On the last Friday night of March, when I got up from my
computer my glance fell on a bookshelf as I passed, and fixed for a moment on
one slim book:
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry
McMurtry. I reflected for a second that
it was the book that got me started on my “History of My Reading” series here,
the only successful format I’ve found for any sort of autobiographical
exploration. I’ve been researching and
writing it for several years now, with 45 entries, and I haven’t gotten past
1969.
Then I took the ipad off the kitchen counter and into my
den/library/mancave to do the New York Times Spelling Bee. Scrolling down to it I saw Larry McMurtry’s
obituary. He’d died the day before.
McMurtry had been publishing novels for a decade before I
was aware of his work. But he certainly
started with a bang—his first novel Horseman, Pass By was immediately
made into Hud, a classic Paul Newman movie. His next two novels were also made into movies, though The
Last Picture Show didn’t hit screens until 1971.
I probably was first aware of his name in connection with
that film, though I have no memory of either reading the novel or seeing the
entire movie.. But I probably did, at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge,
MA. when its director and co-star came to town a few years later. McMurtry’s luck with selling
stories to the movies had its downside, not so much from the flops as from the
successes, particularly the iconic Lonesome Dove miniseries and the Terms
of Endearment feature, which will overshadow the books at least until they
become more readily available than the movies, and people who remember the movies die out.
My first clear memory of his name is also from the early
70s, when I saw it on the cover of a novel titled
All My Friends Are Going
To Be Strangers. The title pissed
me off, because it was too close to a title I’d intended to use:
Friends And
Other Strangers, which admittedly I’d stolen from a Bob Dylan song (and who
knows who that famous packrat stole it from.)
I think I was mostly pissed off because I hadn’t written the book yet
that the title would go on, and this guy McMurtry had.
I was resentful
enough that I refused to read the book.
Then one subsequent Sunday afternoon, visiting a young woman I’d
recently met, I saw the paperback of this novel lying on a coffee table, at
almost the precise moment that I realized I was never going to see this woman
again. Somehow I took that as a sign
that the whole point of this non-relationship was to point me back to this
book.
So I bought it, I read it, I loved it, and read it again. I
liked the character of young Danny Deck and the laconic yet precise, sometimes
passionate and often bewildered first person voice of the narrative. It was a book of its time and a book of my 20s.
Then shortly after his novel
Terms of Endearment was
published, I met McMurtry in Washington.
By then I was editing an alternative weekly, Washington Newsworks, and
our publisher was the sister of a McMurtry lady friend, and possibly a partner
in his Washington bookstore. So when I
went to a public talk McMurtry gave, I had an introduction.
I don’t remember anything about meeting him after the talk,
except that it was brief. I was mostly
interested in getting him to write something for the paper. What I chiefly remember is my impression of
his talk. I was astounded at his
voice: indolent, insolent and insinuating, or in a
word, Texan. Of course I knew he was
Texan, and that the Danny Deck novel was set in contemporary Texas. But when I read that dialogue, I didn’t hear
Texas voices in my head. That remained
true for his novels set in contemporary times that I read later. Some essays published after his death
fixated on the resonance of Texas cities and scenes in his novels. To me all of that was irrelevant. (In my own defense, I’ll point out that none
of the major characters in the movie version of Terms of Endearment
sound particularly Texan, and the words sound just fine.)
Probably my period of sustained attention to McMurtry’s
novels was in the late 70s and early 1980s—the pre-
Lonesome Dove
80s. This was the period of
Somebody’s
Darling (a novel about Hollywood he later denigrated),
Cadillac Jack and
The Desert
Rose (the novel set in Las Vegas that years later he called his favorite.) I read these, while re-reading
All My
Friends... and
Terms of Endearment, which by then was a hit movie
with Jack Nicholson and Shirley McLaine in great late performances, and Debra
Winger in one of the best performances ever.
It was around then that I had my first and only conversation
with Larry McMurtry. (It hadn’t even
occurred to me when I was in Washington that I could have walked into his
Georgetown bookstore and chatted many times.
Sometimes my cluelessness astonishes me. Though I recall this was also
an occasional quality of Danny Deck.)
My Washington paper was no more, and I was back in my Pennsylvania home town when I tried to
contact McMurtry for some freelance story I was working on—I don’t remember how
or what the story was. But one day the
phone rang and it was him. He didn’t have
much to say about whatever it was I called him about—it must have had something
to do with movies because when he demurred, he noted that he enjoyed the people
he worked with there and wanted to continue.
So instead we talked about his books. I proposed my theory that he’d written a
kind of trilogy that included
All My Friends and
Terms of Endearment. He agreed—he’d deliberately written that
trilogy including those two books, but I’d gotten the third book wrong. I thought the third was
Somebody’s
Darling, which does center on a character known to the main characters of
the other two. But even then, he
downplayed that book. No—I had missed
the first of the trilogy, a novel called
Moving On. I hadn’t even heard of it, which seemed to
delight him—he recommended it. It was
one of his books that, at least at the time, he liked.
