It must have been the pickups and cacti. Or maybe it was the lone star wrapped around the spine. Oh! I thought, another one of those things, my hopes raised from 1989 Corona Publishing's New Growth: Contemporary Short Stories from Texas Writers. Texas Bound, however, distinguishes itself from other recent Texas fiction anthologies, including New Growth, in its genesis: all the stories of the collection have been featured in the "Arts and Letters Live" series at the Dallas Museum of Art, a program in which such Texas actors as Tommy Lee Jones and Tess Harper read "Texas stories" to live audiences. The success of the readings prompted director Kay Cattarulla to publish the stories as a print collection. Though I couldn't decide whether to be pleased or disappointed at only recognizing four of the contributors (Rick Bass, Shelby Hearon, Reginald McKnight, Larry McMurtry), I decided to risk the letdown of getting hold of a mediocre set of stories. After all, there had to be a few winners in the group.
What interested me most about the collection, once I got hold of it and started reading the preface, was this idea of "Texas" stories. Let's take Rick Bass, for instance. His talent speaks for itself, as do the worthiness of his stories for inclusion in any anthology. But does the fact that Bass happens to have been born within the boundaries of the state of Texas make him a Texas writer, and does he write Texas stories? Probably not. But Rick Bass sells anthologies, and perhaps there's nothing wrong with this kind of promotion. The idea of regionalism in fiction is, however, a problematic one. Setting residence requirements for writers living in certain states and regions seems a bit drastic. And what would guarantee a writer who'd lived half his/her life within a state (Texas, in this case) writing "Texas stories"? Cattarulla skips over the problem by summarily answering that "every piece... has its origin in the state in one way or another" (viii).
Lawrence Wright, contributor to the collection and staff writer for The New Yorker, undertakes a sort of testimonial in the foreword, for the current state of "letters" in Texas. Using Larry McMurtry as example, Wright describes three stages of development in Texas writing: stage one, characterized by swaggering, macho Texas stereotypes; stage two, a forsaking of Texan roots for all things cultured, refined, cosmopolitan; and finally stage three (which Texas writing now inhabits), the stage of "reconciliation," in which the now-educated and accomplished writer (McMurtry, McCarthy) finds him/herself free of insecurities about the past and able to return to the "juicy roots of his own culture" for material and inspiration.
To these juicy roots only a handful of the nineteen stories, in my estimation, return. Among them, the late William Goyen's "The Texas Principessa" and "Precious Door," display Goyen's virtuosity as a Texas writer capable of evoking (in "Precious Door") the sad and tender nuances of understatement in east Texan dialect against the backdrop of a child's love for a dying stranger; and (in the Browning-influenced "The Texas Principessa") humor and satire from an unreliable narrator relating the life and death adventures of a wealthy Texan who marries European nobility and thus acquires a seventeenth-century Italian palazzo, through which wander all manner of Texas eccentrics and stereotypes.
"Precious Door" and "The Texas Principessa" reveal Goyen as a Texas writer, but not for their inclusion of a few references to towns, rivers, and cultural symbols (oil, Aggies, ranches) as setting. Nor is this phenomenon primarily a matter of dialect, since traditional Texan speech patterns differ from the Rio Grande Valley to the Great Plains, from the Piney Woods to the New Mexico border. Rather, the distinct and resonant sense of place achieved in the two stories results from a subtlety that seems somehow artless, as if the story could have been contemplated in no other place, as if "Precious Door" could have occurred nowhere else but an east Texas cotton town bracing itself for a hurricane blowing up through Galveston. In my judgment, this is the mark of a great regional writer, as opposed to a merely skilled one, and reminds me of the same utterly authentic and unquestionable loyalty to place in the Faulkner novels. The language and cultural mythology of Northern Mississippi give rise to the story of declining aristocracy in The Sound and the Fury; the language, religion, and social customs of rural east Texas yield, in "Precious Door," the initiation of a young boy into empathetic love for a murdered stranger. These two works succeed as regional fiction for their firm and authentic grounding in the culture of the place, not for the simple fact that they seem to be "set" in Mississippi and Texas.
