Larry McMurtry
IN 1968, sensing that he was at a
juncture in his career, Larry McMurtry paused from writing novels
to publish a collection of essays entitled In a Narrow Grave.
From 1961 to 1966 he had published three novels that comprise a rural trilogy. All are set in Thalia, a fictional
town in Archer County, Texas, where McMurtry himself was born
in 1936; all deal with the decreasing significance of such rural
communities. Even though he confesses in In a Narrow Grave
that he has no "business setting a novel in a city,
Texas or otherwise" (p. 137), his next five books are city novels
in which traditional cowboys and ranchers play only minor parts.
In his essays, consequently, he not only eulogizes the "passing
of the cowboy" and the "god of the country"; he also bids
farewell to his fiction about the cowboy "mythos" (pp. xvi–xvii).
A definite pattern emerges in these eight novels that reflects
what McMurtry considers to be the significant feature of contemporary
Texas–and also the central fact of his own life–the
migration from "homeplace to metropolis" (p. xiv). In moving
from the country to the city for his setting, McMurtry shifts
from a frontier where the masculine ideals prevail to a suburbia
that he considers to be female. As the frontier myth disappears
from history into the celluloid of Hollywood films in his fiction,
the new West becomes a woman's place.
In McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), the
narrator Lonnie Bannon inherits from his grandfather Homer Bannon
a love and respect for the homeplace and its rural values. To
remind himself of the frontier days when these values were formed,
Homer keeps on his ranch two longhorn steers and a Hereford bull.
In the novel, Lonnie briefly experiences the frontier life that
these animals symbolize on an early morning ride to Idiot Ridge.
Exhilarated by the day's beauty, Lonnie races his horse home
and recovers unhurt from a hard fall at the corral, much to the
admiration of the itinerant rodeo star Jesse, whom Lonnie idolizes.
On this ride, Lonnie experiences the "masculine ideals appropriate
to a frontier" that McMurtry describes in In a Narrow Grave:
he has left the house to escape the "sexual tensions
of the household"; on Idiot Ridge he experiences "the Ride,
and the sacramental relationship of man and horse"; and he proves
himself deserving of male admiration and friendship by enduring
"bone-grinding hardships" (ING, xvii, 72, 27, 147).
Lonnie also inherits the destructive aspects of the male mythos, embodied by his stepuncle, Hud. The traditional features of the cowboy's culture become perverted in Hud's modernized version: instead of escaping to the range on his horse, Hud escapes to the town in his Cadillac; instead of idealizing and then avoiding women, he exploits and rapes them. Hud's rape of the black cook Halmea is a portentous scene for Lonnie. Horrified into inertness by the violence but also by the knowledge of his own sexual fantasies, Lonnie witnesses the ugly consequences of the cowboy's creed. Symbolically, Hud also kills Homer soon after all the cattle on the ranch are killed to eradicate hoof and mouth disease. Losing the man he most admires, and unable to become Hud's apprentice, Lonnie leaves the home-place, apparently to become a homeless wanderer like Jesse. With this novel, McMurtry thus sets the theme that he finds characteristic of his fiction: "the place where all my stories start is the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country, its customary and legendary range" (ING, 140).
In McMurtry's second novel, Leaving Cheyenne (1963), the
characters face this loss of their customary range from two perspectives:
the male homeplace and the female household. The plot follows
the lives of two cowboys and the woman they share in love, each
of whom narrates a section of the story. Because Johnny McCloud
remains the unencumbered cowboy his entire life, he plays a secondary
role to Gid Fry and Molly Taylor, who experience both the love
of home and the lonely homesickness that plague other McMurtry
characters. Two storm scenes in this novel epitomize the differences
between the male and female worlds of Gid and Molly. In the first
section of the novel, Gid is caught in a severe hailstorm that
he outlasts under his saddle. When he arrives home, his furious
wife Mabel chides him for arriving late and for losing a Ward's
catalog. In the third part of the novel, when Gid retells this
story to Johnny, he does not mention the quarrel. Instead, the
event becomes a humorous and memorable recollection of the frontier
mythos: leaving the house to escape his wife, Gid confronts physical
danger and possible death alone with his horse. Thus, Gid's story
forms another bond between himself and Johnny; they represent
the poles of frontier life, one as a hired cowboy and one as
a respectable rancher. In the second section of the novel, Molly
too must wait out a storm, but she has the comforts of a storm
cellar where she snuggles in quilts and eats an apple. Isolated
in the cellar, however, she is reminded how alone she is. As
a nurturer, Molly has spent her entire life serving four men
and two boys; she must now confront a future in which none of
these men will need her as much as they needed her in the past.
Although Gid experiences a loneliness similar to Molly's, he
defines himself more by the work he does and his friendship to
Johnny than by the women in his life. Molly has no other work
than the domestic care of men and she has no female friendships.
