The Once Forbidding Land

Around a single table at the Scholz Garten one may find a bewildering assortment of people: an Englishman who runs a book store that specializes in 18th-century literature, the editor of Texas Observer (an independent liberal newspaper that is one of Texas' clearest, if not loudest, voices), a Dallas newspaper columnist, a physicist called Dirty Tom ("All I want to do is build them bombs," he says), a cowboy, a state senator, a painter, a writer, a fellow with a guitar and sandals and Buffalo Bill haircut, a football coach, a labor lawyer, a classicist, a millionaire. And innumerable girls. The prettiest girls on earth. One of them rides to work on her motorcycle wearing jeans, sweater and headband. "When I get to the office," she says, "off come the headband and the jeans. I'm wearing a skirt underneath. I take my high-heeled shoes out of my purse, and I'm a square's supersecretary. I don't know what my boss would do if he saw me on my motorcycle and found out I'm a beatnik." At the Scholz Garten are students playing chess, Germans shouting songs, politicians scuttling around in the power game, a professor scratching notes for a book on Ezra Pound, some young men putting together a scrapingly funny satiric magazine called THE Austin Iconoclast—an incredibly mingled group, somewhat like a displaced-persons camp, some of them hating the place and some of them loving it but all of them addicted to it. Owner Bob Bales has provided nourishment for numerous indigent writers. "I'm a businessman, but I'm also a citizen," he says. "What kind of citizen would I be if I helped to make the writers shut up?" His attitude is in contrast to that of an Austin banker who was asked to contribute money toward restoring O. Henry's old house on East Fifth Street in Austin. "I can't help," the banker replied. "In fact, I do not understand this sudden excitement. I knew the man called O. Henry—Will Porter, that is—very well indeed. Worked with him, in fact. He was a very indifferent bookkeeper."

Austin and the Hill Country still have room for the individual. People who are viewed with suspicion and fear in the conforming, image-coveting, salesmanship city of Dallas, 200 miles to the northeast, feel free in Austin. Home to Austin is where John Henry Faulk went when he was blacklisted by the networks. Since then he has won a $3.5 million libel suit over the blacklisting and is working again in radio, TV and motion pictures, but Faulk still maintains his Austin home in addition to his West Side apartment in Manhattan. Folk Musicologist Alan Lomax and Poet Randall Jarrell are Scholz Garten veterans, as is Congressman and Historian Maury Maverick Jr. Novelist Larry McMurtry, author of the novel that was made into the movie Hud, comes sliding into the Scholz Garten, grinning, wary, with his small son by the hand. Photographer Russell Lee lives in Austin and recently shared his Scholz Garten table with writers Aubrey Goodman and Jay Milner. Sam Houston Johnson, brother of the President, is an Austin resident. So is a man who breaks wild buffalo for saddle riding.

The Hill Country—from the tables at the Scholz Garten to the mountains of Kerrville, from the country store that sells jawbreakers in Ding Dong to the red-tile roofs of the Spanish haciendas in San Antonio—is a country where it is still a virtue for a man to own his own piece of land and to work it, where there is dancing room for the spirit. The puritans and the thought controllers, who rule much of the state and deny Texans such freedoms as the right to drink, bet on a horse or read an uncensored book, do not have much power in the Hill Country. The wide polished sky and the awesome land reduce their hysterias to absurdities.

But like most of the places in the U.S. that are wild and free, the Hill Country in its present form may be disappearing. Because of the popularity of Lyndon Johnson, tourists are entering the Hill Country, though as yet somewhat timidly. There are picnic-lunch sacks crumpled on the banks of the Blanco River where it rushes, clear over the limestone and blue in the channels, near the high blue ridges of The Devil's Backbone. More dude ranches are opening. Some of the working ranchers are selling out to syndicates from Dallas and Houston. There are grand plans for resorts—hunting and fishing and horseback-riding motels with neon signs and leatherette couches and mustard and catsup in little plastic boxes and, God knows, maybe even Scopitone, which may become known as the last defeat of civilized man. But the Hill Country has one weapon, perhaps an ultimate one, against encroachment, and that is the stubbornness and loneliness of the land itself. It is not the place for everybody.