Man of Letters

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out John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-1960, a keepsake edition of 22 previously unpublished letters from the Knopf Collection at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.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

The "John" to whom this letter is addressed was my New York agent John Schaffner, a sensitive and discerning man who for several years had appreciated and pushed my writing perhaps more than much of it deserved. I had been back in Texas for a number of months at this point, staying on because my father had undergone a major cancer operation in June, but intending to move along elsewhere when the time came.

However, there was also a powerful homecoming feel to this sojourn in familiar terrain, based on hunting and fishing and poking around in a canoe on the Brazos as well as in libraries, where I spent much time digging out half-remembered bits of old local history and lore. These things started reflecting themselves in my writing, and the idea of an article based on this proposed canoe trip came full-blown into my mind.

A thing that strikes me strongly in this letter is the description of the Brazos as wild and blessedly neglected. It was, back then. It isn't, these days.

 

Route 5, Box 297
Fort Worth, Tex.
11 May 1959

Mr. John Schaffner
312 East 53rd Street
New York 22, N.Y.

Dear John:
Herewith I send you a copy of the first draft of Part One of the Brazos book, which I call at present Goodbye to a River.[. . .]

[. . .] Its form is more or less that of a string of beads, the string being the trip-narrative itself and the beads the various digressions in the form of anecdotes, tales, historical commentary, essays, etc. As Part One stands right now, maybe a little bit more string shows than beads, and in the long run I may decide to change that by inserting a bit more digressive material. Maybe not, too—I don't want to think about it at this point. It will be mostly a matter of "feel," and some of the string itself may come out.

"Feel," too, will have to be the determining factor in how much personal matter I leave in the final version. Personality is bound to intrude somewhat in a thing of this kind, and what one has to do is hope that the personality involved will please his readers. To avoid such intrusion too much constitutes an affectation, though I know well that to let it overpower the book would be disastrous.[. . .]

The historical material I am going to let unfold itself in roughly chronological order. It has to be rough because it has to be tied organically to the river and the country as the trip progresses, but the river does lend itself somewhat to this plan: Indians and the frontier are more definitely associated with the upper stretches, and the subsequent brawling, cattle-driving era of relations among the whites themselves is better exemplified down in Parker and Hood counties. Most of the really contemporary incidents and illustrations I plan to use are hooked up with the last stretches of country in the trip.[. . .]

[. . .] If I do what I intend to do, the book will catch a good bit of meaning not only about this part of the country but about the frontier in general, and about all personal attachments to American places. I do not want, however, to bear down on that oratorically; it will have to do it by itself, organically.[. . .]

Cordially, John Graves

 

June 24, 1959

Dear John:
A few days ago, Harold Strauss, the senior editor at Knopf who was the one there who originally solicited your book, called me to say that he had read the manuscript of GOODBYE TO A RIVER and considered it a minor masterpiece. In view of the fact that Mr. Knopf is himself interested in it, Strauss has to hold the book for him to read before getting a definite decision but there is no doubt in his mind, so he says, that he would want to be talking about a contract with me as soon as Mr. Knopf has read the manuscript.[. . .]

I can't tell you how delighted I am at this prompt and enthusiastic reception on the book. You will be pleased to know that Strauss told me that rarely has as impressive and professional a piece of writing come his way as this work of yours! As he really is something of a curmudgeon, this is even higher praise than it sounds like.

My very best to you both.

Yours, John (Schaffner)

This to me of course was a beautifully welcome letter, even though it related only to a draft copy of one-half of my book. Harold Strauss was editor-in-chief at Knopf, and I suppose that Schaffner's "curmudgeon" remark was based on some friction between them in the past. He was never at all unpleasant to me, however—a gentleman and a bright, understanding editor, as some subsequent letters will show.

My wife Jane was a designer at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and we were occasionally invited over to dinner at Stanley and Billie Marcus's home. These were rather grand affairs, usually with a sprinkling of notables from the fashion world or the arts. At one such function we met the publisher Alfred Knopf, a formidable figure whose face registered great reserve when he found out I was a writer. ("Curmudgeon" was a more accurate description of him than of Harold Strauss, though in the long run I came to like Alfred very much.) But when I mentioned that some work of mine was in the hands of his editor-in-chief he pricked up his ears and turned affable, and after returning to New York he obviously talked with Strauss about the book.

 

August 4, 1959

Dear Mr. Graves:
I think I have been very remiss in not writing you long ago to tell you how glad I am that we are publishing your book and how much I enjoyed GOODBYE TO A RIVER. I am reminded of this by your return of our author's questionnaire which I have read with interest. Your description of the book seems extremely sound and helpful.

