Goodbye to a River by John Graves

Iconic, slow, erudite, flowing, clear, and, at times, murky. Easy ways to describe a river, yet in this case it's the writing of John Graves's 1960 eponymous Goodbye to a River. In typical Graves form, even from the opening, Graves gives and introductory note to keep the reader off balance (Graves's readers are always off balance as they wait for the idea to form as it pores from Graves pen). It's as if he is inviting the reader to look closer at what he writes and for the reader to think, which he provides ample opportunity with ellipses to give the reader time to ruminate and pause on the text.

Though this is not a book of fiction, it has some fictionalizing in it. Its facts are factual and the things it says happened did happen. But I have not scrupled to dramatize historical matter and thereby to its emphases as I see them, or occasionally to change living names and transpose existing places and garble contemporary incidents. (Introduction)

With such a laconic opening mirroring the depth and twisting ride the reader is about to embark upon, Graves is inviting the reader to push off on a journey not unlike his 1957 trip down the Brazos-soon to be dammed. Goodbye to a River was a way for him to come to terms with saying to goodbye to the river, but to also say hello to a Texas he had escaped for the previous few years abroad as he searched for his writing voice on the European continent. The juxtaposition of conflicting moods, emotions, fiction and non-fiction, and rural versus urban attitudes defines the meandering prose of Goodbye to a River and is at its core exactly that which makes this book a beautiful and essential read.

Graves follows the history of the river through the tumultuous times of its Anglo existence. The sense of the rivers existence before the Anglo frontiersman is prominent in the ever-present shadow of The People (Comanches). The scepter of the People hang in the peripheries of Part I of Goodbye to a River, but their presence is not forefront because this is the story of the struggle of the Anglo settlers to tame the river. Part of that taming was to conquer the Comancheria and the scrub wilderness of early west Texas. The story of the People, as we all know, is the eradication of the indians and a slow assimilation of the settlers into the fray of the unforgiving nature of the land. But Graves shows compassion and invites the reader to empathize with the People. He touches on the story he would later publish as The Last Running to grieve the loss of the People and the frontier to the Anglos. Part I is a coming to terms of where the Anglo fits into the picture and sets up the irresponsibility of the Anglo to the landscape.

In Part II, Graves leaves the People behind, as time has, and moves into the modern. What he witnesses "to the tinkle of motorboat radios" is a river he no longer recognizes. Although he is still on the river of his childhood, much unchanged except for aging shacks and memories, Part II is the another juxtaposition of what was to what is to what is to become-a theme and style he employs throughout the book. He is shocked by the garbage and human interference into the river and the surrounding nature. It's a stretch to remember back to Part I, but he uses the abuses, subtly, of the Anglos to the landscape and their affinity to the new and progressive (the pecan orchard owner especially) and compares it to the looking back and wishing of the People to a return to the way it used to be. This is Graves's goodbye and, in essence, the loss of innocence for the Texas frontier. We have used and abused a part of his childhood and destroyed the beauty of her shores. And, although he is criticizing the egregiousness of our abuses, Graves is never polemical. He is always sound and subtle in his judgments leaving the activism and screaming to his readers. Graves's writing invites readers to form their own opinions, and he only provides a view of the world as he witnesses it-right or wrong.

A.C. Greene named Goodbye to a River as one of the 50 Greatest Books on Texas. Goodbye is listed last. And for those with a proclivity to reading into things: stop there. By no stretch is Greene saying Goodbye to a River was a footnote: no, Greene is paying homage to Graves and Goodbye. If Greene's publisher were to ask him to cut 49 titles from his list, the only one remaining would be Graves's Goodbye to a River.