Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Land without Myth; or, Texas and the Mystique of Nostalgia

Land Without Myth, or, Texas and the Mystique of Nostalgia Imost a dozen years later, it's possible to look back on the Texas Sesquicentennial with something considerably less than awe. The Centennial, in 1936, had been a watershed moment in Texas cultural history. A whole book has been written about that congeries of events, but when the history of the Sesquicentennial is written, it won't take a book. Perhaps a few paragraphs will suffice. The only stimulating thing about the Sesquicentennial was its ironic timing-it came right in the middle of plunging oil prices. So instead of celebrating the rich panoramas of the past, some of the rich spent much of 1986 hiding out on their ranches and attending auctions; only they weren't buying, they were selling. Still, there were a few lame attempts at celebration, self-evaluation , and the sort of backward glances that are supposed to accompany events such as a 150-year milestone. James Michener, for exam183 Giant Country 184 pIe, signed on to help us out, delivering his Lone Star opus even before the calendar year 1986 began. The result, Texas, was like a giant oil spill off the fair coast of Texas literature. A television station in Corpus Christi mounted a PBS-style documentary called Lone Star. It recycled all the old myths: Texans are strong, Texans are independent , Texans are blah blah blah. What the series really said is that Texans are male, minorities are either invisible or colorful, and women are best seen in short skirts on the sidelines of football games. Larry Hagman, dressed as JR. Ewing, introduced the series, standing on the beach in back of his adobe palace at Malibu, a Texas flag waving in the gentle California landward breezes. The merde in Lone Star was deeper than the sand at Malibu. Jimmie Dean, the mythic sausage maker, squinted into the camera and said, "Ah know the meaning of temporary setback, but Ah don't know the meaning of defeat." Travis couldn't have stated it better. All through 1986 the myth was showing signs of strain. A wagon train with a bunch of pioneer-style senior citizens, early retirees dressed up in leggings and calico, was supposed to travel all around the state, but by early spring they were out of money and nobody gave a damn. In the eighties I'd been writing about Texas' propensity to advertise itself at the expense of facts. In three books, one about movies, one about literature, and one that was literature-an anthology of Texas short fiction-Texas was depicted as little different from the one celebrated in film, song, beer commercials, and the Lone Star television series. What I quickly learned, though, was that the media preferred the stereotypes. At various times I was interviewed by the media-by CBS during the Republican convention in Dallas in 1984 ("Morning in Texas"), for example, and by USA Today. I'd answer their questions as truthfully as I could, and then they'd edit my answers to fit their needs. As a result I always came out sounding like (1) a fatuous spokesman for the Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce, or (2) a fatuous spokesman for the Republican party. My message is simple. Texas is a land largely without a "land myth." In modern Texas, where I live, the land is almost wholly given Land Without Myth over to malls. What hasn't been mailed or condoed o'er awaits the next boom. In Austin we're said to be in that boom even now. Eventually we'll pave the rest of the state that's inhabitable. Needless to say, I don't own a foot of land. I'm afraid if I did, I'd start writing like John Craves, one of the state's more treasured writers. Craves is a landowner who feels compelled to write about it. He won't let anybody alone about his land; it's his only subject and has been for nearly thirty years. Herewith, a typical passage from one of his books: . . . inside me somewhere there has always been the incipient disease of the land.... I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion, contracted in childhood from kinsmen looking back to a rural past, that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole...