God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Throughout my life in Texas, the state has been torn between Level One and Level Two, which occurs when a primitive culture casts its eye on other societies to see what they have to offer. This stage coincides with the arrival of money. Whereas Level One is aggressive and rooted and sure of itself, Level Two is consumed with longing. Expansive, neurotic, uncertain of its own goals but deeply embarrassed by its naive origins, Level Two is the stage of sophisticated imports. It is in love with the au courant, which is to say the passing and quickly discarded fancies of more polished cultures. It is a voluptuous and rather bogus stage of development.

  It is easy to sneer at Level Two, but it is a necessary stage that any great culture must endure. It is a time of travel, education, and acquisition—the never-ending process of widening one’s horizons. Level Two cleans the dirt from under its nails and turns to the humbling work of civilizing itself. Classical music, Renaissance art, Elizabethan theater, foreign philosophies, and exotic cuisines: the world pours in and swamps the little craft of Level One. The undergraduate bohemian reading Chekhov is indulging in the joys of Level Two as surely as the arbitrageur discussing the Matisse exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Museum over a plate of sashimi. This is all wonderful, but it is also in its way destructive, as one can easily see from the homogenized Level Two culture that has franchised itself and spread all across America, leaving so little of the original cultural imprint that made one place stand apart from another.

  The most explicit and enduring example of the influence of Level Two in Texas is the architecture of our cities, which have practically obliterated their own native charms in order to become showplaces of other people’s ideas. In the rush to build to the sky, cities have scraped away their histories and sucked the life out of their downtowns. When I moved to Austin in 1980, there were shops and cafés and department stores along Congress Avenue, and the majestic capitol dominated the landscape, as it was designed to do. Now Congress Avenue is shadowed by undistinguished office towers, which rudely leapfrog the three-story historic buildings that remain. The effect is like the mouth of a child, full of baby teeth and permanent teeth and awkward gaps in between. There is grandeur in the shimmering new skyline, but the human scale has been obliterated as Austin becomes just another big city.

  Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei brought architectural acclaim to Houston and Dallas, and these cities can think more highly of themselves now that The New York Times and Progressive Architecture have put their imprimatur on them. The buildings that have come to define the urban centers of Texas—the Williams (formerly Transco) Tower, Pennzoil Place, the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, to name several of the most elegant and successful of these—have added energy and an air of self-importance that characterizes any great city. They are “world class,” to use a phrase that characterizes Level Two thinking. But there is nothing Texan about these buildings, nothing that refers to the history or responds to the environment in which they are placed. One could just as easily see them in Boston or Sydney—but that’s the whole point of Level Two, which is the achievement of a high level of sameness.

  It is easy to forget who we are in Level Two. We have wandered far from home and gotten lost in the cultural forest. What had seemed so secure in Level One—that is, our rootedness and a sense of what we stand for—has been torn away and made to seem tacky and inconsequential. In many ways, however, Level Two is a noble and adventurous stage, full of delightful cross-fertilizing discoveries. For me, the first, gratifying step into Level Two began with the arrival, in Abilene, of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a momentous and longed-for departure from meat loaf at the officers club at Dyess Air Force Base on Sundays after church. Abilene was dry in those days, so whenever my parents made a trip to San Angelo, ninety miles away, to load up on liquor, we’d stop at the Lowake Steak House, which was situated in a cow pasture with a dirt airstrip running across the road. We were a family of five but would order steaks for three and then bag up the leftovers. Mother liked to have a beer, which they brought in a goblet she could barely lift. This was pure Level One Texas.

  When we moved to Dallas, in 1960, I encountered my first pizza. It took place at Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant—which was, despite the “Egyptian” moniker, the first pizzeria in Texas. The only actual “ethnic” restaurant I can recall in the city at the time was La Tunisia, which was notable mainly for the seven-foot-tall, fez-wearing doorman, along with cocktail waitresses dressed as harem girls. There was no such thing as a fajita in Texas until Ninfa Laurenzo introduced the dish in her revered Houston restaurant—Ninfa’s—in 1973. (I’m aware of the scholarship on this matter, which proposes that the fajita was actually an indigenous Tex-Mex creation of the mid-nineteenth century, which migrated south and ingratiated itself into the kitchens of Coahuila, Mexico, before returning in its full beer-marinated, sizzling-plattered, sour-cream-dolloped glory.)

