A Breath of Fresh Texas Air

William Goyen's The House of Breath (published in 1950, and Goyen's first work) was recently listed as a recommended book in Texas Monthly magazine, of which I am a subscriber. I also finally figured out how to use "LINK +" with the Oakland Public Library system, so was able to get this book on loan from another library system.  It was a book like none I have ever read before - the narrative structure and writing style is wholly unique to Goyen.  It is poetic and evocative, and brims with memories of small town life in Charity, Texas.  The style reminded me a bit of Faulkner and a bit of Garcia Marquez.   These days I'm more drawn to realistic fiction, so I didn't love the unconventional style but I appreciated some of the beautiful phrases in the book.  Here are some of my favorite passages (with spelling as it appears in the book):

"Everything then, working with and upon everything - with accompanying resistance and damage and error but turning out something changed, finished, prepared to receive something more, to take in and take on something more:  pain, wisdom, love.  This great, mysterious chemistry going on - praise it."

"Aunty just got up from her chair on the gallery and said in at the front door, "Seven years bad luck little feist," for the broken mirror.  (Oh, she had it, seven and more.)"

"I'd lie there in my bed and want to die, and think - is this what parents have to come to, a creepin at night through room and room with a shotgun after the ghosts of their children who've gone away and left them lonely and sleepless and chokin in the night?"

"O what's the meanin of it all?  There must be some meanin somewhere - it cain't all be just this rabblement and helter-skelter."

"We ought to see it that we make good memry for ourselves, like a slow and perfect stitchin, as we go along, and embroidry a good and lovely memry out of all the tread we one day have to set, alone, and unravel, stitch by stitch."

"You didn't want to flicker around East Texas, you wanted to blaze in the world, to sparkle, to shine, to glisten in the great evil world."

More on Marfa

Tony Cano's The Other Side of the Tracks is a book I learned of when I visited Marfa, TX for the first time last year.  Cano's book follows the coming of age of a Mexican teenage boy in the 1950s in Marfa, when he and his friends, who call themselves The Chinglers, begin to challenge the unspoken racial divide between Mexicans and whites living in small-town Marfa.  Cano writes of dynamics on school sports teams, local establishments, and young love between Mexicans and "Anglos."  While the writing isn't beautiful, the pace is good and Cano's voice is authentic and draws the reader in to day to day life at that time, and to the protagonist's thoughts about being treated as lesser by many whites in the town.  I'm fascinated with all things Marfa, so this book provided a new lens through which to see this unique place.

Texas Trilogy

With Cities of the Plain, McCarthy concluded his Border Trilogy.  In this third work, McCarthy brings together his two protagonists in the earlier works, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham.  John and Billy are in early adulthood as ranch hands in New Mexico in the 1950s.  It is interesting to learn their fates, but this was my least favorite of the three books in the trilogy.  Trying to read as many books as I can before the end of the year, thus the relatively short posts!

Revisiting Cormac McCarthy

  

I was originally turned off by McCarthy as the first book I read by him was The Road, a post apocalyptic, disturbing novel.  However, I am on a Texas streak and thought I would give the first of his Border Trilogy books a try, and I am glad I did.  After all, how can a book entitled All the Pretty Horses be too disturbing?!  While not nearly as bleak and unsettling as The Road, this novel still has its fare share of violence, but it also has some quiet moments and exquisite passages as well.  Set in West Texas and Mexico, teenager John Grady Cole sets out with his friend Lacey Rawlins on horseback.  "I just wanted to see the country, I reckon," says Grady.  Complete with knife fights, romance, lightening storms, haciendas, and a general rough and tumble tone, McCarthy infuses this story with grit in a meticulously researched and authentic way.  It seems to me that McCarthy perfectly captures the young cowboy - in his bravado and courage, chivalry and tight lipped manner, and very rarely, his expressions of tenderness (toward horses, friends, women, and children) and even sadness.  One of my favorite scenes is when Grady sets out to propose to a girl and he sits with some children he meets and shares his meal with them, then tells them of his dilemma and they offer him various suggestions as to what he should do.  It's one of the only moments that depicts Grady with a bit of kid-like energy still in him. 

