Bill Moyers Journal; 425; John Graves: The Head Varmint of Hard Scrabble

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL

John Graves: The Head Varmint of Hard Scrabble

July 23, 1979

BILL MOYERS (over shot of John Graves walking and of Brazos River): This is John Graves and his friend Hup. As a young man he left Texas to see the world, to earn a Purple Heart in the Marines, to write in Spain and New York, to wander the earth in search. Twenty years ago, approaching midlife, John Graves came back to Texas, to the limestone rock and gullied clay and scrub cedar of a place he calls Hard Scrabble, an hour from Fort Worth, where the West begins and John Graves grew up. Slowly, deliberately, he has written two books about this land, small classics of rare power.

Goodbye to a River was his first, the account of his return to Texas and a canoe trip down the Brazos River before the Corps of Engineers dammed it up and changed it forever. The second book he named Hard Scrabble, after the land. It took him twelve years to write, as he earned a modest living raising goats and cattle, occasionally teaching English and consulting on water resources. All those years he struggled to make this land live again after it had been used up by the settlers who moved here a century ago. Hard Scrabble is about that struggle: man, one time, one place. I'm Bill Moyers.

JOHN GRAVES (sitting on low wall, reading): "It was a pleasant segment of life, that year or so, one of the unencumbered, clear-minded interim times that come after one way of being has ended for you, though you may not yet know that, and before another has set in. They do not last, such times, not unless you've built a better wall against life's insistences than I have ever managed to do. And maybe, for that matter, they're not supposed to last. To that point in my life I had never much wanted to own anything that could not travel with me or that I could not walk away from. But inside me somewhere there had always been the incipient disease of land, or so it seems now looking back. Land mattered. And even in peasant villages in foreign mountains I had cared to know that a man owned a patch of terrace with vines and olive trees, and what it produced for him, and how the grazing was for sheep and goats on the gnawed slopes thereabout. I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion, contracted in childhood from kinsmen looking back to a rural past, that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had a stake in them, a daily knowledge of them.'

MOYERS (walking with Graves at Hard Scrabble): How did you find Hard Scrabble?

GRAVES: I suppose you might say I happened on to it. I had been coming down to this country hunting and fooling around, mainly on a friend's place over here, for a number of years; and I think I was hunting or just wandering one day and I happened down in here and later on found that the original part of this place was for sale, and made an effort to buy it and eventually did. It really wasn't so much a place because the fences were all down in this country then, most of these old places were abandoned, they'd been sort of used up and people moved off of them and new people hadn't moved in. And I just like this corner of the country, you might say; I didn't like this place, because I didn't think of it as a place that I'd bought.

MOYERS: Why did you like this corner?

GRAVES: ‘Cause it's rough and private and pretty. because it's very good country, which it's not.

MOYERS: (Laughing.) Not You don't make a living off this place, do you?

GRAVES: No. It has other words, it's no longer a financial burden. it has come to pay for itself most years. In

MOYERS: What was here, on this side?

GRAVES: Nothing. Just a hillside. We had a bulldozer in and scraped out some cedar and leveled off on top of a limestone ledge there, for a building site.

MOYERS: Did you lay the stone?

GRAVES: Yeah. Laid the stone and hammered the planks and...practically all of it, with help occasionally.

MOYERS: Why did you name this place Hard Scrabble?

GRAVES: Well, look at it. Look if I want a wave, look at the hillside back there. That's the end result of something over a century of hard years.

MOYERS: Were the old-timers careless toward the land?

GRAVES: They didn't have to be otherwise. In other words, by the time they'd gotten here their ancestors had probably occupied a farm a generation, back to before the time of the American Revolution, and there was always more land in the West and you could move on and...for whatever reason, I've always been drawn most to sort of Hard Scrabble country northern Mexico, and Spain, and places where people sort of have to scrabble. I like the sort of thing it brings out in people.

MOYERS: What?

GRAVES: Well, there's a kind of dignity that goes with endurance that I'm not talking about toughness in an aggressive sense...

MOYERS: Not macho. swinging the shoulders, no.

GRAVES: Toughness in the sense of enduring, putting up with what there is and making do with what you've got and making a dignified life out of what in some parts of the world would be considered very small material.

MOYERS: I think one of the reasons I would like land like this is for the ghosts, the feeling of the other people who've been here before.

GRAVES: Yeah?

MOYERS: Do you find yourself, even though they're long dead and gone, keenly curious about the settlers here and find yourself becoming intimate with them in a way?

