Understanding Larry McMurtry

Steven Frye

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781611177626
• eBook ISBN: 9781611177633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An inviting, detailed analysis of the work and characters created by this Pulitzer Prize–winning writer

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Lonesome Dove and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Steven Frye considers a broad range of McMurtry's most important novels and offers detailed textual analyses of works such as Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Moving On, and Lonesome Dove to reveal the manner in which McMurtry engages the human condition.

Characters are at the heart of McMurtry's fiction, whether they are nineteenth- or twentieth-century ranchers, modern rodeo men, or women grappling with the angst and confusion of life in the suburbs of Houston. He has created characters rich in texture, such as Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, not only to encourage an understanding of the persistent force of American mythology but also to transcend type so that they emerge as quintessentially human figures grappling with circumstances beyond their control.

McMurtry portrays with depth and insight the conundrums of the modern moment and its relation to heritage, and he deals as well with the intensities of the human mind as it negotiates with a complex and sometimes indifferent world. In Understanding Larry McMurtry, Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of one of the most important living authors, one who has emerged as a central figure in a rich and compelling contemporary canon.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Larry McMurtry

After years away from home—writing novels, running his own bookstore in Washington, D.C., consulting on film adaptations of his many works—Larry McMurtry returned to Archer City, a small town in north Texas that had sustained itself for more than a hundred years on the cotton trade, ranching, and the oil industry. Archer City is in many ways an emblem of the American small town: vibrant and hopeful at its inception, a gathering place for trade and extravagant hope, wistful in its twilight as the pace of urbanization took people elsewhere. Like many towns throughout the country, it remains alive and by no means warrants an epitaph. But a description of it might best emerge from the language of historical memory. In Willa Cather’s terms, Archer City takes its deepest breath from “the precious, the incommunicable, past.” McMurtry’s departure and return should come as no surprise, because of course he never really left. Some of his most memorable novels transform Archer City into the fictional Thalia and Anarene, and, like many American authors before him, he found that to leave was the best way to stay. Distance seems to inspire that peculiar alchemy of imagination and understanding that in the end amounts to wisdom and beauty.

In many of his important works, Larry McMurtry portrays his native Texas, both past and present, with a vivid unvarnished realism and, in doing so, imbues the region with a meaning perhaps not immediately observable to the naked eye. Barren range becomes the interior landscape of mind, full of natural detail and texture, a strangely permanent resource of personal identity. For McMurtry, Texas always remains itself, but it emerges also as a grand symbol for the American West and indeed the nation as a whole.¹ McMurtry’s capacity to create characters bound in time and place but richly interior in their psychological complexity places him alongside the most notable practitioners of the novel form. People remain his primary subject—living, breeding, working, bleeding, and dying, always seeking, deeply flawed but sympathetic, frequently comic and endearing. They are universals to be found anywhere, yet they are distinctly American in their intense capacity for hope, their commonality, and their humble grandeur. As an author grounded in the novel form, Larry McMurtry has become that rarity among contemporary authors: a popular novelist to be compared with some of the finest architects of the human drama.

Life and Career

Larry Jeff McMurtry, the son of William Jefferson McMurtry Jr. and Hazel McIver McMurtry, was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1936 and was raised in Archer County, Texas, where he was first exposed to the people and places he would later fictionalize in many of his novels. He was only one generation or so removed from the age of the great cattle drives, and much of the culture remained, transposed in certain ways into the time of the oil derrick but retaining many of its former cultural contours: the roughness, violence, intolerance, the emphasis on courage and hard work, even the religious fundamentalism. He was also exposed to a practice that influenced more than his themes and permeates his writerly practice—storytelling and humor laced with elements of the tall tale. These experiences, together with the historical circumstances of historical change in the Southwest that he observed, became central to his work. Located near Archer City, his first home was remote and rural. McMurtry’s grandparents, who were originally from Missouri, moved into the area in 1889, buying a parcel of ranch land near Windthorst, eighteen miles from Archer City. His parents first made their home on the paternal ranch, and McMurtry lived there until he was six years old. His mother wanted a more social environment where she could indulge her love of bridge and conversation, and in 1942 she convinced McMurtry’s father to move the family to Archer City, where McMurtry’s three siblings were born. Archer City was a fairly typical small town of its time, tremendously religious, preoccupied with rigid moral codes with respect to sexuality, highly provincial and insular. Thus, in his childhood, McMurtry alternated from the open range to a provincial American town. In his earliest years, he felt vaguely out of place among the rough, independent, hardworking, yet anti-intellectual West Texans who lived in the outlying country. Always by his own admission “bookish,” he experienced the writer’s capacity to observe and remove, which served him well later and fostered his ability to draw the interiors and exteriors of his often idiosyncratic characters. McMurtry’s childhood was not atypical, and he seems to have demonstrated a range of abilities and interests. In high school, he participated in sports, lettering three years in basketball and one year in baseball. He was a member of the 4-H Club for four years and was both the editor of and a writer for the school publication Cat’s Claw. Many of his contemporaries in youth became the prototypes for his characters. One of his female classmates, Ceil Slack Cleveland, is thought by many scholars to be the basis for Jacy Farrow in The Last Picture Show (1966). Another classmate, Bobby Stubbs, was the pattern for Sonny Crawford in the same novel and for Duane Moore in Texasville (1981) and Duane’s Depressed (1999) and, according to McMurtry, inspired other characters as well. McMurtry and Stubbs were apparently close, and before Stubbs’s death, in the early 1990s, McMurtry inscribed books to him. In 1954 McMurtry graduated with honors from Archer City High School and enrolled for a short time at Rice University, in Houston, later transferring to North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), where he studied literature and worked on student publications, including the unauthorized Coexistence Review and the student journal Avesta. At that time, he began writing short stories.

