The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

The size of it, of course, is unbelievable. When I’ get up high in Texas and look as far as my eye will carry across the plains, I always expect to see the ocean at the horizon’s rim. It just doesn’t stand to reason that any land can stretch as far as this without running into an ocean.

Pat Neff, the president of Baylor University, once said that Texas could wear Rhode Island as a watch fob. There are 254 counties in this state, and the largest, Brewster County, is actually six times larger than Rhode Island. One county. All told, Texas is one twelfth of the entire United States. If it had the population density of Massachusetts, it would number 145 million people. Someday it probably will—that’s what every Texan believes — but actually today there are only something over 7 million people living in this huge domain. So that’s where the chance for growth comes in.

Ten years ago, lecturing and scouting, I eventually came to that growing town on the Gulf called Corpus Christi. I was met at the station by two seven-foot Texans wearing ten-gallon hats and beautifully stitched high-heeled boots. They picked up my suitcases as if they were bags of popcorn; and feeling like a midget, I walked between the big boys up the street to the local hotel. “We’re having a luncheon meeting today,” they said, “and we want you to come to it. We want you to make a short speech, not more than a minute and a half, and then we’ll all listen to Judge Jones.” I thanked them and said I would be delighted.

As I signed the hotel register I could hear a brass band upstairs in the ballroom playing so loudly that it made the walls of the hotel palpitate. So when, after lunch, I was called on for my short speech, I said I bet I was the first Yankee thal had ever been welcomed at Corpus Christi with a brass band — and sat down. They laughed at that, and then everyone settled back to hear what Judge Jones had to say.

The Judge was a big fellow with a reassuring voice. He told them that this home town of theirs, Corpus Christi, had doubled its population in two years. “ We’ve got 50,000 souls living here,”he said, “and we’re all worried about the water supplyBut I can tell you men,” he added, “that the plans we’ve just drawn up for a new reservoir will provide this town with water enough for half a million. We’ll have the water in five years. Now you go out and find ihe people.” I might add, in case you don’t know it, that Corpus Christi, population now over 100,000 and going up, is a natural, one of the great boom towns, a city so rich in oil and natural gas and shipping that I have no doubt it will live up to that prophecy.

As you know, every American loves to exaggerate. Exaggeration is an indivisible part of our humor. In Texas, where size counts so much, they make a specialty of tall stories, the kind of stories that were told about Davy Crockett who was killed in ) he Alamo. The most entertaining collector of these tall stories is J. Frank Dobie, who was for many yea r s Pro fessor of English at the Un i ver si t y of Texas. There is, for instance, this whopper about the Bostonian who, on his first visit to Texas, found a lobster in his bed. Knowing how out of proportion everything was in Texas, he called his host and said tact fully, “ Will you look at t his Texas bedbug! ” The Texas host shook his head doubtfully. “Must be a small one,” he said. Another whopper that stays in my mind tells of the Texas boardinghouse where the meat was so tough that you couldn’t stick a fork in the gravy.

These tall stories were the first outcropping of Texas literature. And along with them went the cowboy songs. One of my first friends in Texas was John A. Lomax, a wonderfully racy character who began to collect these songs when he was very young. Mr. Lomax’s parents moved from Mississippi to Texas at the end of the Civil War because, as his father said, “I want to give my boys room to expand.” They were part of that big migration from Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi— the hardy stock who, in their covered wagons, became the backbone of the new state. The Lomax family built themselves a two-room house close to the old Chisholm Trail, and now I let Mr. Lomax tell the story in his own words: —

“I couldn’t have been more than four years old when I first heard a cowboy sing and yodel to his cattle. I was sleeping in my father’s two-room house — twelve of us sometimes in two rooms. Suddenly a cowboy’s singing waked me as I slept on my trundle bed. A slow rain fell in the darkness outside. I listened to the patter on the pine shingles above me, and through the open window I could hear the cries of the cowboy trying to quiet, in the deep darkness and sifting rain, a trail herd of restless cattle. Over and over the fresh young voice of the cowboy rang out in the night, pleading with the cattle to lie down and sleep and not to worry:

“During the period of twenty years,” Mr. Lomax told me, “ten million cattle and a million horses were driven northward from Texas along the Chisholm Trail and other cattle trails. As ihe cowboys drove the cattle along, they constantly made up new songs about the trail, and these I began to write down when I was a small boy.”

