Books in Brief
Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship by John Graves (Knopf, 235 pp., $24). In a quiet way this memoir is very touching–and very American as well. John Graves, its author, is eighty-four. In going through old journals he’d kept from the late 1940s into the 1960s, prior to committing them to the flames in a general clearing away of a lifetime, he began to feel maybe there was something he could possibly salvage.
Happily he did. The book covers the years that took him from his Texas home to being wounded on a small Pacific atoll as a Marine Corps captain in the Second World War to an expatriate existence, much of it lived in Spain, as he tried to discover whether he had the stuff of a writer in him or not. Many times he quotes from those journals, reflecting on what “Young John” had experienced, adding comments from “Old John,” a wiser but certainly not sentimental fellow. He passes along reactions to his reading–he did a lot of reading then, and occasionally adds his reflections of today–“George Sessions Perry, Hold Autumn in Your Hand. It is a good piece of work, and causes me no envy because Texas is not my territory any more.” He follows with “[Old John: This was a very major misapprehension, for in the long run Texas was the main territory I did have.]”
Graves has some fairly acute thoughts about Americans when off their native soil: “The resentful dislike which many Americans abroad feel toward other Americans for being there too, and which at bottom is probably a nervousness about being American.” He continues: “That season in Madrid I was alone a great deal, mainly by choice. It is one of the better cities I have known to be alone in, not so big that loneliness surrounds you and piles up as it can in New York, nor so active and vibrating that the mere fact of being by yourself amid so much movement and companionship cuts you, as in Paris, like a knife.”
If Graves did his share of hanging out in cafés and drinking with fellow Americans or Englishmen, he also savored strong and close friendships with Spaniards, hunting, fishing, and sailing with them. He’s clearly aware of all the writing done by fellow Americans over the years on the topic of café-life abroad. He mentions Hemingway and Fitzgerald but scarcely in any burst of maudlin nostalgia. And yes there were women as well, about whom he generally maintains the discreet gallantry of his southern upbringing.
Off and on through those years abroad, Graves was slogging away at a novel, A Speckled Horse, interspersed with producing short stories (his very first accepted by the New Yorker) and articles for the likes of Holiday and Colliers. But when finally the novel was finished and sent off to his agent, a letter came back–“long, rather horrified.” And Graves reread his manuscript and decided “it still wasn’t as good as I had wanted it to be, and I had done all I could with it.”
He went back to Texas, writing stories gleaned from browsing through the Southwestern Collection of the old Carnegie library downtown in Fort Worth. “I was where I belonged.” This led to the writing of Goodbye to a River, and “its rightness wiped out my disappointment over the failure of A Speckled Horse, which I could now see as the last, deck-clearing stage of an apprenticeship lasting more than a decade and experienced far from home, during which I had slowly developed a degree of objectivity in regard to who I was and how to handle language.”
It is from Gertrude Stein, a woman who knew something about writers and living abroad, that Graves chose his title: “I write for myself and strangers.” He adds with typical modesty, “Me too, at least when I’m writing honestly.” Myself and Strangers is an altogether commendable picture of a time and of a man who proved singularly American.
—Cynthia Grenier
