The Headwaters of John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Historical Tribute to Fifty Years of an American Environmental Classic

Abstract

The Headwaters of John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Historical Tribute to Fifty Years of an American Environmental Classic Brandon D. Shuler (bio) Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, is often considered the birth of the modern environmental literary movement. However, it is John Graves’s Goodbye to a River (hereafter, “Goodbye”), published two years before Carson’s book, that should not only hold this honor but also stand as one of the finest environmental treatises in Southwestern literature. The book centers on the encroaching effects of urbanization and the subsequent loss of history, landscape, and place that define the ecological and historical diversity of the American West. By reading the textual history of Goodbye, readers, critics, and scholars will find that Graves’s work sets the standard and the tone for the future of the American environmental movement’s literary forms and themes. We should heed Robert Hume’s argument in his article for the June 2005 issue of the Papers of the Bibliographic Society, in which Hume stresses that scholars should take into account the “genesis,” “production,” “dissemination,” and “reception” of a work before applying a theoretical or critical lens (201–02). To produce this kind of groundwork, this essay compiles the first full textual history of Graves’s work. Celebrating the First Fifty Years The year 2010 marked Goodbye’s fiftieth anniversary, and, since its publication in 1960 by A. A. Knopf Publishing, the book has remained in hard-cover print and grown in influence within the field of Western American environmental literature studies. The popularity of Goodbye is attributed to its simple concept, its prose, and its timeliness. As Americans moved away from their rural communities to urbanized metropolises, Graves’s writing has earned a reputation for his “ruminative nature” and, according to Don Graham, has “convey[ed] a sense of heartfelt worth to Texans with a strong and often sentimental attachment to the land” (Auroras 226). The concept of Goodbye is simple enough: a man, a canoe, a dog, and a solitary three-week trip on a local stretch of river.1 But the concept’s simplicity and Graves’s narrative style mask the undercurrent of complexity that winds itself through the work and makes it such an iconic environmental text. Graves’s intention in Goodbye is to recapture the Brazos River of his childhood when he hunted blue quail and ducks in the Brazos’s eddies, a place where he fished for bass and ran trot-lines for blue and channel [End Page 158] cats and “where even first bottles of beer, bitter, [were] drunk with two bawdy ranchers’ daughters [he] and Hale ran across once, fishing . . .” (7). Graves sought to capture the last days of the river’s wildness before a set of proposed dams were constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in order to tame his beloved Brazos “into bead strings of placid reservoirs behind concrete dams,” a new place where the histories and landscapes of which “Santana the White Bear and Mr. Charlie Goodnight had known ended up down yonder under all the Criss-Crafts and the tinkle of portable radios” (8–9). Today, a few images capturing the journey are tucked neatly into a folder in Graves’s archives at the Wittliff Southwest Writers Collection of Texas State University’s Alkek Library. The sepia-toned pictures of the trip’s first day do not reveal much. Weathered and yellowed by age, one picture shows the bow of a canoe pointing southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico and the eventual ending for all Texas rivers. The bow is filled with 1950s camping paraphernalia, and the pointed head of a black dachshund fills the lower right corner of the frame. In a second picture, the dachshund, named Cacahuete, sits in the lap of a well-dressed Graves.2 Graves’s salt-and-pepper hair is neatly combed, and he wears khaki pants and a sports coat. He looks more prepared for a night with friends than for setting off on one of the most popular canoe trips in Southwestern literature. In this second photograph, the sky above Graves and the dachshund is one of those...