Deep dive into a ‘minor regional novelist’
I read “Moving On” in the summer of 1970 as I was finishing graduate school at Cornell and about to be moving on myself to Houston and a job at Rice University. It was the first Larry McMurtry novel I read, and I read it in a way I don’t usually read novels — that is, not for its art, but for its information. What is Houston like, I wanted to know. And Rice. After all this time, I can’t remember what I learned then — except that Houston is humid and many members of the English department were interested in pro football.
At the time, the other contemporary writers I was interested in were John Updike and Philip Roth. “Rabbit, Run” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” were breakthrough books for me, the first because I had never read a novel narrated in the present tense and the second because I’d never read anything as filthy or as funny. McMurtry is a more traditional novelist, but he gives us characters such as the imperious, melancholy, hard-to-forget Aurora Greenwood, whom he surrounds with equally memorable minor characters. There is, for instance, the oilman Vernon, who lives in his car parked on top of a downtown garage. He is in love with Aurora and for her birthday he gives her a goat. He thinks it will help her tend her lawn by eating the grass.
All of McMurtry’s best books are filled with wonderful minor characters such as Vernon; and taken all together, they may be his greatest talent and most important achievement. They are always eccentric and usually both funny and sad not unlike many of Charles Dickens’ minor characters.
McMurtry died March 25 at 84. Much has been written about his national acclaim in these pages, the New York Times and elsewhere. I’m interested in something else. Where in his writing can we find his self-portrait. For those purposes, my favorite moment in all of his novels is the opening of “Duane’s Depressed”: “Two years into his sixties, Duane Moore — a man who had driven pickups for as long as he had been licensed — parked his pickup in his own carport one day and began to walk wherever he went. … He didn’t want to be in the cab of a pickup anymore because being in the cab of a pickup suddenly made him wonder what had happened to his life.”
Is this sadder than it is funny, or funnier than it is sad? And I have often wondered how much of McMurtry himself is in Duane and ready to take a new route. He published “Lonesome Dove” in 1985, which won the Pulitzer Prize and great popular acclaim. (“I hate McMurtry,” a friend of mine said. “He made ‘Lonesome Dove’ too short.”) But McMurtry himself was unhappy with the way the book was received. He had begun to doubt the value of all his work, then required quadruple-bypass surgery, and entered a long period of depression.
He published “Duane’s Depressed” in 1999 the year he also published “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.” In it he begins to think about the relationship between place, the community it locates, and memory and the loss of oral storytelling. He writes: “The question I want to investigate is how someone like myself, growing up in a place that had just been settled, and a place moreover in which nothing of historical or cultural consequence had ever happened, became a novelist instead of being content to worry over an old woman who had been traded for skunk hides, or a dairy farmer who had given away to despair.”
McMurtry wore a shirt with “Minor Regional Novelist” printed on it. That phrase makes me think of being assigned in graduate school Hamlin Garland’s “Main Traveled Roads.” (One of your favorites too? Wikipedia calls it an “undisputed American classic.”) Garland wrote about the upper Midwestern prairies states such as South Dakota and Wisconsin and called this region the Middle Borders. Texas is more than a geographical region, as California and New York City are, and no one thinks either of them is “minor.” Or merely a region. He was kidding with the slogan on his shirt, but perhaps also confessing his doubts about himself.
When Duane can’t overcome his depression by walking it off, he goes to see a psychiatrist. He doesn’t notice that she’s lesbian and falls in love with her. She says he needs a rehabilitative distraction and tells him not to come back until he has read Proust. “In Search of Lost Time” is well over 3,000 pages, but there is nobody better than Proust to read if you are thinking about place and memory. I want to believe McMurtry himself read Proust (or more likely reread him) for the inspiration he felt he needed. And then I have to realize that after 1999 he published nothing as good as “Terms of Endearment” or even “Cadillac Jack.”
One of the Texas writers he most admired was the poet Vassar Miller. She published 10 books over 40 years, won the Texas Institute of Letters prize three times, and was named Poet Laureate of Texas in 1988. All her life, she suffered from severe cerebral palsy, and when McMurtry praises her, the virtue he singles out is her “physical, intellectual, and moral tenacity.” Reading Proust takes tenacity. Duane shows that he has some tenacity. McMurtry had some too. He wrote 38 books and many screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain,” for which he won an Oscar.
“All of My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers” is the story of Danny Deck, a young novelist who has just published his first book. Published in 1972, it’s a wild and crazy picaresque story, and it seems to be McMurtry’s version of “a portrait of the artist as a young man.” “All My Friends” is one of my favorites, despite its sad and empty ending. Danny Deck remains a minor regional novelist. I wish McMurtry had also produced a full portrait of the mature author who, like himself, was a major American writer.