Superficially, Larry McMurtry, 84, and I have had much in common (even more so before he went and died on me on Thursday, March 25, 2021):
—We both spent much of our lives writing: he, famously, prolifically, and richly, author of more than 30 novels, in addition to books of essays, memoir, and history, and, of course, screenplays; me, a mere flicker of a journalistic light, less prolific, and not rich.
—We both grew up in small towns: he, in Archer City, Texas (Thalia in the book and movie, The Last Picture Show, the most exquisite black-and-white movie ever made); me, in Nowata, Oklahoma (prominent in Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart and the unrelated movie Possums.)
—We both knew cattle: he, the son of an Archer County rancher about 120 miles northwest of Dallas; me, the son of a veterinarian whose private practice included large animals and small (but mostly large) and whose later work for the federal Department of Agriculture included disease eradication and control in cattle and BIG Oklahoma bison.
—We both won awards for our work: he, the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for the novel Lonesome Dove, a 2006 Oscar for screenplay for Brokeback Mountain (written with Diana Ossana, and based on an Annie Proulx short story); me, a small piece of one Pulitzer (“The Goodyear War,” 1987) and a larger piece of another (“The Question of Color,” 1994) at the Akron Beacon Journal.
—We both attended lesser known schools as undergraduates and later taught at those where we received master’s degrees: he, at what is now the University of North Texas and then Rice University; me, at Chico State College—now California State University at Chico—and Hiram College, where I earned a late-in-life MA and then taught Writing Biography, briefly, as an adjunct in the Weekend College.
—We both became involved with books beyond putting words on a page: he, as a dedicated antiquarian bookseller whose store, Booked Up, once contained 400,000 volumes in six buildings in Archer City (in 2012, McMurtry auctioned off two-thirds of his inventory with plans to consolidate because he wanted his heirs to have the store but not the burden of a mega-store, according to Dwight Garner’s obituary in The New York Times); me, I worked occasionally with my friend Greg Bethel, who owned Pickwick Books in Akron before his premature death, and later, after an early-retirement buyout from the Beacon Journal, became a bookseller and community relations manager for a Barnes and Noble Store.
I could trace further the similarities of our lives and careers—he on the high wire, me on a lower one—but I’ll desist in order to emphasize what a gift people like McMurtry are to their hometowns and how I have wished I could do for Nowata what he did for Archer City and, for that matter, closer to Nowata what Ree Drummond of Pioneer Woman fame and her husband Ladd have done for Pawhuska, Oklahoma. They have almost singlehandedly revitalized Pawhuska’s downtown, and certainly have reignited it.
When I wrote my memoir, which was published during the book-killing coronavirus pandemic of fall 2020, I suggested that Nowata, though larger than Archer City (there are two primary thoroughfares downtown) compared in many ways to the small Texas town but had less dust. The Last Picture Show could have been filmed on Nowata’s streets as easily as Archer City’s where The Royal Theater has been restored and has helped Archer City, according to the Archer City Visitor Center, become “a center for the performing arts.” Nowata’s Rex, the last time I visited Nowata looked closed and sad.
Possums, a sweet football fable starring Mac Davis, cannot be compared to the powerful McMurtry book and the award-winning film that grew out of it, but each evinces the subtle power and lasting pull of small hometowns. The difference is that McMurtry remained in Texas and a big man doing good for Archer. Forced to leave Nowata by Daddy’s transfer to California, I never made it back, getting only as close as Tulsa.
Small towns, even beloved ones, seldom offer the career opportunity of a larger city, particularly if you are a journalist whose ambition proved too big for his britches. Larry McMurtry could not wrangle cattle the way his father did but he did like to point out the ineffable connection to forebears, as Joe Holley put it in The Washington Post: “The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsman tradition, following animals across the earth,” he told The New York Times in 1997, using a favored analogy. “The bookshops are a form of ranching. Instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.”
Though he resented that some considered him “a minor regional novelist,” he nevertheless formed his finest, most-lasting work out of familiar Texas dust. Historian Douglas Brinkley, in the essay for The New York Timesreferred to in the preceding paragraph, wrote that while “Some claim the three essential books of Texas history are the Bible, the Warren Commission report and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, his Pulitzer Prize-winning winning novel about 19th-century cattle drives,” he preferred reading McMurtry’s “underappreciated Houston trilogy of Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment(1975), the best novels ever set in America’s fourth-largest city” as he rode out Hurricane Harvey.
So, at least for Brinkley’s money—and that’s pretty rich—McMurtry was not only good with small towns but also with words that put large cities such as Houston in their place. This says something, because at the end McMurtry was attracting slings and arrows for diminished quality as he “recycled his favorite characters in prequels and sequels.”
The irony is that even Lonesome Dove, his most respected work, as good as it was, had a most unintended consequence. “All I had wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West,” McMurtry told Texas Monthly in 2016. “Instead, it became the chief source of Western mythology. Some things you cannot explain.”
One such inexplicable thing might be how this kid from Archer City put an arrow right into the heart of not only Western mythology but also small- and large-town Texas. McMurtry may have been a “regional novelist” but there was nothing minor about him. Clearly, I was mistaken when at the outset I claimed we had much in common.