I plan to read the second book.  My favorite passages:

"...they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."  

"What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change."  

Texas Today

It seems like everywhere I turn, there are articles about Texas.  Erica Grieder's journalistic account of the current state of affairs in Texas, entitled Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas, is an accessible book that focuses on some hot topics such as religion, politics, big business, and small government, and also touches upon major Texas industries such as cattle and oil.  What I got out of this book, more than the analysis itself, were some interesting facts about Texas, such as the fact that Houston is the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the U.S., Texas has more people living in rural areas than any other state, and San Antonio is considered by many to be a progressive city with a significant number of same-sex households.  Grieder does not shy away from some of the challenges in Texas (poverty, schools with little funding, limited services, etc.), but she also tries to demystify Texas and point out that many of its stereotypes may hold less water than we might think. 

Talking about Texas

Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:  Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, provides insight into the things that were important to McMurtry, such as place, reading, and book selling.  Having grown up in Archer City, Texas, McMurtry was destined to become a cowboy, but once he discovered books, he went on to Rice University and his whole world opened up.  As McMurtry puts it, "In the end my father's career and my own were not as different as I had once thought.  He cattle ranched in a time he didn't like much, and I word ranched..."  One of my favorite quotes from the book is, "First I try to herd a few desirable words into a sentence, and then I corral them into small pastures called paragraphs, before spreading them across the spacious ranges of a novel."  With humility and honesty, McMurtry writes about his own work as a novelist, his life after a major surgery, and his love for the open space and light of Texas.  Finally, McMurtry pays homage to one of my favorite writes of all time - "The first fictions of any value to come out of the West were usually about the struggle of sensitive, art-minded souls to survive and assert themselves amid the discouragements of necessary practical frontier society.  Willa Cather, for example."  It seems that wide open spaces have been the inspiration for some of my favorite writers. 

Both Sides of the Border

The night I arrived in Marfa, TX, Ruben Martinez and Alfredo Corchado were speaking at the Marfa Book Company.  Exhausted from the nearly nine hours it took to get there, I missed the talk, but vowed to read both of their recently published books. 

In Ruben Martinez' Desert America, he writes, "Most of all there was space, Western immensity.  The area has one of the vastest stretches of land in the Lower 48 with the fewest people and roads and human-built structures."  Martinez focuses on some of the political and demographic shifts in several different desert regions, such as Joshua Tree, CA, Velarde, NM, and my beloved Marfa, TX. 

Part personal cathartic account, part ethnographic research, and part investigative journalism, Martinez' book is a blend of approaches.  Perhaps I was just antsy to get to the chapter on Marfa (at the very end, of course), but I think I was looking for facts and found more anecdotal evidence, which can be just as powerful but did not capture my attention in this case. 

Alfredo Corchado's Midnight in Mexico, like Martinez' book, weaves in the author's personal experience.  Corchado recounts his life as a journalist in Mexico and in the U.S. focusing on border issues, and more specifically, discusses drug trafficking, and the impact of it on his life, his emotional state, and his personal safety.  

Together, these two books are an interesting introduction into the darker sides of life on the border. 

West Texas of Yesteryear

 

I returned from my recent trip to West Texas inspired and in awe of the expansiveness, the silence, the space, the light, and the sheer beauty of the region.  I'm reading all kinds of books about Texas, and happened upon The Lonesome Plains:  Death and Revival of an American Frontier, by Louis Fairchild, at the public library.  Published by Texas A&M University Press in 2002, Fairchild relies heavily and interestingly on first person primary accounts (letters, journals, etc.) of West Texas settlers in the 1800s.  Often living many miles apart and not seeing anyone other than family for long stretches at a time, the empty endless land often created a deep sense of loneliness and isolation, for which settlers hungered to escape, however briefly.  Neighbors often came together for two specific reasons- as Fairchild puts it "times of misfortune" such as accidents and deaths, and annual religious revival meetings.  As Fairchild writes, "of all the late nineteenth century agricultural frontiers, western Texas was probably the most isolated and the most lonesome..."  The religious gatherings often gave the settlers an opportunity to have an "emotional release," an outlet from the stoicism and harshness of their daily lives.  This is a very specific book that was of particular interest to me, but it may not be everyone's cup of tea.  It is very readable, and was clearly painstakingly researched and presented in a really clear and informative way. 

