Ramsey Yelvington: The Best of the Breed Called Texans

For me. Ramsey Yelvington will always wear a white Stetson, a smile playing about his face, belying the bristling white moustache beneath the brightest blue eyes I ever saw matched only by the hot blue Southwestern sky rising behind him in a vast gothic arch. 

He was the best of the breed called Texans. Soft-spoken, understated, preferring the suggestion to the command even in the theatre where he was master, this man was intuitively courteous. He was alive in the deeps to every nuance of his associates and his era. He possessed a relaxed capacity for action, action at all the levels of the word — physical labor, sports, insight, suffering, ideas, language. He was adept at all degrees of the word. 

As a man of theatre he was fascinated with designs of action— the movement of minds and emotions, the shape of the internal. He had an ear for the music of the heart, the silent torture of purpose caught in contradictions. His was an eye for the minutiae of moments. He readily perceived realities beneath appearance. 

He was a loner. Whatever he did he did his way, not in simple stubbornness— though he was gifted this way, too— but because there was a way that only he knew, and his journey made all the difference in what he returned with. He was an artist who would do nothing except with excellence. His mastery of the things he did was the accumulation of care and application. Slight of stature, yes, but he was steel and complex purpose, a blend sustained by courage. 

Above all he was possessed by a sense of integrity beyond any speaking, a bright personal honor unsurpassed in my experience, rare indeed in an age almost unable to define the word. His integrity was matched only by his honesty. When he lectured at Ohio State University on a visit a few years ago— he was always loathe to leave Texas and his playwrighting and teaching at Southwest Texas State University, but always enjoyed himself when he did — he was followed by students, galvanized by his genuineness. 

This dry-humored man of ready laughter and soft speech recoiled from sentiment. The springs ran deep. He was a lover, a boundless lover of his family— his wife Louise, their two daughters and the grandchildren— and his friends: Baylor: his inheritance as a Scotsman, a Southwesterner, a Texan, a Baptist. “I’m just an old Texan, an old Baptist, and an old cattleman,” he once remarked to me, “and nothing’s going to change me.”

A distinguished regional playwright, he described himself as “just an old Texan, an old Baptist, an old cattleman.”

He wore his love like a badge, loyally. It was visible in his smile, his Harris tweed coats, his Stetson, his Texas speech which, professional that he was. he could in the drop of a vowel move into any dialect from Chicago-Polish to the Isle of Skye for the stage.

Dr. Jack Byrom said of him:  “… he was serious about himself and his work, but his sense of humor saved him from being grim.” 

Ramsey will be best remembered as the first playwright of Texas, indeed as the first important playwright of the Southwest. I believe his greatest contribution is to the future which will discover him beyond his era and his region with the forthcoming publication of his collected plays. The man who built his own house above Cypress Creek on River Road near Wimberley in the Hill Country was a disciplined workman. He sustained a rich flow of plays and characters, completing more full-length plays than any man in America since 1945. 

A partial listing only of his titles suggests the breadth and audacity of his labor: Home to Galveston, Cocklebur, Widow’s Walk, The Marble Horseman, The Long Gallery, A Cloud of Witnesses, The World by the Tail, The Will to Win, Women and Oxen. Shadow of an Eagle, Montezuma Alley, The Governors, The Folklorist, and such one-act plays as The Choir, Korea, Sunshine Sisters, Go! Fly a Kite. 

Output is the least of his achievements. What is within is a theatrical vision of Southwestern life, a dramatic telescoping of centuries and generations, races, philosophies, characters. More important than this regional achievement— and it is unparalleled in itself— one discovers the world within the man Ramsey Yelvington and a focusing of his vital interests and forces into a vision that is universal, even cosmic, as his men and women personify the human condition. 

He loved Texas and Texans. He wrote movingly, lovingly, often chillingly of both. His character grasp is wide and masterful, meriting the label “Chekhovian.” He was fascinated with language — language as music, emotion, logic, persuasion. Here one perceives his inheritance from his minister-father and his church up-bringing. 

The plays are vital with an uncompromising honesty and life-struggle unparalleled by better. known playwrights of his period in America. He never stoops to patronizingly portray a popular issue, and he never suggests simplistic solutions. His issues are abiding and human. He leaves room for hope about solutions. 

In these dramas one finds the agonized realist, the humanist, the committed man. the believer, the philosopher. He styled himself a “Christian Stoic.” The very words imply the land, the man, the Old Testament verities of Job, experience and faith. They also suggest his lifelong conscious searching and his territorial claims. His was no easy belief. He peered into the abyss and resolutely set his face against despair and fatalism.

But he always remembered. 

He never leaned on the scales nor did he prop himself with comfortable assumptions. He reported what he found. The discomfit of the affected or willfully blind or ignorant did not motivate him. nor did it deter him. Sham did not survive his sight. He was hard on the church, on Texas, on America. But he could not rest as an iconoclast. The sterility repulsed him. He continually struggled into basics, a basis for new beginnings. He did not focus on warts and blemishes, but his portraiture included them. 

There was much of Ramsey in his character Travis, in A Cloud of Witnesses.            

                    “God does not mock the mortal flock. 

                      It is the earthly shepherd leads them

                      Into endless pastures of endless rock! 

                      Who showers God with devotions of the 

                      empty belly 

                      Showers God with devotions of carnival 

                      confetti. 

                      God desires man enter his presence in full 

                      stride. 

                      To stand before him. a god-chip, in godly 

                      pride: 

                      And full of the knowledge of a son’s place. 

                      Stare boldly into the Father’s face.

                      Then — then out of his own will and accord

                      Bow,

                      And say:  ‘My Lord.’ ”

He never included love scenes in his plays because he felt that love— the genuine phenomenon — was not spoken but evidenced. He had no scruple against revealing the fraudulent. But he wrote about strong women: painted dolls had no appeal for him. Like his character. Bonham, he believed 

                      “Women God did well

                       When he made you our softer selves.

                       Cut off from you men grow hard.”

His plays, widely produced in Texas and the Southwest, have never been pushed or “puffed” by press agentry or publishing houses. It is as though his imaginative children must make their own way even as he did. I once heard him say. “I figure if a man can’t make it where he lives he should do something else— unless he’s an actor!” The utterance reveals Ramsey the man and writer no less than the man of theatre.

Unaided as his work was it won wide acceptance, celebration and partial publication. Raul Baker was his mentor, friend, and lifelong advocate. A Cloud of Witnesses was staged three years in San Antonio, receiving national acclaim by the press and magazines. The Long Gallery was an off-Broadway success as produced by Stella Holt, acted by Clu Gullager. 

Of his own work, he said, in latter days and later wisdom. “A writer writes, and there comes a point at which he actually is the best judge of what he has written.” 

The man himself loved simplicity beyond easy perception. Perhaps the best intimation of this comes from a remark his Uncle Bill once made as they sat on the “long gallery” of the house in Smithville. It was an Indian summer evening, the leaves rustling with the first feel of autumn. “I thought I heard a pear fall.” his uncle said. Ramsey used that as the last line in The Long Gallery. 

Louise Yelvington says it “embodied the whole of life to him, a life he loved — simplicity, productivity, all the pattern of being born, growing, maturing and falling away.” Appropriately, his favorite line from Shakespeare is a fragment from Hamlet (his favorite play) that adumbrates a similar gentleness: 

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . .”

The Sunday before his death he and Louise were at the farm. As they talked he said. “This is the pleasantest thing I know — to watch the light fall across the field, to watch the cattle.”