Larry McMurtry
Mar. 23rd, 2025 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraWoke up in the middle of the night from a vivid dream:
I was on a bus, but then the bus took a turn off the familiar route, & I realized it was the wrong bus.
So then I had to think about which stop I should get off to have the best shot at getting where I wanted to go. Rick Raffanti was on the bus, too—a very old & withered Rick Raffanti. And I thought, Yes, of course: He has MS (in real life, he doesn't.) And I also thought, Those preternaturally young-looking men—the ones who look 18 when they're 35—always age badly when they finally start to go.
I decided to get off the bus where Rick got off the bus. And I kissed him on his cheek—which was papery and... moist at the same time.
There were two ways out of the street I found myself on.
The first was an alley that ran along the back of a clutch of little stores. Except the alley deadended against this massive cliff with very eroded stairs. I watched two young vigerous girls struggle up those stairs & thought, You (meaning me) will never make it up.
The second way was through one of the stores. And it was the most amazing store filled with all sorts of rare & beautiful treasures presided over by a kindly Black man.
Sadly, in waking up & then willing myself back asleep, I have forgotten what all those rare & beautiful treasures are.
###
Anyway, I neither Remunerated nor web-designed yesterday because early in the morning, I stumbled across Tracy Daugherty's absolutely terrific biography of Larry McMurtry & began reading that instead.
Tracy Daugherty is also an excellent fiction writer & the Larry McMurtry bio reads like fiction, not necessarily because the events of Larry McMurtry's life are so picaresque—though in many ways, they are—but because Daugherty sows so much backstory into them that the book is as much a biography of Texas as it is of McMurtry. Thus, the opening chapters about McMurtry's family & his boyhood—first on Idiot Ridge (!) and then in Archer City—read like Jim Harrison's most elegaic myth-making about the Old West:
This was the new Cold War Texas, redrawing the map of the state McMurtry had known, on which he could pinpoint, in this same area near Amarillo, the spot where, in the late nineteenth century, the sad last running of the buffalo occurred in the Panhandle. It was a single buffalo, begged from Old Man Goodnight on his famous ranch by a small, ragged band of Comanches who'd slipped away from their reservation in the Indian Territory. They showed up one day riding old, emaciated horses, wearing tattered feathers and scraps of white man's clothing. They asked Goodnight to release an animal to them. He complied out of compassion, giving them a ropey young bull, assuming they'd take it back to the reservation and eat it. Instead they let it loose and chased it across the plains—to the extent that their horses could run—the way their ancestors had once pursued millions of animals here. They killed the bull with lances and arrows, just to taste the old ritual, then sat silently on their exhausted mounts staring at the dead animal, reckoning with their longing and the staggering absence of what once was. A chilly wind from the north ruffled the rags of their clothing.
That is a perfect paragraph—from the way geography balances on the conditional, comma-separated clauses of its opening sentence, as elegantly as a gymnast on the bars, to the way a myth condenses from the mists of its imagery and the unsentimental dismissal of that last understated sentence.
The hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read it.
###
If I close my eyes very tightly, I can still summon up the smell of the McGill University stacks where I first discovered Larry McMurtry. (What was I doing at McGill University? Don't ask.)
The book was Moving On, generally considered one of McMurtry's less successful novels. But I liked it.
Moving On was the saga of the lachrymose Patsy Carpenter, filled with aimless graduate student angst and rodeos and Houston heat, so I don't know why I liked it. I didn't like any of those things. I suppose I liked it because it was immersive, and I like to be immersed.
I was in the library stacks at McGill University hiding out from a complicated love life and also from a physics class that I was flunking. I didn't much care that I was flunking because it was clear my complicated love life would shortly take me very far away from Montreal, back to California where I would never, ever mention my McGill transcripts.
That was also the winter I discovered Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God! As a child, I had been obsessed with Greek, Egyptian, & Roman mythology, used to organize complicated role-playing games with my fellow students at Hunter High School, then an all-girls school: You be Zeus, I'll be Hermes. (Trickster gods have always appealed to me.)
Campbell offered validation for the syncretism I saw everywhere. Still see everywhere, beneath the forces of social conformity constantly rallying to restrict human imaginations.
###
McMurtry himself turns out to be a fairly unpleasant character. Not only looks like my old Monterey neighbor Bill Sullivan but seems to have that same obsessive personality, hiding out behind a cloak of gee-whiz affability.
One thing that really surprised me: I had always assumed McMurtry was kind of a laidback writer, as casual as his casual prose. In fact, he was not: He was deeply steeped in the canonical literature of the 19th century. Like the structure of The Last Picture Show—my favorite McMurtry novel—was actually patterned after the structure of Middlemarch.
Who knew?
And, of course, McMurtry is a very uneven writer. Not just from book to book, but also within the same book. Like The Evening Star is mostly drek but right at the end of the novel comes one of the most moving scenes I have ever read.
I got about 200 pages into the biography, and I can tell I am reading it too fast.