Comanche Characteristics

Having read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry and The Son by Philipp Meyer this year, I was very interested to learn more about the Comanches that featured so prominently in these novels and in American history.  S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is a readable non-fiction account of the life of Cynthia Ann Parker, a member of one of the most powerful families in the days of early Texas, who is captured in 1836 at the age of nine by the Comanches and ends up choosing to marry a Comanche chief and stay with the tribe for over twenty years.  She has a mixed-blood son named Quanah, who becomes the last and most famous chief of the Comanches.  Interestingly, Cynthia Ann is eventually discovered and taken from the tribe, at which point she tried to repeatedly escape back to the tribe.  After her daughter Prairie Flower died, Cynthia Ann died six years later after self-starvation and illness.  

As white settlers arrived in Texas, the Comanches fought to maintain their tribal lands, which led to brutal battles over four decades.  A group called the Texas Rangers was formed especially to deal with the threat of Comanches.  Eventually the tribe diminished and the U.S. government provided reservations for the remaining Comanches, who were appalled at this offering, having no initial interest in becoming farmers.  Over time, Quanah and other Comanches adopted some conveniences of non-native culture. 

Unlike other native tribes, Comanches did not engage in agricultural pursuits or make artisan goods, and they had a simple cultural structure that was not stratified or rigidly organized.  They were a hunter-gatherer nomadic tribe (their primary diet was buffalo), and were exceptional horsemen which gave them a major advantage when at war.

So the next time you are in Texas under a bright moon, remember that under that bright moon the powerful Comanches lived and fought, and lived out its legacy as the most powerful tribe in American history. 

Supporter of Porter

Perhaps it is fitting that on the cusp of my first trip to West Texas, I have just finished The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1965, for which she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  While the stories were published in 1962, most of them were written in the early 1930s.  Porter grew up in Texas and Louisiana.

Porter's stories take place all over the world - West Texas, the South, Mexico, Berlin, the German countryside, etc.  Her characters are electric as her settings are.  There were some stories that didn't really hold my interest, and others that were piercingly good, such as "Old Mortality" and "Holiday."  In the latter, a young woman gets advice from her friend about where to go for her spring holiday, and she goes to the country to live with a "family of real old-fashioned German peasants, in the deep blackland Texas farm country." 

Porter is an important writer in the American canon, and while I didn't like every story in this collection, it is absolutely worth reading a handful of these distinctive stories. 

For Porter, Two Prizes

Katherine Anne Porter grew up in Texas and is best known for her short stories, the collection of which was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award in 1965.  Pale Horse, Pale Rider features three short novels.  My favorite of the three was "Noon Wine," which tells the story of the Thompson family who live on a dairy ranch in Texas in the 1890s.  A quiet Swedish man named Mr. Helton shows up at the farm and asks for work and Mr. Thompson agrees to provide him room and board, and a small salary, in exchange for work.  Mr. Helton quickly proves himself to be a hard worker, having learned a great deal from his work in North Dakota, though with little interest for becoming friendly with the Thompson.  His main care in the world seems to be his collection of harmonicas.  All goes well on the farm for nine years, when another man shows up at the farm, claiming that Mr. Helton escaped from a mental asylum after stabbing his brother with a pitchfork over a harmonica-related scuffle.  Mr. Thompson doesn't want any trouble and wants the stranger to leave, but before he figures out a way to get him off his porch, things quickly go awry and a tragic incident occurs over which Mr. Thompson can ultimately never forgive himself.  This dark tale is very well written and moves at a quick pace.  On a different note, one of my favorite quotes from the short novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," is "How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines."  Certainly an intriguing writer, I plan to read Porter's full collection of short stories. 