As publication approaches we'll do all we can for you in Texas. I imagine that Stanley and Billie will be of some assistance and fortunately I know Frank Dobie quite well. The problem with him, of course, is his uncertain health. Lon Tinkle is an old friend but a singularly undependable fellow when you are not actually with him. I should think Walter Webb, another old friend, would be interested and Frank Wardlaw of the University of Texas Press would do what he could. However, the most important man is probably J. F. Albright of the Cokesbury Bookstore in Dallas. He did a terrific job on Tinkle's book on the Alamo but yours is a hundred thousand times superior to that. I was amused to have Albright tell me (better keep this between us) when I saw him in March that a book about Texas to be popular has to be very corny—and Lord knows yours isn't that either. But we have lots of time to work on all of these people.

Meanwhile, congratulations on a fine job and kindest regards to you and your wife.

Yours sincerely, Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred's emphasis on specifically Texan promotion is interesting in the light of publishing practices these days, when the big houses mainly eschew regionally focused work.

 

Rt. 5, Box 297
Ft. Worth, Tex.
13 January 1960

Mr. Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
501 Madison Avenue
New York 22, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Knopf:
Thank you for your kind note of 11 January. I'm proud that my book has been able to please discerning persons like you and Mr. Strauss, and grateful for the considerate and certain editorial hands into which it has fallen.

Even though I hope I've avoided true provincialism in Goodbye, I do realize that its focus on Texas matters makes it an unlikely candidate to set the entire nation on its ear. Like you, though [. . .] I hope and expect that it will evoke a good response down here. And I believe there's a good chance that those other "provinces" of nature-lovers and history addicts and Western lorists and so on may afford it a considerable audience elsewhere.

Almost certainly my next one will seek to illuminate wider horizons.[. . .]

Sincerely, John Graves

My prediction in this letter of the sort of public appeal that Goodbye was likely to have—mainly in the Southwest but also to some degree elsewhere—seems to have been fairly accurate. It has never been a best-seller, but has sold well enough to have remained in print in hardback for forty years. This says a good bit about the Knopf operation too, for despite the deaths of Alfred and Blanche Knopf and Harold Strauss, and the acquisition by Random House, the firm retains much of the old commitment to its writers.

Alfred certainly appreciated my work, what there has been of it. He used to tell people that he had "discovered" me, down there in wildest Texas. . . . When in Dallas he would often call and invite Jane and me over to dinner at one of the good restaurants, where we would talk our heads off over gourmet food and wine, for when he wasn't being rather pompously on stage among strangers he was a most genial and interesting man. Once when Jane's car was on the blink and we had gone over to meet him at the Old Warsaw in my rather beat-up Volkswagen pickup truck, he was delighted to be taken back to his hotel in it—I think to the old Adolphus—and absolutely strutted for the assembled gawkers after climbing down from its high cab.

On another visit he brought his brilliant wife Blanche along, shortly before she died. I was telling them about the rocky piece of land I had just bought with the proceeds from Goodbye, and they looked at each other with rueful, significant smiles.

Blanche said, "There went his next book!" And turning to me she explained that in their experience, when a writer got interested in a piece of land, it meant he was likely to stop being a writer for a good while.

She was right. The "next book" I sent to Knopf was published fourteen years after that conversation. It was Hard Scrabble, and it was about that same patch of rocks, on which Jane and I have now lived for many years.

 

Ft. Worth, 15 April 1960

Dear Mr. Strauss:
[. . .]For promotional purposes, I've got a couple of bits of information that may or may not be of use. One is that I've received word that Martha Foley has chosen my story from last June's Atlantic, "The Last Running," for her this year's Best American Short Stories.[. . .]

Still another item, though possibly not of great use, is that I recently met Mr. Frank Dobie and identified myself to him. Harry Jackson (our erstwhile prospective illustrator) flew down bringing some Western bronzes from the show he is have (sic) at Knoedler's in May, with the idea of seeing if he could get an endorsement from Mr. Dobie to print on his catalogue. I drove him to Austin, and though Mr. D. is said to be, and appears to be, in poor physical shape and has the reputation of being rather crusty and short with unwanted intruders, he received us warmly and we had a fine long talkative visit with him during which he not only endorsed Jackson's bronzes but bought one of them for his own collection. He is a superb old man, incisive and organic and totally honest. I mentioned my book to him, and he laughed and said that a friend of his among your editors (first name Angus?) had been after him to read the manuscript or the proofs, but that he didn't have the time or energy for that sort of thing these days. I did not of course try to pressure him, for I respect him greatly and think his time and strength both probably do need to be rationed carefully now. But as we were leaving, he grinned and told me: "I'll read you now." I got a pretty definite impression that this didn't mean he was going to read the manuscript or the galleys, but that he'd read the book when it comes out, so that if you furnish him with a copy as early as possible we might get some useful support from him. If he likes it, of course; that honesty cuts both ways and is one good reason why his opinion of things Western carries the weight it does.

Knowing that Knopf does not operate in high-pressure ways, I'm sure you'll see that this scrap of information is used just for reference and not as a lever to get Mr. Dobie to do anything he's hitherto expressed unwillingness to do. For one thing, I'd like to stay friendly with him and to be able to visit him some more, and I feel certain that if he thought I was finagling around to "use" him, this wouldn't be possible.

