A River Runs Through It 
Writing Life
John Graves might have published more books if he hadn’t spent so much time carpentering and raising goats. The bard of Glen Rose’s legacy is written in stones as well as words.
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John slept late the following morning—since his fall he doesn’t usually get moving until about ten or ten-thirty—so Jane graciously offered to show me White Bluff Creek and some of the outlying pastures, which were covered this April with a spectacularly thick carpet of bluebonnets and paintbrushes. Though Jane is in her early eighties, she is still spry, trim, and attractive, with curly gray hair and nearly perfect bone structure. She was raised in New York City, where her mother owned an elegant boutique, Helen Cole Inc., at Seventy-first and Lexington. “My father was a Southerner who thought women should look pretty and smell sweet,” she told me. “I never shot anything except, once, by mistake, I shot a hawk.” Nevertheless, she has learned to love dirt, rock, and cactus for themselves. “It took me a long time but I finally got it,” she said. As she jumped behind the wheel of her old pickup truck, I could easily picture her sliding gracefully into a limousine or window shopping on Fifth Avenue, though probably in something more uptown than the slacks and denim blouse she was wearing at the moment.
In 1955, while she was working in her mother’s shop, Jane learned from friends about a Texas writer named John Graves who was getting ready to move to Sag Harbor. They met a short time later. “My friends had warned me not to look at his left eye because they said it was glass and had an American flag in it,” she recalled. “Of course I looked at it right away, not realizing they were joking.” In 1956 she accepted a job at Neiman Marcus and moved to Dallas, where she reacquainted herself with John. A serious courtship followed, as he showed her his beloved hills and rivers around Glen Rose. When I asked her if the cedar country came as a shock, she laughed and said, “Dallas came as a shock.”
“When we were dating, John would take me on canoe trips down the Brazos,” she recalled. “I had canoed at camp, and I had three brothers, so that part wasn’t strange. I wasn’t captivated with the river—I didn’t think about where I was until later, when I read his book—but I was captivated with John. I decided, he’s for me.” They married in New York in December 1958. Jane worked at Neiman’s until 1961, when she took leave to raise their daughters. She returned to the job when the older one, Helen, went off to Princeton and the younger one, Sally, started high school, and she continued until her retirement, in 1992.
“When John first brought me to this piece of land, it was a blazing hot day,” she recalled, steering the truck around clumps of cactus and dodging brakes of cedar. “He said we could swim in the creek and cool off, but the water was only two inches deep. I was used to the ocean. He said something about building a house. I didn’t get it until he actually started building. Then I had something to do with my hands. Yes, I began to think, we could live here—part-time.”
For years that’s what they did. During the school year, Jane and the girls stayed in Fort Worth during the week, while John worked on the house and wrote in his corner office in the barn. Gradually, Hard Scrabble became the family home. “Our idea was to teach the children that you can almost exist without a grocery store,” she told me. “We raised our own beef, froze our own fruit and vegetables in a huge freezer, milled our own flour. Except for salt and coffee and rice, we had everything right here. The girls raised and showed goats, milked them, helped them have babies. Goats were a big part of the girls’ lives. They carried them up to the house in cardboard boxes when they were newborns, bottle-fed them every four hours, sometimes took them to bed with them.” There were horses and cows too, and always dogs—Pan, Blue, many others, including Watty, a dachshund pup identified as “Passenger” on John’s famous canoe trip. “It’s hard to remember the many parts,” Jane said, brushing hair from her eyes. “It’s all a life, a whole.”
Inching the truck down a steep, muddy grade toward the creek, she said, “I hope we can get back up.” So did I. To my surprise, she began driving along the limestone bed of the creek, which, except for a few pools, was only a couple inches deep. She parked the truck on a rock ledge, just above a four-foot-high waterfall. “This is where we come in the summer when our children and grandchildren are here,” she said. “It changes every year. Sometimes after a big rain, those huge rocks you see down below us are underwater.”