GRAVES: Yeah, in a certain way you do. I'm unable to be anywhere and not wonder how the past led into the present and, you know, what future the present will lead into; but oh, yes, they're around. I mean, what the first ones did to this land is with you every day if you try to do anything with it.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

GRAVES: Well, it's, you know, what we were talking about a while ago, essentially the soil erosion that took place as a result of overgrazing in the early days and cotton farming in the wrong places and that sort of thing. If you plow a field, even if you plow it with a tractor where they used a mule, there's a certain brotherhood with long-vanished specimens, you know.

MOYERS: As all these changes occur and people like you try to stay rooted in places like Hard Scrabble, do you sometimes feel that you're being left behind or out of date?

GRAVES: I'm not that worried about being left out of date. In other words, the things that I have pitted myself against are not so much external as internal.

MOYERS: Such as?

GRAVES: Writing, primarily. And understanding. And as far as rootedness goes, I don't think any of us nowadays are rooted in the old sense, not too many; and I'm not, certainly. In other words, I'm rooted here in the sense that I've put in nearly twenty years fooling around with this place and trying to understand what goes on in terms of the wildlife and the vegetation and also of some minimal use of it economically. But the main point has been understanding rather than to establish oneself in one place for the ages, and so on. We aren't living in that kind of time, you know, and if you've been around enough you know that. It's very unlikely that my children will live here. There's too much going on elsewhere, they'll move on. I hope. One point in having had it was that they could come to understand certain things more or less through the skin, from experiencing them, you know, when young. But we are not rooted in the old sense of people who grew up where their grandfathers grew up and whose family tale involved some old oak tree that's still there, you know, that sort of thing; we're simply not. So, no, I don't feel all that threatened.

MOYERS: You don't see yourself as a quaint old codger trying to hold on to...

GRAVES: No; no, I've always maintained and I may never do it -- but I've always maintained that I could, if age or ill health or simple inclination towards something else dictated it, I could walk away from here and not look back. And it would have been worthwhile, having done all of it and having achieved whatever understanding I have achieved of it.

MOYERS: But what if the reverse were to be so, if somebody said to What would you tomorrow, "John Graves, you will never leave Hard Scrabble"?

GRAVES: Well, I've come to pretty good terms with it; I don't think I'd mind too much. There was a time earlier in my life when they might as well have stuck me in a prison cell as to have said that.

MOYERS: Well, what's been the big change?

GRAVES: Well, you see the other things and you come to terms with them. I mean, you know, I've lived in New York for, I imagine, a total of three years since the war, and other places; I spent three years over in Europe one time, Spain mainly. And those are things that I somehow needed to do, or thought I needed to do, and I did them. And either got the good out of it or didn't, but was ready by then to come back and see where I'd been, like that fabulous bird in the story, you know?

MOYERS: No, what?

GRAVES: I've forgotten the name of the bird; I think it was called the fillalua bird, which flew around backward all the time because he didn't care where he was going, he just wanted to see where he'd been.

MOYERS: That's why you came back to Texas?

GRAVES: I came back just sort of visiting. Really the essence of a piece of my return to Texas is that Goodbye to a River book. I don't think I realized that at the time.

"To note that our present world is a strange one is tepid, and it is becoming a little untrue, for strangeness and change are so familiar to us now that they're getting to be normal. Most of us in one way or another count on them, as strongly as other ages counted on the green shoots rising in the spring. But if you're built like me, neither the certainty of change nor the need for it, nor any wry philosophy, will keep you from feeling a certain enraged awe when you hear that a river that you've known always, and that all men of that place have known always, back into the red dawn of men, will shortly not exist: river, anyhow, my piece. They had not yet done more than survey the sites for the new dams, five between those two that had already risen during my life. When someone official dreams up a dam, it generally goes in.

Dams are ipso facto good all by themselves, like mothers and flags. Maybe you save a dinosaur monument from time to time, but in between such salvations you lose ten Brazoses. And what I wanted to do was to wrap it up, the river, before what I and Hale and Satanta the White Bear and Mr. Charlie Goodnight had known ended up down yonder under all the Chris Crafts and the tinkle of portable radios. Or was that maybe an excuse for a childishness? What I wanted was to float my piece of the river again. All of it.

MOYERS: "One river, seen right, may be all the rivers that flow to the sea. Those are your words.

GRAVES: Yeah. In the River book somewhere, I'm not sure where.

MOYERS: It's in there, but that's the truth you're getting at, that in the Brazos River.

GRAVES: I'm not arrogant or overweening enough to set myself up alongside them, but an awful lot of the really great writers in world's history have been original writers in the sense that they were tied to a particular type of land and a particular society and so on; and yet they transcended it and made their society stand for all societies in the world, made their river, if there was a river, stand for other rivers, and that sort of thing. The distinction, of course, is always a hard one to draw because one man's provincialism is another man's universality, I guess.