  Level Two is marked by the rise of cultural institutions—the opera houses, ballet companies, symphonies, music halls, museums, galleries, libraries, theaters, and schools that have proliferated in the last several decades. These institutions begin by importing other people’s culture and, one hopes, end by fostering their own. To understand the anxiety that floats beneath the boasts of Level Two, we have only to visit the vaulted sepulcher of the Dallas Museum of Art. Solemnly designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, it opened in 1984, boasting “the finest collection of post-war American art” in the Southwest. It also laid claim to the country’s “finest collection of Japanese-influenced American silver,” “the largest display of Chinese export porcelain,” “the largest Robert Rauschenberg painting,” the “largest painting by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo,” and finally, “the world’s largest indoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg.” Only in Texas is Large Art an aesthetic category.

  The DMA also houses the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. Wendy Russell Reves was a leggy blonde from Marshall, Texas, who became a New York fashion model and the longtime lover of a wealthy European publisher, Emery Reves, whom she finally married in 1964. She was the Jerry Hall (from Gonzales, Texas) of her day. Wendy became the chatelaine of a villa on the Côte d’Azur formerly owned by Coco Chanel. Winston Churchill spent months at a time there, to paint, and to drink in Wendy’s charms. His wife pointedly refused to join him. Noël Coward observed in his diary that Churchill was “absolutely obsessed with Wendy Russell…I doubt if Churchill has ever been physically unfaithful, but oh what has gone on inside that dynamic mind?”

  After Emery died in 1981, Wendy offered to donate his $30 million collection of impressionist and postimpressionist art to the new Dallas museum, which was still in the planning stage. Museums in France and elsewhere avidly courted the widow, but they were unwilling to accommodate her intransigent demand that her residence be faithfully reproduced in order to showcase the art.

  Thus, one leans into the roped-off rooms in the DMA’s version of a Mediterranean villa to see life as it was lived by a Hungarian playboy with his spirited Texas mistress. Here in their dining room, with still lifes by Courbet and Cézanne, are the Reveses’ china plates and silverware all laid out on the immense banquet table. (Housewares occupy center stage in this exhibit; the art is mere decor.) A nude Degas pastel looms over the tiger-skin boudoir chairs in the master bedroom, and the bed itself is mounted on a kind of presentation dais. At the foot of the bed is a pair of Wendy’s not-exactly-Cinderella-sized slippers.

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  STANLEY MARCUS WAS the great Level Two proselytizer in Dallas. He was the only liberal, and practically the only Democrat, that I was aware of in the city when I was growing up. This was a city so hysterically anticommunist that the Dallas Symphony had to cancel a program of Shostakovich because he was Russian, and the Park Board ripped out a bed of poppies because they were red. Marcus fought against the absolutism and paranoia that dominated Dallas politics, creating space for ideas to breathe. Through Neiman Marcus, the marvelous department store that h
e oversaw, he tutored the newly affluent city, not only on how to dress and what to buy but also on how to behave. He raised the standard of cuisine in the city when he hired Helen Corbitt to run the store’s restaurant, the Zodiac Room. He almost single-handedly desegregated public facilities by welcoming black citizens to shop in the store and, in 1961, by serving two black couples in the Zodiac Room. The word went out in Dallas that desegregation had arrived. Marcus hired Eddie Bernice Johnson, a nurse, as an executive assistant, on the singular condition that she run for office. In 1972, she was elected to the Texas legislature—the first black woman from Dallas ever elected to anything. Since 1993, she has served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Stanley Marcus changed Dallas. Few individuals have ever had such a profound and beneficent effect on the city in which they lived.