Until further correspondence,

Yours very cordially, John Graves

Harry Jackson was a good friend whom I had met in Madrid in 1954, a former Wyoming cowboy, U.S. Marine, and Abstract Expressionist who by 1960 had reverted to his roots and was becoming one of the best of the "Western" sculptors. He had called Mr. Dobie from New York about an endorsement for the Knoedler show, and Dobie had said "Hell, bring the bronzes down here and if I like them I'll say so."

He did like them well enough to furnish the endorsement and to buy one as noted above, whereupon Jackson gave him another and he gave us inscribed copies of his books. Because he had had two or three heart attacks by then, Mrs. Dobie at the door had told us she thought a thirty-minute visit would be about right, but the three of us got along so well, with tales and jokes and laughter and Jack Daniel's in his upstairs study, that we ended up staying three or four hours.[. . .]

 

September 7, 1960

Mr. John Graves
Route 5, Box 297
Fort Worth, Texas

Dear John Graves:
Alfred Knopf himself sent me a copy of GOODBYE TO A RIVER. Nobody in this firm ever suggested that I write a blurb for the book. One written by A. B. Guthrie [a Western fiction writer] is a measure of his overrated power. Anyhow, as soon as I read the book, I composed a newspaper column to be released Sunday, October 9. I'm always appreciative of a good subject for one of these columns.

Insistors on your being a Thoreau of the Southwest strike me as not having read Thoreau—or perhaps not having read Graves. As I said in my column, which perhaps you'll read eventually, it's a book I've been waiting for. I could do with fewer Comanche episodes, but every line of interpretation talks to me. I get hungrier and hungrier for something about life—life in this part of the world to which I am welded and in which I am rooted, although by nature I would prefer a more gracious land of trees and water.

I guess my favorite character in the book is Sam Sowell, the hermit. I feel kin to him in the same way that he felt kin to the rattlesnake. I also feel a damn sight closer kin to rattlesnakes than I feel to a lot of politicians and greedy graspers parading under the name of religion.

I've been kind of looking for you. You wrote that you expected to go to south Texas before September. You will be mighty welcome when you come. If there's to be an autograph party here or something like that, I want to gather a few people to meet you, though now that [Roy] Bedichek's gone I have a hard time finding somebody that will do credit in a conversational way to a party. I don't mean a big party—I mean just three or four or five people. I haven't heard from Jackson[. . .]. In time he'll prefer more of repose in some of his work. Even when I was very young I didn't go strong for action, action, action in art or literature. It would be fine if Jackson came along at the same time you come.

The other day I ran into Harry Ransom, who is now President of the University. He had just read your book and said, "We've got to get him down here at the University."

Sincerely yours, J. Frank Dobie

P.S. Sometimes I think a man had just as well keep quiet and not try to explain himself or say what he thinks. He's made up of too many selves, and his ideas fade off and reverse themselves. Generally I get tired of the cult of violence as applied to the West. Then somebody like Cooney Mitchell [another character in the book] comes along and makes a dying speech just before being hanged that thrills me positively with admiration. Maybe I admire even more the way Cooney's boy Bill eleven years later showed daylight through the head of his father's pious, lying murderer.

 

Ft. Worth, 9 Sept. 1960

Dear Mr. Dobie:
I'm solidly gratified by your letter and your article about my book, and can say without hypocrisy that no other person's approval of that book could mean to me quite what yours does. In it I tried to say a few things honestly and as well as I could. One always hopes, of course, that the force of the things he has to say will transcend the symbols he builds for expressing them, and if he's lucky and has some insight, sometimes they do. But they stand no chance at all of doing so if the symbols aren't right. Here my symbols were Texas symbols, and I know of no other man alive half so well equipped as you with that combination of perceptions—of philosophical and esthetic acumen mingled with specific knowledge and "feel"—needed to spot weakness in such symbols. I seem to have bogged off here into some long words, as one will when he writes too fast and abstractly. But I mean it all. Your thinking the book worth devoting one of your columns to is a great compliment to me, and I appreciate fully that it means a chance at a wider readership among people I'd like to have read me, and all that that entails. More importantly, though, it means that you've liked my writing, and I'm proud of that.

Thanks for differentiating between me and Henry David Thoreau. That New England Brahminical air gets a bit rarefied for me. . . .

I've intended to get down there, and may still do so before classes take up here, though I can't be certain. August, as often, turned into a kind of sullen duel between me and this typewriter, with very little output but the feeling that I'd better stay with it in case something good was about to come out. Nothing did.[. . .] I'll definitely get down before long, though, and if possible will give you some advance notice. I very much appreciate your idea of arming a tertulia [a party] for me, though mainly I'd just like a chance to talk with you some more.

Sincerely, John Graves

This friendship with Mr. Dobie, begun in the spring of 1960, lasted and grew until his death in 1964, nourished by correspondence and by the visits made to him in Austin and his Paisano country place. We were not only friends but damned nearly kinfolks, I felt, and I think he felt the same way.

 

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.