In 1959 McMurtry married Jo Ballard Scott, and the couple had one son, James Lawrence McMurtry (named after Henry James and D. H. Lawrence), before divorcing, in 1966. While married to Scott, McMurtry earned an M.A. degree from Rice University, having written his master’s thesis, “Ben Jonson’s Feud with the Poetasters: 1599–1601.” He was awarded a prestigious Wallace Stegner creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, where he became friends with Chris Koch (the author of The Year of Living Dangerously) and Ken Kesey (the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest). McMurtry ultimately dedicated In a Narrow Grave to Kesey. He was a member of a group of writers who ultimately became widely recognized, including Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, Robert Stone, and Wendell Berry. This experience seems to have contributed immensely to his development as a writer, giving him exposure to other emerging authors and the publishing community. In 1961 he returned to Texas and taught at Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, as well as at Rice University, and he continued teaching intermittently throughout the 1960s while writing and publishing his earliest works. During his time at Rice, he worked at a shop called The Bookman and developed his lifelong enthusiasm for book collecting. In 1964–1965 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing. In 1969, McMurtry moved to the vicinity of Washington, D. C., and together with two partners started a bookshop in Georgetown, which he named Booked Up. Later in 1988 he opened another branch of the store in his hometown of Archer City, next to the Royal Theatre, which he immortalized in The Last Picture Show. Because of economic pressures, McMurtry decided in 2012 to sell the bulk of his inventory, retaining only a portion to maintain the store. On April 29, 2011, McMurtry married Norma Faye Kesey, the widow of Ken Kesey, on April 29, in a civil ceremony in Archer City.

Throughout his career, the settings of McMurtry’s novels have rotated among the frontier, the ranch, the small town, and the city, with most of them set in Texas but some in Hollywood, Washington, Las Vegas, or elsewhere. He admits to being somewhat conflicted by an attraction and a repulsion to all of these locales. His early novels, Horseman, Pass By (1961) and Leaving Cheyenne (1963), are set on ranches and farms and deal with the historical transformation McMurtry experienced in his childhood. The Thalia novels fictionalize Archer City and explore the intricacies and intimacies of smalltown life, and many other works, including Moving On (1970) and Terms of Endearment (1977), are set in Houston and Dallas and portray in detail human relationships and their complexities in the modern city and suburb. His well-known Lonesome Dove saga, which includes Lonesome Dove (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Streets of Laredo (1993), Dead Man’s Walk (1995), and Comanche Moon (1997), consists of historical romances set in the late nineteenth century in the wake of the Comanche wars and in the midst of the cattle kingdoms. This variation in time and place is mirrored in his own life. When McMurtry left Texas and moved to Northern Virginia, he resided there for nearly a decade. During the 1980s he lived in an apartment over his bookstore, but he kept apartments in Arizona, California, and Washington. After the success of Lonesome Dove, when he returned permanently to Archer City and opened Booked Up, his hometown honored him with “Larry McMurtry Day,” and he attended and even spoke. Many of his popular and critically acclaimed novels have been adapted into film for screen and television, including Horseman, Pass By as Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963, three Academy Awards), The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971, two Academy Awards), Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983, five Academy Awards), and Lonesome Dove (Simon Wincer, 1989), which won seven Emmy Awards and remains perhaps the most popular and respected miniseries in the history of the genre. Among his many accomplishments and activities, he has served as president of the PEN American Center, which promotes writers’ freedom of expression; in that capacity he organized support for Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the writer. Thus, in his life and work, Larry McMurtry has immersed himself in the human scene. His work demonstrates an intense preoccupation with the past, its character and richness, and its living reality in the present moment.

