Cowboys, Oil and Braggadocio

TRYING TO come to terms with a state as huge and varied as Texas in a single magazine issue seems, at best a difficult undertaking. To a Texan it might appear presumptuous. The editors of the Atlantic Monthly, while lamely acknowledging the futility of the effort have nonetheless attempted to do just that. With the help of a number of natives and a few outsiders, they have produced in their March issue an uneven but absorbing investigation of a state the, despite the national attention it receives, remains little understood.

No issue like this one would be complete without Larry McMurtry, the best known writer produced by Texas in the last decade McMurtry's novels (Hud. The Last Picture Show) are generally dull and mediocre, but his Atlantic, article. "The Texas Moon, and Elsewhere," is an incisive exploration of the Texas character, and the strongest article in the issue. Carefully shunning the innumerable cliches about cowboys, oil and braggadocio that make up the prevailing image of the state even among Texans, McMurtry acts as the critic he feels Texas has always lacked. An expatriate now living in Washington. D.C., he returned to travel around Texas for three weeks last summer, and came away "contrasting with those of countless Southerners such as Faulkner and Wolfe. These differing views have their roots in history tradition, according to McMurtry"

What seems to draw southerners home...is a genuine aching and evidently almost constant need to re-experience themselves it is this need that I have noted only rarely in Texas. Texas is very new--still very new--and it has always been urgent, intemperate, and barbaric...The cattle kingdom was not the cotton kingdom: it had no refinement, no architecture, and no leisured class--certainly no leisured ladies. Even now, few Texans slow down to look at their energy is far more phone to the masochism of overwork than to the sweeter masochism of nostalgia, a preference that has weakened them literarily while making them very rich.

McMurtry is a happy exile, and his insights are more often disparaging than admiring, Dallas and Houston are characterized by "lack of depth, narrowness of style, and insufficiency of mind;" Austin is "a third-rate university town that thrives not because of its intellectual standards, but because of the lack of them." He implies his criticism of Austin to the entire state:

Informed conversation is simply too hard to get those who can give it are spread too thin. This does not reflect a lack of intelligence in Texas: the deficiency is cultural and involves a deflection of interest from anything remotely suggestive of mind.

Texas lacks much use for intellectual concerns, but it is not so much anti-intellectual s simply unintellectual. Its driving ambition and vigorous energy, channelled into business and agriculture, do not clash with intellectual preoccupations, but instead diverge from them. McMurtry laments that condition, but retains a grudging admiration for the state's "freshness, vigor, openness, undepleted energy, and - most importantly--undepleted possibility."

ATLANTIC ALSO had to include Larry King, the most prolific Texas-born writer around today. His style ranges from sneering pretension to shallow folksiness. But he is an authentic Texas writer, and Eastern magazine-publishers who have never seen one seem to think that is enough. The Atlantic editors are doubly gullible, featuring two articles by King. Discussing the citizens of Dallas, King fondly recalls his reaction to the news of President Kennedy's assassination: "those goddamned Nazi bastards!" He bows piously to the standard altars of guilt--right-wing politics, oil wealth, "exploitation" of minorities. If nothing else, he knows what sells.

King's piece almost looks good next to the article by Robert Coles. Coles's article on Mexican Americans in Texas is dominated by self-conscious anguish over the abused Chicanos, offering more insight into his own psyche than into Chicano life, which he reduces to a grim picture of economic and political oppression. The history of Mexican-Americans in Texas is a tragic, depressing story; discrimination and poverty still plague most Chicanos. Those conditions deserve considerable attention, especially from Texans, who find them easy to forget or ignore. But Coles fails to examine the complex roots of such conditions, such as language differences, the problems of assimilating a continuing flow of foreign immigrants, and the persistent cultural antagonism between white Texans and Mexican-Americans. With pompous exaggeration, he describes the plight of the Chicano farm worker:

let him begin to assert his American citizenship, and soon enough the law, in all its sudden, arbitrary, inescapable power, will be down on him, and hard indeed.

Coles's preoccupation with economic problems ignores the rich vitality of Chicano culture and the stubborn optimism of the people, which survive stubborn optimism of the people, which survive despite all the injustices dealt them. He also neglects to mention the growing strength of the Raza Unida political party. But then Coles, like King, is more intent on demonstrating his moral purity than on understanding his subject, and the Chicanos get lost in the shuffle.

THE MOST entertaining piece in this issue is Molly Ivins's examination of the Texas Legislature, "Inside the Austin Fun House." Three years ago, to demonstrate the lack of attention given to proposed bills, a legislator presented a resolution that passed without dissent, honoring Albert DeSalvo for his efforts in population control. Ivins recalls another bill requiring felons to submit twenty-four hours advance notice of their intended crimes, and a free-for all during which four representatives mounted the speaker's platform to sing "I Had a Dream, Dear." A recent study of state legislatures rated Texas thirty-eighth out of fifty in quality, provoking a predictable response from statehouse wags: "My God! You mean there are twelve worse than this?"

Texas has too long existed in the vacuum of superficial generalities accepted by both outsiders and natives. The diversity that gives Texas its special character is so obvious that it has become a cliche, and has never attracted more than superficial study, as in John Bainbridge's The Super Americans. As Larry McMurtry remarks. "Texas has lacked many things, but especially it has lacked critics." With the appearance of native magazines like Texas Monthly, and D, that observation may soon by obsolete.

In any case, this issue of Atlantic Monthly deserves special credit for its attention to the problem--without the sort of criticism it offers. Texas will remain a shadow of its potential, narrow and self-congratulatory in its ignorance of its own faults and weaknesses. Without criticism, in McMurtry's words, "that which is corrupt and trivial in a people's character will certainly flourish and it will flourish--as it is flourishing in Texas--at the expense of those elements of character which are genuine and valuable.