Essays from West of 98: A Minor Regional Novelist
“When Augustus came out on the porch, the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. The were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had its tail.”
So begins “Lonesome Dove.” It is perhaps the most popular Western ever written and it begins not with cowboys in a saloon or in the heat of a cattle drive, not with cattle, not even with horses, but with two pigs wrestling a snake on a porch of a ramshackle house in a hot, dusty South Texas border town. Such was the wit of author Larry McMurtry, who died on March 26 in his hometown of Archer City at the age of 84.
The Great American Novel is a concept bandied about in literary circles. The idea is that such a novel would embody America and its national character, much as Shakespeare embodies the British Isles, Homer embodies the Greeks, and so forth. It is a question that lacks a true answer (much like finding the perfect country song), especially in a country like America with a national character that is such a melting pot of cultures. Candidates for the Great American Novel include such revered books as “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “The Grapes of Wrath. But “Lonesome Dove,” with its sweeping portrayal of the American West, is undoubtedly part of the conversation.
My fandom of “Lonesome Dove” is no secret. I have read the book approximately a dozen times. When Lauren and I got married, Basil Poledouris’ magnificent theme from the film was our recessional. I included in my vows the words carved on Deets’ grave marker in the book (and film), promising to be cheerful in all weathers, to never shirk a task, and to maintain splendid behavior. Lauren gave me as a wedding present a copy of Lonesome Dove with a handmade leather cover.
As much as I love “Lonesome Dove,” its author did not seem to share my love for his masterpiece, which is less a statement on the book itself and more a reflection of McMurtry’s general countenance. For years, he seemed unimpressed with its significance. It won him a Pulitzer Prize. It has sold over 300,000 hardback copies and a million paperbacks (according to Texas Monthly in 2016). The film (shown as a CBS miniseries) drew 26 million viewers and won seven Emmys. Yet, McMurtry was reported to not have even read the book after finishing it. He confirmed that to Texas Monthly in 2016, also telling writer Skip Hollandsworth that he had only seen parts of the miniseries, stating dryly, “I’ve got other things to do.”
Larry McMurtry was, without question, a unique individual. Interviews with friends recount that his conversations roamed wildly from one obscure topic to another, but he was thoroughly uninterested in self-introspection or the trappings of fame. When Hollandsworth asked McMurtry what drew him to fiction writing, he flatly said, “I like making stuff up.” For many years, he loved to wear a t-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist,” which was partly a shot at his critics from his early career, but also seemed partly a statement of his own self-effacing personality.
McMurtry famously despised Western novels in general. He was descended from Archer County pioneers, so his family history included the difficult stories of cowboy life on the rugged frontier. Hearing the family stories partly inspired his derision of the stereotypical Western as “country and western literature.” He lamented Texas writers who relied on scenery and nostalgia. When McMurtry rose to fame, he did so with novels (and their film adaptations) that were hardly the stuff of nostalgia and scenery—celebrated works like “Horseman, Pass By” (adapted to the silver screen as “Hud,” starring Paul Newman) and “The Last Picture Show.” In fact, these works were quite the opposite of the tropes of nostalgia and scenery. It is hard to imagine scenery bleaker than the town of Anarene in “The Last Picture Show.” When McMurtry finally broke down and wrote his own Western novel, “Lonesome Dove,” he set out to demythologize the legacy of the cowboy and the American West. In McMurtry’s defense, he steered far from the traditional tropes of the genre. Woodrow F. Call and August McCrae became Texas cultural icons, but they were hardly the idealized cowboys of John Wayne and Louis L’Amour. Call lacked people skills and refused to acknowledge his own son. McCrae focused his life on, ahem, pleasure and laziness, like an overgrown teenager. McMurtry sought to demythologize the cowboy, but in the brilliance of his storytelling, he simply redefined it and grew it larger.
While McMurtry won the most accolades for his fiction, his non-fiction essays are some of my favorites of his works. “In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas” contains this masterful analysis of changing Texas society and politics:
“I started, indeed, to call this book The Cowboy in the Suburb, but chose the present title instead because I wanted a tone that was elegaic rather than sociological. Nonetheless, I think it essentially that movement, from country to subdivision, homeplace to metropolis, that gives life in present-day Texas its passion. Or if not its passion, its strong, peculiar mixture of passions, part spurious and part genuine, part ridiculous and part tragic.
However boring Texas might be to move to, it is not a boring place to be rooted. The transition that is taking place, and the situations it creates are very intense. Living here consciously uses a great deal of one’s blood; it involves one at once in a birth, a death, and a bitter love affair.
From the birth I expect very little: the new Texas is probably going to be a sort of kid brother to California, with a kid brother’s tendency to imitation.
The death, however, moves me–the way of life that is dying had its value. Its appeal was simple, but genuine and it called to it and is taking with it people whom one could not but love.”
That passage was written in 1968. Yet, a half century later, it remarkably accurate and insightful in 2021.
Then there’s “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” in which McMurtry sits at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, reads an essay by German writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and is inspired to pen his own set of essays reflecting on life. It opens in 1980, with McMurtry drinking a lime Dr Pepper, a then-local delicacy available at the Archer City Dairy Queen, but unknown at the Dairy Queen in nearby Olney. McMurtry then waxes philosophical on everything from local gossipers to European literature and history to his family and other pioneers of Archer County to Garth Brooks.
Larry McMurtry ventured around the country before returning to his native Archer City, where he presided over a massive bookstore sprawling across numerous buildings and comprising close to a half-million titles. Alas, I never traversed the 100 miles from Stamford to Archer City to visit his bookstore. This was partly due to all those excuses about being busy in life, but also out of a belief in the theory of never meeting your heroes, so as not to be disappointed. I knew McMurtry’s reputation as different sort of character. If I ever ventured to his bookstore, I would have inevitably tried to talk to him. If it did not go well, or if he was unimpressed by my fanboy tendencies, then that encounter would forever stain my admiration for his brilliant writing.
Thus, I remember Larry McMurtry as I know him, from afar and with great admiration for his brilliance and wit. He was a small town son of the Texas plains. His relationship with Texas was complicated, but his love was true and immense. Thankfully, delicacies like the lime Dr Pepper are more widely available today. I have ordered them many times over the years and in Larry’s absence, I can vouch for their exquisite taste. So today, I will swing by the Sonic in Stamford and I will order a lime Dr Pepper in tribute to the greatest chronicler of Texas culture, the self-proclaimed “minor regional novelist,” who wasn’t so minor after all.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the “West of 98” website and forthcoming podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com.