Myself and Strangers
MYSELF AND STRANGERS: ...
MYSELF AND STRANGERS:
A Memoir of Apprenticeship.
By John Graves. Knopf. 235 pp. $24
First, a confession: I know John Graves, we sprang from the same Texas soil, we’re in the same business, and I admire both the man and his work. So Myself and Strangers, based on a journal Graves kept from the mid-1940s through the 1950s, has a particular appeal for me. But even if you’ve never heard of John Graves, you’re likely to enjoy his youthful preoccupations, worries, loves, searches, and encounters with a world not much with us anymore. “Old John”—now 83—occasionally breaks into a comment on “Young John,” but fortunately he doesn’t overuse that device or attempt to prettify his youthful actions and opinions.
In 1946, not long discharged from the U.S. Marines, in whose service he had lost his left eye in a firefight, Young John went to Mexico, “mainly because it was unconnected with my own personal background and it seemed to be a likely environment wherein to start getting my head straightened out,” an effort that would “endure sporadically for another 10 long years.” Graves didn’t think of himself as a writer then, but he soon had the bug. While getting a master’s degree in English at Columbia University, he started turning out short stories, the first of which “was taken, unbelievably, by The New Yorker.” (In time, a failed attempt at a novel and a distaste for writing formula fiction for slick magazines turned him toward nonfiction.) He taught English at the University of Texas, found little pleasure in academia, and in 1953 began anew his roaming in Spain, France, England, Scotland, and elsewhere.
“What do I really have to say as a writer or a person?” Graves asked in his journal in 1954. “This era of suspended breathing and fright in which we live—how can you say anything worth saying about it? You’d be better off ranching or farming or doctoring or in some other of the unquestionable occupations. This mood will pass but it is relevant. I would like so God-damned much to write something worth writing, and if I had the conception I am now competent enough with words to do it. But the conception is hard to come by.”
Graves didn’t know it, but he had stated in his frustration a couple of the occupations he would both practice and write about: ranching and farming. What would make them possible was a book he would publish in 1960, the now-classic Goodbye to a River. Some of the royalties paid for 400 acres of land close to Glen Rose, Texas, not far from his native Fort Worth. Graves named his acquisition Hard Scrabble; he wrote a book by that name in 1974, and later a collection of essays about making the place productive, From a Limestone Ledge (1980). He told of raising goats and cattle, clearing brush, keeping bees, mending fences, and the thousand and one other chores that I, as a Texas farm boy, considered agrarian torture and fled for good at age 13, but for which he had more tolerance.
Graves wrote Goodbye to a River after paddling up the Brazos for three weeks with his little dachshund to bid farewell to a river he had explored all his life—both on the water and by land—before much of it was to be flooded out of existence by the construction of seven dams. He blended in history, folktales, Indian wars, the hardships of settlers, his youthful memories, and his mournful sense of loss. Ironically, much of what worried him never happened: The bureaucrats decided to build but one dam, not seven. Even so, John Graves got a fine book out of it, as well as the money to buy the hard-scrabble acres he still occupies four decades later. They don’t call him “The Sage of Glen Rose” for nothing.