"By the time I wrote my second
book," McMurtry says, "I knew that to create memorable Texas
women I would have to go well beyond what could be seen or sensed.
The definition of themselves that Texas women had agreed to live
with was simply no good."
1
Yet Molly's complete dependence
on men makes her little different from the pioneer women who
were victimized by their men in the rural Texas of McMurtry's
youth. Although McMurtry liberates Molly from sexual conventions,
she is physically and emotionally abused by the male characters.
Recently McMurtry has acknowledged that Molly is not the strong
Texas woman that he had thought her to be. He characterizes the
love triangle between Gid, Molly, and Johnny as a "male
journalistic fancy," and he denounces Molly as "easily the
least legitimate" of his Texas characters. As he confesses, "Women
don't believe in her a minute."
2
Of McMurtry's first three novels, The Last Picture Show (1966)
contains the bleakest portrayal of the rural West. The central
setting is now the town of Thalia rather than the countryside,
Idiot Ridge becoming the site only for nostalgic picnics. Sam
the Lion, the one character who maintains a primary love for
the land akin to Homer's and Gid's, runs a pool hall that substitutes
for the ranch homeplace. In this place where no women are allowed,
Sam keeps a fatherly eye on the adolescent boys of the town who
are otherwise homeless; but this place also becomes the setting
of violence when the high school flirt Jacy Farrow is sexually
victimized there. As in all of his novels, a combination of black
humor and thankless sex evinces the dislocation and alienation
of contemporary westerners.
The concluding scenes of The Last Picture Show illustrate
both the method by which McMurtry likes to write and the themes
that he develops about Texas. He claims his stories begin in
his imagination not with opening scenes but instead with culminating
scenes. The closing of the movie house in Thalia symbolizes the
dying of a homeplace. Not even the picture shows can salvage
the old myth for the residents of rural Texas. A second culminating
scene indicates the direction that McMurtry's fiction will take
as he moves to urban settings in his next five novels. Sonny
Crawford returns to Ruth Popper's kitchen, where they silently
hold hands, facing an uncertain future. The wife of a latent
homosexual who neglects her for the high school football team
that he coaches, Ruth is the loneliest of McMurtry's domestic
victims, lacking both the dignity and lucidity of Halmea and
Molly. Yet her kitchen rather than Sam's pool hall becomes a
refuge for the adolescent who has lost his frontier myth.
McMurtry's first three novels remain his most popular books,
perhaps because all three have been produced as movies. Horseman,
Pass By was produced as Hud in 1963, a movie McMurtry
praises for correcting some of the faults of the story as he
conceived it; The Last Picture Show was released
in 1971, the screenplay written by McMurtry
in collaboration with the director Peter Bogdanovich; and Leaving
Cheyenne became Lovin' Molly in 1973, a box
office failure that McMurtry also dislikes. As a consequence
of these movies, his first three novels have been reprinted several
times and he has been praised for his realistic portrayals of
rural Texas. Yet McMurtry himself disowns these novels, regarding
them as products of an immature, adolescent vision. He particularly
dislikes the adolescent male characters who form the centers
of these novels. Instead, he prefers his female characters: "One
of my problems," he claims, "is finding men worth having
in the same book with my women. Women are always the most admirable
characters in my novels."
Moving On (1970) and All My Friends Are Going to Be
Strangers (1972) mark a significant change in theme and structure
demanded by the new setting in the urban West. In contrast to
the controlled narratives, the limited settings, and the small
number of characters in the rural trilogy, these two novels are
long and rambling, only loosely controlled through the points
of view of the central characters who wander around the West
looking for a home. In setting and character these novels often
reflect McMurtry's own life–his move from the country to
the city; his graduate studies at Rice; his interest in rodeo;
his fellowship year at Stanford; his early success as a writer;
his fascination with movies. In Moving On McMurtry collects
a bewildering set of characters–rodeo stars, Rice graduate
students and faculty, California hippies and movie makers–who
cross paths in an improbable dinner scene buried in the middle
of the novel. All My Friends follows the same kaleidoscopic
patterns, shifting in various bedroom scenes from Houston to
San Francisco and Los Angeles. The differences in the novels
arise primarily from the different genders of the main characters.
In Moving On, the female wanderer Patsy Carpenter learns
how to make a home in the city; in All My Friends, the
male wanderer Danny Deck remains a homeless exile from both rural
and urban Texas.
Of Patsy, McMurtry says, "She is selfish, snippy, and expectant,
a mystery to herself and to her men; but when her men finally
prove too stolid and inflexible, unable to respond when she tries
to nudge their lives into larger spiritual spaces, she does walk
out."
