ESSAY THE SEEDS OF CULTURE

CULTURE, IT’S EASY to figure out, is related to both religion (linguistically, in cults) and to organic growth, as in agriculture. There is some relevance to the fact that God appears to have wanted almost nothing to grow in Dallas, that every blade of grass in our city is a work of human art rather than of nature. In its culture as in its very existence, Dallas represents the triumph of the human will over natural circumstances.

Now that Dallas has a major art museum, plans for a concert hall and more, its culture might profit from a skeptic’s attempt to see exactly what is growing here, what is worshiped, and why. Like so much else in the life of this city, culture is no easy crop to sow or reap. By “culture,” I mean, in general, the performing arts (theater, music, dance), the fine arts (painting and sculpture), and, most intangibly, literature.

Two sides of the Dallas character have shaped its major institutions and the attitudes of its citizens to cultural life. The first is xenophobia, by which I do not mean simply the redneck arrogance you see on bumper stickers (“Save Gas, Freeze a Yankee”), but something more subtly pervasive. I arrived here one blistering day in August 1971. Carless, I went to a rental agency at Love Field, where, while waiting to have my cash (I was also credit-cardless) approved to rent an automobile, I chatted with the woman at the desk. She was phoning my employer to check on my legitimacy. “What are you going to do at SMU?” she asked. “I’ll be in the English department,” I replied, with equal doses of eagerness and heat prostration. “You’ve come down here to teach us English?” she asked, with a wild surmise. “Why, you don’t even talk like us!” So much for our common language.

And although that woman’s remark was issued more from naive wonder than from hostility, it still seems to a transplanted Yankee, even after 13 years, that much of the local Establishment in Dallas resents or resists any effort to transplant or cultivate strangely “Eastern” ideas in native soil. The outrage over City Hall’s Henry Moore sculpture (“So much money,” the foes cried, “and not even to a local boy!”) did not occur so long ago.

For years I have cajoled and berated my SMU students, people of generally ample means, to attend (fill in the blank: theater, ballet, the symphony). One searches in vain, not only downtown but even at SMU’s Mc-Farlin Auditorium, for any SMU students other than the professional dance or music major or the rare adolescent venturing beyond Greenville Avenue nightspots. Raised in privilege, these students have been culturally deprived and, what is more distressing, unwilling to think that their lives are anything but complete. And they are the civic and business leaders of tomorrow.

But something more pernicious feeds the fires of anti-culture in Dallas: a half-hearted sense that a city requires culture and therefore can purchase it. Remember the museum bumper stickers before the bond election: “A Great City Deserves a Great Museum”? They appealed to civic pride rather than artistic merit. But they worked. The pervasive feeling is that we need a theoretical commitment to the arts. This position is legitimate on two counts: First, to get culture, or a cultural institution, money is the sine qua non; second, hypocrisy has a lot in its favor, since today’s bought culture will foster tomorrow’s genuine article. The classic position was taken by the late mayor R.L. Thornton, who said he was willing to spend any amount of money on the symphony, provided he didn’t have to attend. I was struck by the persistence of his attitude when I went to a Thursday evening symphony program last spring and found the floor about 40 percent empty. When I asked a symphony official if sales had fallen off, I learned that the ground floor was about 95 percent sold out. In other words, people in Dallas are willing to buy-but not to occupy-their seats at the symphony. Check out Boston’s Symphony Hall or Philadelphia’s Academy of Music to see a different kind of public commitment to the musical establishment.

One might also ask who controls the boards of the musical organizations in the city. Consider the fact that in New York, Philadelphia or Boston, these boards are made up of the expected civic leaders, businessmen and their wives, but many of these people are also serious music lovers or amateur musicians themselves. They know their music, and they understand musicians’ problems.

In a city with such facilities as Dallas has and will have, one can hardly say that there’s no interest in the arts even when attendance seems low.

