November 2000
Man of Letters
A new book pays tribute to two Texas classics: John Graves's masterpiece, Goodbye to a River, and Graves himself.
Forty years ago John Graves's elegiac Goodbye to a River was published, quickly becoming a classic of Texas literature. This month, to mark the anniversary, TaylorWilson Publishing is bringing out John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-1960, a keepsake edition of 22 previously unpublished letters from the Knopf Collection at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. It is the first book for the fledgling Houston publisher, which acquired the trade backlist titles from the now-defunct Gulf Publishing. Someone must have proclaimed November John Graves Month, because the eighty-year-old author will also receive the prestigious Bookend Award—"Really a lifetime achievement award," says TaylorWilson vice president Dave Hamrick—at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. "Goodbye to a River is my favorite book," says Hamrick, who edited the commemorative volume. "I feel that it is one of the most important books ever written by a Texas author." And the new book? "Because Graves is such a wonderful letter writer, it provides an absorbing framework for reading—or rereading—Goodbye to a River, almost like a reader's companion." Beginning with Graves's initial article proposal to his agent and ending with a fan letter from J. Frank Dobie, the following excerpts offer a glimpse into both the publishing process and the personal relationship of two of the state's literary giants.
Fort Worth 12 Sept. 57
Dear John [Schaffner]:
I write this to give you, as you asked, a few more details about the Brazos River piece I mentioned to you. Although I haven't got the form of it clear in my mind yet—nor will I have it until I have done the things that will go into the article—I can tell you what the material is like.
The stretch of the river that interests me and always has is somewhere around a hundred and fifty miles long, running from the Possum Kingdom Dam that was finished about the beginning of the war nearly down to the upper reaches of Lake Whitney. Since I was a child I've been hunting and fishing and camping along it, but I guess what intensified my interest in it recently was the fact that progressive-minded souls are making plans to convert the whole thing into a necklace-string of lakes for electrical power, flood control, moisture conservation, and water-skiing. . . . In a region that alternates between drouth and flood and doubles its population as often as it can, these are praiseworthy projects, and I suppose one can't in conscience oppose himself to them, but one can regret the whole affair personally and can make an effort to crystallize his feelings about that quite distinctive piece of river before it's drowned deep down yonder under all the Chris-Crafts. This, of course, was the basis of my idea for an article.
The Brazos runs something over eight hundred miles from its sources across the New Mexico line down to the Gulf, and like all rivers that are rivers and not mere tributaries, it is many things on the way down—from a salty trickle out on the high plains to a full rolling Southern river, with levees and cottonfields and hardwood bottoms, down near the coast. My piece is between those extremes; it begins in the rugged canyons of Palo Pinto County, winds with tremendous contortions between cliffs into sandy peanut and postoak country, and leaves the realm of my project in the cedar-covered limestone hills around Glen Rose. I know that no one ever heard of those places, and there's not an oil well on the whole route, but it is as purely Texas country as you can find. In the springs, after rains, the river is violent, though not as violent as it used to be before Possum Kingdom was built, and regularly maroons farms and ranches and whole towns for a few days at a time, but during most of the year it is a series of long tortuous placid
Letters reprinted with permission of John Graves; the J. Frank Dobie Library Trust, the Chase Manhattan Bank as Trustee; Alfred Knopf, Inc.; the Schaffner Family; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. From John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-1960, to be published in November by TaylorWilson Publishing.pools connected by trickling shoal water where, if you're canoeing, you often have to get out and wade and lead your boat down to the pool below.Its main quality is wildness and isolation. Bridges are few: it took me five days to paddle from one of them down to the next last fall. There are farms in the sandy part, but most of it looks much as it must have to the Comanches and Kiowas when they rode down it to raid the settlements white men built in that valley in the 1850's and '60's. No boom has brought people to that country; they have rather been drawn away to the air-craft factories and the beerjoints in Dallas and Waco and Fort Worth. The river picks up a lot of gypsum salts out on the plains and therefore is not attractive to the big cities as a source of water, except as a last resort—which is what has saved it from the Corps of Engineers thus far. The fishing and hunting along it are not bad, but only if you work hard at them, and most people don't want to. Motorboats run aground or shear pins, and quicksands occasionally swallow folks up. So generally they stay away, all but the few who live along there, and you can camp at night and see no light from horizon to horizon but your own lantern, and hear no sound that was not always there except maybe an occasional airplane, and for two or three days of quiet paddling sometimes you'll see no human being, just the coons and deer and squirrels and cranes and ducks and herons and kingfishers and innumerable small songbirds that the Comanches saw too in their time.
The Spanish and the Mexicans didn't settle that far north along the Brazos before they lost their hold on Texas. Most of the human history of that part of the river is built around those Comanches and Kiowas and the conflict between them and the interloping Anglo-Saxons who drifted up the river valley. There is quite a lot of that history—unsignificant, quietly bloody—for the Comanches and the Kiowas gave up hard, and even after they had been herded to Oklahoma they used to come down the Brazos on the full moon, raiding. Quieter Indians lived there, too—Caddos, Anadarkos, Ioni. . . . They built villages and planted pumpkins and corn and in the end got the same raw deal as their fierce cousins. After you dig in the little county histories for a time, it begins to seem as though every curve of the river, every rapids and pool, must have some tale of murder, rape, mutilation, heroism, cowardice, attached to it from those thirty years or so of the last century when the fight was going on. Fine, stout people lived and moved along there: the Parkers (it was Cynthia Ann Parker the Comanches kidnapped and bred a great chief from), Big Foot Wallace, Old Man Charlie Goodnight and the Lovings and the Slaughters (Palo Pinto County bred more of the big West Texas and New Mexico and Colorado ranchers than any other one place did), Satank, Satanta, Peta Nocona. . . . And the fact that nowadays few persons outside of that immediate region ever heard those names doesn't matter much. They were there, and so was the river, and since there have been few significant changes after their time, some of the hardbitten people there still know about them and can tell you where to beach your canoe and climb up a little creek-valley to find a broken-down log cabin that used to belong to one or another of them. . . .
I know that is too much to try to get into an article, and I have no intention of doing so. I'm absorbed in all of it and in trying to relate it to this honkytonk present that has somehow grown out of it, but that is not the idea of the article—though I'd like to get that feeling behind it. What I want to do for the article is to take a canoe trip down that stretch of the river—all or part, preferably alone—and get it down on paper. Get down what it looks like, how it sounds, the birds and animals I see, how duck-breasts taste broiled over mesquite coals, what a leathery rancher says to me from the bank where he's trying to untangle an Angora goat from the wire, and the Comanches and the stolen horses and the two little redheaded boys scalped and murdered always behind it all.
What I mean is that I'd like to set my feelings about that river down now, before they drown it, and the framework for setting them down will be the trip.
How much interest this might all have for the editors of Holiday or for any other editors I don't really have any way of knowing. Though I'm not much of a photographer, it wouldn't be hard to get some fine illustrations for such a piece. . . . Possibly, if my father's condition permits (you're as cut off out there as if you were on the Amazon), I'll go ahead with the trip regardless of any expression of interest from editors, or the lack thereof. I'd like to do it during the next month or so while the bird migration is on and before winter's bleakness descends. The river has a fine cool melancholy quality in the autumn. . . .
I hope this is approximately the kind of description of the piece that you wanted.[. . .] My best to Perdita and your children.
Cordially, John Graves
