Content area
Full Text
In May, 1971, Cyril Connolly came to Austin at the invitation of the University of Texas's Humanities Research Center to be the major attraction at the exhibit based on his The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books (1965). UnI ike some of his countrymen who sneer at the idea of the Center without having visited Austin, Connolly was charmed by the setting and moved by the memorial to art because it gave him "a sense of belong ing to the tradition, a boost to the ego for one's diffident London self."
He even liked the accommodations, "an enormous double room in a hotel which is cal led a club to be able to serve liquor and which provides appetising Southern food and iced tea" ("Apotheosis in Austin," Sunday Times, 6 June 1971). Connolly was being unusually generous; this was undoubtedly the Forty Acres Club, named after the original area of the University of Texas campus. The food was unexceptional even by middle-American standards, and Connolly charitably did not mention the wall paper, striped black and white, which gave one the impression of being inside a translucent zebra.
But the Forty Acres Club did have a bar, and most evenings one could see the chairman (equal emphasis on both syllables) of the University of Texas Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, sporting the University colors in white hair and burnt orange blazer. Orange does not flatter the complexions of white Texans, who run to red or dusty tan, but Erwin's jacket was a statement of power, not fashion.
Connolly was justifiably impressed by the Humanities Research Center. In Stereotypie Texas fashion, the University had gone through the dealers and executors of Europe like a Dallas matron through Nieman Marcus. Harry H. Ransom (Connolly calls him William), President of the University, had funded the Center with Texas oil money, and Warren Roberts, who directed the Center, made annual trips to England to buy archival material in carload lots. He brought it to the original Center headquarters in a very crowded corner on the top floor of the Undergraduate Library next to the Tower, from the top of which a crazed but proficient marksman had shot passing students and professors a few years earlier.
Connolly was flattered to see...