Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship

By John Graves

Book Overview

In Myself and Strangers, John Graves, the highly regarded author of Goodbye to a River and other classic works, recalls the decade-long apprenticeship in which he found his voice as a writer. He recounts his wanderings from Texas to Mexico, New York, and Spain, where, like Hemingway, he hoped to find the material with which to write books that mattered. With characteristic honesty, Graves admits the false starts and dead ends that dogged much of his writing, along with the exhilaration he felt when the words finally flowed. He frankly describes both the pleasures and the restlessness of expatriate life in Europe after World War II--as well as his surprising discovery, when family obligations eventually called him home to Texas, that the years away had prepared him to embrace his native land as the fit subject matter for his writing. For anyone seeking the springs that fed John Graves' best-loved books, this memoir of apprenticeship will be genuinely rewarding.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292709722
• ISBN13: 9780292709720
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Only occasionally dull

It was Gertrude Stein who said that she wrote for "myself and strangers," a saying John Graves quotes with approval. His reading of Stein is both deep and wide, and in a way his book is a reply to her famous AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, for just as she became a legend only after leaving the USA to live in Paris, the same applies to John Graves and his status as living legend of American writers. After an uneventful childhood, Graves found himself at 21 in the grandest adventure of them all, he joined the Marines in time for World War II. A sniper took out one of his eyes, and he acknowledges this was probably all for the best because otherwise he would have led his squadron to Iwo Jima where casualties were out of hand. Afterwards he became part of a second "Lost Generation," trying to learn to write in Mexico, Mallorca, and Spain. If you know Graves' writing, then you keep searching through the book trying to find out the books he read and the dilemmas he pondered while writing his first novel A SPECKLED HORSE. The lists are fascinating and his comments uncensored. He strikes the novice as being outspoken, irreverent, lusty and always in love with one beautiful woman after another. It is a book in the old style of restless young American wandering through the cheap capitals, dreaming of the great American novel. I kept wondering when he would meet Robert Graves, and if the two of them would acknowledge they shared the same surname, but I was disappointed. John Graves, he tells us, stayed away from famous people, even those who writing he admires. On the jacket copy it says that he hobnobbed, as an expatriate, with the famous as well as the obscure (like the 400 pound, cryptohomosexual Park Benjamin), but this is not so and after a hundred pages or so, we realize we're stuck with him meeting a bunch of nobody drunks and whores. But he's fascinating and his book is pretty good, dull only occasionally.

Hemingway...plus

Many times in the reading of Myself and Strangers I had the sense that this, finally, was the book Graves dreamed of writing as a young man, a book that was literate, exotic, sensual and profound. Not that Goodbye to a River isn't superior. But it is about a river in Texas, and the history of that remote place and its people. This concerns New York, and ex-pats, and ambition and self doubt, and romance, (and lust,) plowing the same European turf that Hemingway did, only (in my humble opinion) more compellingly. Myself and Strangers now resides on the list of the finest books, memoir or otherwise, that I've ever read.

An intimate delight from a master of detail

This memoir covers the time the then-nascent writer John Graves spent in Europe - mostly Spain - following the Second World War and a failed first marriage. The book traces, through narrative and through journal entries from that time, Graves's effort to become a literary writer. It also chronicles the times, the people, deep friendships and poignant romances. And it provides us a decidedly UN-romantic look at the wealthy, hard-drinking American expatriate community - some entertaining moments come when the youngish and strictly reared Graves lets his journal know just what he thinks of all the bad behavior he's seeing (the older Graves appears more amused)."Myself and Strangers" is a highly personal look back at youth by an author whose work has *always* been marked by the beauty of its language and the vividness of its images and portraits. The effect is heightened in this book because the subject matter is so intimate, even for a writer known for the immediacy and the personal nature of his prose. Here Graves lets us in on his early years of serious writing - writing that did not always go well, and that often caused more pain than pleasure for its creator. The old journal entries show Graves struggling with the "anxiety of influence" as he reads work by others. They also show him struggling with a sense of necessity and destiny that drove him forward even as he doubted his abilities.This is an aspect of literary life that many writers don't reveal - either writing comes easily, or they don't talk about their difficulties with it (except jokingly) - and it is sometimes almost heartbreaking to read. But the heartbreak doesn't last - because if you know Graves's other books (and you should, particularly, in this reader's opinion, "Goodbye to a River" and "Hard Scrabble"), you know that not too long after the apprentice times he chronicles here, he had become the real thing. (For his entire career he has been known to other writers - though not always to the reading public beyond Texas. It's time for the rest of us to catch on!)Graves is superb at bringing the reader into the moment, economically yet thoroughly. If sounds matter to a scene, they are almost audible. The stones on the ground and the clouds in the sky are almost visible. Even the smell and taste can be found if you need them. Thanks to this quality, you can read a page of "Myself and Strangers" and find yourself in the midst of a moment that happened 50 years ago. And whether you're out on a sailboat off Mallorca, or trying to figure out how to leave a shrill drunken party, or sitting on a terrace with a glass of wine on some warm luminous night, you are always spending time with a writer who's the best of good company.