Lone Star

No one remains the same person over a long march of sixty years, of course, as the rough rubbings of experience transform all but the most witless. McMurtry’s other self, however, had a more shattering genesis, the result of a heart bypass when he was 55, in 1991. The operation went well, but two months later, “I ceased to be able to read.” It felt, he said, “somewhat like death — personality death, at least . . . I felt as if I was vanishing — or more accurately, had vanished.”

Reading had been the core and point of McMurtry’s life. As a youngster on a hardscrabble Texas ranch he had discovered, in a box of books given him by an uncle leaving for the army in World War II, that there was a vastly wider world out there than the one his grandparents and parents had endured through incessant labor simply to remain on the land. What reading gave him, many years later surgery took away, turning him into a recluse for two and a half years, during which he was taken in by a friend and her daughter. He sensed that he might never recover the “wholeness . . . the integrity of the self.” So he began the arduous chore that continues “to put a kind of alternate self together.” Eventually he began to be able to read again for pleasure.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond is not, however, one of those accounts of a terrible illness that excavates the bruised psyche and battered body of the sufferer (a genre of inexplicable popularity). While the book is autobiographical, it might be called the autobiography of a reader; there is little about McMurtry’s lively career as novelist, screenwriter, and intimate of celebrities.

His ruminations about his pioneer ancestors and life on the marginal cattle ranch from which he briskly departed are poignant. These reflections on his past, his ancestors’ past, and his more recent convalescence are linked through his examination of an essay by Walter Benjamin, the German cultural essayist, which McMurtry first read while nursing a lime Dr. Pepper at the Dairy Queen in his Texas hometown. Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” is a study of “the growing obsolescence of what might be called practical memory and the consequent diminution of the power of oral narrative in our twentieth-century lives.”

Indeed, McMurtry reckons that “fewer and fewer humans really need to remember very much,” since the “extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with memories of all significant events . . . but edits those memories for us too.” Thus, he wonders with Benjamin if “the communicability of experience is decreasing.” This provocative but familiar complaint provides McMurtry with a conduit into the “arid” small-town life of his native turf. Storytellers were already “nearly extinct” in northwest Texas when he was reaching maturity. This leads him logically into the history and the myth of America’s westering experience.

Which in turn leads a reader to reflect on Larry McMurtry. He is a literary journeyman. If there were an all-star team of letters, it is doubtful that fans would vote for McMurtry; however, he likely would be one of the manager’s selections to fill the roster — a savvy utility infielder, say, who knows how to bunt and won’t kick games away with errors.

The novel that may constitute McMurtry’s literary legacy is Lonesome Dove, a marvelous tale that was turned into one of the finest series to appear on commercial television. Memorably starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, the four-hour production is one of those rare examples of a first-rate book transformed into a first-rate film. There is, in fact, a film-like quality throughout McMurtry’s fiction, which may be why half a dozen of his novels have become movies. Horseman, Pass By was made into the 1963 movie Hud with Paul New-man, which has held up quite well. Probably the best-known film based on a McMurtry novel, and indeed a better movie than the novel, is The Last Picture Show, which launched Cybill Shepherd onto the celebrity fast-track.

But Lonesome Dove is an alp among foothills in McMurtry’s prolific career. Curiously, or so it seems to its author, Lonesome Dove was popularly read (and viewed) in the romantic tradition of the American frontier. But McMurtry says he wrote it as a variation on that venerable thematic myth. In fact, he thought he was “demythicizing” the romanticized West. He intended to portray his characters as less “triumphalist” than Western heroes traditionally have been presented since the nineteenth-century dime novels. Which is to say, McMurtry wanted to get away from the typical story of brave and uncomplicated individualists who endured horrific obstacles in heroic exertions to rout the bad guys and make life safe for the schoolmarm and preacher.

Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, the ex-Texas Rangers who ramrod the cattle drive, are tough and capable. But the former is so costive that he cannot acknowledge the illegitimate son who worships him, while the latter clings so tightly to his footloose freedom that he denies himself genuine love. McMurtry’s intended demythification went awry probably because of his skill in creating vividly admirable individuals, heroic despite the dents and burrs of character. Furthermore, McMurtry is nearly unrivaled in his ability to convey the grandeur and the terror of the Western land itself.

Despite the critical and popular success of the novel, McMurtry notes that he grew tired of the Old West theme as he continued work on the tetralogy of which Lonesome Dove was the first part. It shows in The Streets of Laredo, the sequel, which is unrelievedly grim, offering only vestiges of the gritty verve of its predecessor. The sequel to that sequel and then the (detestable word) prequel, were both pale and limp.

Yet McMurtry sees his writing life as book-ended by stories of the West and is fascinated by its enduring, if increasingly attenuated, symbolism. The cowboy has, he writes, been “absorbed into the national bloodstream,” the distillation of the dynamic movement of Manifest Destiny. (Never mind that the cowboy’s historical actuality occupied only about twenty years toward the shank of the nineteenth century.) He notes that his grandfather watched, from the hill of the McMurtry homestead, the start of one of the last of the great overland cattle drives.

The image and symbolism of the West has lived on even as younger historians beaverly gnaw away at the concept of the frontier as a potent determinant of who we are and what this country is. To the academicians of the “New Western” history, it is a symbolism not just mythic — which is to say, true in its generality if not in all particulars — but false.

