LARRY McMURTRY: A WRITER, A READER, A TEXAN
By Bob Vickrey
                                                    
Waco Tribune-Herald, December 26, 2010

The list of Texans who have spent their writing lives chronicling their roots is rather long and impressive and includes names like Dobie, Webb, and Graves.

For many years J. Frank Dobie was considered the preeminent voice of Texas and southwestern culture. Walter Prescott Webb was the esteemed historian whose books put the American West in a broader national and international perspective.

John Graves evoked the spirit of the land and its people and capped his career with his beautiful elegy to the meandering Brazos in Goodbye to a River. Few American writers have fully captured the depiction of small town life like the late playwright Horton Foote.

Katherine Anne Porter, William Humphrey, Billy Lee Brammer, and Terry Southern were among other native sons and daughters who made their own indelible marks on the literary landscape.

However, considering a half-century of writing which featured an impressive body of work (more than 40 books,) including a Pulitzer Prize and countless other literary awards, Larry McMurtry surely has emerged as the Lone Star state’s writer of record. The 25th anniversary of the publication of his landmark novel Lonesome Dove was celebrated in 2010.

McMurtry is the son and grandson of West Texas cattlemen who was raised in a ‘bookless’ region. He said he could not recall even the presence of a traditional family bible which was found in most homes of the era. As a boy, he remembered listening intently to his uncles’ storytelling on the front porch. That oral tradition represented the method that most family and regional history was passed along to future generations.

He had the good fortune as a young boy of receiving a box filled with nineteen books from an older cousin who had been deployed in World War ll. He considered this gift to be the true beginning of his education which would ultimately lead him into a life of reading, writing, and book collecting.

McMurtry’s life as a writer began in the early 1960s with the novel Horseman, Pass By and made famous by its transition into the movie Hud. His book The Last Picture Show was published in 1966, and the resulting movie scored another hit at the box office and now holds classic status with most critics. Terms of Endearment followed with great success in later years, but it was Lonesome Dove which won him the 1986 Pulitzer Prize and cemented his legacy as one of America’s best writers.

While having gained the reputation as a western writer in recent years, he has always shown artful skill in navigating contemporary themes and has been lauded as one of the few male writers who can comfortably and accurately write women’s characters. He said he tired of fiction at some point in his career and began writing about his own life, focusing on time, place, and literature—and his relationship to each.

Even in his early books set in the Old West, McMurtry destroyed the notion of the good guys wearing white hats and the bad guys black hats. In his stories, good and evil always walked a tightrope in tandem and occasionally changed hats in the process.

He peppered his novels with prostitutes, common thieves, Comanche warriors, and often portrayed them as sympathetic figures. His books recorded the progressive confinement of the nomadic cowboy as roads, fences, railroads, and farms began to segment and divide the open prairieland.

McMurtry has spent his life debunking the romanticism of the West and completely turned the brief period which created the cowboy myth on its head while still inadvertently enhancing that legacy. He has painted a rather grim picture of the difficult, destructive and lonely lifestyle they lived. He has tried to subvert and demystify his subjects with irony and parody. Instead, readers clung to their own romantic images of the cowboy lifestyle.

He created two of the greatest characters in recent contemporary literature with the introduction of the two former Texas Rangers in Lonesome Dove—the pragmatic Capt. Woodrow Call and the whimsical and philosophical Augustus McCrae.

McMurtry has always represented the single biggest influence of my reading and writing life, and has been the force that has underscored and strengthened my Texas roots even though I haven’t lived there in more than three decades. His ability to weave history, folklore, and the philosophy of a region into his storytelling helped me connect (and reconnect) with the place I was born and raised. He taught me the strengths and the weaknesses of my home state and has always made me appreciate the best it had to offer—and also acknowledge its frequent maverick attitudes.

After seeing the movie Hud and then reading The Last Picture Show during my college years, I made a veritable dash to my local bookstore to discover his earlier work like In a Narrow Grave which introduced many of the central themes he would develop in later books.

While living in my first post-college apartment in the Rice University area of Houston, I was devouring anything McMurtry wrote and found out many decades later that he and his young son James had been living right around the corner from me. He was then a young English professor at Rice and was always rather conspicuous on campus by wearing a tee-shirt which read “Minor Regional Novelist.”

I never met Larry McMurtry even though I eventually got into the publishing field and worked with hundreds of authors in my career. I was always secretly a bit envious that Simon & Schuster was the publisher of most of his work—and not my company. Years ago I had prepared a few remarks that I thought I might use in tribute if I ever had the occasion to meet him face to face. I will even admit to rehearsing a bit.

That opportunity finally arrived on a business trip to Tucson where he was appearing at the venerable Book Mark. More than 200 people packed the old barn-like space and the staff there knew of my great loyalty to his work and arranged a meeting after the event. However, his presentation that night was listless and uninspired. I realized he was still suffering from a depression that lingered after a recent heart attack and by-pass surgery.

Many years later after reading one of his memoirs, I began to understand the dramatic and profound impact the surgery had made on his life. I later learned it took him several years to regain his voracious appetite for reading. He acknowledged going through the motions as a writer and felt a great distance from the words that he typed each day on the page in front of him. That evening he quoted William Faulkner who had said that there comes a time for a writer to break the pencil and just walk away.

I informed the surprised young publicist that I wouldn’t need that meeting with him after all. I decided to keep my undelivered tribute to myself, and then watched from the back of the room as the crowd of attendees lined up at his autograph table to deliver their own tributes. I was reminded that he had heard the gushing of fans for years and had listened to just about all the personal testimonials imaginable. He didn’t need mine. It wasn’t truly unique anyway.

Mr. McMurtry has always professed to be a reader first and a writer second, as his love of the written word and admiration for great books is manifested in his various memoirs and later works. His extraordinary home library of more than 20,000 volumes is testament in itself of his ongoing reading quest.

Thankfully, for his vast loyal readership, he chose not to “break the pencil” after that health scare and has continued his writing life. He subsequently published works of quality and consequence in the intervening years.

McMurtry now lives in his hometown of Archer City, a few miles south of Wichita Falls, and has assembled one of the great collections of used, out-of-print, and rare books in the country at his Booked Up stores. They encompass a good portion of the downtown area, just down the street from the theater featured in The Last Picture Show. He had once collected well over 450,000 volumes in various buildings that he purchased around town. Even though he held an auction in August of 2012 to pare down his stock, he will still have an active inventory of over 150,000 books.

I understand that he spends considerable time at the local Dairy Queen doing his reading. In fact, he claims that it’s still about the only spot in town to eat.

I’ve often envisioned the idea of making a trip from my Southern California home, picking up my brother in Dallas, and driving to Archer City to see the book town he has created.

I must admit that on the way out of town it might be tempting to stop at the Dairy Queen and press my face against the glass window and see if I could glimpse a solitary figure at a table immersed in a book.

However, before ever taking that trip to Archer City, I’ve taken a solid pledge to restrain myself from slipping into that booth across from him and betraying that promise I had made to myself many years earlier.

Bob Vickrey is a freelance writer whose columns have appeared in the Houston Chronicle and Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for the Waco Tribune-Herald and a contributor to the Boryana Books website. He lives in Pacific Palisades, California.