Grover Lewis' writing feels like sort of a mixed-bag to me, intermittently soaring but very uneven.

Grover Lewis was a prominent New Journalism writer of the 1960s and 1970s, probably best known for his Rolling Stone on-location pieces in which he ensconced himself on film sets and gave readers a behind-the-scenes look at how Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, among others, got their work done. He also had a taste for the film business’s fascinating fringe characters.

Lewis passed away in 1995 while in the midst of writing his memoirs. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lewis is all but forgotten, despite the existence of a handsome collection of his work, Splendor in the Short Grass, which was published by the University of Texas Press in 2005. The book contains a piece taken from his uncompleted memoirs, in which Lewis recalls the tragic circumstances of how he lost both his parents while he was eight years old. An excerpt from “Goodbye If You Call That Gone”:

“History and legend bind us to the past, along with unquenchable memory.

In the spring of 1943, my parents–Grover Lewis, a truck driver, and Opal Bailey Lewis, a hotel waitress–shot each other to death with a pawnshop pistol. For most of a year, Big Grover had stalked my mother, my four-year-old sister, and me across backwater Texas, resisting Opal’s decision to divorce him. When she finally did and when he finally cornered her and pulled the trigger as he’d promised to do, she seized the gun and killed him, too.

A next-door neighbor of Opal’s–called ‘Dad’ North because of his advanced age–witnessed the mayhem shortly after dawn on a rainy Monday morning in May. Big Grover was twenty-seven years old, Opal twenty-six, and they’d been married for almost eleven years. My father survived for half a day without regaining consciousness, and died in the same charity hospital where I was born. Opal died where she fell, under a shadeless light bulb in the drafty old rooming house where she’d been living alone, and struggling to keep Titter and me in a nearby nursery school. No charges were filed, and a formal inquest was considered unnecessary since the police and the coroner’s office declared the case solved by mid-morning. My uncle Dubya Cee, Opal’s older brother, talked to one of the detectives involved and found out some additional information, which he shared only with the Bailey elders. Such, anyway, were the bare bones of the story as passed along in family history that soon blurred off into murky family legend. It was the sum of what I was allowed to know, although there remained to be answered, of course, questions I had not yet learned to ask.”