I’m rather certain that most Texans have heard the often quoted words of John Steinbeck: “Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.”
He wrote this in his nonfiction work, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” Charley was a standard poodle who was Steinbeck’s traveling companion in 1960, when together they cruised America’s highways and backroads in a GMC pickup truck with a makeshift camper that Steinbeck called Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse.
What may be news to many is that Steinbeck’s comments about Texas and Texans go well beyond his “state of mind” sentence – 10 pages beyond. He has much more to say about us that is generally complimentary, and sometimes critical – but, as people on the border say, he says it “con cariño,” with affection.
Steinbeck wrote:
When I started this narrative I knew that sooner or later I would have to have a go at Texas and I dreaded it. I could have bypassed Texas about as easily as a space traveler can avoid the Milky Way. … Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never do.
… Even if I wanted to avoid Texas, I could not, for I am wived in Texas and mother-in-lawed and uncled and aunted and cousined within an inch of my life. Staying away from Texas geographically is no help whatsoever, for Texas moves through our house in New York, and our fishing cottage at Sag Harbor. . . . It permeates the world to a ridiculous degree. Once in Florence, on seeing a lovely little Italian princess, I said to her father, ‘but she doesn’t look Italian.’ To which her father replied, ‘her grandfather married a Cherokee in Texas.’
» MORE: Do you have a favorite W.F. Strong story? Here are our top 10
Here Steinbeck laments the struggles all writers have in trying to define Texas and Texans. He says that they all end up “floundering” and lose themselves in “generalizations” that have little meaning. He says that he is no exception to this rule, but he tries anyway.
“Texas,” he says, “is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.” Steinbeck notes that “A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.”
He says that his wife claims that she is a ‘Texan who got away.” But he does not buy it. He says, “She has virtually no accent until she talks to another Texan, when she instantly reverts.” Soon she is saying yes, air, hair and guess with two syllables, Yayus, ayer, hayer and gayus.
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
Steinbeck touches on many Texas themes in his wanderings and wonderings:
On secession he writes: Texans claim “the right to secede at will. . . . They want to be able to secede, but they don’t want anyone to want them to.”
On Texas history he says, “Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited to facts.”
Steinbeck says that Texans are tight. If you attack one Texan, you attack them all. They circle the wagons. There may be no “geographical unity in Texas. Its unity lies in the mind. And this is not only in Texas. The word Texas becomes a symbol to everyone in the world.”
On Texans and football: “Sectional football games have the glory and despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.¨
On cattle: “The tradition of the frontier cattleman is tenderly nurtured in Texas … When a man makes his fortune … his first act is to buy a ranch, the largest he can afford, and to run some cattle.”
Steinbeck concludes that Texas has a “cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. … Texas is the obsession … and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
