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Goodbye
to a River John Graves’ most significant work
is Goodbye to a River—part history, part memoir, and part
travelogue—based on his canoe trip down the Brazos River in 1957.
He had written a number of magazine pieces for various publications at
that point, and he had a contract with Sports Illustrated to
do a piece on the canoe trip. (The piece become more philosophy than sport
and was published in Holiday instead of SI.) Graves’
strong sense of history was inspired by summers visiting his grandfather
in Cuero in South Texas and merged with his keen feelings for the natural
world developed during the time he spent in the Trinity River bottom near
his home in Fort Worth. He knew that if the five proposed dams were built
along the Brazos, the area would be irreparably changed. The Brazos is
the third largest river in Texas and the largest between the Red River
and the Rio Grande. Called el Rio de los Brazos de Dios (the
River of the Arms of God) by the early Spanish explorers, it flows for
840 miles from its source until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico near
Freeport, just south of Galveston Island. Drawing from a long tradition of nature writing
about rivers, from Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack to the Rivers of America series to Paul Horgan’s
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History and from
the elegiac pastoral tradition, Graves brings his own unique approach
and concerns to writing, much of which reveals a deep ambivalence about
his being identified as a nature writer in the Thoreauvian tradition (inspired
by the work of Thoreau) or being perceived as a polemical writer, single-mindedly
pursuing a transitory agenda. In a 1963 article published in College
Composition and Communication, Graves articulated his concerns about
hard-nosed persuasion, the article’s title revealing Graves’
persuasive strategy. In “On the Desirable Reluctance of Trumpets”
Graves writes that polemical writing is “preachment, a trumpet-note
for good action, an exhortation boiling up out of a vision of present
wrong and possible right. It arises from a belief that something can be
done about almost anything” and on “the principle of action
that will produce change” (210). He then asks, rhetorically, if
it follows that writers should “tootle our built-in trumpets frankly
in favor of whatever cavalry charges against evil we see as desirable,
encourage the conscripts to do the same” and answers by saying: No, sir, not for a good many of us, it
doesn’t. Those who like to tootle are going to keep on tootling;
their number is legion and they will be with us always, and bless
their good hearts one and all. But the fact that even those who don’t
want to are forced by their own humanness into reluctant or unconscious
music of this sort does not invalidate detachment as an ideal, any
more than democracy as a concept is invalidated by the fact that it
has nowhere ever quite worked, and never will. The fact is that detachment is in spite
of everything probably the best general ideal that a writer can hold
to. First rank writing whatever its form is concerned with expressing
human truth. All-out tootlers are apt to confuse truth with facts….
The facts of human existence are mostly obvious, and if they are evil
facts they can often be changed; they are susceptible to cavalry charges.
The truths the facts add up to, though, are neither obvious nor very
susceptible. (212) These comments clarify some of Graves’
basic assumptions underlying his approach to writing persuasively. Both
his desire for detached rather than polemical persuasion and his acute
awareness of the complexity of human truth lead him to approach writing
about damming the river subtly. His trumpeting is muted, a reluctant persuasion
that takes the form of presenting human truths that are attached to the
history of places and objects and therefore instill in those places and
objects a value beyond and beneath the surface. The detached position Graves stakes out leads
to subtle persuasion in Goodbye to a River. He adopts a rhetorical
stance similar to the one Shakespeare’s Mark Antony takes in his
famous eulogy for Caesar, saying he comes just to bury Caesar, not to
praise him, and then sets about to move his audience in his subtle praise.
That is what Graves does with his piece of the Brazos, and it is profound
persuasion. As the book begins, for example, Graves seemingly disarms
a reluctant reader by saying that he holds no bitterness about the proposed
series of dams: In a region like the Southwest, scorched
to begin with, alternating between floods and droughts, its absorbent
cities quadrupling their censuses every few years, electrical power
and flood control and moisture conservation and water skiing are praiseworthy
projects. More than that, they are essential. We river-minded ones
can’t say much against them—nor, probably, should we want
to. (8) The clue to his real position here is the
placement of water skiing in the last and emphatic position and saying,
tongue firmly in cheek, that it is “essential.” He then goes
on to announce that it is not his fight and that he is just going down
the Brazos to “wrap it up” before the river and “Satanta
the White Bear and Mr. Charlie Goodnight” disappear under the “CrissCrafts
and the tinkle of portable radios” (9). This contrast between the
high significance of Texas history and the brittle inconsequence of skiing
to the sounds of portable radios heightens his position through verbal
irony and allows him to achieve the detached position he seeks. Goodbye to a River, like many Texas
narratives, uses the journey for structure, and the journey takes on symbolic
significance as well. This journey is a personal process, a trip to recover
a wanderer’s sense of history and place. By returning to places
that have meaning, the persona-narrator demonstrates how one regains a
rootedness that gives life meaning. Although the narrator does not mention
Ishmael’s water journey undertaken during a “damp, drizzly
November in my soul” from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick,
by leaving on a grey, threatening November day, Graves connects Goodbye
to a River to Moby Dick, another work that uses the water
journey of escape and return to suggest the powerful personal insights
that the experience provides. While Goodbye to a River enacts
the escape and return pattern on a small scale as the writer-narrator
leaves on November 11, 1957, for a 175-mile journey that ends with return
to civilized life on December 2, the return to Texas after Graves’
decade as a sojourner abroad also underpins the book. Particular and general
pulse like systolic and diastolic, ebb and flow, in Graves’ work,
intertwining into a whole. This individual experience represents the possibility
of understanding available to everyone, because “one river, seen
right, may well be all rivers that flow to the sea” (254). Still, it is the vividness and intensity
of Graves’ observations presented in his recognizable style that
make the book memorable. This casual and folksy yet philosophical and
literate canoeist with his Dachshund pup, Passenger, spins out stories
connected to the history of places like Poke Stalk Bend, Old Painted Campground,
Thorp Spring, Mitchell Bend, and others. By revisiting these places and
recovering the stories the countrymen and women tell and by examining
the natural history of the area, Graves constructs and dramatizes how
a single individual can “know” a river, understand himself,
and symbolize the process of achieving awareness of self through valuing
place.