Danny Deck in All My Friends is happy only when he is
sitting in the kitchen of Patsy's best friend, Emma Horton, who
is married to his best friend. This irony of fate characterizes
all of Danny's experiences–he seems doomed to wander, excluded
from both the male homeplace and the female household. Danny
is a writer, and his career invites comparison to McMurtry's
life: a Rice student, Danny publishes a novel entitled The
Restless Grass that eventually becomes a movie as well. McMurtry
claims to like Danny best of all his male characters because
Danny is not a naïve adolescent like Lonnie or Sonny. Nevertheless,
Danny is no more successful at dealing with the loss of the rural
male myth that he knows only through legend. In a second novel,
not yet published, he idealizes the life of Granny Deck, a pioneer
on Idiot Ridge whom he never knew. Uncle Laredo, his only living
link to the mythic West, maintains a bizarre caricature of a
ranch that Danny rejects. After wandering around California,
Danny learns too late that he loves Houston and needs to make
it his home. Made into a fugitive in this city by his in-laws,
Danny drowns his second novel in the Rio Grande and disappears,
ending his presence in McMurtry's novels with a legendary act
that signals the end of the rural homeplace.
In McMurtry's sixth novel, Terms of Endearment (1975),
Houston becomes the central setting for an "international
cast" of characters, a development McMurtry concludes was "probably
for the best" because his imagination had "been peopled
exclusively by Texans for long enough."
In the gallery of McMurtry's female characters, Aurora is Patsy's
successor. McMurtry likes her because she is "wildly selfish,
wildly irresponsible; crazy, demanding, kinky, arrogant, and
yet, an extremely endearing and lovable woman. But she does not
possess any of the virtues of a normal wife and mother."
McMurtry is especially fond of Terms of Endearment and
considers it to be the most mature of his first seven novels.
McMurtry's long flirtation with
the film industry led him to set his seventh novel in Hollywood.
Both he and the critics now agree that Somebody's Darling
(1978) is the weakest of his novels to that point. Although
it is linked to McMurtry's urban novels by the California and
Texas settings and by several major characters, McMurtry excludes
it from his urban trilogy.
In a review of his fiction, he identifies All My Friends and
Terms of Endearment as books that "an intelligent
reader might want to read twice" but adds that he "once
again lost the knack" by 1976.
McMurtry's next novel, Cadillac Jack (1982), contains
similar weaknesses, but this novel also proves his knack for
storytelling. The setting this time is Washington, D.C., where
McMurtry himself has been operating a bookstore since 1969; the
political and social intrigues of some of his characters are,
perhaps, no more convincing than the Hollywood scenes in Somebody's
Darling. The strength of this novel lies in the main character,
Jack, who narrates the entire story. Once a rodeo star, Jack
has become what his friends think of as a "self-made man"–he
is a scout for antique
collectors, traveling across America in a pearl-colored
Cadillac to buy and sell a potpourri of the world's antiques
and collectibles, from Sung vases to Texas boots. The emotional
core of the novel is his realization that he has no home. Like
Danny Deck, he finds himself very comfortable in the kitchen
of a thoroughly domestic woman, but she wisely parries his offers
of marriage. In learning to accept himself as a perpetual wanderer,
Jack becomes the most satisfying male character McMurtry had
yet created, almost a match for his strong female characters.
A brief comparison of this novel to his first two demonstrates
the pattern of McMurtry's writing career thus far. Idiot Ridge
and any corresponding nostalgia for the western landscape have
disappeared from his novels in Cadillac Jack. Now the
western past is represented by a cattle rancher who is a drug
addict; the modern West is run by a network of female real estate
agents who are directed by a powerful and dynamic woman living
in the East. In his first two novels, lonely women are encircled
and engulfed by men who both love and abuse them. Cadillac
Jack is peopled largely by women, many of whom use and then
discard the lonely men in their lives. Because of Jack's quiet
acceptance of his fate, Cadillac Jack becomes the first
McMurtry novel in which man and woman seem almost equal.
McMurtry's two latest novels inspire me to use both limits of
the superlative range to describe my responses. The Desert
Rose (1983) is as bad a novel as he has written. Lonesome
Dove (1985), on the other hand, is superb, a masterpiece
in the genre of trail-driving novels. My faith in McMurtry through
a score of years has certainly been justified by this promised
book.
I do like the premise of Desert Rose. Harmony, an aging
chorus girl, hopes her talented daughter Pepper will choose a
fuller, richer life for herself than the glamour of casino nights;
but in adolescent rebellion, Pepper ignores her mother's advice.
The flaw in Desert Rose reminds me of the weaknesses in
Somebody's Darling–in both novels, the idioms of
place and time somehow ring false. Like Hollywood, Las Vegas
becomes nothing but the tinseltown it appears to be, and there
is little to admire in either Harmony's naivete or Pepper's greed.
With little understanding of their fate, both women become victims
of men who control women's lives.
