May 2002
The Fifty Best Texas Books [August 1981]
History, fiction, legend, drama—A. C. Greene picks 'em and tells why.
THESE ARE MY CHOICES FOR the fifty best Texas books. I would like to emphasize that these are the best books about Texas. By that I mean Texas is their main subject or, in the case of fiction and biography, their chief setting. They are not the best books written by Texas authors (in fact, not all of the authors are Texans), and they may not be the most important Texas books—but don't let's get off into a thicket of objections and explanations: the quality of the books speaks for itself.
I hope I will not sound too arbitrary with bold assertions: "This is my pick . . . My choice is . . . This is the best." But I feel there hasn't been enough of this in Texas letters. I think Texas has needed more positive criticism, more outspokenness from within, with regard to its own culture. The bold international braggart when it comes to material trivia, Texas has an inferiority complex about its art. Behind that mask of bigness, Texas can't believe it has the ability to bring forth, in and of itself, something worthy of mankind's recognition. Texas has relied too long and too completely on the opinions of outsiders.
The book from which this article is excerpted (to be published by Pressworks Publishing in Dallas) includes descriptions—like the twelve used here—of each of my selections. The books are not listed in order of preference or ranked in any other way. I have not attempted to pick something from each form of literature, but I haven't slighted any type of writing, either, unless you might say that I excluded textbooks and technical manuals. But frankly, if I had been attracted to a book of that sort, I would not have hesitated to include it as well.
So I boldly submit my choices for Texas' fifty best books. And whether you are outraged or in agreement, I give you leave to make your own.
* Coronado's Children, J. Frank Dobie. This book is the one that made it possible for a Texas writer to stay home and make a living. When Coronado's Children was published in 1930 (in Texas), it was picked up by the Literary Guild—the first non-Eastern publication ever chosen by the Guild or Book-of-the-Month—and became a national success. The book created Frank Dobie's Mr. Texas image, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. Although the Guild payment was a pitance by today's standards (and his Texas publisher went bankrupt before he received his full royalties), the consequences were more valuable than dollars. First off, Dobie got a Guggenheim grant, which enabled him to do Tongues of the Monte, but more important, he could now sell anything about Texas he wanted to write, and this opened the field for others, too.
Coronado's Children
is folklore about lost mines and buried treasure, caves full of gold bars, and jack-loads of Spanish silver. (How many of us had heard of a jack-load before we read Dobie?) I know of no other Texas book from which so many writers have filched so much.When I met Frank Dobie some 25 years after first reading Coronado's Children, I told him it was still my favorite of his books. He acted hurt. I think friends had convinced him that his more serious works, like The Longhorns or The Mustangs, better fit his literary stature. Or maybe it was Mrs. Dobie. After his death, when I was living on his ranch on a Dobie-Paisano fellowship, she and I became friends, and I suspect Bertha wished he had been more of a footnote counter. Bless her gracious memory, I'm glad he wasn't.
* Blessed McGill, Edwin Shrake. Like so many authors, Edwin "Bud" Shrake started out as a newspaper sportswriting. In fact, when I went to work for the Dallas Times Herald in 1960, he, Blackie Sherrod, and Gary "Jap" Cartwright were on the same staff and were joined, or succeeded immediately, by Dan Jenkins and Steve Perkins—you talk about a golden age of sportswriting. But all that time Bud was writing novels, a good many of which seemed to be reaching for some truth about life (Texas life) that needed to be explained. Blessed McGill (1968) combines the best of Shrake's talents: an appreciation for the absurdities of existence, a recognition of irony's major role in the world, highly suggestive humor, and a decent amount of historical and anthropological research so that the book never spews off into the campy pseudo-historical "nonfiction" that characterizes a whole school of American prose. Blessed McGill is hilarious. It begins with Peter Hermano McGill's boyhood in Austin following the Civil War. He is reared by a devout (but a little cuckoo) Catholic mother, but through a series of circumstances he becomes as much a brother to the Indians as to the Anglos, enough that he is guarded by a renegade half-breed, a Karankawa throwback called Badthing. But Shrake does not sacrifice truth or wisdom for sheer entertainment, and when McGill—by a sequence of inevitabilities—moves toward sainthood in Taos, it is not merely an absurd plot twist but a subtle study of what spiritual deliverance really is.
* Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861, edited from the original by Ernest W. Winkler, state librarian. This is the most tragic document in Texas history—and the most dramatic. Officially and meticulously (469 pages, not one of them wasted), it details the enveloping tornado that swept even Texans with better sense into the catastrophe that history knows as "the Southern cause." Although the events in these official minutes are, without the slightest question, pushing pell-mell to disaster, we see the galleries full (literally) of cheering supporters as folly succeeds folly: the counting of votes, the naming of delegates, the resolutions, speeches, motions, letters, reports, braggadocio, brave and foolish acts, grandiose Confederate schemes. Why couldn't sanity have been allowed, just one day, or in one session, to rise above the malarkey, the empty rhetoric? Because at this point, in Texas, to have opposed secession would have meant total dishonor—as happened to Sam Houston—or even death. The Journal of the Secession Convention (1912) makes all this plain, without commentary. Its compressed chronology pushes it along like a brilliant historical novel. The Secession Convention (illegal in its inception) was called for January 1861, and by March 25, when it adjourned, Texas was committed to the cataclysm that destroyed, perhaps forever, the chance of these United States to be a happy nation.
* Interwoven, Sallie Reynolds Matthews. A number of charming women wrote books, or portions of books, about their experiences in Texas: Mary Austin Holley, Jane Cazneau, Amelia Barr, Libby Custer, Melinda Rankin, to name a few. But Sallie Reynolds Matthews, in Interwoven (1936), gave us a lifetime view, not that of a visiting journalist or traveler. And what she wrote tells more about daily life on the frontier than any comparable narrative. Not only was Sallie bright but she caught and understood the eternal rhythms of society. Born in West Texas in 1861, she tells of girls and boys in love, of foolish but lovable brothers and (a few times) husbands, of weddings and babies—but never in a sentimental vein. This is a delightful book, written around the Reynolds and Matthews families, who inter-married and whose affairs were (and are) so bound together as to be inseparable, justifying the title. It is also the history of a large part of the cattle frontier from the 1860s to modern times. Without setting out to do so, Matthews shows us the differences between that Texas society and ours—which lifts Interwoven out of the family memoir class and makes it a historical tool.
* Uncovered Wagon, Hart Stilwell. You think all the old-time Texans worshiped their fathers and learned lessons of manliness and integrity from them? Not necessarily. Uncovered Wagon (1947) seems to be written around a core of autobiography, and Billy, the boy in the books, grows up hating and fearing his father, who is called only "the Old Man." Stilwell, who got pretty cranky as he aged, argued loudly and damningly with me when I suggested that the book was autobiographical, but you don't need an Eskimo to tell you there's ice in Alaska. (Stilwell was an unpredictable cuss, and once at a party where a friend and I were singing and playing hymns on a guitar and a harmonica, he proceeded to strip off his clothes and sit, stark naked, in the middle of the floor until we stopped. Then he talked.) Uncovered Wagon takes place in those uneasy years just before World War I, and Billy and the Old Man spend a lot of the book working in the fields and living unpleasantly along the back roads of Texas. But the circumstances of the story are secondary to the boy-man, son-father relationship. You don't find many Texas writers who can face the bitter reality of rural poverty in a changing society as Stilwell does, and this book is one of those rare Texas works that convinces the reader that it speaks for thousands of others—call it cynicism, or whatever. Some who knew Stilwell better than I did—and I didn't know him well at all—say his streak of frustration and cynicism kept him from being the great writer he should have been. I'm neutral, but Uncovered Wagon is evidence enough that Texas benefited when he did put his angry heart in it.
* Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Anne Porter. Some people say Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is not a Texas book, but they forget, perhaps, that the volume of that title contains two other famous short novels, Old Mortality and Noon Wine, both with Texas settings. In any case, I don't care. I insist that Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the best Texas fiction ever written. The story takes place during World War I, but it is as contemporary as any feminist work since. Miranda, a newspaper reporter (who, as a young girl, also appears in Old Mortality), hasn't a taint of outdatedness; she is headstrong and independent, yet gentle and, despite herself, romantic. But none of this gentleness allows Miranda to be pushed around—except by a terror bigger than she is.
Katherine Anne Porter, the one time I met her, acidly denied that she had been a newspaper reporter in Dallas—or Texas. I have always thought it strange she was so bitter in her disavowal of things Texan but did so many of her best stories with a Texas background. (I once spent half a day trying to find her birthplace in Brown County.) Katherine Anne Porter told an interviewer, shortly after Pale Horse, Pale Rider was published, that she could not really imagine "creating" a story, that everything she had written or would write must be based firmly on a foundation of actual experience. Who knows?
