Welcome and Introduction

Thank you very much, Pat, for your leadership and for the fine program.As we began planning for our meeting and our subject emerged, it seemed important to me that part of our program should concentrate on the images and myths of Texas as they've revealed themselves in our imaginative literature and film. Literature and film embody myth, and in turn elaborate it, reinforce it, and even transform it. As Joyce's wonderful character Leopold Bloom-just a minor character in a minor work-divines as he's walking through Dublin past Trinity University's ugly jowls, he says and thinks, "Location myths depend upon parallax." And he isn't quite sure what he means, but he knows that the angle of vision determines how the object is viewed.

For example, living some years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I especially enjoyed Dan Jenkins's novel about Texas. It was called Baja Oklahoma. More seriously, one of the important American novels of the past decade and one that moved me deeply was set in Texas, and that's the first of Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. It's hard to believe that this remarkable novel takes place in mid-twentieth century Texas. It seems so remote from the Texas of today and yet so real in its own way.

To shape the subject of this panel, I asked a group of writers to come to the Ransom Center to try to bring some ideas together and form a topic, a topic that would bring these myths that we've been talking about into some focus. I asked Bill Broyles to moderate the panel, and my assistant, Stephen Smith, to help us with the film, which is going to be a real treat today. I'll introduce our moderator, Bill Broyles, and then what I'm going to do is fade into West Texas, although now we haven't really determined where that is, after this morning's discussion.

Bill Broyles grew up in Baytown, Texas. He went to Rice and then to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. He worked in the civil rights movement, and then he finished out the '60s as a Marine infantry lieutenant in Vietnam. He was the founding editor of Texas Monthly and then was editor-in-chief of Newsweek, after which he vowed never to hold a job again.

He's lectured and taught at UCLA, USC, Rice, NYU, Columbia, the U.S. Naval Academy, and The University of Texas at Austin. He's written for many newspapers and magazines. He wrote the book Brothers in Arms. He was co-creator of the television series China Beach, which won four Emmys. He teamed with his old Texas Monthly friend, Al Reinert, to write the film Apollo 13, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award and a Writer's Guild award and won the PEN Center Literary Award for best screenplay.

He's a contributing editor to Esquire, and he's working on more books and screenplays, most recently Cast Away starring Tom Hanks, which will be released, I'm told, Christmas 2000. I'm very pleased to introduce our moderator, Bill Broyles.

William Broyles*, Moderator

Thank you very much, Tom, and thank you very much for inviting us to do this today. Our topic is the relation of art to place, specifically Texas art to Texas.
For quite some time, and for many people extending even to the present, the expression "Texas art" has been as much an oxymoron as "Texas philosophy." The early settlers in Oklahoma put up a sign at the Red River, and it said, "Texas Begins Here." Those who could read turned back. So I think it's appropriate that we're going to begin our discussion of writing today by showing you something from the medium designed for illiterate people. You may note at the end one of the benefits of being the moderator. Let's run the film.

(Whereupon a film was shown.)

What can I say? After that extraordinarily realistic portrayal of the state of Texas, we're going to have an informal discussion about Texas, its myths, and how it has affected writing. What I'm going to do is introduce our panelists, make a few opening remarks myself, and then jump back into a panelist seat, and we'll throw the football around. I should also say that we will have a question period afterward, we hope, but if you have anything that comes up or jumps into your mind in the meantime, please just go ahead and say it.

Our panelists, beginning to my left, are Elizabeth Crook, who is from San Marcos and grew up in the Hill Country. We're going to notice a certain geographical diversity as we go across here. She's the author of The Raven's Bride: A Novel of Sam Houston and Eliza Allen and the novel Promised Lands: A Novel of the Texas Revolution.
And I should say, as we finish with Apollo 13-and I'm introducing Elizabeth-but it occurred to me that it's quite interesting here that the first word spoken by a human being on a heavenly body was the last name of a hero of the Texas Revolution: "Houston, the Eagle has landed."

Lest you think that our heroes of the Texas Revolution spent all their time cleaning their muskets and riding their horses, you need only to dip into one of Elizabeth's books. They show the extraordinary relation between emotion and history, and they are written with a clean, strong, and beautiful style. Our second panelist, Steve Harrigan, is the author of several nonfiction books, among them Natural State and Water and Light. His first two novels were Aransas and Jacob's Well. His third novel, The Gates of the Alamo, is soon to be published by Knopf. In my humble opinion, Steve is the most lyrical writer Texas has ever produced. His prose is as crystal clear as Barton Springs used to be.

