John Graves

Much loved poet who wrote movingly about nature and his beloved Texas

John graves, poet. Born: 6 august, 1920, in Fort Worth, texas. died: 31 July, 2013, in glen rose, texas, aged 92.

AbAttered maple canoe paddle hangs on a wall at texas State University in San Marcos, framed like a holy relic, which, to the many admirers of the author John Graves, is not far off.

the paddle, part of the university’s Wittliff Collections of papers and artifacts from Southwestern literature, was used by Graves on a trip down the brazos river in 1957. the book that resulted from that trip, Goodbye to a River, established Graves as a giant in texas letters and one of America’s more elegant prose stylists.

Graves died on Wednesday at his home, Hard Scrabble, outside Glen rose, texas. He was 92.

In an article in Garden and Gun magazine, which celebrated the author’s 90th birthday, the writer rick bass called Graves “the best-loved writer in texas and one of the least-known beyond the state lines”.

Graves wrote about nature without being a nature writ- er, and about texas and texans without falling into bluster or cornpone, “never being puffy, never being boosteristic”, said William d Wittliff, the screenwriter who helped bring to tV Lonesome Dove, a novel by another texan, Larry McMurtry.

the novelist Stephen Harrigan (the author, among other books, of The Gates of the Alamo) said of Graves’s work: “It all starts with the voice, which is so intoxicating. there’s a sense of real authenticity and authority.”

He pointed to an opening sentence from Goodbye to a River, which is as meandering as the river itself but which conveys a sense of the place: “Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day’s work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind.”

John Alexander Graves III was born in 1920, in Fort Worth, texas. After university, in 1942, he entered the Marine Corps and served in the Pacific, where he was wounded by a Japanese grenade in Saipan. the injury left him blind in one eye.

He went back to texas to teach english at the University of texas at Austin, but left for New York after three years to earn a master’s degree in english at Columbia University. He travelled in europe and wrote articles and a novel, which his agent rejected. When his father became ill in 1957, he returned to texas, and after several months got into the fateful canoe, accompanied by a sixmonth-old dachshund he referred to as “the passenger”.

“even after he was grown he wouldn’t be a very practical dog,” he wrote, “but he was company, too – more concrete, perhaps, than memories or feelings.”

After Goodbye to a River, two other books, Hard Scrabble and From a Limestone Ledge, formed what became known as the brazos trilogy and cemented his reputation as a writer of note.

Graves “really didn’t find his voice until he went back to texas”, said his editor at Knopf, Ann Close.

back in texas, he met and married a displaced New Yorker, Jane Cole, who was working as a designer for Neiman Marcus in dallas. She survives him, as do two daughters, Helen Cole Graves and Sally Graves Jackson, and four grandchildren. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.

the home he named Hard Scrabble is a former farm he took over in 1970.

He built a house there by hand and made it a place out of time, where his children could grow up close to their land.

“We took care of the goats, we took care of the gardens – we rode horses all over the place,” said Helen Graves. “We were completely free out here in a way most kids don’t get to be.”

Wittliff, who created the writers collection at texas State University that has Graves’s paddle and papers, said: “He cared about the things that were worthwhile caring about, and he wrote about them in a way that made you care about them, too.”

As he spoke by phone from his office in Austin, Mr Wittliff said he was looking at a memento: the spare paddle from Mr Graves’s trip, up on his wall.