MOYERS: What do you think it was that made you that brought you to that very definite conclusion that, after forty years of experience elsewhere, to come here?

GRAVES: Well, I think to some degree it was marrying and settling down and having children. I won't claim to have been so altruistic that I did it all for them; I did it because I like doing it, you know. There were things I wanted to know, there were things I wanted to learn how to do, there were things I wanted to learn about, and there were things I wanted to stay in touch with, just you know; I like to hear a screech owl call at night, and most nights of the year I can hear them here. I like to hear a rooster crow in the morning. Different things come at different times of the year. For the last month, for instance, the plover have been going over, flying to Argentina from near the Arctic Circle, and you hear them at night, particularly in weather like this, under low clouds...that "whicker" that they make as they go over, it's very reassuring. They've been doing that for such a long time before there were any people here.

MOYERS: We noticed this morning coming by on the highway some fowl rising out of the landscape with the nuclear power plant behind them, making quite a contrast.

GRAVES: Yeah. And I expect they'll be here when it's not. There is for me a sense of permanence about these things. It's quite true that today for the first time in history we could wipe out the whole shebang_if we wanted to, but nobody wants to. And you have to believe that the fact of not wanting to will lead to their continuance. So that... these things are, for me, ultimate reality: the way the land functions, the way water falls upon it and makes things grow and percolates in the soil and flows in the streams and the way that all this benefits mammals and birds and reptiles, and all the other things that are here.

MOYERS: You seem to have a certain humility toward change and progress. It doesn't seem to rancor you the way it has in other naturalists with whom I've talked about these things.

GRAVES: I would prefer to exist in a world in which these things weren't ruling the roost, so to speak; I really would. But since they do, I believe in trying to understand what is here and trying to appreciate it and trying to get the good out of it, good out of it, so to speak.

MOYERS: Let me interrupt you what's that call?

GRAVES: A titmouse. It's the black-crested titmouse. The black-crested and the tufted titmouse overlap; that's a single note, and if it were the tufted it would be a two-note thing. "Peter-peter-peter" is usually given for that call.

MOYERS: That's it now. You know, you once said to a friend of mine that it was your experience that whatever is quiet and civilized in life gets submerged. You still think that's true?

GRAVES: Yeah. But it's still there. It survives. Gets submerged, but it doesn't get drowned. If one bemoans the lack of emphasis on quiet and civilized, intelligent, wise things, one nevertheless has to admit that they still exist, and by gosh I think they're going to keep on existing. Which is a nice thought, I think, against one's pessimism.

(Scene of Graves walking to tractor, removing parts.)

GRAVES: This is the queerest oil thing on these little things. You have to drain some of the oil out before you can tell how much it's got. Oh, it's about twenty-five years old, at least 1952, '53. I've always puttered with something, no matter where I was. Not any worse here than it was there. As the years go on you come somewhat to terms with your own tendencies, you know. Just put that much time in on stuff like that, maybe you needed to do them. It seemed to me all my life there'd been so much to do there wasn't any way to get around to it all, it was all sort of fun. I don't classify writing as fun, but...sort of fun to have done it. Did you ever hear of Juan Ramón Jiménez? He was a Spanish poet; won the Nobel prize in poetry, and he died at about the age of ninety. Some years ago, probably twenty years ago. Was a good poet. And he had a set of maxims that he formulated, some of which I always liked very much. One of them was: "Busquemos la gran alegría de haber hecho" -- "Let us seek the great happiness of having done." Not of doing, but of having done. I think that applies very much to writing. For me it never has been too much fun to do, but it's nice when you've done it.

The flat fact about writing is that at least for me, the longer you stay with it the less you know about what's going to come out. You do attain a certain competence, you know that you're not going to stub your toe as badly as you did sometimes when young, but if something really comes out good, you don't know why it did. It did it almost of itself, in spite of a great deal of work on your part.

(Scene of Graves calling cattle to feed, then goats.) GRAVES (reading, over scenes of feeding livestock):

"Close enough, most of the time, shut off by the syndrome and by temperament from the intelligent, almost non-participant purity of a Thoreau, the Head Varmint nonetheless tries in his way to do things right, without ever quite succeeding all the way but in the trying itself becoming a part of the land and the way it works: so that he can no longer truly find the dividing line between his more or less useful country self, who plows and sows and builds and fences and worries and wades through frigid poot and mire while hauling feed to black cows in January; and that other, less pragmatic, self, older in time but younger in spirit, who sips with bees and envies trumpeting cranes and is restless when the plover flute from beneath low clouds on their way to the distant pampas, and runs in his mind with Evetts Gilliver's hounds and with the fox they chase, as well as with all honest chasers and all chased beasts, now and in all times past, and waits catlike in winter dawns beside green fields and has kinship with unknown night things that go, Mesozoically, 'Ink. Queerly, they are the same man.