Big Texas, Big Novel

Relatively fresh off the heels of reading some Larry McMurtry novels, in particular Lonesome Dove, I was ready to take on another epic Texas novel, which is embodied in Philipp Meyer's new novel, The Son.  The story shifts perspectives and time periods, but essentially follows the life and dynasty of the McCullough family.  In 1849, Eli McCullough is a young boy and witnesses the murder of his sister and mother by the Comanche tribe.  He and his brother are tortured and subject to various forms of brutality, and his brother soon dies.  Left to fend for himself among the Comanches, Eli soon adapts and becomes accepted by the tribe, and is even taken under the wing as a son of the chief known as Toshaway and is given his Comanche name, Tiehteti.  Eventually, the tried is faced with starvation and disease and dies off.  Eli is left alone and must acclimatize back among whites.  Torn between these two worlds, Eli forges a new path for himself.  Fast forward to the perspective of Jeanne Anne McCullough in present day, Eli's great-granddaughter who is an aging oil baroness coming to grips with a deeper understanding of her former marriages and the lives of her children.  Not for the faint of heart, Meyer's sweeping novel has no shortage of murders, scalpings, and ruthlessness.  But it also has very lush and generous language, meticulously researched details of the eras, and distinctive characters and voices.  I didn't know where the novel was taking me at first, and it took me some time to get into the story, but ultimately I enjoyed the novel and its exploration of family and ambition.

Don't Pass By McMurtry

 

Larry McMurtry is a prolific writer who spins stories of the American West, many of which take place in Texas.  Having read his Pulitzer prize-winning epic novel Lonesome Dove earlier this year, I was curious to read his earliest (and much slimmer) novel, Horseman, Pass By, written in 1961.  An unsentimental, gritty, atmospheric work, Horseman, Pass By is set against the backdrop of a cattle ranch in post World War II Texas.  Lonnie Brannon is the teenage grandson of Homer Brannon, an honest and hardworking old time cattle man who has owned the ranch for many years.  Homer's stepson Hud also lives at the ranch, and Lonnie is both repulsed by and intrigued by Hud's selfish, ruthless and "mean" ways.  McMurtry brings the tale to life with his description of the ranch landscape, the open sky, and the way a small town can make a person yearn to see the wider world. 

The Great Western Novel?

At over 800 pages, I was daunted by taking on Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning and legendary tale of the American West, Lonesome Dove.  Filled with heroes and outlaws and "cowboys and Indians," this was a fast moving tale, people with many memorable characters like Lorena, Jack Spoon, July Johnson, and Newt.  Led by Captain August McCrae and W.F. Call, both former Texas Rangers, a group of cowboys band together to organize a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the late nineteenth century.  Gus McCrae is fun loving, talkative, and adventurous, in comparison to Call's more quiet and serious nature.  This book has it all - plots and sub-plots of love, revenge, loyalty, adventure, hardship, and camaraderie.   It is a consuming, readable, and memorable tale.

Don't mess with (football in) Texas

When I talk with friends about Friday Night Lights (TV version), their reaction is always the same, to the tune of "why would you want to watch a show about high school football in Texas?"  I have no particular affinity for high school, football, or Texas, but the series, based on H.G. Bissinger's book, is outstanding.  It's shot in a gritty way that feels almost like a documentary.  The acting is top-notch.


Being a huge fan of the show, I was curious about the book.  Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.G. Bissinger spent 1998 immersed in the football season at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas.  His book follows the team through the tremendous ups and downs of that year.  While I didn't think Bissinger's writing was as dynamic as I had hoped, he does go beyond writing about the players and the focus on "going to State," and in doing so, paints a picture of life in a small town affected by the boom and bust of the oil industry.  Bissinger focuses on tense race relations and school integration in Texas, as well as the way in which football was much more of a focus than academics at the school.  Both of these topics were ones he was later criticized for exposing in his book.  


What Bissinger does best is convey how football affects all parts of life in Odessa - politics, home life, career choices, and local tradition and how this all-encompassing love for and loyalty to football makes a group of teenage boys godlike for a season or two, and then become largely forgotten once they are injured or graduate.  Friday Night Lights offers a glimpse into what it would mean to grow up in a town defined by one thing.  I'll admit that after reading the book, it did have me curious about what it would have been like to be under those Friday night lights, cheering for those seemingly invincible kids that had the weight of the whole town on their shoulders.