Prairie Gothic: The Story of a West Texas Family

Chapter Eight: John Graves

57 Chapter Eight: John Graves Iremember sitting on an airplane and watching the man across the aisle from me. He had oriental features and was reading a newspaper covered with Chinese characters that had no more meaning to me than chicken tracks. Yet those marks on the page caused him to smile and frown, and held his attention during a flight that lasted two hours. This left me thinking about the wonder of written language and the miracle that occurs when the human mind transforms those lines of type into mental pictures. Printed words can cause us to laugh, cry, think, remember, and shake with anger. They can alter our blood pressure, dilate the pupils of our eyes, raise the hair on the back of our necks, and cause our breath to quicken. Books have started wars, brought down tyrants, altered history, and caused people to fall in love. Words have a power that is almost mystical, and our ability to transform scribbles on the page into feelings and actions is one of the spiritual qualities that sets us apart from our dogs and cats, and defines us as humans. Sometimes the direction of a person’s life can be changed by what he reads in a book. I can point to several books that have had a profound effect on me. Stories from the Old Testament gave me the heroes of my boyhood. When Mrs. Smith, my fourth grade teacher, read Tom Sawyer aloud to our class, it hit with the force of revelation that reading need not be a joyless experience, that a gifted writer can trap the 58 Chapter Eight sounds and nuances of the spoken word like butterflies and turn them loose to fly out of a page of printed type. Mr. Haley’s biography of Goodnight opened a door on my Texas roots, and John Graves’s Goodbye to a River gave me a template for combining the love of words with an affection for one’s soil. I don’t know if my life would have turned out differently if I had never read Goodbye to a River, but it might have. I think my cousin Mike Harter was the first to call my attention to it, and Kris gave me a copy of it for Christmas in 1969. It made a huge and lasting impression. Here was an author who wrote on subjects that were often shrugged off as “regional,” yet he wrote about them with such precision and wisdom that his sentences resonated in my imagination. His slow, careful stalking of the truth might begin with observations about a horsefly or a Spanish goat, but somehow it turned one’s thoughts toward the stars, and beyond. Texas novelist Marshall Terry has described Graves as “a stylistically elegant writer” and “a whole human being . . . . He is who he is but there is just a slight ironic edge to him that, mostly playfully, warns you against taking too seriously what an ‘old crock’ (his term) like himself might utter.” (Clifford and Pilkington 1989: 143) I met John Graves just as I had met Mr. Haley, showing up unannounced and uninvited—a practice I have come to disavow, now that I am an aging man of Texas Letters myself. But in those days, I was on a mission and had no shame. It was in the fall of 1973 and I had driven down to Austin to meet with Bill Wittliff. Today, Wittliff is best known as the author of the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove,” but in 1973 he was building a reputation as a photographer and owner of a small publishing company called Encino Press. He had read my Through Time and the Valley in manuscript and wanted to publish it through Encino Press. That didn’t work out and the book was published five years later by Shoal Creek Publishers, but at the time I was elated. I felt that, at last, I had become a real author. The book described a fifteen-day horseback trip I made down the CanadianRivervalleyin1972,andIexplainedtoBillthatIhadgottenmy 59 John Graves idea for the book’s structure after reading Goodbye To A River. Bill didn’t seem surprised. Books that imitated John Graves had almost become a separate category in Texas literature, as Graves was without question the writer most admired by other Texas writers. We all wanted to imitate...