Nowadays, this trilogy is considered part of McMurtry’s
“Houston Series” of six novels, which also includes Somebody’s Darling. The next to last in the cycle is Some Can
Whistle, which works out the final fate of Danny Deck. I so disliked this novel that it put me off
reading McMurtry for awhile.
But on his advice I had read and liked Moving On. Bill Holland, a musician and songwriter
friend in Washington who was becoming a book scout, sent me a copy. He had a
spare because it turned out to be a book club edition. McMurtry always considered his work as a
book scout and bookstore owner at least as significant in his life as being a
novelist. I wonder what he’d think
about the fact that I’d sold the few first editions of his novels I owned to
help finance my move to California.
He’d probably approve.
McMurtry subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome
Dove, and became a Lonesome Dove and Old West industry with novels
begetting mini-series after mini-series.
The books had a lot of charm, owing perhaps to his belief that the 19th
century western figures were basically English Victorian in speech and
otherwise. He later won an Academy
Award for the script to Brokeback Mountain, from a story by Annie Proulx
that he admits he should have written.
In the week or so since I read of his death, I’ve re-read Walter
Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which has to be a unique book in his writing
career. I noted first that his comments
on the dearth of books to read in his youth was a very small part of it. He did mention a cache of boys books that
got him started, and the My Book House volumes, both of which were part of my
childhood. These are the element that got me started exploring the history of my reading. But most of the book is not
about all that, exactly. Although it is a brilliant, fertile book, it's hard to say what it is about. The autobiographical underpinnings are obvious, but maybe it's more an autobiography of the West.
It started out to address the assertion made by Walter Benjamin
in his essay “The Storyteller,” that storytelling in the classic sense has gone
from the world. McMurtry notes that
this kind of storytelling—ordinary people telling stories to each other—was
something he experienced in his childhood, before he’d read a single book. But the places where these stories were told
had largely disappeared. In his
hometown of Archer City, the natural gathering place was now the town’s Dairy
Queen, which is where he read that essay.
He wondered if even there he could discern if stories were still being
told.
He wanders away from this promising beginning pretty
quickly, though he makes gestures of returning to the topic now and again, and
maybe in a subtle way he does. Some of
this book is very carefully written, deliberately so. McMurtry’s lifelong habit was to toss off five pages at the
typewriter every morning, as quickly as he could. For at least parts of this book he wrote slowly, with a pen.
But other parts of this short book contain repetitions that
suggest chapters were cobbled together from other sources—prefaces to other
writers’ books, etc. However, in
several places particularly, this book is uncharacteristically reflective. He expresses his ambivalence at writing so
much about the old West, when he knew that the Old West was basically a
Hollywood myth, and that the actual era of the big cattle drives and the open
range was the blip of perhaps 20 or 30 years total. He set out to de-mythologize the West, and admits that instead he
created a new myth, beginning with a Quixote story called
Lonesome Dove that got
out of hand.
On the other hand, he was in his youth an actual cowboy on
an actual ranch outside Archer City, and his grandparents—who lived with him as
he grew up—were authentic pioneers in that part of Texas. He was in that sense writing out of his own
life and experiences. He was especially
conscious that his father maintained a lifelong commitment to ranching even
though he knew it was a lost cause (he admitted to being in debt for 55
straight years.) Here McMurtry suggests the
Old West was a way for him to understand his father’s “essentially tragic” take
on his otherwise happy life.
The Walter Benjamin book’s subtitle is “Reflections At Sixty And Beyond” (He
was 63 when it was published) and McMurtry becomes especially reflective in the
final pages. He writes that his major achievement may turn out to be the
same as his father’s: he kept his good name and passed it on to his “gifted and
responsible” son. He considers that
maybe two or three of his books are “good,” (without saying which ones.) “I
would have liked my fiction to have a little more poise, a little more tact—but
those are qualities that seem to have found their way into my son’s songs, and
that is satisfaction enough.” His son,
James McMurtry, is a singer-songwriter, as now is his grandson, Curtis
McMurtry.
McMurtry made lit biz news in recent years when he moved back to his
hometown and amassed a mammoth number of books in his Archer City bookstores,
filling several buildings on its decaying main street. The town where in his youth the only books
sold were drugstore paperbacks now had more books for sale that any other town
in America. When some of those buildings started falling apart, he had a huge
book sale, but still retained more books than the few surviving used and
antiquarian bookstores of big cities possess.
(The decline of bookstores in his lifetime is a theme he sets besides
the melancholy self-defeat of the cowboy and the Old West.)
Unlike some book scouts and bookstore owners, he loved
reading the books he acquired. He
seemed to retain an enormous amount from his wide-ranging reading. (The daughter of his close friend and
writing partner Diana Ossana described him as “a data base with
opinions.”) The worst moments after his
major heart surgery in the early 90s, he wrote, was when he was unable to
read.
“In my seventh decade,” he concludes, “I feel a new haste,
not to write but to read.” It does seem
that he’d stopped writing largely for love some time ago. But he didn’t lose his pure love for
reading. He was eighty-four when he
stopped, the last Thursday in March 2021.
May he rest in peace. His work
lives on.