With the river journey to provide the structure,
Graves moves back and forth from the river to the larger world through
references to his own wandering past and through epigraphs and allusions
to Sir Gawain, King Arthur, Lawrence Sterne, William Butler Yeats, Thomas
Hardy, Thoreau, Thorstein Veblen, T.S. Eliot, and one of Graves’
favorite writers, the Spanish philosopher Juan Ramón Jiménez,
who provides a quotation that buttresses the book: “Foot in one’s
accidental or elected homeland; heart, head in the world’s air”
(254). From these and other references to the “the world’s
air,” Graves shifts to stories of the homeland, recalling the times
he and his friend Hale and their massive black companion Bill Briggs spent
on the river in their youth (with echoes of Huck Finn) to stories about
the Comanches, who called themselves “the People”; the Mitchell-Truitt
feud that ended with Cooney Mitchell’s hanging in Granbury; the
time the hermit Sam Sowell was almost burned up by thoughtless kids and
was saved by Graves’ friend, Davis Birdsong; and the time Birdsong
tried to impress a French diplomat by putting his leg behind his head.
The human history is complemented by careful examination of natural history,
as Graves observes the plants and animals along the trip, musing on the
firewood quality of cottonwood, willow, cedar, ash, mesquite, live oak,
and walnut and reproduces in hieroglyphic the birdcall of redbirds and
Carolina wrens. Along the way Graves returns to several important
concerns such as his relationship to Thoreau, to hunting, and to the persistent
Puritanism of the people who live along the river. Anticipating that critics
would note Thoreau’s influence, Graves attempts to provide some
distance between himself and his strong forebear. Graves makes it clear
that he finds Thoreau too rooted in the world’s air, too transcendently
“ascetic,” and consistently refers to him as “Saint
Henry.” The Texan’s distance from his river-traveling ancestor
is especially clear when it comes to hunting. Graves notes that even though
“Saint Henry had impulses to gobble woodchucks raw,” he eventually
concluded that “blood sports were for juveniles” (54). Although
Graves wavers along the way, he ultimately aligns himself with “Prince
Ernest Hemingway” and asserts that killing itself can be reverent. To see
and kill and pluck and gut and cook and eat a wild creature, all with
some knowledge and the pleasure that knowledge gives, implies a closeness
to the creature that is to me more honorable than the candle-lit consumption
of rare prime steaks from a steer bludgeoned to death in a packing-house
chute while tranquilizers course his veins. (167) At one point late in the book Graves apparently
decides to hunt no more—only to grab his gun when a good shot presents
itself, suggesting that the persona the writer has created is inconsistent.
Yet it is just such wavering that is significant. His repeated references
to the country’s Puritanism reinforce his emphasis on his shifting
awareness of varying positions. Nature itself confirms his point: Sunshine and warm water seem to me to
have full meaning only when they come after winter’s bite; green
is not so green if it doesn’t follow the months of brown and
gray. And the scheduled inevitable death of green carries its own
exhilaration; in that change is the promise of all the rebirth to
come, and the deaths, too…. Without the year’s changes,
for me, there is little morality. (119) Later considering the Puritan outlook of
the people who live along the River, Graves makes a similar point, noting
that if “wrong is sharply wrong enough, its edge digs deeper down
into the core of that sweet fruit, pleasure, than hedonism ever thought
to go” (191). Later he makes the same point symbolically, when he
has Davis Birdsong tell a story about following Sam Sowell through the
shin oak brush one day and finding a coiled diamondback rattlesnake. As
Birdsong raises his axe to dispatch the snake, Sowell stops him and acknowledges
the human connection to the snake’s symbolic evil. Good and evil
intertwine in Graves’ world, and his trip down the river reinforces
this knowledge for him in personal, historical, and natural ways. This awareness suggests how Graves differs
from some other Western nature writers. Graves’ world is one with
good and evil intertwined (Manichean), ultimately a “fallen”
world and unlike the innocent one that Thomas Lyon describes as the terrain
of other Western nature writers in “The Nature Essay in the West.”