So today, I will try to do some Useful Work before scampering off to socialize.
I was on a bus, but then the bus took a turn off the familiar route, & I realized it was the wrong bus.
So then I had to think about which stop I should get off to have the best shot at getting where I wanted to go. Rick Raffanti was on the bus, too—a very old & withered Rick Raffanti. And I thought, Yes, of course: He has MS (in real life, he doesn't.) And I also thought, Those preternaturally young-looking men—the ones who look 18 when they're 35—always age badly when they finally start to go.
I decided to get off the bus where Rick got off the bus. And I kissed him on his cheek—which was papery and... moist at the same time.
There were two ways out of the street I found myself on.
The first was an alley that ran along the back of a clutch of little stores. Except the alley deadended against this massive cliff with very eroded stairs. I watched two young vigerous girls struggle up those stairs & thought, You (meaning me) will never make it up.
The second way was through one of the stores. And it was the most amazing store filled with all sorts of rare & beautiful treasures presided over by a kindly Black man.
Sadly, in waking up & then willing myself back asleep, I have forgotten what all those rare & beautiful treasures are.
###
Anyway, I neither Remunerated nor web-designed yesterday because early in the morning, I stumbled across Tracy Daugherty's absolutely terrific biography of Larry McMurtry & began reading that instead.
Tracy Daugherty is also an excellent fiction writer & the Larry McMurtry bio reads like fiction, not necessarily because the events of Larry McMurtry's life are so picaresque—though in many ways, they are—but because Daugherty sows so much backstory into them that the book is as much a biography of Texas as it is of McMurtry. Thus, the opening chapters about McMurtry's family & his boyhood—first on Idiot Ridge (!) and then in Archer City—read like Jim Harrison's most elegaic myth-making about the Old West:
This was the new Cold War Texas, redrawing the map of the state McMurtry had known, on which he could pinpoint, in this same area near Amarillo, the spot where, in the late nineteenth century, the sad last running of the buffalo occurred in the Panhandle. It was a single buffalo, begged from Old Man Goodnight on his famous ranch by a small, ragged band of Comanches who'd slipped away from their reservation in the Indian Territory. They showed up one day riding old, emaciated horses, wearing tattered feathers and scraps of white man's clothing. They asked Goodnight to release an animal to them. He complied out of compassion, giving them a ropey young bull, assuming they'd take it back to the reservation and eat it. Instead they let it loose and chased it across the plains—to the extent that their horses could run—the way their ancestors had once pursued millions of animals here. They killed the bull with lances and arrows, just to taste the old ritual, then sat silently on their exhausted mounts staring at the dead animal, reckoning with their longing and the staggering absence of what once was. A chilly wind from the north ruffled the rags of their clothing.
That is a perfect paragraph—from the way geography balances on the conditional, comma-separated clauses of its opening sentence, as elegantly as a gymnast on the bars, to the way a myth condenses from the mists of its imagery and the unsentimental dismissal of that last understated sentence.
The hackles on the back of my neck stood up when I read it.
###
If I close my eyes very tightly, I can still summon up the smell of the McGill University stacks where I first discovered Larry McMurtry. (What was I doing at McGill University? Don't ask.)
The book was Moving On, generally considered one of McMurtry's less successful novels. But I liked it.
Moving On was the saga of the lachrymose Patsy Carpenter, filled with aimless graduate student angst and rodeos and Houston heat, so I don't know why I liked it. I didn't like any of those things. I suppose I liked it because it was immersive, and I like to be immersed.
I was in the library stacks at McGill University hiding out from a complicated love life and also from a physics class that I was flunking. I didn't much care that I was flunking because it was clear my complicated love life would shortly take me very far away from Montreal, back to California where I would never, ever mention my McGill transcripts.
That was also the winter I discovered Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God! As a child, I had been obsessed with Greek, Egyptian, & Roman mythology, used to organize complicated role-playing games with my fellow students at Hunter High School, then an all-girls school: You be Zeus, I'll be Hermes. (Trickster gods have always appealed to me.)
Campbell offered validation for the syncretism I saw everywhere. Still see everywhere, beneath the forces of social conformity constantly rallying to restrict human imaginations.
###
McMurtry himself turns out to be a fairly unpleasant character. Not only looks like my old Monterey neighbor Bill Sullivan but seems to have that same obsessive personality, hiding out behind a cloak of gee-whiz affability.
One thing that really surprised me: I had always assumed McMurtry was kind of a laidback writer, as casual as his casual prose. In fact, he was not: He was deeply steeped in the canonical literature of the 19th century. Like the structure of The Last Picture Show—my favorite McMurtry novel—was actually patterned after the structure of Middlemarch.
Who knew?
And, of course, McMurtry is a very uneven writer. Not just from book to book, but also within the same book. Like The Evening Star is mostly drek but right at the end of the novel comes one of the most moving scenes I have ever read.
I got about 200 pages into the biography, and I can tell I am reading it too fast.
So today, I will try to do some Useful Work before scampering off to socialize.
