Behind the Lines
The Uncertain Sage
(Page 2 of 2)
Hard Scrabble lies at the end of a country road that turns into two ruts just beyond John’s fence. Inside his property, the road winds between empty fenced pastures. He has kept cattle, goats, and a few horses over the years, but now his livestock consists of a single donkey, which hating all canines, was supposed to have prevented coyotes from preying on the goats. Finally, the road hooks around a small hill to the back of John’s house. Nearby is a wide, roomy barn, a pump house, and a few other buildings. During this visit, the one thing he said with unconcealed pride was, “If you see it, I built it.” The house has big, comfortable rooms, stone floors, and high ceilings. John works in a large office off the living room that is filled with bookshelves and paraphernalia for tying fishing flies. A Macintosh computer sits on an old wooden desk, a surprising concession to modernity, I thought, since for decades he had worked on a manual typewriter. Beneath the desk, neatly placed on a sheet of paper, is a tin can for spitting. John likes to chew tobacco.
We talked in that office. John is still a physically arresting man with a blocky head covered by thick white hair, a blocky chest, and stout arms and hands. His left eye is blind and immobile. With his right he peers over black horn-rimmed trifocals. He is, although reticent, legendarily friendly. As a gentleman of the old school, he is patient to a fault and seems to regard people so as to judge them at their best. “I often think of myself as an amateur writer,” he told me, not so much as if were endorsing that condition as simply stating a fact. “A fellow writer once said a professional writer was one who wrote every day whether he felt like it or not. That ain’t me. The damn things have to come to me. There is a building sense of guilt if I haven’t written for a few days. But that guilt comes less frequently as you get older. I’ve gotten good mileage out of what little I’ve done. With that little bit done, the compulsion is not always the same.”
He was raised in Fort Worth by “a standard American businessman with a store.” He went to Rice because he saw it as a potential escape from small-city provincialism. He then went to war and afterward returned to Fort Worth. “I felt like I was sinking back in,” he said, “so I took off wandering.” He studied English literature at Columbia and began to write: “Pure literature, fiction—that was the big aim then and that aim stayed with me for years.” Those were the days when many magazines depended on fiction. John was published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and others. “I wrote one story for the slick magazines,” he said, “and one for me. Except that now I think that the ones for them weren’t that bad and the ones for me weren’t that good. They weren’t lost years in that I learned what I learned. But I read my journal from that period recently and was amazed at my own bullheadedness.”
He wandered around Europe and Mexico, finished a long novel, sent it to his agent, and returned to Fort Worth to hunt and fish and to see after his ailing father. “The agent hated it,” he said. “Then I got to thinking about it and decided I hated it too.” And, after ten years of effort, that was it for John Graves and fiction. He lingered with his father, took a teaching job at Texas Christian University, and met Jane, to whom he has been married since. Without ever making a conscious decision to stay in Texas, he found himself floating down the Brazos and writing about it, then buying a farm in Glen Rose, building house there, and moving his family in. “I wasn’t much suited for fiction, particularly long fiction,” he said late that morning in his study. “But I still regret not making fiction work. There is a greater possibility for achievement with fiction, but also”—he shrugged and grinned, looking at me over the top of his glasses—“a greater possibility for a flop.”
Was he dissuaded too easily back then by a single agent’s scorn? Who can say? For all the writing done in Texas in the hundred years since the closing of the frontier, there is finally no Texas tradition. We have not yet been blessed with a genius whose imagination is so great that it exerts a kind of gravitational pull on everything before and after it, as Faulkner did in Mississippi or Yeats’s did in Ireland. Without that we will remain a region of individual writers who happen to work in the same neighborhood but without much other connection. Perhaps in time we will see that powerful imagination to be Larry McMurtry’s. He is the only writer who can work with equal ease in contemporary Texas and the Texas of the frontier. But, unfairly, his success has undermined his literary reputation at the moment. Or perhaps that imagination will turn out to be that of Cormac McCarthy, the transplant to El Paso for whom the violence of the West forms its romantic beauty. Or perhaps it could have been John Graves’s.
After lunch, we took a walk around the place. A sheepdog bounded ahead of us, and the donkey followed warily at a distance. We saw the barn and various pastures. We walked down to White Bluff Creek and along its banks to a wide, curved waterfall. And then we went back near the house and stood talking by my car before I left. “Jane doesn’t want to leave,” John said, “so I guess I won’t either. But I could. For all the work I’ve put into this place, I could just walk away. When the girls were here, there were a lot of things we did together that were fun, harvesting grapes for one. But they’re grown now. I look around and I think, ‘I’ve done it.’” Then he told me a joke about a farmer and his hogs, slapped me on the shoulder at the punch line, and turned to go inside.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