For an interesting study in contrasts, compare a typical audience at a Dallas Civic Music program in McFarlin with a Dallas Opera production. The former is liable to be small in number, mostly older people, and definitely not glittery. Since the opera has great cachet, it will be jammed.

The fine arts flourish even more than the performing arts for the obvious reason that patronage involves not just visible attendance but-even better-ownership. Texans, artists across the country know, have money to spend (if not to burn), and will buy. Texans collect; new money wants instant possessions, and more than one gallery owner in town has been whisked away to New York by youngish, relatively unsure millionaires to serve as the new Berenson or Duveen at SoHo galleries.

Literature, however, traditionally the most anti-social of the arts (reading is blessedly private), tares less well here. The obvious sign is the quality of the bookstores. Gone are the legendary Elizabeth Ann McMurray and her Personal Bookshop, and its only real successor, Pat Mier’s defunct Bookseller in Willow Creek. The chains predominate, and one looks in vain for permanent stock rather than best sellers, for classics, or for anything that is not of the moment. One looks in vain, as well, for salespeople who are interested in books rather than marketing. A few independent booksellers in the city break the stereotype, but their business is always precarious. Try to find foreign books and you’re in trouble. I searched for the Pleiade edition of Proust. Not in Dallas. Dallasites don’t have time to read books. (There are some recent rays of hope-Rizzoli’s in NorthPark and Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up on Worthington, near the Quadrangle.)

Until the Fifties, Dallas was the undisputed cultural center of the state, the bookish Athens of the alfalfa fields. Book sales were approximately double those of Houston until the cultural tide turned and the ratio reversed itself. The city of oil and aeronautics exploded with a literary venturesomeness that Dallas let slip away.

When I came here, I also discovered the traditional Western hostility to belles-lettres as an area of study for men. I was surprised to learn when I walked into my first class at SMU that it was women who studied literature and the other “soft” courses. The men took business and engineering. Fortunately, this trend might be changing: At least now, women are moving into engineering and business in such numbers that some closet literati might be willing to major in English again.



THE OTHER IMPORTANT side of the Dallas personality is its desperate sense of its own inadequacy, a self-consciousness that, far from resisting foreign influences, positively asks to be inundated by them. This is the side you see in the less stable nouveaux riches, and it is the side that is by far the more interesting and volatile. Un-sureness coupled with money in a society lacking fixed ranks makes Dallas a social historian’s dream. I am convinced that Dallas and Houston, and indeed the smaller Texas cities where money is a-building, will be the subject for, and the breeding ground of, the next major American novelist. Someone will do for Texas what Edith Wharton did for turn-of-the-century Newport and New York. Contemporary urban Texas has all the right soil to nourish a great novelist of manners who can reflect the rapidly changing social patterns of its cities.

The new affluent classes crave pleasurable enlightenment. I have been intrigued to see how anyone in Dallas who can express and defend an opinion with some rhetorical fervor is naturally deferred to; anyone with a small knowledge of cultural matters is immediately considered an authority. An important local businessman once said that all you need to get into Dallas society is $10,000 and a tuxedo. All you need to get set up as a cultural authority is an opinion, and perhaps a degree, preferably from an Ivy League college. This is part of the city’s fondness for titles: They lend authority. In 10 years of university life in Massachusetts, I never referred to a teacher as anything other than “Mister”; in Dallas, everyone is Doctor or Professor-even people without advanced degrees. Modern labels have replaced older badges of class affiliation.

Compare, if you can, the intermission conversations you might overhear at the Music Hall and Lincoln Center. In Dallas, polite chitchat prevails; in New York, heated argument. Dallasites, like Southerners in general, mask timidity beneath the cloak of mannerliness. The full range of invective, praise, and reasoned analysis that you might get in the East is likely to be replaced by generalized cooing or a refocusing of the conversation in Dallas. The rabid New York Culture Vulture, a rara avis to begin with, wouldn’t have enough to sustain him in Dallas, especially in sparring partners. Those people in the New York lobbies may often be wrong, but they’re never in doubt.



