Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Palefaces and Redskins: A Literary Skirmish

Palefaces and Redskins: A Literary Skirmish It is quite all right to regard me as a Southern, specifically a Texas, writer. -Katherine Anne Porter to George Sessions Perry, 1943 he Texas literary scene reminds me of the skirmish line a famous critic once observed in the landscape of American literature . Philip Rahv said it was the Palefaces versus the Redskins, Henry James vs. Mark Twain. On one side, culture, refinement, and technique; on the other, raw life, realism, and maybe something less than art. In Texas terms, Katherine Anne Portervs.J. Frank Dobie. Such polarities are of course complex when you get down to actual cases. In a work like Noon Wine Porter wrote about the Redskin side of Texas experience with consummate power; and Dobie, who devoted a lifetime to studying the Redskin past-Old Texas, the ranching tradition, cowboys-loved Romantic poetry and lusted after Paleface status. 175 Giant Country 176 Today the Paleface-Redskin issue is plainly present, and the sides are clearly lined up. The Palefaces are all those folks who stand ready to rescue Texas writing (and indeed Texas itself) from its provincial, embarrassing, and nativistic roots. Many of the Palefaces are emigres, recent arrivals, but many are homegrown, too. All are the literary equivalent of Yuppies: upscale, well-educated, fern-bar writers. The Paleface world view is pretty simple, and it looks like this: EAST Ideas Sensitivity Art TEXAS Prejudices Crudeness Ort Palefaces tend to cluster in the major cities and many earn their bread in the academies teaching creative writing. Houston is probably the capital of Paleface Writing Culture, though Austin is not far behind. In the 1980s Houston managed to lure back to Texas the best of the Paleface writers, Donald Barthelme. Now Barthelme is a very fine writer indeed, and any state ought to be glad to claim him. But with two or three tiny exceptions, none of Barthelme's work takes the measure of Texas--or tries to--though it does do an excellent job of capturing the frissons of upper Manhattan. Redskins, on the other hand, tend to live out where the screw worms kill the cows. Elmer Kelton, for example, resides in San Angelo where, at one time, the best steakhouse eatery in town billed itself as 'The Dinning Room." Kelton is the puredee Redskin author: his fiction is always and only western, and it's nearly always about cowhands, drought, and squintin' into the sun. Elmer probably couldn't be dynamited out of San Angelo. But you don't have to live in Texas to be a Redskin. Dan Jenkins and Larry L. King have lived out of the state forever, it seems, and have made semi-serious fortunes recycling their increasingly nostalgic versions of Redskin culture . Vide Semi-Tough and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Maybe where you drink is a better index than where you live. In Austin the ultimate Paleface-Yuppie drinking hole is a eucalyptus bar overlooking Lake Travis, with a multi-tiered, many-splendored view Palefaces and Redskins of the lake, the circling buzzards, and the falling waterline. Here, every sunset, the pilgrims from California and Colorado come to sip their Perriers and strawberry daiquiris and genteelly applaud the sinking of the sun in the west. In old-time Texas drinking establishments you never saw the light. Dark, dank, and choked with smoke, such bars featured people hunched over their drinks, getting up only to punch B-16 or the guy next to them. The only green thing was the felt on the pool table. An actual plant wouldn't have lasted two days. Sometimes the barmaid, usually named Brenda, might consent to add a plastic plant or two, but even these lost their glossy sheen in short time amidst all that smoke and hacking. Who's winning the culture battle? asks the erstwhile novice. The Palefaces. In the end they nearly always win. They've already taken over the Texas Institute of Letters. In the early eighties the top prize ($5,000 cold American) went twice in a row to books that have absolutely nothing to do with Texas: the 1981 winner dealt with bachelor life in New York City, the 1983 winner with the international tennis circuit. Mr. Bachelor had barely touched down at the Houston airport before the prize was his, and Mr. Tennis, who taught in Austin for a while, has lived in Rome the...