  Houston had its own great cultural modernizer in Dominique de Menil, the French heiress of the Schlumberger oil-field-services company. She and her husband, John, immigrated to Houston in 1941, following the Nazi occupation of Paris. They brought with them a sensibility that was practically unknown in Texas, intending to plant a flag of cosmopolitanism far from the volatile capitals of Europe. The de Menils collected more than seventeen thousand paintings and other works of art, centering on cubism, surrealism, pop—a totally alien aesthetic for the place and time. “What I admire, I must possess,” Dominique once admitted. They brought artists and filmmakers, such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Bernardo Bertolucci, to speak and teach. They put a cowboy hat on René Magritte and took him to a rodeo.

  Dominique commissioned Renzo Piano to design a serene museum to house her vast art collection, his first American building. The museum is cool and gray and perfect. Nearby is the de Menils’ most memorable contribution, the Rothko Chapel, a meditative space that provides a brooding counterpoint to the headstrong city. In front, there is a Barnett Newman sculpture, Broken Obelisk, which was intended to grace the Houston City Hall, but when the de Menils insisted that it should be dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., the city turned the gift down.

  “Houston is a major philanthropy center, and they were the start of that,” Tommy Napier, the assistant communications director of the Menil Collection, told me, as he took Roberta and me through the de Menils’ home, which is now used for museum events. Designed in 1950 by Philip Johnson, the house is a flat-roofed, pale-brick, one-story affair, with a nearly windowless front, which some Houstonians initially mistook for a dentist’s office. “It was the first modern house in Houston,” Napier said. Certainly it provides a flagrant contrast to the antebellum-esque mansions of River Oaks. Across the back of the house is a long bank of windows, which in the Houston climate were fogged over like a shower stall. The furnishings, by the fashion designer Charles James, are riotously lush, not at all in keeping with the austere Johnson style. The dark living room has black Mexican floor tiles and a vivid yellow Rothko that nearly jumps off the charcoal-gray wall. The bar is a kind of enlarged Joseph Cornell box, filled with colored highball glasses and stuffed birds on a shelf under a Matisse and a Max Ernst. There is a phone booth with a schoolteacher’s pencil sharpener on a tiny desk, along with a Sunday missal and books of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. The door to Dominique’s bedroom is covered with red velvet, and yet the room itself is like a cloister. The de Menil aesthetic is informed by a monkish devotion to simplicity and an absolute rapacity for beauty.

  The best museums in Texas are in Fort Worth. The Kimbell, gracefully designed by Louis Kahn—his last and maybe finest work, using parallel concrete vaults that ingeniously reflect natural light—is one of the most acclaimed buildings of modern times. It set a standard for the future, which was matched by Tadao Ando’s exquisite Modern Art Museum. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson) houses a distinguished collection of Western art. These buildings showcase the artistry of Level Two and its power to elevate a culture; and yet the walls are practically bare of any great Texas artists.

  There is a third level in my analysis, which is when a culture matures and, having absorbed the sophistication of Level Two, returns to its primitive origins to renew itself. One night recently in Houston, I had dinner with friends at One Fifth, a new restaurant opened by Chris Shepherd. He grew up in Tulsa and came to Houston to culinary school. Captivated by the diversity of cultural influences, he began prowling through the city markets and cafés, discovering a mix of cuisines that were all a part of the city around him. Shepherd was drawn to what he called the “underbelly” of the vast city. Just driving west on Bellaire Boulevard is like taking a world tour, through Central America, Thailand, Korea, and the Philippines. Suddenly the street signs are in Chinese characters. In 2011, Shepherd opened a restaurant in a former lesbian nightclub that he calls Underbelly. He subtitled it “The Story of Houston Food.” The menu changes every day, depending on what is available from the local farms, Vietnamese bakeries, the catch that day from the Gulf, and the whole animals that are brought to his in-house butchery. His wine list is annotated by the local rapper Bun B. He folds all of these influences into a cuisine that reflects the city that Houston is now. “I wanted to go from simple regional cooking to hyper-regional,” Shepherd told me.

