In the Deep Heart’s Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas by Craig Edward Clifford (review)

Reviews 245 In the Deep Heart’s Core: Reflections on Life, Letters, and Texas. By Craig Edward Clifford. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985. 145 pages, $13.95.) Readers of books about Texas and observers of life in Texas may under­ stand the native Texan and his loyalties better after reading Craig Clifford’s essays. What is more important, however, is that they may understand better their own rootedness in a place and its connection with their creative impulses. First subtitled Essays on the Meaning of Texas, the collection’s intent is described best by the author: “a mixture of personal narrative and anecdote; literary criticism and interpretation; cultural, historical, and geographical reflection; and, occasionally, out-and-out philosophizing.” After a decade away from his native state studying Greek and German philosophy, Clifford brings a steady-eyed objectivity to his observations of Texas life and Texas writers’ literary aspirations. As doggedly Texan as the redneck who has never wanted to leave Texas, Clifford’s loyalties solidified only after youthful rejection drove him out-of-state to study, and gnawing homesickness propelled him back to teach and to write. In these literate, absorbing discussions, Clifford argues with Larry McMurtry over the definition and importance of Texas myth. He expands the reader’s comprehension of the Texan’s love-hate relationship with the land. One searching piece urges readers to discard current concepts of rugged individualism as a first step in discovering the true, and therefore useful, symbols implicit in Western myth. Ethnic concerns, country music, and Texas freeways provide philosophical starting points for Clifford’s facile pen. Although he admits that in the restless lives of many today, no ties to anywhere exist, Clifford believes that large truths about the human community can be revealed best by those who can convey the relationship between indi­ vidual members of that community and their particular homelands. With this premise as focus, these essays throw a searchlight on much hoary thought about Western myth and traditions, which Clifford believes need updated definitions and intelligent reconsiderations if they are to serve us well—either as thinkers or as writers. Here, better than most current commentators on Western life and literature, Clifford realizes the avowed intention of writing about “worldly and earthy things, and about the unraveling thread that, these days, barely holds them together.” LOU RODENBERGER McMurry College No Time for Tears. By Lora Wood Hughes. (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. 305 pages, $7.95.) Lora Wood Hughes emerges from her autobiographical No Time for Tears as a genuinely western nurse. Recently reissued by the University of Nebraska Press, this lively account of Hughes’ life as a nurse spans over sixty ...