Mcmurtry saw the truth behind the Texas myth
He arrived suddenly, without warning, like a West Texas windstorm.
Larry Mcmurtry was 25, a man whose talent belied his age. His words could caress in one sentence, gut-punch the next. He was that kind of writer, and “Horseman, Pass By” was that kind of book, his first.
Here was a Texan who rejected the myth of Texas, a state where every act had been punctuated by a six-gun or a branding iron. Leave the Texas of popular culture to J. Frank Dobie, the folklorist who became a literary lion. Mcmurtry was more nuanced and insightful, and he searched for something more complicated than myth. Mcmurtry saw the truth behind the myth, the corrosion behind the tin star. The young author saw a state where the six-gun could not solve every problem, a state where high-noon duels became more personal and internal. He saw adolescents taking the first tentative steps toward adulthood, losing what had been their most cherished joy, the freedom and license to be stupid; he saw mothers and daughters struggling with the toxicity of their relationships; he saw middle-aged women looking back on wasted lives. He saw cowboys driving pickups, adjusting to modernity on the frontier. “Horseman, Pass By” was a work of stunning insight, but what would subsequent books reveal? Would they confirm his genius or brand him a onehit wonder? The anticipation was sublime.
The answer came soon and with rapid-fire frequency. Mcmurtry was the real deal. He would write dozens of books, each of which might have been the masterpiece for any other writer — “Leaving Cheyenne,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove.” These works stamp him as, arguably, the greatest of all Texas writers, a status that created a delicious irony — a Texan who rejected myth suddenly becoming mythic himself. Mcmurtry died Thursday. He was 84. His publicist said he died of heart failure.
We will remember him not for the promise he showed in his debut novel but for the promise he fulfilled in subsequent books. He wrote with a simplicity and grace that characterized his works from the start — about 30 novels, 15 nonfiction books, and many screenplays and teleplays. Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, called him “the Flaubert of the Plains” for his “sure eye for the bleak landscape of small-town Texas and the isolated ranches of the Panhandle, as well as the history of the West.” Born on June 3, 1936, on a cattle ranch in North Central Texas, Mcmurtry often set his stories in Archer City, which he called Thalia in his books. Archer City, his hometown, boasted a single blinking light, perhaps one too many for its population of about 1,900 in the 1950s. It was a pretty town, prettier than the bleak, hardscrabble village he depicted in his novels — a landscape that matched the psychological struggles of his characters.
“He cast a shadow across the landscape,” journalist and author Lawrence Wright told the Los Angeles Times. “There are very few other writers in Texas history that had the popular appeal that he did.” Mcmurtry won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterpiece, “Lonesome Dove,” in 1986 — a book later adapted into a popular miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. The writer shared an Oscar for best adapted screenplay with Diana Ossana for “Brokeback Mountain.” He also received a National Humanities Medal for “work that evokes the character and drama of the American West with stories that examine quintessentially American lives” in 2014.
“While writing these three books, it was clear to me that I was witnessing the dying of a way of life — the rural, pastoral way of life,” he wrote in his collection “Thalia: A Texas Trilogy.” “And in many of the books that I’ve produced, it has taken thousands of words to attend, as best I could, to the passing of the cowboy.”
Those thousands of words began with a sentence in “Horseman, Pass By” that captured his grit and grace: “I remember how green the early oat fields were, that year, and how the plains looked in April, after the mesquite leafed out.”
Those words appeared in 1961, and we have been reading this great writer ever since.