Texans are still so close to the past and so busy with the present that very few of them bother to write. The story of how the state was settled and then wrested away from Mexico is a fresh living memory in many families. One of my friends in Fort Worth who is still in his forties remembers when 1 his sprawling cit y of 300,000 was just a cat t le town, the headquarters of the big ranch owners, with a dusty main street like any American main street leading up to the courthouse on the rise. This man’s great-grandfather was the Texas ambassador to the United States when the Lone Star came into the Union. It all sounds like only yesterday.

The best account of how Texas began is to be found in that vivid biography of Sam Houston, The Haven by Marquis James. Sam Houston was a great buffalo of a man, dark-haired, shaggy, broadshouldered, and very handsome with his bedroom eyes. Houston was an Indian fighter and one of the heroes of the War of 1812; he was a Major General and Governor of Tennessee in his early thirties. Andrew Jackson would have given him a high place in Washington. At the peak of his career he married a young, somewhat delicate beauty from Mississippi. That is surely one of the most mysterious marriages in all American history. The couple separated before the honeymoon was over. Houston resigned his governorship, threw up his chance for the Senate or the Cabinet, and went back to the Indians to live with the Cherokees under an assumed name. He was never to see his wife again, and until this day we don’t know what came between them.

But Houston was too big a man to hide. The Cherokees called him “’The Raven”; they sent him as their representative to Washington. And so, by one of those fascinating chains of circumstances, Sam Houston, with his prodigious strength, his know ledge of Indian fighting, and his magnetism for men, became the natural leader of Texas in its fight for independence. Sam Houston was the soldier who redeemed the Alamo, who captured the Mexican general, Santa Anna, and who served two terms as the President of Texas. His life story, as Marquis James tells it, is a book to read and remember.

What I’m saying is that Texas literature is ripe for the picking but there just are not enough writers in the state to do it justice. The story of Stephen Austin, like the story of the Alamo, deserves to be written and rewritten. The story of the great plains and of the great ranches will always fire our imagination; if you haven’t read one recently, look up that superb short novel The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter. That book is full of color and vitality. But live present is just as full of life as the past. Katherine Anne Porter, one of our finest short-story writers, is a Texan, and in her book Flowering Judas she skillfully touches on the Southwest of today. George Sessions Perry is another eloquent Texan, and in his novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand he tells an endearing story of East Texas, a land which, w ith its scrubby pine and sandy farms, is as different from the fertile Rio Grande Valley or the rocky Panhandle as Cape Cod is different from Virginia.

For those who love the open country, I can recommend a delightful book entitled Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, by Roy Bedichek (Doubleday, $3.00). Dr. Bedichek is a naturalist wise in his observation, sensitive in his antennae, and happily gifted in his power of description. While he was on a year’s leave of absence from the University of Texas, he divided his time between the Davis Mountains, high arid country far to the west of Texas, and the Edwards Plateau, the green, rolling, well-watered country in the neighborhood of Austin. Me camped, he climbed, he studied the birds through his glasses, he watched the golden eagles soar, the rock squirrels at work on the pecans, he studied the goats and the dogs who guard them, he interpreted the history of the wild flowers, philosophized on what fences mean to men and to wild life, and then waxed indignant as he watched a hunter with a lust to kill take target practice on the pelicans. So he speaks his mind about conservation: —

It is the scientist turned hunter, with his passion for mere collecting, who is most to be feared. His scent is especially keen for those species which are on their way out. A nest, a clutch of eggs, a specimen or series of specimens of a bird which in a few years will probably be extinct is the prize he seeks. Be it in the field of jewels or painting, books or bird’s eggs, the zest of the collector for possession of a unique has inspired a thousand crimes. The scientific collector, if given a free field with no restrictions, can exterminate a species in less time than one would suppose.

