Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest | Page 7

sense of form. The popular restriction of
creative writing to fiction and verse is illogical. Carl Sandburg's life of
Lincoln is immeasurably more creative in form and substance than his
fanciful Potato Face. Intense exercise of his creative power sets, in a
way, the writer apart from the life he is trying to sublimate. Becoming a
Philistine will not enable a man to interpret Philistinism, though
Philistines who own big presses think so. Sinclair Lewis knew Babbitt
as Babbitt could never know either himself or Sinclair Lewis. J. F. D.
The time of Mexican primroses 1952
1
A Declaration
IN THE UNIVERSITY of Texas I teach a course called Life and
Literature of the Southwest." About 1929 I had a brief guide to books
concerning the Southwest mimeographed; in 1931 it was included by
John William Rogers in a booklet entitled Finding Literature on the
Texas Plains. After that I revised and extended the guide three or four
times, during the process distributing several thousand copies of the
mimeographed forms. Now the guide has grown too long, and I trust
that this printing of it will prevent my making further additions--though
within a short time new books will come out that should be added.
Yet the guide is fragmentary, incomplete, and in no sense a
bibliography. Its emphases vary according to my own indifferences and
ignorance as well as according to my own sympathies and knowledge.
It is strong on the character and ways of life of the early settlers, on the
growth of the soil, and on everything pertaining to the range; it is weak
on information concerning politicians and on citations to studies which,

in the manner of orthodox Ph.D. theses, merely transfer bones from one
graveyard to another.
It is designed primarily to help people of the Southwest see
significances in the features of the land to which they belong, to make
their environments more interesting to them, their past more alive, to
bring them to a realization of the values of their own cultural
inheritance, and to stimulate them to observe. It includes most of the
books about the Southwest that people in general would agree on as
making good reading.
I have never had any idea of writing or teaching about my own section
of the country merely as a patriotic duty. Without apologies, I would
interpret it because I love it, because it interests me, talks to me,
appeals to my imagination, warms my emotions; also because it seems
to me that other people living in the Southwest will lead fuller and
richer lives if they become aware of what it holds. I once thought that,
so far as reading goes, I could live forever on the supernal beauty of
Shelley's "The Cloud" and his soaring lines "To a Skylark," on the rich
melancholy of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," on Cyrano de Bergerac's
ideal of a free man, on Wordsworth's philosophy of nature--a
philosophy that has illuminated for me the mesquite flats and oak-
studded hills of Texas--on the adventures in Robert Louis Stevenson,
the flavor and wit of Lamb's essays, the eloquent wisdom of Hazlitt, the
dark mysteries of Conrad, the gaieties of Barrie, the melody of Sir
Thomas Browne, the urbanity of Addison, the dash in Kipling, the
mobility, the mightiness, the lightness, the humor, the humanity, the
everything of Shakespeare, and a world of other delicious, high,
beautiful, and inspiring things that English literature has bestowed upon
us. That literature is still the richest of heritages; but literature is not
enough.
Here I am living on a soil that my people have been living and working
and dying on for more than a hundred years--the soil, as it happens, of
Texas. My roots go down into this soil as deep as mesquite roots go.
This soil has nourished me as the banks of the lovely Guadalupe River
nourish cypress trees, as the Brazos bottoms nourish the wild peach, as

the gentle slopes of East Texas nourish the sweet-smelling pines, as the
barren, rocky ridges along the Pecos nourish the daggered lechuguilla. I
am at home here, and I want not only to know about my home land, I
want to live intelligently on it. I want certain data that will enable me to
accommodate myself to it. Knowledge helps sympathy to achieve
harmony. I am made more resolute by Arthur Hugh Clough's picture of
the dripping sailor on the reeling mast, "On stormy nights when wild
northwesters rave," but the winds that have bit into me have been dry
Texas northers; and fantastic yarns about them, along with a cowboy's
story of a herd of Longhorns drifting to death in front of one of them,
come home to me and illuminate those northers like forked lightning
playing along the top of black