The Best Little Literary Paddle in Texas

Jane Graves John Graves on the Brazos.

John Graves, an author revered in Texas but relatively unknown beyond the borders of the state, died on Wednesday at 92. The New York Times obituary discusses his best-known work, “Goodbye to a River,” published in 1960. That book tells the story of a three-week trip down the Brazos River, from just below Possum Kingdom Lake to a spot near the town of Glen Rose, near where Mr. Graves built his home, which he called Hard Scrabble.

The obituary mentions the power that the book holds, especially for many Texans â€" so much so that the paddles that Mr. Graves used on that trip are treasured. One of them is on display at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which gathers the papers and artifacts of the creators of Southwestern literature.

Bill Witliff, the screenwriter who, with his wife, founded the collections, said he discovered the paddle, which had been broken into three pieces, in a woodpile at Hard Scrabble. It had been stepped on by one of Mr. Graves’s cows.

Mr. Wittliff asked Mr. Graves if he could have what was left of the paddle. “John was astonished that I’d want it,” Mr. Wittliff recalled. Mr. Wittliff repaired the paddle and gave it to the Southwestern Writers Collection, the beginning of the Wittliff Collections.

When the Witliff was dedicated in 1993, with then-governor Ann Richards and Larry L. King (author of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”), among others in attendance, John Graves spoke about the paddle. He again seemed mystified by the interest in this object, saying he found it “a curious thing.” “What ought to matter about writers is their writing, period,” he said, while allowing “There is an undeniable glow to be derived from seeing articles used daily” by admired literary figures.

And so, he said: “I don’t have any idea what emotions, if any, my old canoe paddle on display in there will arouse in others, but what it chiefly arouses in me, aside from a few recollections, is disgust that I let a useful tool lie out for three or four years among willows beside a stock pond, where it was rotted by weather and fractured by the hooves of Black Angus cows. It is testimony to one of my basic flaws, a slobbishness about personal possessions.”

In a more serious vein, he made a run at explaining why the region’s writing might be important, saying “whatever Southwestern literature’s virtues and lacks may be, whatever its degree of acceptance in the wider world of letters of America and the world, it is our literature insofar as we feel ourselves to be Texans, and Southwesterners, just as the work of Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy and Faulkner and a host of others belongs to us as conscious inheritors of Western Civilization.”

Today, the paddle is hung in the collection’s reading room. For fans of Mr. Graves, “It’s really become a point of pilgrimage here,” said Michele M. Miller, a spokeswoman for the collections.