Essay on Graves and McMurtry

Texas writers John Graves and Larry McMurtry were the subjects of the essay "John Graves, Larry McMurtry, and the Nature of Goodbyes," the lead essay of the 100th anniversary edition of Southwest Review. It is available on JSTOR (linked at McMurtry photo), a digital library of academic books and journals.

An excerpt is below. 1527 words.

Left: Photo of John Graves, author of Goodbye to a River

From "John Graves, Larry McMurtry, and the Nature of Goodbyes"...

I. John Graves

On its surface, the Brazos River today differs little from the murky, meandering, and unpredictable stream that it was in 1957 when John Graves and his dachshund companion canoed along its variable banks for 175 miles, from just below Possum Kingdom Dam to a point in Somervell County a little east of Glen Rose. Believing that the river as it had been would be erased by new dams, Graves set out to inhabit the stream, to retrieve and dwell in its history and lore, and to know it as one knows a person intimately over time. He saw it as inseparable from the stubborn, often violent people it encountered, and from the catfish, darting teal, and deadly water moccasins whose existence it supported. By investing the river with a long and vivid past, he honored its very endurance. The Brazos became like life itself—always changing, always there, vital regardless of appearance. Buried in the mud of the river today are the flint arrow points of tribes now departed, the spurs of cowboys drowned in the tricky currents, and the ruined tintypes of stoic settlers desperate for land. John Graves floated with and above these things, and the ghosts along its banks were a presence within him. About it all he wrote Goodbye to a River, a lament; the lament became a tribute; and the river survived.

There is much that is Faulknerian in Graves’s feeling for the past. It is never dead, it’s not even past, as Faulkner famously said. And like Faulkner, Graves admonished the present for presuming to ignore its origins and assuming that the future could do the same. Faulkner’s stream of consciousness style revealed the internal, emotional collisions of past, present, and future, with a keen awareness that the past, while not being past, is also not static: it carries forward and reaches back to itself simultaneously. To see it as static is not to see it at all but to dwell in its illusions. Where better than on an actual stream to get the feel of this process. The actual, the concrete, were important to John Graves and gave him his inspiration.

Graves and another writer, Henry David Thoreau, had this in common: they both wrote about their trips down a river, and did so with elegance, insight, and precision. Graves resisted a too facile comparison of himself with “Saint Henry,” his nickname for Thoreau, and was not eager to become a fourth at the once prominent table of Texas writers Roy Bedichek, Walter Prescott Webb, and J. Frank Dobie. Graves recognized in Thoreau a man whose faith in the power and serenity of Nature grew out of “the certainty . . . that regardless of the race’s disasters the natural world would go on and on,” but Graves, more than fifty years ago, knew that “Saint Henry’s bottom comfort has been yanked from under us.” What was the path to transcendence for Saint Henry became the locus of deep concern for Graves. He wrote about Nature to warn of the dangers it faced, not to celebrate as a given its eternal regeneration.

Yet, personally, he received from the Nature whose passing he could see something of Thoreau’s transcendence. But for Graves, the idea that one’s bearing and place in the world grew out of the ground one knew best may have had its origins in the poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez, whose work Graves likely encountered during part of the 1950s when he was living in Spain. “Foot in one’s accidental or elected homeland; heart, head in the world’s air,” Jiménez wrote. When Graves’s heart and head went skyward, he never lost his sense of the land, believing that the better he knew his own real ground, the higher that knowledge would take him. All the more reason to be so concerned about the manifold threats to that ground.

Graves’s affinity with Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie certainly extended to an abiding respect for the land, and for its creatures, history, folklore, and rhythms. Don B. Graham, a longtime professor at the University of Texas at Austin, sees Graves as the direct descendant of The Three: “The appeal of [Goodbye to a River] is threefold. It combines history, folklore, and nature, as though the triumvirate of Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek were incarnated in one volume.”

Graham rightly characterizes Goodbye as “a philosophical narrative” based on Graves’s “ruminations” as he and his not so intrepid dachshund made their way down the river. At first, this might not appear to distinguish him from The Three: in Austin’s Zilker Park, near the banks of Barton Creek, is a sculpture known as Philosopher’s Rock. Depicted in bronze are The Three as they may have appeared during their frequent trips to the cold, spring-fed creek in the summertime, though Bedichek went there year round.

In that setting, and in their correspondence and other personal exchanges, The Three certainly traversed some philosophical terrain. While Graves argued for their continued relevance and recognized that he, like them, was a “nature head,” it is difficult to imagine the solitary Graves perched alongside The Three.

Goodbye is more philosophical than anything they wrote. Steeped in Texas history and lore it is, but the deepest message of the river in Goodbye suggests a kinship with another writer, far from the Llano Estacado and the banks of the Brazos, but as rough-hewn and occasionally cantankerous as Graves himself: Robert Frost.

Where Graves, and Thoreau before him, floated and paddled down their respective streams, Frost at his most philosophical created one in a poem, “West-Running Brook.” In one of the best analyses of the poem, published in 1994 in the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Walter Jost wrote that Frost had said that “the new thing with me has always included the old.” The central image in the poem is that of “the black stream, catching a sunken rock/Flung backward on itself in one white wave/And the white water rode the black forever.” Near the end of the poem are these lines:

It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us.

Two writers, two streams, one imagined as a metaphor for what is “most us” and the other a real stream, whose backward reach and tenuous existence come alive in Goodbye to a River.

II. Larry McMurtry

If John Graves believed that some essence of the past was necessarily joined to the future, Larry McMurtry has regretted the past’s distorted presence, feeling that what was real in it has truly passed us by. Far from paying tribute to the past, he laments its gauzy residue. Too many Texans are only “symbolic frontiersmen,” revering the tough individualism and expansive ambitions of ranchers Charlie Goodnight, Oliver Loving, and John S. Chisum, the absolutist stance of the Alamo’s defenders, and the exploits of the old Texas Rangers. The past for them is what they want to believe, and real history an inconvenience. In an increasingly urban Texas, the symbolic frontiersmen are self-aggrandizing, cartoonish, and restless. Their ties to “the land” are likewise symbolic: it is not to raise beef or grow crops that they make claims on the land; it is to put a crown on their attainments, to combine the solitary Randian tycoon with the John Wayne (or Ronald Reagan) in their minds. Others who cannot afford such grandiose displays do not typically begrudge them, finding their own swagger in big trucks with a herd of horses under the hood, in camouflage caps or cowboy hats, or in the gun or guns of their choice.

McMurtry feels that what has been lost, is lost. The horseman has passed by; young Lonnie has left Cheyenne; the last picture show has ended. Believing otherwise is to calcify the present and shroud it in illusion. But not only is McMurtry convinced of the loss, he has felt it deeply himself, and in him the residue is an uneasy compound of pain and contempt. Growing up precocious and bookish, he was the rural intellectual, set apart in a resolute ranching family that honored hard outdoor work and the authentic cowboy heritage. Like those before them, ranching was their life and gave little time for reflection. Once in the marrow, it was a life that refused to die, even in the midst of vanishing. McMurtry must have developed early a sense of dramatic irony: he could feel what lay ahead, perhaps because he was not encased in that life. He knew that their world could not be his, and that he had to leave it, knowing also that it could not be theirs much longer. That’s a lot of emotion for a young man to carry, enough that a powerful creative life was built around it, along with a need for reconciliation that would not go away. Neither a peripatetic life nor the narrow grave to which he consigned the past would leave it behind entirely. But about leaving the dying land he had no doubts....

More at JSTOR...

No Archives