Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 5

The hope of
regional literature lies in out- growing regionalism itself. On November
11, 1949, I gave a talk to the Texas Institute of Letters that was
published in the Spring 1950 issue of the Southwest Review. The
paragraphs that follow are taken therefrom.
Good writing about any region is good only to the extent that it has
universal appeal. Texans are the only "race of people" known to

anthropologists who do not depend upon breeding for propagation.
Like princes and lords, they can be made by "breath," plus a big white
hat--which comparatively few Texans wear. A beef stew by a cook in
San Antonio, Texas, may have a different flavor from that of a beef
stew cooked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but the essential substances of
potatoes and onions, with some suggestion of beef, are about the same,
and geography has no effect on their digestibility.
A writer--a regional writer, if that term means anything--will whenever
he matures exercise the critical faculty. I mean in the Matthew Arnold
sense of appraisal rather than of praise, or, for that matter, of absolute
condemnation. Understanding and sympathy are not eulogy. Mere
glorification is on the same intellectual level as silver tongues and juke
box music.
In using that word INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the
accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental
brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it
be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal
epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth
of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as
education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a
school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards along the highways of
Texas advertise certain towns and cities as "cultural centers." Yet no
chamber of commerce would consider advertising an intellectual center.
The culture of a nine- teenth-century finishing school for young ladies
was divorced from intellect; genuine civilization is always informed by
intellect. The American populace has been taught to believe that the
more intellectual a professor is, the less common sense he has;
nevertheless, if American democracy is preserved it will be preserved
by thought and not by physics.
Editors of all but a few magazines of the country and publishers of
most of the daily newspapers cry out for brightness and vitality and at
the same time shut out critical ideas. They want intellect, but want it
petrified. Happily, the publishers of books have not yet reached that
form of delusion. In an article entitled "What Ideas Are Safe?" in the

Saturday Review of Literature for November 5, 1949, Henry Steele
Commager says:
If we establish a standard of safe thinking, we will end up with no
thinking at all.... We cannot ... have thought half slave and half free....
A nation which, in the name of loyalty or of patriotism or of any
sincere and high-sounding ideal, discourages criticism and dissent, and
puts a premium on acquiescence and conformity, is headed for disaster.
Unless a writer feels free, things will not come to him, he cannot
burgeon on any subject whatsoever.
In 1834 Davy Crockett's Autobiography was published. It is one of the
primary social documents of America. It is as much Davy Crockett,
whether going ahead after bears in a Tennessee canebrake or going
ahead after General Andrew Jackson in Congress, as the equally plain
but also urbane Autobiography of Franklin is Benjamin Franklin. It is
undiluted regionalism. It is provincial not only in subject but in point of
view.
No provincial mind of this day could possibly write an autobiography
or any other kind of book co-ordinate in value with Crockett's "classic
in homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still
retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his
land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents any
active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples, struggles
far beyond any province.
Not long after the Civil War, in Harris County, Texas, my father heard
a bayou-billy yell out:
Whoopee! Raised in a canebrake and suckled by a she-bear! The click
of a six-shooter is music to my ear! The further up the creek you go, the
worse they git, And I come from the head of it! Whoopee!
If it were now possible to find some section of country so far up above
the forks of the creek that the owls mate there with the chickens, and if
this section could send to Congress one of its provincials untainted by

the outside world, he would, if at all intelligent, soon after arriving on
Capitol Hill become aware of interdependencies between his remote
province and the rest of the world.
Biographies of regional characters, stories turning on local customs,