essays, reviews, and novels. He holds academic degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity University, and the University of Tulsa. Reynolds has won numerous awards for his work and is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and serves as professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His most recent work includes a collection of essays, Of Snakes and Sex and Playing in the Rain, and a collection of short fiction, Sandhill County Lines. 159 Judy Reynolds FROM WIT TO WISDOM: THE IRONY OF THE ARTISTIC JOURNEY The original writer is not one who imitates, but one whom nobody can imitate. François–René de Chateaubriand U N R E M A R K A B L Y , I was born in a small town in Texas. It was fairly typical of hundreds of other small towns in Texas during the “boom years” following World War II, typical of tens of thousands of small towns across America in those days of “I Like Ike” and idyllic fictions of family and community. In most ways, I was an ordinary baby boomer. I wore baggy dungarees and ugly striped T-shirts, a flattop held up with butch wax, and had a passionate longing for a V-8 engine and a girl who looked like Annette Funicello or, later, Ann-Margret. My father was a blue-collar working stiff, a combat veteran of World War II who came home after trouncing Hitler and his minions to settle down and grow prosperous. He settled down, but he never grew prosperous, not in the way he planned. He always wanted to be a rancher and to raise horses, as his father had done. He wound up working for the railroad until they farmed him out with bad eyes and a bad heart, which were probably caused by trouncing Hitler and his minions when he should have been home becoming a rancher and raising horses . My mother was a typical small-town girl who married a likeable guy with a big heart and a good work ethic with NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 160 whom she could have children and grandchildren and grow old and beam proudly whenever her progeny were on parade. She got most of that—the progeny, anyway—but my father died comparatively young, and her children moved away to hold their parades elsewhere. I think that I began the “writing process” before I left home, but to realize it, I first had to go and find it. When the point of departure is West Texas, the trip is apt to be a long one. For me and my friends, the world ended at the county line. We knew there was something else out there, but we were afraid of it. Only a few of us would ever go there; almost none would return. I think we knew that would happen, and I think, for most, that was terrifying. In an era when television had but three part-time channels, “out there” was a mystery. We weren’t ignorant, backward, or poorly informed. We had AM radio beamed all night at us from KOMA, Oklahoma City, after all; through those staticfilled airways, we heard of far off places such as Kansas City and Omaha, Chicago and St. Louis, of phenomena such as boardwalks and beaches, places we could only imagine. We marveled over the wonders of a “hemi under glass” and “double overhead cams” as they were detailed in the rapid-fire commercials for stock car races—interspersed between Gene Pitney and Buddy Holly and Elvis and Patsy Cline crooning about depths of pain and love we couldn’t fathom. Cousins from Fort Worth and Dallas, from Atlanta and San Francisco and New Jersey visited and told us of a world of juvenile delinquents , beatniks, surfboards, then flower children and heavyduty rock and roll. Our vocabularies expanded with words like “cool,” “boss,” and “far out,” and we learned about sex and drugs and even met some kids who had seen Bob Dylan live, been to a Cowboys’ game...