R.I.P. Larry McMurtry

To my mind, Larry McMurtry was one of great writers of America in the postwar era. Part of a group of writers who sought to examine and lay bare what they saw as the hypocrisy of American values, the history we ignored, the concerns we repressed. Of course the New York Times in his obituary wrote that McMurtry was “a Novelist of the American West” but the Times has often argued that a writer not living in the trial-state area is a “regional” figure, but that’s a separate issue. And misses the point of what the West - in fact and in myth - has meant to this country.

Perhaps it took a man born and raised in rural Texas to see so sharply the distinction between the myth of the West and its reality. The myth of the cowboy and the West was so central to his work which were often about people who lived in the shadows of those myths. Or sometimes as in the case of Pretty Boy Floyd, they were about a real person whose myth was something else entirely. The characters of Brokeback Mountain, which McMurtry adapted with Diana Ossana from the short story by E. Annie Proulx, want to be cowboys like they’ve seen onscreen green and read about, but of course there are no cowboys. They’re ranch hands, and they discover a loathing for the work.

Lonesome Dove, which won the Pulitzer Prize and will be the book he’s best remembered for, has all the elements of the Western mythology. The story of two former Texas rangers on an epic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana. The TV miniseries did as well – mores, really, since the miniseries had those sweeping vistas. But it wasn’t a story about that. McMurtry wrote the book to go after the myth of the cowboy from people like Louis L’Amour and John Ford and others.

Lonesome Dove also stands out because it has more plot than most of his books. And I say that loosely because it’s about a cattle drive, but it’s not really about a cattle drive. It’s an armature that McMurtry used. So many of his books - look at Last Picture Show or Terms of Endearment - are character driven stories. The books could be comic and melancholy, small and epic, stoic and epicurean, in ways that made ordinary characters sometimes seem bigger than life.

I think that’s one reason Hollywood fell for his work, and one reason why they were able to make the transition to the screen so well. Film and TV served McMurtry as well as it has any writer. Movies like Hud and The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and miniseries like Lonesome Dove are classics. And not because of their great plots but for the indelible characters. And you could see actors loving those roles, which were so rich and complicated and alive.

I’ll admit to a love for McMurtry’s nonfiction, about Texas and Hollywood, books and travel, and especially his 1999 book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. But I struggle to think of anyone else I know who’s read it.

McMurtry was perhaps his own harshest critic. Perhaps because he had such high ambitions for his own work. To take aim at the myths of the Unites States, and yet, instead of chipping away at the bullshit, the myth remained. And instead of denting that myth, his work only bolstered it in the eyes of so many. I don’t quite know what to make of that. I think McMurtry spent decades trying to understand that. I’m not sure he ever did. As he said more than once that “Lonesome Dove is the Gone with the Wind of the West” which he knew was good and bad.

One reason I’ve admired McMurtry was simply the life he led. Born the son of rancher, he eventually left Texas to study at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship where his classmates included Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey, only to return and teach for years. He ran an antiquarian book store for decades. He lived in Washington DC. He was the President of PEN America, where he led the group’s efforts to defend Salman Rushdie. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. When he won his Oscar, he thanked booksellers, and famously wore cowboy boots on stage. He also had something of a colorful life as a ladies man. But he was also a man who was always writing. And he was upfront about hating his own work, about the shifts in what he wrote and wanted to write, about his illnesses and depression.

He was a writer who worked in many forms, and in the end, I felt like I understood him a little bit as a person. Not abstractly but simply because he wrote about his life and his passions, he wrote travelogues and about books. He was a hard working and thoughtful lover of writing and reading. He wrote a lot of books and I won’t claim they were all good, but we never judge a writer for their worst work, only their best. And there’s a handful of his that I think stand up as well as any of his contemporaries.

As McMurtry once said about something else “it’s not simple, but it’s practical.” One could say that about his life. A child born in a house without books who became a man of letters, who traveled the world, dined with Presidents and Princes, and kept returning to Archer City, Texas.