Don caught up with himself poolside at the Allen Park Inn, Houston, Texas. He looked tanned and fit.

Q: Thanks for the piña colada, Don. Now that you've finished Giant Country and are resting, catching some rays, mind if I ask the author a few questions?

A: Not at all. Fire away.

Q: What made you choose Houston over other places as your vacation spot?

A: I'm temporarily light. I couldn't afford where I really wanted to go—which is northern Italy, Venice.

I've always found Houston to be the best that Texas has to offer in the way of cities. I know a lot of people wouldn't agree, but once you get inside the freeways, it's great. It has what I look for in a city: good restaurants, good shopping, good bars. A cosmopolitan edge. And, of course, it's not Austin. People in Houston wear shoes, unlike in Austin, the Birkenstock capital of the free world, and another thing, here in Houston there aren't that many VW vans with Save the Whales bumper stickers. So it's a relief from the Austin scene.

Q: And Houston's museums, of course.

A: [orders another drink] That's what they say. I'm not really into museums.

Q: Why this particular motel, Don? I mean, it's nice, but it's not the Four Seasons.

A: A couple of reasons. One, my wife and I always meet interesting people here.

Not stars, but the relatives of stars. Remember John Riggins, the great Redskins running back? We met his cousin here one night, round 2 a.m., out here by the pool. Great guy. Another time, not Sissy Spacek, but her sister. It's that kind of place. Second, they serve red-eye gravy with the biscuits for breakfast, and outside of Mississippi, there's hardly any place left that serves red-eye gravy.

Q: Turning to your book, how did that come about, Don?

A: Well, the further we got into the nineties, the more I realized that a certain preoccupation with Texas on my part—and perhaps on the part of others—might be cresting. Or ending.

Q: What do you mean?

A: I found that in the eighties I'd written a good deal about Texas, and it seemed about time to sort out what I thought was the best of that work and then . . . move on . . . new pastures, new venues.

See, the eighties, which Bill and Hillary like to brand as the decade of greed, was for academics a pretty darn good decade. For me the eighties were boom years. Universities had money for raises, and they had money for conferences and talks. In the Sesquicentennial year alone, 1986, I gave twenty-three talks—from Beaumont to Amarillo. This is how great it was: I remember once at a museum in San Antonio I talked for five minutes, introduced a classic Texas film, collected a check on site for five hundred bucks, went back out to the car where Betsy was waiting with the motor idling, and we were out of there. "Saks," she said. "Saks is open."

Q: And what happened to the glory years?

A: Beats me. All I know is it all came tumbling down. The decade of creed took over.

Q: The decade of creed?

A: Ideology, political correctness, neo-puritanism, you name it. Now, in the nineties, everything in Texas is sort of becalmed—literarily speaking. At least it seems that way to me. Everybody's writing crime novels or film scripts. I should know; I've just written a film script myself. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I am, but I don't see much going on in the way of serious writing.

Q: Does this book represent for you, then, the end of an era of Texas culture?

A: Hard to say, but certainly some things are over. I doubt seriously if we're going to see another urban cowboy phase. Which is probably a good thing.
Let's just say that I thought, in looking back over the past fifteen years, there was a certain historicity to it. Giant Country, for me, was a summing up.

Q: You pointed out that these essays go back a few years. Did you print them exactly as they were published, or what?

A: No, I found that I couldn't leave them alone. I changed some titles—many titles, actually—and I did other things: in some cases writing new introductions to reposition the essays for the nineties.

Q: I notice that nearly all of these essays were published regionally, in Texas, several of them in Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer. Care to comment?

A: Sure, it seems natural. Most of the pieces deal with Texas, obviously. And, besides, it's frustrating sending stuff out to big-name magazines. I mean they actually manage to lose your stuff.

Q: What do you mean?

A: I'll tell you. Last year I sent an essay on Texans and guns to The New Republic; the tie-in was deer season. Months passed, many months, and so I thought I'd better make an inquiry about the status of the manuscript. I received an embarrassed reply and phone call: they'd lost the manuscript. During the same six-month period the New Yorker had done exactly the same thing; they'd lost a short story I'd sent them.

Q: Why did you write these essays in the first place?

A: The subject interested me, or some editor asked me to write on the subject.

Q: Was money ever a motive?

A: That, and audiences. In the early eighties, I decided that I wanted to write for a larger audience than the usual academic crew. It was a simple ambition: I wanted to be read on airplanes.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Well, you know, you're on an airplane, they haven't brought the drink yet, you haven't ordered the drink yet, the drink may never come, and you look around for something to read. There it is: an in-flight magazine.

Q: Did you ever write for an in-flight magazine?

A: Yeah.

Q: Yeah?

A: One time this editor calls me out of the blue and says we want you to write a fifteen-hundred-word piece on any subject you like. And I said, terrific. Can I write on why I hate the movie Paris, Texas?

Q: How did it turn out?

A: Great. The pay was good and in the next issue, in the letters to the editor, a woman wrote in. She took offense at everything I had said. I love it when people write in.

Q: Can you give me an example of one of the pieces that you wrote simply because you wanted to, or because the subject demanded it?