We stood on the limestone ledge for a time, listening to the roar of the falls, enjoying the perfect peace of country life. “One of these days,” Jane said, directing my attention to some rocks the size of trucks that seemed to balance on the cliffs behind us, “those giant rocks will tumble into the creek and be washed away.” One of these days, I thought, we all will.
It took her four runs before she got the truck back up the muddy incline.
While John ate breakfast, I asked him some questions that had been bothering me. Reviewing my notes the previous night in one of the Graveses’ upstairs bedrooms, I had been troubled by some of his remarks about his native land. He had talked about his indifference to all things Texan until his accidental return to nurse his dying father, at which time he saw the land with new eyes. I also recalled a line from Goodbye to a River, where he said that Texans had lost their “organic kinship to nature.” I wondered if he considered the loss permanent.
“What are your feelings about Texas today?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s a sign of old age, or decrepitude, but I’m not very optimistic about the future of this country,” he said, sipping his coffee. “People here, they weren’t what you’d call an admirable hunk of American society, but they had their own ways, which I got used to. They were a distinctive variety. But that’s all been wiped out. It used to be that the differences among people were big, and those differences always interested me greatly. But now I find a lot of sameness. I don’t like the way things are shaping up.”
He drank some more coffee and looked out the window. “I’ve written about this,” he said, directing me again to the Meinzer book, where he had observed in his introduction, “Differences in modes of human work, play, manners, language, and even appearance have fascinated me forever, and I have come to believe that these differences not only hold rich and interesting color and drama but are a stout force in the possibility of humankind’s endurance on this planet, for as Darwin knew, variety fosters survival.” He nodded. “I still feel that way,” he said.
And if it’s true, at least John has done his part, holding fast to his particular view of the world in his particular place, never claiming too much for his work other than that it was his and his alone. In a long writing life he has put only a handful of books on the shelf, but the ones he has put there are powerfully informed by his activities away from the desk, in a way that few other writers come close to. Who but John could have prefaced a book with these lines, from Hard Scrabble: “If at some point in his perusal of this book a perceptive and thoughtful reader should ask why in the hell . . . anyone even half aware of the currents of the world would choose to spend heavily out of his allotted time on such archaic irrelevancies as stonemasonry, the observation of armadillos, vegetable gardening, species of underbrush, and the treatment of retained afterbirth in ruminants, with very slight expectation of even crass cash gain, he will be asking the same thing I have often asked myself.”
Nowadays, life at Hard Scrabble has become too sedentary to include much of those archaic irrelevancies. John is too old and feeble to hunt or fish, much less clear cedar. He could, if he chose, sit on the creek bank with a cane pole, but that’s never been his way. There hasn’t been a dog on the place for years. He misses them, like he misses a lot of things that were once natural and everyday. He will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on August 6, though “celebrate” isn’t the word he would use.
There were other questions I had intended to ask, but I knew it was time to go. John needed to get back to his office, back to work, back to his book about friends. It’s a typically idiosyncratic project, which he describes as “just an alphabetical list of people who’ve meant something to me in my life. What happened between us, what we did together.” The office is his sanctuary. “I leave him alone in there,” Jane says. “It’s his room, his computer, his printer, his books.” When the weather is good, he sleeps in a bed on the office porch, close to his work. Work is what he has left. Work is who he was, who he is, who he always will be.
By the time I was packed and ready to leave, John was already lost deep inside his current composition. “Drive safely,” Jane admonished. The gate opened automatically as I pulled up in my car. Camped in the road ahead, six turkey vultures were cleaning up the remains of a small animal. One of the steers from a pasture of Longhorns had found an opening in the fence and gave me a look of supreme indifference before resuming his meal of roadside vegetation. The narrow gravel road back to the highway hugged the creek. Just past the low-water crossing, I stopped and climbed out of the car and stood there a good five minutes, savoring the essence of this lost place, drinking down its sounds. Finally, reluctantly, I turned south toward home. Walnut Springs, Meridian, Clifton, Valley Mills, each small town opened one eye as I passed by, as slowly as the law allowed.
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