Skip Hollandsworth for a 2001 Texas
Monthly profile. “Sally and I wanted
to create something we would call
the Southwestern Writers Collec-
tion. It would be a place you could
go to see artifacts of Texas writers
who had struggled throughout their
lives to find just the right word or the
right phrase, who wanted to express
a feeling, who needed to tell a story. I
wanted a place that might inspire a
new group of Texas writers.”
In the years since, the collec-
tions have grown, expanding in a
way only the Wittliffs could have
dreamed. They house manuscripts
and personal papers of writers like
Cormac McCarthy, Sandra Cisne-
ros, and Sam Shepard, as well as the
archives of Texas Monthly. They
contain Billy Lee Brammer’s typed
manuscript of The Gay Place and its
unfinished sequel, plus the screen-
play Larry McMurtry wrote and set
aside in 1972, then later picked up
and turned into Lonesome Dove,
the novel. There’s a 1555 edition of
Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación y co-
mentarios, which contains the ear-
liest known written description of
Texas; Edward S. Curtis’s landmark
photographs of Native Americans;
and production files from King of
the Hill. There are original lyrics
Willie Nelson handwrote when he
was eleven years old, four joints he
once smoked to the roach ends and
left in the ashtray of Wittliff ’s truck,
the prop of Gus’s one-legged corpse
that Call dragged back to Texas, and
the paddle John Graves used on the
canoe trip immortalized in Goodbye
to a River. Every one of those items
is available for inspection to anyone
who happens in.I asked Jones what he considered
to be Wittliff ’s greatest accomplish-
ment. “I’m not going to be the source
of such an indignity as to sum him up
in a sentence,” Jones replied. “No.
His greatest accomplishment? Hell,
I don’t know. He loved his grand-
children.”
That brought to mind my own fa-
vorite memory. My first interviewwith Wittliff for the Lonesome Dove
research was a long, rambling con-
versation in his office. The building
itself was a piece of living history,
an old Victorian home just west of
downtown Austin. O. Henry once
rented a room there, and Bill and Sal-
ly bought it in 1973 to house Encino
Press. At Wittliff ’s invite, Bud Shrake
and Stephen Harrigan wrote novels
in a room upstairs, and famed bird-
watcher Victor Emanuel started his
business there. The walls of the room
where Wittliff actually worked were
hung with fine prints of photos he’d
taken of Graves, Willie, and Duvall
and Jones as Gus and Call, and ev-
ery inch of shelf and tabletop—and
much of the floor—was stacked tall
with books and manuscripts, some
he was working on and others he was
reading for friends. Amid all that,
he mused for two hours on the bril-
liance of McMurtry, the mysteries
of Texas, the lunacy of Hollywood,
and his eternal belief in the power
of a well-told story. It was a perfect
afternoon.
But the real insight came before I’d
even gotten to the door. As I walked
up, Reid Wittliff was leaving. He’s an
attorney in Austin now, and he’d just
had lunch with his dad. He stopped
on the porch, and they shared a long,
strong hug.
I told all that to Jones. “Wittliff
walked me through every memen-
to,” I said. “He explained his great
miniseries, the relationships that
came out of it, and how much it all
meant to him. But I got a real sense
that with everything we got into that
day, to his mind, the most important
thing was that hug with his son.”
Jones didn’t pause for even a beat.
“The most beautiful thing I saw on
that first fly-fishing trip,” he said,
“was Bill make a bologna sandwich
for Reid. It consisted of cheap white
bread, mayonnaise, and bologna.
Maybe a slice of American cheese.
I never saw anyone take such care
to make a bologna sandwich. And I
have never forgotten it.” TIN MEMORIAM