Larry McMurtry's "There Will Be Peace in Korea" succeeds as a Texas story for its evoking of the geo-mythological aura of the Texas high plains: a flat, lonely land where the wind blows through ranching towns scattered from Dallas to Amarillo. Sonny, a recent high-school graduate, feels guilt for fighting over a girl with his former best friend, Bud, who is due to leave for the Korean War the next morning. In recompense, Sonny picks up Bud at his rooming house in the middle of a Texas norther, and the two head to Fort Worth to repair their friendship over bottles of Pearl. Though in the end friendship remains, Sonny is left (archetypally) alone on the plains to deal with the loss of Bud and also of Laveta, now engaged to a boy from Dallas: "There were some dust and paper scraps whirling down the street toward me but when the bus was out of sight it seemed like Bud and Laveta were gone for good and I was standing there by myself, in the wind" (167).
Reginald McKnight's "The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas" recreates a tension-filled classroom in the recently-integrated Texas public school system of the 1960s. In a story chronicling a sixth-grade boy's struggle for his identity as an African-American, Clint "Uncle Toms" his white teacher in a need to prove his superiority to the other sullen, indifferent, (and ignored) black children in his class. As a result, Clint is accepted neither by whites nor blacks. The situation is complicated by the fact that Clint is an Army brat well acquainted with not fitting in: "I'd been to so many different schools in my short life that I ceased wondering about their differences. All I knew about the Texas schools is that they weren't afraid to flunk you" (145). In the climax, a white bully prepares to pound Clint into the concrete when Marvin, a black boy who distinguishes himself only by sleeping through most of class and never being awakened by the teacher, steps in and takes on the bully in order to save Clint. Marvin and the bully are removed from class, but Clint remains, finally able to acknowledge the undeniable bond--that of oppression--shared with his fellow black students.
Other notables in the collection include Rick Bass's "Antlers" and Diane DeSanders's "When He Saw Me," neither of which are Texas stories, and Lawrence Wright's "Escape," one of two non-fiction pieces included. "Escape," however (as opposed to Bryan Woolley's non-fiction "Burgers, Beer, and Patsy Cline") seems no less a "story" than the adventures of Harry Monroe in Barry Hannah's Geronimo Rex, or any number of rambling, young-adult-awakening novels. At any rate, the distinction is an academic one, and the piece walks the line between the nostalgic personal essay and the coming-of-age story.
There are no bad stories, per se, in Texas Bound. My least favorites of the group were Robert Flynn's "The Midnight Clear" and William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight." In the case of "Good Rockin' Tonight," I blame the genius of Padgett Powell and Barry Hannah, those two masters of grotesque southern humor, for my relative lack of enthusiasm over Hauptman's tale of honky tonks, transsexuals, and Elvis impersonators. Perhaps I'm not being fair to Hauptman, but once you've been to the mountaintop with A Woman Named Drown, ordinary Elvis impersonators pale in comparison.
My criticism of Flynn's "The Midnight Clear" is a bit more even-handed. On the one hand, Flynn is to be congratulated for an ambitious attempt: the story occurs on the nineteenth-century (Texas?) frontier, complete with wagons, mules, and frontier dialect. The overall structure, however, relies too heavily on parallelism, and eventually the convention becomes repetitive. Obviously, this is a subjective aesthetic judgment. Some readers will no doubt enjoy Flynn's quaint humor and sing-song narrative voice, but I found "The Midnight Clear" somewhat tiresome.
With all this said, I am sure that Texas Bound, like many regional fiction anthologies, will enjoy a fairly active shelf life, particularly in libraries around the state. It is unlikely that many readers will seriously question the appropriateness of the label "Texas stories" for pieces that display no discernible relation to the state, written by writers living in Montana and New York. It will be enough that these are good stories, mainly. And perhaps they're right.
And no, the collection is not necessarily representative of the best of contemporary "Texas" letters; one notes the absence of Cormac McCarthy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sandra Cisneros, among others. On the other hand, Lawrence Wright is correct: many writers, not a select few, are raising Texas writing "to a higher point than even Texans imagined" (xiii), and in this wealth we can certainly take pride.