A: Yes. The one about my father's funeral. I felt I had to write that. It brought together the personal and the literary, which, for me, is one of the things that makes literature important. Well over half the essays are like that: attempts, in the root form of essayer, to find out something, tease it out, see what I think.

Q: Any regrets about any of the writing you've done over this period?

A: Well, I'd have probably been better off if I'd never reviewed a book by a living writer. Meaning especially friends and acquaintances. It's a no-win situation. You can't like a book enough, and if you don't say it's the best thing since Tolstoy they take it kinda personal. Also, I learned that you shouldn't make lists of "best" books because authors who aren't on it never forget, and they treat you badly at parties.

Q: You're kidding.

A: No, I'm not. A couple of years ago I did a piece for Texas Monthly, which they asked me to do, in which I listed the twenty best Texas books since 1980. Well, an Austin writer came up to me at a literary gathering right after the piece appeared and said, and I am quoting exactly what she said: "How does it feel to know—to absolutely know—that you have only nineteen friends in the whole state, since one of your twenty is already dead?'

Q: What did you say?

A: What could I say? I probably mumbled something incoherent.

Q: Does the fact you don't use footnotes in these essays make some kind of statement?

A: Not really. Originally, about half the essays in the collection had extensive documentation and anybody interested in that can go back to the originals. But I like a clean text myself. It's more reader-friendly.

Q: Care to comment on the organization of Giant Country?

A: I think it's pretty straightforward. It's a series of Ps. The first section is "Places" and those pieces, mostly narrative and somewhat autobiographical, are set in various places including, let's see, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Texas in 1940, England, Marfa, and Collin County. The second section, "Pages," explores certain major figures in Texas literature, namely George Sessions Perry, Katherine Anne Porter, William Humphrey, J. Frank Dobie, Walter P. Webb, Roy Bedichek, Billy Lee Brammer, and Larry McMurtry. "Polemics" brings together several shorter pieces that take a sometimes irreverent view of subjects ranging from the Texas literary scene to Larry McMurtry, the film Paris, Texas, and the Bridges of Madison County guy, I can't think of his name, oh yeah, Robert James Waller. There's also a parodic homage to my current favorite "Texas" writer, Cormac McCarthy. Finally, the last batch, "Pictures," offers a sampling of writing I've done about Texas in the movies, including a personal survey of the best Texas-based films on video.

Q: How do you see your book as we approach the millennium?

A: As a rule, I don't take questions on the millennium, but I think it's fair to say that with this book I'm trying to build a bridge to the twenty-first century.

Q: What kind of bridge?

A: A bridge of understanding. A way to connect our recent past, this century, with the next. And so on like that.

Q: So how would you define this book's objectives?

A: I think it provides a picture of a transitional period in Texas history, from a rural way of life to an urban one. Which is where we are now, obviously. Since 1940, Texas has flip-flopped its population from country to city. We're now eighty-two percent urban. Many of the essays touch upon a vanishing Texas. There is also in this book an evaluation of what our mythology tells us about our past and what our actual experience tells us. I'm interested in the gap between mythology and experience. It's where I live, in Irony Gap. And there are other objectives, other themes, but those are for readers to find for themselves.

Q: Do you see any tendencies in your writing now, compared to when you started out?

A: Yes, I think there's an increased emphasis on narrative. My biography of Audie Murphy followed a narrative line, and several of the travel pieces quite naturally do as well. The "Harry and Jamie" story in this collection is just one of a number of fictionalized travel pieces I've done recently.

Q: So is travel important to you?

A: Yes, travel is very important. And I've learned a lot from travel—particularly from repeated trips to Australia and Australian writers like Michael Wilding. It's a definite influence on my work.

Q: Is it fair to say that you no longer find Texas and its culture endlessly fascinating?

A: Not endlessly fascinating, no. I never did. But I think the demographics predicted for the state in about 2020 promise a very interesting future. A truly multicultural population. It will be interesting to see what survives of the past and of the mythology. In any event I'm a Texan, and this state is part of me. I know certain things about Texas in my blood and bones. But Texas ain't the whole world, not by a long shot.

Q: So you're moving on?

A: Absolutely. I'm movin' on.

Q: Word has it that your latest project, a novel, is top secret. Could you at least give us an idea of what it's about?

A: Ummm . . . Texas.

Q: On a personal note, are the rumors true that your wife, Betsy Berry, urges you to make obscene amounts of money so that she may pursue exotic beauty regimens in European capitals?

A: Yes.

Q: Tell me, Don, why you consented to this interview instead of writing a more conventional introduction to your book.

A: First, I thought a standard sort of introductory essay would be boring, and second, I thought this short-hand kind of q. & a. might be something different.

Q: Do you think some readers will find it coyly post-modern?

A: Oh, now don't take that tone with me. Actually, I think until now you've asked some probing questions. I think we've touched all the bases, laid down the groundwork, set up some parameters; in short, I think you can stick a fork in this interview, it's done.

Q: Hey, thanks, big guy. Listen, we appreciate the time you've taken from your busy vacation, and, as always, it's been fun. Say, could I have another one of those coladas?