RELATED TO MILD manners (back to xenophobia), there’s the distinct feeling in Dallas that “criticize” is a dirty, rather than a neutral, word. For years, John Ardoin, unquestionably the city’s most internationally recognized journalist, received a barrage of hate mail because he didn’t like-or so they said-what he heard. The fact that the Dallas Symphony might have been playing badly was an irrelevancy: They wanted the critic to be a booster. But the critic’s job is to provide intelligent, distinterested commentary and analysis, not to act as a Chamber of Commerce spokesman.

The general willingness to kowtow to the imported and the foreign rather than to take (when legitimate) pride in the domestic and the home-grown has no stronger evidence than in the areas of architecture and interior design. If you are interested, as I am, in turn-of-the-century American furniture, which would be appropriate to much of the vaguely prairie-style architecture here, you would search Dallas in vain. Mention the names of Stickley or “Greene and Greene,” or the words “mission oak” or “arts and crafts movement,” and you might as well be speaking French (but at least if you spoke French, the right people would find you classy, though peculiar). No, early modern American furniture can’t be found here. But any third- or fourth-rate English import will sell in a minute, just as French objects did 20 years ago. Texans have always suffered from Anglophilia (think of Ellie Ewing’s new sister-in-law), a fact the English are quick to take advantage of as they export their down-on-their-luck nobility as well as their heirlooms to Texas for a quick buck. See the remark of a Lord Churchill (distinctly a younger son), visiting Dallas to sell exclusive, ritzy package tours of Britain, as quoted by Marlyn Schwartz in the Morning News of May 3, 1984: “So good for you Texans. . .This is so different. You know how you Texans go in for one-upmanship. The ’My Britain’ tours are really special, so perfect for you Texans. After all, you Texans seem to have everything but history, don’t you?”

Lord Churchill is wrong, of course, but much in Dallas might support his sorry claim. Where, exactly, is the architectural evidence of Dallas’ 19th- or even early 20th-century past? Torn down, for the most part. Wealthy Dallas had a luxury that smaller towns like Fort Worth or Waxahachie could not afford, but our neighbors now boast the legacy of Prairie, Gothic and Romanesque buildings that Dallas long ago did away with, in the name of progress, novelty and “new is better.” Even today people are paying exorbitant prices for “teardowns”-decent houses that deserve intelligent, caring restoration.

Drive through older neighborhoods and see what the houses look like. By and large, everything is a cautious imitation of older, imported, models. An architecturally sound neighborhood should answer to Alexander Pope’s famous 18th-century description of a natural landscape: “Where order in variety we see, and where, though all things differ, all agree.” Diversity and harmony together, in other words, rather than unimaginative uniformity or utter randomness. But spin down Beverly Drive and see a wainscoted English Tudor cheek by jowl with a tiled Spanish hacienda, a miniaturized Loire Valley chateau, a Georgian brick complete with Palladian window (Georgian is always the safe choice), a New Orleans wroughtiron fantasy, etc.

At its worst, the architecture mixes styles in one amphibious building. Too much of Dallas looks like Disneyland or Universal Studios. (European Crossroads comes to mind, as does the Venetian ambiance at Las Colinas.) Don’t even begin to consider the excrescences of mansard roofs (some years ago, one was actually installed upside down, and no one noticed).

Dallas has a history and style of architecture that, in Rape’s words again, “consult the Genius [spirit] of the place in all,” but its residents-and especially its leaders-will have to learn to distinguish between what local styles are worthy of maintaining and what is imported but not interesting for that reason alone. Similarly, Dallas must provide a soil from which the foreign will not be automatically excluded. We must neither unthinkingly imitate English culture (or turn to New York, as Fort Worthians have always claimed), nor remain proudly insular and resistant to forms and ideas from outside. A truly native culture can nurture the imported as well as the local, especially in Dallas, where everything was foreign.