This book with its quietly acquired knowledge is ideal for a North Atlantic winter. It is a book to be read, put down, and then picked up and read again — so it keeps the mind alert for the open days to come.

In ihe last winter of the war and in her eighth consecutive winter as a foreign correspondent, Martha Gellhorn was with the 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen; she reported the Battle of the Bulge, was stationed for a time with a P-47 Group, and then, as the front caved in, she followed the 3rd Armored Division as it plowed into Germany from Remagen. Against this background, and with her steadily increasing skill as a storyteller, Miss Gellhorn has given us one of the most authentic novels of the war, The Wine of Astonishment (Scribner’s, $3.00). It is the story of a hard-driven infantry Battalion; of its “lucky” commander, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers; of his jeep driver, a kind, silent Jew, Jacob Levy; of Bill Gaylord, the Intelligence Officer who got the meemies; of Dotty, the Red Cross worker who had a protective philosophy about officers, even a Southerner as attractive as Smithers; and of Kathe, the little waitress in Luxembourg who had been waiting so long for a beautiful American like Jacob Levy.

The Battalion is the hero of this story; and the action, the anger, the fear, and the endurance of the individuals in it are conveyed in lean idiomatic prose with hardly an excess word. When the Battalion comes out of the line, Miss Gellhorn, in pages quick and alive with laughter, describes their return to life: —

There were the ones who loved food or drink, there were those who pursued women, there were shoppers, souvenir hunters, camera specialists, sightseers, gamblers. There were even athletes and letter writers and one or two who read books. Every man was furiously occupied; searching, moving, scrounging, borrowing money, lending money, giving addresses, picking up addresses, laughing, being shrewd, helping a pal, looking after himself; all making time reward them, greedy, grateful and alive.

Surely the scene in celebrat ion of Sergeant Postalozzi’s baby is as funny as anything in Mister Roberts.

The men in this book who matter most, the Colonel and his jeep driver, are shaken violently out of their younger selves by the fighting and the wounds. The Colonel, with his new capacity for command; the driver, with his quiet yearning for life — each has built his dreams of what he will do with himself when the war is over. Both are fated to fail and it is in this aftermath of the action that I find my doubts arising. The scenes which follow Jake’s visit to the torture camp have not the plausibility of what has gone before, but the tragedy and the pity remain: to have gone through so much, to end with so little.

Guard of Honor (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50) is a large-scale, very busy, very masculine novel of three tense September days at the big air base in Ocanara, Florida, in 1943. Through the book circulate hundreds of characters swiftly etched and touched with the warmth, the fallacies, the humor, and the resignation of Army life; the story is packed with episodes which momentarily accentuate the motives of the individuals and the ruthless driving power of the machine of which they are such tiny cogs; the novel holds some of the very best writing James Gould Cozzens has given us.

Yet I am obliged to add that as a narrative it runs all the risks which have tormented other writers when they have attempted to bring such vast and diffuse activities within the unity and focus of a book. Mr. Cozzens has re-created the busyness, the high tempo, the multiple intricacies of the life at a great training center: the panorama is so real that you grin with recognition time and again. The people who really matter in this book — “Bus" Beal, the youngest Major General in the Air Force; Colonel Norman Ross, the Judge who serves him with such balance; Captain Nathaniel Hicks, the once inquiring editor; and the convalescent fighter pilot, Carricker — are he-men drawn to life and fascinating in conflict, but again and again they are buried in the weight of red tape, minutiae, lost sight of as we turn this way and that in our bird’s-eye view of the big field. I feel the dedication in this novel and I greatly respect the craftsmanship of its parts: I only wish it were more of a whole.