In remembrance of Bill Wittliff

In remembrance

Bill Wittliff

The world lost a treasure when Dr. Bill Wittliff, a Texas State Hero, passed away on June 9, 2019. Bill and his wife, Dr. Sally Wittliff, founded The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in 1986. Texas State is honored to steward Bill’s legacy and continue building a world-class archive of the Southwest’s most important literature, photography, music, and film. In April of 2020, the inaugural Wittliff Collections Festival will take place in Austin, as a celebration of Bill’s inimitable vision and creative spirit.

Author Stephen Harrigan, whose papers are part of The Wittliff Collections, delivered the eulogy at Bill’s private graveside service. Following is an abridged version. Read the full text at bit.ly/wittliffeulogy. 

Bill Wittliff was, among so many other things, one of the most successful screenwriters in the world. He knew how to braid a confusing tangle of events into a single coherent narrative, or one central theme. I’d like to be able to do that today, but Bill’s life was too various, too vast, and too crucial to everyone here that it almost seems like an insult to his memory to try to neatly sum up who he was. There’s no one Bill Wittliff story—there’s a story for each of us.

And just as there’s no one story to his life, there’s no one theme. But there are three words that keep cycling through my mind when I think about him and what he meant to me: the three words are integrity, inspiration, generosity.

These three elements of his personality weren’t separate, they weren’t sequential, they were all bundled together into a human being you instinctively liked and trusted and, maybe at some level, found yourself wishing you could be.

He was someone who was never afraid to say no, but whose door was always open. You knew when you listened to him talk that he came from someplace real, and you knew by every choice he made that he stood for something important. He was a living rebuke to inanity and pretense. He knew what was true, and he was relentless in sniffing out anything that was bogus.

It was certainly his insistence on truth that elevated Lonesome Dove from what could have been a fairly conventional cowboy miniseries to the most beloved western ever made. As the project’s screenwriter, executive producer, and guardian angel, he made sure the movie was made in a manner that honored Larry McMurtry’s novel and protected the adaptation from wrongheaded casting and sometimes boneheaded studio notes. “If we take care of Lonesome Dove,” he told everyone involved with the production, “Lonesome Dove will take care of us.”

The week before he died, Bill and his wife, Sally, celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary. Sally was his partner in creating the great Texas cultural heritage that lives on through his work and through The Wittliff Collections.

Speaking of The Collections, I want to close with something I read a few days after Bill died. Christian Wallace is a young writer for Texas Monthly. In a Twitter Post, Christian remembered the time he met Bill at a reading at The Wittliff Collections. They began to talk about writing, and Bill asked him what kind of writer he wanted to be. Christian gestured toward Pat Oliphant’s statue of John Graves that looms over the Collections’ reception area.

“A few days later,” Christian wrote, “I got a call from someone at The Wittliff. She said they had a package for me. I went by and picked up a manila envelope with my name scrawled across the front. Inside was a rusted horseshoe and a letter.”

The letter read “Here’s a horseshoe I found out at John Graves’s Hard Scrabble the last time I was there. . . I believe in Luck. . . now here’s some you can take along with you as you go. . .”

As I said, there’s a Bill Wittliff story for each of us. Stories of integrity, inspiration and generosity. And no doubt, we’ll all be telling Bill Wittliff stories on into the afternoon, far into the night, and deep into the ages.