  Shepherd is a bear-sized man with bristling brown hair and an expression of intense concentration. His new restaurant, One Fifth, reflects the restlessness and imagination that he brings to re-creating a native cuisine. “I wanted to do the corners of Texas,” he said. “You’ve got East Texas, which is Creole, with the field greens and okra. In West Texas you have the Hispanic influence and the chiles. North Texas, you had the cattle drives. In the south and the Gulf, I wanted to give the sense of a true Southern fishing camp. Then in Central Texas you have the Czech and German influences.” To accomplish all that, he decided that he would reinvent the restaurant each year.

  Its current incarnation was a steak house. We had ordered the chef’s board, which was brought to us by two waiters and stretched across the entire table—crispy pork shoulder, lamb Wellington, brisket, collard greens and bacon, sweet potato au gratin. I have to say that my favorite part of the meal was dessert—apple pie, cooked in a wood-burning stove so that the crust was slightly charred but the apples were still firm.

  Transcendence is always rare, and the best examples of Level Three tend to be origin stories. Beyoncé’s album Lemonade absorbed the street talk and country music and the church choir of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Houston, and enlarged the tablet of popular music. The National Wildflower Research Center, in Austin, quotes the limestone arches and tin-roof barns of the countryside to create an environment that is both familiar and new. One can look at the jubilant choreography of Alvin Ailey’s masterwork Revelations, for instance, which is a sumptuous re-creation of Ailey’s experiences in a black Baptist church in the flyspeck Central Texas community of Rogers. It is as if the artist had split the atom of consciousness and released its energy into the universe. Robert Rauschenberg, who studied pharmacy at the University of Texas before discovering himself as an artist, used the images of his native Port Arthur—windmills, derricks, even a bubbling tub of oil-field mud—to give a new language to modern art. He commented on the recession in Texas in the 1980s, caused by the crash in oil prices, to create what he called “gluts”: tire tracks, crumpled gas-station logos, and highway signs riddled with bullet holes, the detritus of the car culture that rules—and despoils—America. “I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia,” Rauschenberg commented. This is what Level Three is all about: returning to one’s roots with knowledge, self-confidence, and occasionally, forgiveness.

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  PERIODICALLY, Larry McMurtry erupts to deprecate the state of literature in Texas, which he has called “disgracefully insular and uninformed,” and produced by “a pond full of self-satisfied frogs.” He particularly singled out the overworked cowboy myth for undermining the literary proje
ct of the state, before producing the best cowboy book ever, Lonesome Dove, four years later. In his essay “Ever a Bridegroom,” published in the Texas Observer in 1981, he singled out only one writer in the entire state worthy of his unequivocal admiration: Vassar Miller, a little-known poet in Houston.

  McMurtry is one of my favorite writers, and after his article came out, I conceived what I thought was a hilarious idea. Every year, the Texas legislature selects a writer to be the poet laureate of the state—typically, back in those days, an elderly schoolteacher from Port Arthur or Burkburnett. I decided to start a political action committee and lobby legislators to pick a real poet for the post. POPAC, I called it. Steve nominated Glenn Hardin, a talented poet known to be cantankerous and profane and certainly not in the mold of the usual laureate. Steve used to publish him in a poetry magazine he founded called Lucille. My object was to see how much money it would take to get my candidate accorded the state’s highest literary position—its only one, in fact.

  Just then, rather suspiciously in my opinion, the Texas Senate decided to formalize the selection process, sabotaging my scheme to bribe the legislators. Jack Ogg, a handsome senator from Houston, convened a panel, proclaiming that its purpose was to “select the next poet lariat of Texas.” After that, every speaker who addressed the panel carefully spoke of “lariats,” not “laureates.” A few days after this perfunctory panel, the senators announced they had chosen a new poet lariat: Vassar Miller. This was the only time in Texas history that literary criticism has had an effect on state affairs.