Overview, Influence, Character, and the Novel Form

In coming to terms with the largest cross section of McMurtry’s works, readers and critics confront a common conundrum, even a prejudice. He is among the most popular novelists of his time, and he is popular in a distinctively modern way. Not only have his novels sold millions of copies, appealing to a broad base of readers, but also from the beginning his work has been adapted into films, beginning with Horseman, Pass By, which became Hud in 1963 and starred the already famous Paul Newman. His novels lack the surface-level complexity of the work of the high modernists and of many contemporary authors who employ techniques and aesthetics similar to those of the moderns. His works are readable and often quite entertaining, but they make a different set of demands, sometimes vexing critics, who react with confusion to his complex and sometimes purposefully directionless plots. Still, while certain serious and acclaimed writers of the time appeal to a more limited audience, McMurtry has been widely read from his first work on.

Much to his own dismay, his later Westerns appealed to those who extol the myth of the West and the Western cowboy, though a careful observation of both the novels and the films reveals a strong revisionist sensibility and a firm challenge to the myth. In his early novels, there is a quality of whimsy and the appeal of love and romance, in works ranging from Leaving Cheyenne through the later narratives set in Thalia. These aspects of appeal are intimately linked to themes of transience and loss of place. Most have proven remarkably cinematic, and, judging from the popular success of the adaptations, there seems to be something inherent in McMurtry’s work that translates to cinema with an ease quite rare among novels. There is a host of possible reasons for this, but perhaps the most obvious are McMurtry’s remarkable skill with character and dialogue and his frequent involvement with the adaptations themselves. Often, the same vision that motivates the novel motivates the adaptation, and when it doesn’t, the characters are commonly so rich and interesting that “faithful” adaptation becomes a driving motivation of the screenwriters. It is tempting to conclude that McMurtry lacks the overt preoccupation with literary style typical of his immediate forebears William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and, perhaps most notably, his rough contemporary Cormac McCarthy. But close scrutiny of sentences and paragraphs reveals not only an identifiable style but a distinctive mood and flavor uniquely McMurtry’s own. Much of this is difficult to capture in a stylistic analysis, but it is very much a feature of tone. An excerpt from Terms of Endearment (1975) will serve as an example. General Scott is one of the main character Aurora Greenway’s many suitors, and he is well deserving of attention given his successes in life, but Aurora is playfully unimpressed, and she sends the General into fits of frustration.:

In his prime he had commanded a tank division, and attempts to get through to Aurora almost always brought his tanks to mind. He had even begun to dream of tanks, for the first time since the war. Only a few nights before he had had a very happy dream in which he had driven up River Oaks Boulevard standing in the turret of his largest tank. The people in the country club at the end of the boulevard had all come out and lined up and looked at him respectfully.… General Scott had many dreams involving tanks, many of which ended with him crunching through the lower walls of Aurora’s house, into her living room, or sometimes her kitchen. (101)

There is a playfulness and whimsy to the prose and the situation constructed, and there are many scenes of this sort in McMurtry’s work. Humor abounds, but beneath the humor and very much implicated in it is human frustration in many forms, in this case a man’s frustration at a woman’s willful ambivalence. There is even a conversational, oral quality to the language, and McMurtry is perhaps drawing from the tradition of conversation and storytelling so common in his region. The conversational quality and humor belie the underlying seriousness of situations involving human beings oddly and frequently on the verge of choiceless despair. Still, whatever literary characteristics might emerge from style and language have not (as in the case of other authors) limited his readership or intimidated filmmakers interested in successful story material. On the contrary, major directors and studios have been eager to adapt his work, contributing greatly to his fame, popularity, and general reception in the print media. But even in his Westerns set in the nineteenth century, there is nothing formulaic about his plots and characters. His storylines are frequently unpredictable, his situations stark and unsentimental, his characters often endearing but complex and deeply flawed. It is interesting to note that, given the success of the miniseries adaptation of Lonesome Dove, the television studios could not resist adapting the entire series, from the prequel Dead Man’s Walk (1995; miniseries 1996) to the sequels Streets of Laredo (1993; miniseries 1995) and Comanche Moon (1997; miniseries 2008). But they could also not resist creating their own alternative film sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove (1993), significantly altering the plot, sentimentalizing situations and especially characters, and reaffirming the myth of the West in ways McMurtry did not intend. Thus, there is something immediately appealing about Larry McMurtry’s work, and the principal challenge for the critical reader is how to read it carefully enough to move beyond the surface appeal, beyond the veneer of romance in the case of the Westerns and the pleasing nostalgia in the early novels.