MOYERS (walking with Graves and dog): Well, I know a writer needs solitude, but sometimes the line between solitude and loneliness is a very thin line.

GRAVES: Yeah, it's fairly thin. I don't find this all that much of a problem these years, though, of course I'm within an hour's drive of Fort Worth, where I grew up and where all kinds of friends as well as family are. Also, I think this whole business of lonesomeness is more exaggerated when you're younger, and particularly when you're single. Used to bother me a lot; I never really felt that I'd worked it out. But blessedly, as you grow a bit older and relationships...

MOYERS: Let's sit down on that log.

GRAVES : Very well, sir. Relationships pretty well established, pretty solid, you don't tend to get so frantic about that anymore. Least, I don't.

MOYERS: Do you think that this country will ever get over its obsession with land? That's really a part of us, isn't it?

GRAVES: Part of humanity. It's not by any means confined to Americans, it goes way, way back, you know. I mean, Texas in part and a good bit of the Midwest even more were settled by people from the Old World, to whom the ownership of land you know, the possession of a patch of it they could call their own was the finest thing that they could imagine. And they brought that with them; it wasn't born here. So we simply carry it on. No, I don't think it'll die out; I hope it doesn't.

MOYERS: When do you really own?

GRAVES: You don't. The only way you own things is in your head. If you know something well enough and understand it and have sort of earned the right to regard it as your own by comprehension, that's a form of ownership. It's the most genuine form, as far as I'm concerned.

MOYERS: Anyone who reads Hard Scrabble will recognize that you've learned a lot here; that...

GRAVES: (Laughing.) I hope so; that's the only possible justification, as I told you, of the time that's gone into it. And I think probably so. Maybe I could have learned it faster at another place or in another way, but...it's one of the advantages of growing older. And I don't want to bear down on that, I don't feel particularly old; but I am getting older, and you notice certain philosophical equilibrations that take place. One of the advantages is that you come to terms with the way you are. You know you're not going to make any great radical

if it took me changes in your character at this point, and so you eighteen years to learn the things I have learned on this place, so be it. I've gotten a little work done in the meantime, and I haven't gone dead in the head that I know of, yet. Does that make sense?

MOYERS: Does to me.

GRAVES (reading): "And if you did, sold out, packed up a few portables, and moved yourself and your ladies along to some other spot, urban or rural, foreign or domestic, turned over your slice of the Tonk nation to new and fresher peasants, and the house and barn you built, and the fenced, grassed pastures and still unvanquished brush, and the mellowing garden and fields and all that drive, sweat and hope, would to walk away thus mean confessing that you'd pounded ten or twelve years of sporadic but hard work and focus down a rathole, in writing it off? Would you then just be another man the rough Tonk hills had whipped in retaliation for old longhorn cows and cotton? Maybe. And again, maybe not. There are things a man needs to learn before he dies, for fullness; and these seem to have been such things for me. might be better to have learned them early, but I didn't. At least, not in an understanding way. Earlier there were too many other things to find out about as they came along. So many of them that there was never time for all, nor any chance to be bored. So that only when past forty, in a period when by rights a man ought to be using what knowledge he has already acquired, toward writing his best books, painting his best pictures, arguing his best cases before a jury, snipping out his best carcinomas, or whatever, did I start consolidating a store of rare knowledge concerned with putting threads on pipes and stones on stones, with making a show in carpentry, with fences and humus and stumps and bugs, with the smell of rain on dung and drouthy soil, with how goats bleat when frightened and how when only alone, with strange fox sounds beyond the barn at night and the comical anger of bulls, with plows and seeds and cement mixers, with fields that are green, and why, and what flowers the bees work in August in the third smallest county in Texas. But having learned these things by now, if most of them inexpertly, and the other things that go with them and make up a sort of whole, I own them in my head, which is the only place you can ever own anything. And if tomorrow I had to be carted off, a physical wreck, to eke out long death in some bleak and cheery rest home, I would be carrying away with me more of Hard Scrabble than by leaving I would lose."

MOYERS: This has been a visit in Texas with John Graves, author of Hard Scrabble and Goodbye to a River.

I’m Bill Moyers.