A belle of the deconstructionist ball is Patricia Nelson Limerick. Her 1987 book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, is a primary text of this mauling of myth. The popular reverence for the “pioneer” West, she argues, ignores the treatment of Indians and other minority groups, despoliation of the land, and acquisitive obsession. The West as most people know it from novels and movies is, she writes, “ethnocentric and tied to a simple notion of progress.” More to the point, there was really no “frontier,” a myth that has obscured and distorted what she and other New Western historians regard as a social, political, and especially an economic continuum. “Conquest,” in her context, is of course an eight-cylinder pejorative noun.

As Limerick puts it, “Reorganized, the history of the West is a study of a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences” — rather than “a process,” as is Frederick Jackson Turner’s moving frontier, where civilization is planted and nurtured. It is not difficult to caricature this “reorganized” study with its proliferating subspecialties for professorial harvest — Western women, Native Americans, Hispanics, the environment, and perhaps Equine Studies.

Though the regional historiography of the past three decades is not without interesting elaborations on the era, in the eagerness to hew a new path through the woods the traditional notion — and connotations — of a frontier have been denigrated. The casualties have been respect for the indomitable courage of settlement and the tough virtues that required. These are relegated to the intellectual junk heap as “ethnocentric” and “exclusive.” Courage and virtue are merely euphemisms for a “contest for property and profit” in “a context for cultural dominance.” The historian Bruce Lincoln, in his study of Russia and Siberia, puts such matters quite differently: “Nations are born of battle, and conquest makes them great.”

Larry McMurtry fits into the revisionist landscape as a “leading story-teller” of this “new gray West,” (as one historian puts it) as opposed to the white-hat/black-hat schema. Certainly the characters with whom McMurtry populates the West of his fiction, past and contemporary, are recognizably layered. But McMurtry, though ambivalent, does not disdain the traditional notions of the frontier and of the cowboy. As actuality and as historical memory to this day, he believes the frontier and the cowboy still exert a presence in America.

McMurtry’s grandparents, he tells us in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, arrived in north-central Texas when it was still an unsettled frontier in the 1880s and claimed a tract of land near a seeping spring. His parents continued on this scruffy spread, though later moving a short distance to town while still ranching (McMurtry now owns the old home in which he grew up). The writer’s frontier “memory” reaches back to this time of “root hog or die” in an inhospitable and frequently dangerous land. It was a lonely life, and disappointment was frequent and searing.

His father died a decade before Lonesome Dove and never knew that “one of his central desires — to be a trail driver — had found its way into one of my books.” An affecting passage in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen has the author recalling his father’s reflection toward the end of his life that somehow it hadn’t added up. He had not been an unhappy man, but, “in the end the two or three good horses [he had owned] seemed to mean more to him than anything he had done with cattle or the range.”

His father had “attached his heart to a hopeless ideal, a nineteenth-century vision of cowboying and family pastoralism; such an ideal was not totally false, but it had been only briefly realizable.” But disjunction between the reality and fantasy of the West aside, McMurtry became convinced “that the core of western myth — that cowboys are brave and cowboys are free — is essentially unassailable,” even as it suffers anemia in generational transmission, for instance in today’s “more genteel” country music.

McMurtry’s formulation that the vision was “not entirely false” in fact reveals its own truths. The settlement of the West of which the cowboy is the preeminent image was an interlude of liberty, with unmediated freedom for the individual, that is scarcely imaginable today.

The West of tradition, and truth, was a time and place in which a man could come to terms with existence through a willingness to survive awful hardships (or choose his own trail to Hell from a variety of possibilities).

For that reason, the cowboy continues to gallop across our culture, crowded and constrained as it increasingly is. That things were done that might have been done in an otherwise ideal world does not alter that marvelous passage of history. Men and women draw sustenance from the myths that shape their collective past. They provide an essential continuity that, in America, rested from the beginning on a rare stratum of ideals and aspiration. Indeed, the “myths” of the West contribute to undermine the idea that ours is a culture without a compass.

In a way, Larry McMurtry’s own writings also refute Walter Benjamin on the anachronism of the storyteller, as does the alternate self McMurtry is constructing “beyond sixty.” He has shunned the bright lights of the big city and returned to his homeplace, Archer City, Texas. Though the town is down at its heels like many small towns in flyover America, he is intent on turning it into a “book town,” buying up vacant commercial buildings and stuffing them with used books.

McMurtry reminisces about his years as a “book scout” — he thinks he has devoted as much of his life to dealing in books as to writing — and his travels from city to city and the hours spent burrowing in the old downtown used-book stores that are vanishing. Archer City now, he says, is “a kind of anthology of bookshops past — remnants of twenty-two bookshops now reside there,” with more to come as he now “herds” books instead of herding cattle as his family did for so long. “I still believe that books are the fuel of genius. Leaving a million or so is as good a legacy as I can think of for that region and indeed for the West.”

In much of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, the authorial voice is on the austere, even chilly, side. But Larry McMurtry as he emerges from it seems to be a man who in his “second self” knows where he came from and why he returned.
Walter Benjamin at the Diary Queen
Reflections at Sixty and Beyond
by Larry McMurtry
Simon & Schuster, 204 pp., $ 21

Woody West is associate publisher of the Washington Times.