The function of the nature writer, Lyon suggests, is “to reforge
a fundamental continuity between inner and outer, so that for the reader
the world is alive again, seen precisely for what it is, and the mind
is alive to it.” Lyon continues: To have known the beauty of the world,
seen with unclouded eyes the sheer wonder of a clear river or a mesa
or a cottonwood tree, is to be in some sense and for that time, psychologically
whole. The deepest attraction of the nature essay, probably, is this
basic rightness of gestalt. Good nature writing is a recapturing of
the child’s world, the world before fragmentation, the world
as poets and artists can see it. (221) Although the elegiac tone of Goodbye
to a River suggests nostalgia, Graves does not look back to an innocent
world devoid of evil. Rather, his piece of the Brazos reinforces and becomes
the vehicle for his understanding of human complexity. In an insightful observation of Graves’
style in 1981, Larry McMurtry, who taught with Graves at TCU in the early
1960s, points out that “one of his most frequent rhetorical devices…is
to undercut himself: questioning a story he has just retold, doubting
an observation he has just made, twisting out from under a position. Often
he simply reverses his field and abandons whatever line of thought he
has been pursuing” (29). This technique highlights the complexity
and mystery of human truth rather than clarifying it. McMurtry continues: He is popularly thought to be a kind
of country explainer, when in fact he seems more interested in increasing
our store of mysteries than our store of knowledge. He loves the obscure,
indeterminate nature of rural legend and likes nothing better than
to retell stories the full truth of which can never be known. If nature
continues to stimulate him it may be because it too is elusive, feminine,
never completely knowable. Certainly he is not looking forward to
becoming the Sage of Glen Rose. His best writing is based on doubt
and ambivalence—or at least two-sidedness; he is not eager to
arrive at too many certainties, or any certainty too quickly. The
persona he adopts most frequently is that of the man who considers.
He may choose to consider a goat, a book, an anecdote, or some vagary
of nature, but the process of considering is more important to the
texture of his books than any conclusions that may get drawn. (29-30) Goodbye to a River demonstrates
clearly the reluctant trumpeter considering, in this case the
human and natural history of a small piece of the Brazos River. Through
his emphasis on using the natural world to consider the human history
associated with it and his own consciousness, Graves provides a clear
example of the process Scott Slovic describes in Seeking Awareness
in American Nature Writing. Slovic notes that the tradition of nature
writing from Thoreau through Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry,
and Barry Lopez reveals an emphasis on the relationship between nature
and the considering writer’s mental state: “Nature writers
are constantly probing, traumatizing, thrilling, and soothing their own
minds—and by extension those of their readers—in quest not
only of consciousness itself, but of an understanding of consciousness”
(3). Graves’ consciousness results from
a combination of personal experience, history, folklore, nature, and philosophy—a
unique mixture that led to numerous positive reviews. Paul Horgan in the
New York Herald Tribune Book Review hailed Graves as a new talent:
“This highly original book bears witness to the appearance of an
excellent literary talent not previously seen in book form.” Wayne
Gard in The New York Times Book Review called it “a memorable
saga…a warm, moving book with many rewards for the reader.”
And Edward Weeks in The Atlantic Monthly pointed out the connection
between the specific and the general, saying that “as you read,
you have the feeling that the whole colorful, brutal tapestry of the Lone-Star
State is being unrolled for you out of the biography of this one stream.”
It was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for 1960 and
won the Texas Institute of Letters Carr Collins Award for nonfiction that
year. Graves explores themes and emotions that
evolve from the relationship between humans and the natural world in the
context of his trip down the Brazos River: how places have meaning, responsibility,
solitude and community, innocence and experience, good and evil, humanity
and inhumanity, conservation. Arguably the central theme in much of Graves’
work concerns how humans relate to and find value in nature. The relationship
between humans and nature, particularly the significance of rivers, offers
a relevant, challenging, and inspiring theme for the 2007-08 Common Experience.
None of Graves’ books explores the
theme of understanding the relationship between humans and nature from
more perspectives than does his 1960 memoir Goodbye to a River.
Goodbye to a River should challenge students to examine their
own lives in light of Graves’ journey down the river. Students can
apply Graves’ various methods of understanding the relationship
between humans and nature to themselves and to the people in his book,
ones they admire and ones they don’t. They may well come to understand
that the central test of Graves’ relationship between himself and
nature results from the way people learn to understand the importance
of a place. At 309 pages, Goodbye to a River
is somewhat longer than recent Common Experience texts, but it is for
most readers a lively reading encounter. Some chapters (although all are
connected to the entire book) could be read by themselves. Instructors
who do not wish to teach the entire book can use, for example, Chapter
VII or Chapter IX, or perhaps just Part One, which includes the first
nine chapters, as a briefer introduction to the theme of understanding
the relationship between humans and nature. — Mark Busby |