I like Lonesome Dove for a dozen reasons, one of which
is the character Augustus McCrae. Gus views his world from an
appealing perspective that is only hinted in previous novels
by characters like Roger Waggoner and Sam the Lion. Gus is content,
stable, confident, perceptive, sympathetic, ironic–an elder
in the classic sense. It is important that the novel opens with
his voice. At the other end of this massive book, a second voice
of reason enters–Clara, the woman whom Gus has always wanted
to marry, Clara, the head of a stable family. Other women in
the novel, prostitutes mainly, often retreat into full silence
in a victim's attempt to preserve their lives. Together, Clara
and Gus save them as much as they can; together, Clara and Gus
are equal in their bringing perspective to the violence and loneliness
of their world.
McMurtry's fiction has been pointing to such equality for a long
time. I also suspect that McMurtry has been able to create such
powerfully attractive characters by lifting his setting out of
the twentieth century into the past, where men and women can
both be comfortable with the places they have created for themselves.
Musing on the novelist's craft
in In a Narrow Grave, McMurtry offers his version of the
metaphorical house of fiction, which suggests the pattern of
his fiction. Home, he says, is "the place where my characters
live. I can never be quite sure whether home is a place or a
form: The Novel, or Texas. In daily life the two become crucially
but vaguely related, and it is difficult to say with precision
where place stops supporting fiction and fiction starts embodying
place" (p. ix). In McMurtry's fiction, two places are embodied:
the rural homeplace loved by the cowboy, and the household maintained
by a maternal woman. The homeplace has mythic force in McMurtry's
conception, but it is also a feature of the past. Without a myth
by which to identify themselves, McMurtry's male characters have
limited choices: they can disappear, like Danny Deck; they can
invert the myth to violent and perverted ends, like Hud or Sonny
Shanks; or they can learn to accept temporary homes, like Sonny
Crawford and Cadillac Jack. In the modern, urban West, McMurtry
suggests, women are the powerful characters because they have
learned to create homes without the support of a myth.
Notes 1. "Unfinished Women," Texas Monthly 5 (May 1977): 106.
2. "Approaching Cheyenne . . . Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw!" New York 7 (29 April 1974): 66; "Unfinished Women," p. 166.
3. Patrick Bennett,"Larry McMurtry: Thalia, Houston, and Hollywood," in Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), p. 28.
4. "Unfinished Women," p. 166.
5. "The Texas Moon, and Elsewhere," Atlantic Monthly 235 (March 1975): 34.
6. Charles D. Peavy, Larry McMurtry (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p. 74.
7. Bennett, p. 34.
8. "Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature," The Texas Observer, 23 October 1981, p. 17.
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
Cadillac Jack. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
The Desert Rose: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Horseman, Pass By. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin: Encino Press, 1968.
The Last Picture Show. New York: Dial Press, 1966.
Leaving Cheyenne. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Moving On. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Somebody's Darling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Terms of Endearment. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975.Secondary Sources
Ahearn, Kerry. "More D'Urban: The Texas Novels of Larry McMurtry." Texas Quarterly 19 (Autumn 1976): 109–129. Examining both style and theme, Ahearn concludes that Horseman, Pass By remains McMurtry's best novel, his fiction progressively degenerating since this first novel.
Landess, Thomas. Larry McMurtry. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. A well-written, often unkind but not always unjust evaluation of the author's early career.
Morrow, Patrick D. "Larry McMurtry: The First Phase." In Louis Filler, ed., Seasoned Authors for a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1980), pp. 70–82. Morrow reviews the strengths of Hud and The Last Picture Show from the perspective of McMurtry's having written two trilogies. Morrow finds the second trilogy to be a "firstrate group of serious novels."
Neinstein, Raymond L. The Ghost Country: A Study of the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1976. Neinstein finds displacement to be a central concern of McMurtry's first five novels. In what Neinstein calls a neo-regionalism, McMurtry's characters replace the actual land with a country of the heart, an imaginary, fictive place.
Peavy, Charles D. Larry McMurtry. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Peavy identifies four major themes in McMurtry's novels: initiation, loneliness, ephemerality, and marriage. He finds the female characters to be stronger than the male characters, and concludes that "McMurtry's urban Westerns represent his greatest contribution to contemporary Western literature."
Phillips, Raymond C., Jr. "The Ranch as Place and Symbol in the Novels of Larry McMurtry." South Dakota Review 13 (Summer 1975): 27–45. The ranch represents "a stationary vortex, a cluster of values, about which everything moves. It is home, the place to revere, the place to protect, to flee from, to return to."
Stout, Janis P. "Journeying as a Metaphor for Cultural Loss in the Novels of Larry McMurtry." Western American Literature 11 (Spring 1976): 37–50. Stout identifies three stages in the development of journeying in McMurtry's novels: the journey as an adventure or an experience; the journey as an alternative to an unsatisfactory life; and the journey as a metaphor of modern life itself.
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