Larry McMurtry has been called many things—the Melville of the American West, the Flaubert of the frontier, the Tolstoy of the plains. These are weighty comparisons, and they probably have more to do with the needs of the country’s reading community than with the author’s own talents. He lacked Flaubert’s poetic effusions and Melville’s abstract manias; he and Tolstoy both wrote panoramically, but otherwise had little in common. But he will be remembered nonetheless, because like these great authors he wrote a great novel: Lonesome Dove (1985), a swirling epic of love and sorrow, full of contempt for the myths and realities of cowboy life. His desire to demythologize the West may have missed the mark, but in the process he hit upon a masterpiece.
Two new books about McMurtry have just been published: Larry McMurtry: A Life, a standard biography by Tracy Daugherty, and Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry, a series of essays detailing the impact McMurtry made on the lives of fellow writers. Both books leave the same impression. Born into a dying way of life—cattle ranching—McMurtry could neither escape nor wholly disavow the romantic notions of the West, even though he claimed his oeuvre was dedicated to doing just that. This duality was captured in his sartorial choices: middle-class casual when in Texas, jeans and cowboy boots when in Hollywood or New York. A creature of habit, he wrote every morning and ate dinner at the same restaurant six nights a week; he’d have eaten there seven nights a week, but the place was closed on Sundays. A book collector, he eventually filled entire buildings—including an old car dealership—with thousands of books ranging from old pornographic magazines to novels about German composers. If the Western mythos was what McMurtry wanted to escape from, then world literature is what he escaped to.
For non-fans, McMurtry’s popularity can be puzzling. I had a similar reaction when I first read him. The writing was smooth, yes, and lovely. But it seemed to lack a vital element, a life force. He straddled the line between genre fiction and high literature but possessed the virtues of neither. You were neither in for a ride nor awed into contemplation. The writing felt flat. It didn’t lift off the page, much less lift you out of your seat.
From both Larry McMurtry and Pastures of the Empty Page, we discover that this wasn’t just the unsatisfied reader’s reaction to McMurtry’s work. The author himself went years without liking anything he penned, motivated as much by ritualistic compulsion and financial necessity as by artistic vision. He joked that Tax Day was always inspirational because he needed the next advance to pay for the previous year’s taxes. Later, he wrote seemingly to undermine and parody his earlier novels. Despite being a country boy, McMurtry didn’t seem to understand you could run a well dry. Or perhaps he just felt the business of publishing restricted his ability into branch out to new genres or geographies.
But McMurtry’s books sold: Lonesome Dove spent almost two years on the bestseller list. And they were adapted. Peter Bogdanovich’s treatment of The Last Picture Show (theatrically released in 1971) is still regarded by many as one of the best films of all time. Even his lesser novels are defended by readers—one of the many perks of writing a masterpiece is that all your other efforts can be defended by the claim that they just aren’t appreciated because they’re unfairly compared to the sublime. But why, if the writing is just a beautiful corpse? Because, as McMurtry said himself, good fiction creates its own audience. And that’s what McMurtry’s books did. Through them he created an audience that wanted not just an expression of melancholic resignation but also the communal experience of melancholic resignation. That many of McMurtry’s books feel dull and empty isn’t a vice to his fans. Nor is it a vice, for them, that this flatness and emptiness seems to stem from the writer’s mood rather than writerly affectation. Misery isn’t the point: it’s commiseration. His suffering, alongside the reader’s, is what makes McMurtry’s writing so seductive, and finally what makes Lonesome Dove a masterpiece.
McMurtry’s sorrow stemmed in part from his struggles with work–life balance. For those immersed in a creative endeavor, whether it be writing a novel or starting a business, daily responsibilities can feel overwhelming, if not apocalyptic. This is why many authors write in the morning: they want to get the work out of the way before the pulsating weight of daily life begins to fill their head. It seems McMurtry wrote obsessively to avoid this pulsating. No wonder, then, that he called writing unhealthy and had his writer-protagonist in All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers (1972) drown his manuscript in the Rio Grande. He just wanted the pulsating to stop.
McMurtry wasn’t a complicated man. He wrote. He married, divorced, and re-married. He struggled. He mythologized and de-mythologized and mythologized while de-mythologizing. He drove around the country buying books. He kept a harem of female friends. He made his money, like most novelists who can, by getting his books adapted for film and television. And he resented this fact. He praised “the culture of the book,” because the culture of the book was for him what the plains were to his father and his father’s father—where suffering was given meaning. Like them, he didn’t love the work, but he loved that work made his suffering noble. And if his books meandered or seemed uneven, he could say, like his cowboy forefathers, You weren’t there. You didn’t feel the wind and the storms. Most of all, you didn’t feel the weight of that great emptiness.