The final panelist is Don Graham, who is the J. Frank Dobie Regent's Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the author of Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas; No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy; and most recently, Giant Country: Essays on Texas.

In spite of his lofty title, Don is an author as strong as onions and as tart as Ruby Reds. He loves Texas the way longhorns love cactus. He thinks you should burn it first. Now, as we get into this and we get to our distinguished panel, I'm going to exercise my prerogatives to set up our theme. When I went to college at Rice, writing was what happened elsewhere in England or Ireland or Russia or France, New England, the South, but certainly not here. I think that has something to do with the newness of our culture. We were too busy building Texas to write or read about it, and until very recently we were suspicious of those who did. I think it also has something to do with size, literature tending to blossom in tight, close cultures, fertile with memories and rich in human history.

Until recently the ratio of history to land in Texas has been about the same as that in Siberia, and I mean no insult to Siberia by that. We may not be the head, we may not be the heart, we may in fact be the wart on the toe of English-speaking culture, but we have given the world some enduring mythic characters, some of whom we've seen on this screen: the frontiersman, the cowboy, the wildcatter (that up-from-nothing James Dean shaking his rebellious, oily fist in Rock Hudson's face, giving the you-know-what to the established order), and of course, the astronaut, that can-do cowboy, riding off not into the sunset but to the moon itself. We've also had our hand in cradling the blues, Tejano music, and literature, and Southern Gothic. But writing until recently in Texas has been like looking for oil. You didn't always find it in the pretty places. I grew up on the Houston Ship Channel, as yet unsung in poetry and song.

Sweet Ship Channel, flow softly until I end my song.
Oh, ship channel, I long to hear you, away you rolling channel.
Away, I'm bound away across the wide ship channel.
I'm still working on this, but you get the idea.
I grew up watching those ships go by, headed for romantic-sounding places like the Straits of Malacca, Veracruz, Zamboanga. I wanted to get on them and go, I didn't care where, just out of here, out of where I was, away from all those refineries that belched fire into the night, into a place where I didn't have to go in the back door of the library to check out books lest I be beat up by kids coming out the front.

I wanted to and I did, but no matter how far away I went, I kept coming back, both to live and to write. The film Apollo 13 was set right down the road from where I grew up. There's something about Texas, something that keeps us here and writing about it. What is it? That's what our panelists are going to tell us.
How has our writing-this was our question-and our work in particular been inspired by, dependent on, or a rebellion against those myths we just saw on that screen?

Steve, you take the first shot at that.

I've just written a novel about the Alamo, and the myth of the Alamo had a particularly strong hold on me when I was a boy. I literally was wearing a coonskin cap the first time I saw the Alamo. This was in 1955 during the Fess Parker-Davy Crockett phase, which was-for those of you not old enough to remember it, which would be virtually nobody in this room-maybe Elizabeth-it completely took the country by storm. It was the Star Wars of its time. And it had such a profound effect on me that I wonder now if I've written this book not out of some sort of mature artistic judgment but just out of arrested development. Thinking about my visit to the Alamo when I was a kid reminded me of what Dr. Silber said this morning about needing to live in a place where there are ghosts. In Texas, the Alamo is the haunted house. That's where the ghosts live. And I think it's almost impossible not to visit that place at an impressionable age and have a profound reaction to it.

In terms of the myth, in terms of writing a book about it, it's no fun for me as a writer just to recycle myths. I feel like I have to grapple with them. As you can tell, there was plenty to grapple with in those two film clips about the Alamo that we just saw. There is so much myth built up about it that has to be reexamined if you're going to write something that's even partly reasonable.

And what I discovered when I was researching this novel was that there was an equal amount of counter-myth built up about it, an equal level of revisionist history that I also had to wade through and find a way to tell the story in a way that was authentic, both to me and to what I perceive to be history. So that's how I've been dealing with the myth lately, the last seven or eight years. Other people have their own reactions, I'm sure.

