This was a busy month for me, with the placing of the ashes of my late husband Mark Gresham in Corpus Christi Bay on April 11, followed the next day by "Gresham's Freebie," a come-and-go reception at a Corpus Christi restaurant/bar.
I did, however, hope to attend a presentation at the end of the month back in my home in Granbury about John Graves' Goodbye to a River - so I needed to re-read that book. My copy was given to me in June 1975 as a high school graduation gift from my father's boss, Oscar Newton, and his wife June, with the inscription "To AMANDA PAPE, with our admiration, congratulations, and confident best wishes." I'm sure I read it that summer, and obviously kept the book, but did not have time to read it again until this month.
Goodbye to a River was published in 1959, and was about a three-week canoe trip Graves made in November 1957 down a stretch of the Brazos River running from Possum Kingdom Dam in Palo Pinto County, through Parker and Hood Counties (I live in the latter), down to near Glen Rose in Somervell County. Having grown up in the Fort Worth area, Graves had spent much time here, and wanted to do the trip before the river changed, as a number of dams were (at the time) planned between the two already existing at Possum Kingdom and Lake Whitney (a ways south of Glen Rose). As it turns out, only one dam was built in that stretch, and not until 1969 - the one that forms Lake Granbury in my town.
I read two other books by/about Graves that were related to this one:
John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-1960, (edited by David S. Hamrick), published in 2000 when Graves was 80, and
Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship, which was written/published in 2004, when Graves was 84.
The first book is a compilation of original correspondence from and to Graves concerning the conception and production of Goodbye to a River, from a letter to his agent in September 1957 when he proposed making the canoe trip and writing about it for a magazine article, to its ultimate development into a book, with letters to his editor and publisher, the book's designer, and J. Frank Dobie (for publicity and promotion. For this book, Graves added footnotes to many of the letters (which are difficult to read, due to the use of a very small and faint font), as well as a few photographs taken on the canoe trip, and an awesome annotated bibliography of all his published writings (as of November 2000) at the end.
The second book is an autobiography of sorts of Graves' early years, up to 1960. He moves quickly through his early years (1920-1945) and those at the end of the book (1956-1960), with most of the focus on his post-WWII travels and living in Mexico, Mallorca, Spain, and the Canary Islands. During this time, he is trying to become a writer (and live cheaply while doing so). Much of the book consists of entries from his journals from January 1953 through April 1956, with commentary by Graves in 2004. The title comes from Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “I am writing for myself and strangers.”
I did attend the presentation shortly after starting Myself and Strangers. It was disappointing, in that the two Ph.D.s conducting the round-table discussion really did not talk that much about the book, but mostly about late-1800s interactions between Native Americans (mainly Comanche) and early settlers in these counties (Graves does include some of that folklore in his book).
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