The Epic West 
Body of Work
The Southwestern Writers Collection, at Texas State University, in San Marcos, is home to a treasure trove of manuscripts, letters, and personal items from the state’s greatest writers, singers, and photographers. And one stripper.
(Page 2 of 2)
“Songs by Willie Nelson”
The titles sound like vintage Willie compositions: “I’ll Wander Alone,” “Hangover Blues,” “Long Ago.” But he was only eleven years old when he wrote them (the kid was already playing with a polka band in Abbott) and collected them in a notebook. The front says “Songs by Willie Nelson” and the back “Howdy, Pard.” On one page he practiced writing his name, as if he knew it would come in handy in the future. Other Willie stuff includes letters, posters, song lyrics written on hotel bar napkins, and documents from the singer’s troubles with the IRS—including the sticker that agents glued on his Pedernales studio door giving notice of confiscation.
Letters of Recommendation for Katherine Anne Porter
Porter was born in Indian Creek and raised in Kyle, but she left Texas in her twenties and rarely looked back, feeling unappreciated by her home state and donating her papers to the University of Maryland. In the mid-seventies, Roger Brooks, the president of Howard Payne University, in Brownwood (near Indian Creek), wanted to give Porter an honorary degree, but first he had to convince the board of regents that she was worthy. So he asked dozens of well-known writers to send letters to the board, telling how important Porter was; 88 did, including Norman Mailer, John le Carré, and James A. Michener. It worked, and Porter returned for the ceremony. She also visited her mother’s grave in Indian Creek and was so moved that she directed that she too be buried there. In 1980, she was.
Buck Winn’s Cattle Drive Mural
When it was painted in 1951, James Buchanan “Buck” Winn’s 280-foot-long mural showing an epic cattle drive was the largest in the world. It hung in the Pearl Brewery, in San Antonio, until a renovation in the seventies brought it down and it was sliced into eleven panels. The collection has three of them, each 28 feet long, and each is an elaborate, gorgeous work, with that lofty feel of the Works Progress Administration post office murals. Winn, from Celina, actually did many public murals in the thirties, mostly in Dallas, including several at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition.
Russell Lee’s First Camera
Lee was a former chemical engineer trying to be a painter in Depression-era New York City when a friend advised him to get a camera to help him with the details. In 1935 Lee did, leaving a painting unfinished and never picking up a brush again. That camera was this Contax, and with it and others Lee would go on to be the most prolific of the Farm Security Administration photographers traveling the country during the Depression, taking pictures in 29 states and becoming known for his heartfelt shots of poor tenant farmers, homesteaders, and their families. After World War II he spent time taking photos of the poor in South Texas; he also shot for the Texas Observer, and in 1965 he became the first professor of photography at the University of Texas at Austin.
Larry L. King’s Letters
King writes a lot of letters. And he saves them. And then he sends them to the collection, some 3,000 pages a year. In the past he typed on carbons; now he prints out e-mails. The collection has about 50,000 pages: receipts, invitations, Christmas cards, and letters to and from Norman Mailer, William Styron, Mo Udall, and Ted Kennedy. The funny thing is, in 1964 King’s first wife burned much of his stuff, including his letters (such as the ones to FDR telling him how to win the war); those here are only from age 35 on. King knew they would be important someday, and he was right.
Mariana Yampolsky’s “Maguey House”
The gran dama of Mexican photography was born of Russian and German parents near Chicago in 1925. Yampolsky wound up living permanently in Mexico in the mid-forties, taking thousands of photos of the country’s common people doing regular things, imbuing them with the same dignity that Russell Lee and Dorothea Lange (two of her heroes) had given Depression-era folks in the United States. Ever since curator Todd contacted Yampolsky in 1994, the artist has helped Wittliff meet dozens of Mexican photographers, becoming, in Todd’s words, the gallery’s fairy godmother. The collection has more than two hundred signed prints of hers, including this one of daily life outside a home made of maguey leaves.
Candy Barr’s gloves
Note the tips of the gloves, the paint worn down from the continual friction of being removed, finger by finger, night after night. Candy Barr, known by her mother as Juanita Dale Slusher, was the most famous stripper, pot smoker, and all-around bad girl of the fifties and early sixties, at least in Dallas. It wasn’t all fun and games: Barr was forced to act in a porn film at fifteen, was abused by her second husband (whom she eventually shot), and spent three years in jail for marijuana possession, where she wrote poems that she later published as A Gentle Mind … Confused. The collection has various things from her life, including silver boots, bathing suits, and a stripping license (fee: $50).
J. Frank Dobie’s Valentine to his Wife
Dobie, the son of South Texas ranchers, who would go on to write more than a dozen books about the cowboy way and the state’s rough folklore, also loved English romantic poetry, as seen in this valentine he sent his new bride, Bertha, during World War I. Later Dobie would call her “the most incisive and the most concretely constructive critic I have ever known,” but in 1917 he was more romantic, in his own brainy, up-from-the-scrub-country way. “… Your laugh is the laugh of a gladsome elf/And your smile Titania’s dream,/Your hair’s dusk o’er a perfect brow/A hue for Lefévre to deem.”
Billy Lee Brammer’s Manuscript for “The Gay Place”
At some point in 1958 or 1959, Brammer wrote perhaps the most celebrated first lines in Texas literature, describing the Edenic Austin of the time. The book would become the closest thing to the Great Texas Novel and also make Brammer a star. He never finished the sequel, Fustian Days, either because of simple writer’s block, brought on by the greatest of expectations, or just simple drug abuse (Brammer would die of an overdose in 1978). Besides these two manuscripts, the collection holds plenty of others from Brammer’s career, including a phony 1965 interview with the Mailer-esque Norma Maelstrum, in which Brammer undams altogether his stream of consciousness.
John Graves’s Paddle
This is one of the paddles Graves used to transport himself and his dachshund puppy along a stretch of the Brazos River for three weeks in the fall of 1957, resulting in the classic Goodbye to a River, the journey into the self and the soil and the history of Texas that earned the author comparisons to Thoreau. The paddle has Graves’s 1957 Fort Worth address written on it in ink; when he moved to rural Glen Rose in 1970, he took it along but eventually threw it onto his woodpile, where the elements and the cattle cracked it into pieces. His friend Wittliff retrieved them and glued the paddle back together.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