Elizabeth Crook*

I grew up watching the kind of Westerns that we saw on these film clips, and they may not all have taken place in Texas, but I thought they did. Actually they were not my choice of viewing material. I had an older brother, and in our house, the law of the West was still fairly much intact, which meant, basically, if you were bigger you were in control of the television set. With all of the outrageous stereotypes that you see in those old Westerns, the women are actually fairly interesting. They're better than anything on the Lucille Ball show. They're better than Ethel. They're strong, and they're independent.

Steve and I were talking earlier and saying it was in the Westerns and in film noir that you had decent women. I certainly wasn't watching any film noir, but I was watching these Westerns, and I remember this one scene where there was a woman-a peroxide blonde with about an eighteen-inch waist-and she was standing out in front of her cabin looking like a million bucks, and there were all these bad guys out there. And she drew these two pistols, and she said in this sultry voice, "Do you want to try that again, cowboys?"

This stunned me, because she was so tough. I felt like there was something in this for me. I have come to realize, and probably had some rudimentary sense at the time, that these were not the greatest words ever written in cinematic or literary history. But when you are a three-foot-high kid with a four-foot-high brother who has control of the television set, they can sound like words to live your life by.

From that point on, the Westerns began to feel very comfortable to me. You can imagine that reading Jane Austen seemed anticlimactic after growing up on Bonanza. And so I began to find my way into these tougher stories. And what has been difficult for me as a writer has been divorcing myself from those old images, which are very powerful images. I have had to think in a fresh way about everything because those stereotypes were often wrong and wrongly done. I am a dutiful writer. I have wanted to achieve an authenticity and resurrect the ghosts of the real people who lived on the frontier rather than these aberrant derivatives that have been made up by bad novelists and Hollywood.

And so it has been a challenge to try to grope my way back to the authentic and the real and separate myself from the myths. It's been interesting watching Steve write his book. He hits on things that I missed. I feel like with each new book that comes out, that writer somehow comes a little closer to the bone than I was able to because more information is out or they're thinking a little more critically. You read these new things with your eyes shut because you did miss things. I think the trend-and we see it in these movies-has been to try to get back to what is real, and in a sentimental way appreciate some of the myths and then divorce ourselves from the ones that don't help us.

Don Graham*

I was interested to hear Steve talk about his identification with the Alamo and Elizabeth with strong women characters and with the film clips we just saw. I identify with the loser kids in The Last Picture Show, with the boys who date cattle and so on. But that really was my high school that's being portrayed in that film, and Larry McMurtry, the author of that novel and co-author of the screenplay, once said a great thing about small towns in Texas. He said he grew up in a bookless town in a bookless part of the state. And I thought, Well, he'd have to get in line. That's where we all grew up in the Texas of the 1950s.

The other character that I identify with more and more strongly as years go by is Jett Rink, and I was thinking if I could win the lotto tonight, I would be Jett Rink. He's this boy who would like to make it rich-like to get rich and so on. Now, he has some nasty characteristics, nasty practices along the way and wealth corrupts him. It wouldn't corrupt me at all. It would purify me. And it would send me straight to Italy, which is my spiritual home.

But from a personal point of view, from the point of view of trying to write about Texas, I grew up in what I call the unmythic part of Texas, which is North Central Texas, Collin County, northeast of Dallas. And I grew up on a cotton farm, and our animals were not prancing cow ponies but mules, and there ain't nothing romantic about mules. And I was thinking if Fort Worth is where the West begins, Collin County is where the South ended. So the Texas I knew was not a romantic place at all. It was a place pretty much of hard labor and small farms, quite decent people. And the Texas that mattered, the Texas that seemed real was the Texas I saw in the movies on Saturday afternoons and then at the theater with my family during the week, when we would go to what we'd call A-level pictures-Red River, movies like that. And that Texas seemed wonderful. There were beautiful, snow-clad mountains near Amarillo. There was beautiful desert country near Beaumont, and everybody owned vast cattle ranches and seemed to have a very jolly time of it.

And so I would go home, and my Texas wasn't at all like the Texas I saw in the movies. And since then, I've been writing about real Texas and my Texas and trying to connect the two, and they rarely connect. The last note I would say is that, in 1978, the final insult to my Texas heritage came when the TV show Dallas became popular, and it turned out that Southfork is located three country miles from where I was born, and in terms of mythology, about three million miles. But Dallas, for me, was the completion of a process of westernizing Texas, of erasing East Texas and its embarrassing connections with the South and so on.

And so for me, the movies have always been both an attraction and a source of amusement, and at times of irritation.

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