It is worth remembering that McMurtry is among the most highly trained and well-read authors in American literary history, possessing an undergraduate degree in literature, an M.A. in creative writing, and a Stegner fellowship in creative writing. He has absorbed the tradition of the novel deeply and intensely, and he demonstrates that interest in his many epigraphs to canonical authors before and within his novels. He stands, then, at the end of a long line of authors who both were remarkably popular in their own time and emerged later as important figures in a literary tradition: Cooper, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, London, Dreiser, Hemingway, as well as Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, the latter two from whom McMurtry took the name he gave his son, James Lawrence McMurtry. Consistent with our best understanding of the novel form, a successful reading of Larry McMurtry’s novels must involve a reading practice attentive to what is valuable in his forebears: language and style, yes, but also the sometimes deceptive complexity and unpredictability of characters, universal in nature but situated firmly in time and place. Comprehending the importance of McMurtry’s work does in fact require this attentiveness to the complexities of genre, as well as a recognition of his deep understanding of the form, his varied use of subgenres, and his frequent and creative combination of them.

Readers who admire McMurtry might conceivably be confronted with a simple question: Which McMurtry do you prefer? Many of his novels might be conceived, in a term used by Graham Greene to describe his own work, as “entertainments,” novels designed for readability and surface-level appeal and not intended to be scrutinized rigorously. These might include Somebody’s Darling (1978), Cadillac Jack (1982), and The Desert Rose (1983), though some of these works deserve some attention for their presentation of his common themes. But among his many serious inquiries into the human condition, do you prefer the McMurtry of Lonesome Dove, of The Last Picture Show, or of Moving On? Although close reading reveals certain continuities in these works, such as the Texas setting, the preoccupation with the effects of change upon individuals and relationships, and the intricate and endearing flaws and limitations of people, there are significant differences as well. As such, it becomes important to chart the thematic preoccupations in these various works and periods, particularly as they relate to the subgenres McMurtry so deftly employs and blends. The earliest novels, Horseman, Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne, are set in the twentieth century, in a time by no means remote from the author’s own. They deal with rural and semirural settings and the waning ranch culture and its complex transformation into oil culture. They do not particularly qualify as historical romances in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, as do the Westerns of the Lonesome Dove saga or other Westerns such as Anything for Billy (1989) and Buffalo Girls (1990). But in terms of theme these early novels respond to many of the same concerns. Nineteenth-century historical romances, which derived their form from the works of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, are overtly mythical in nature. From the Filsen narratives that portrayed the exploits of Daniel Boone, the Revolutionary War novels of William Gilmore Simms, to, most notably, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales, this subgenre of the novel began to constitute an American national mythology, with characters that were larger than life and emblematic of the emerging nation’s values, self-perceptions, aspirations, and ambitions. Central to these works was historical change itself, which in a kind of sweeping dialectic involved the competing impulses of progress and reaction. In the best historical romances, there is a painful ambivalence that creates powerful tensions that lead to deeply moving narratives. Character are caught in a sweeping process of historical transformation that is not wholly positive or negative, as the forces of modern modes of social organization and new economies improve the world in many ways but displace premodern lives and communities in the process. Always imbued with an epic and subtly tragic sense of inevitability, people are caught in a historical dynamic they do not understand, as time itself with a kind of immaterial power alters the social scene and, with it, the inner reality of human identity.

Frontiersmen are simultaneously and perhaps ironically the icons of the past, born of the land, united with its natural processes, and acclimated to its brutish laws, but they also represent the vanguard of civilization,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1: Understanding Larry McMurtry
• Chapter 2: The Early Works
• Chapter 3: The Thalia Novels
• Chapter 4: The Houston Trilogy
• Chapter 5: The Lonesome Dove Saga
• Chapter 6: Other Works
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index