Looking back on his prolific career, Larry McMurtry described himself as a "mid-list" writer, meaning that his novels didn't generate the critical attention that many of his contemporaries--Mailer, Roth, Updike--did, even though he put them in the same category, a rung below literary masters such as Tolstoy. Tracy Daugherty spends the better part of 400 pages trying to prove the ornery but lovable cuss from Texas wrong, unsuccessfully, in his impressionistic biography.
No doubt McMurtry had a fascinating, fulfilling life. He wrote novels about his dusty western roots and prairie values that occasionally exposed the cowboy myth (Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove) that has done so much to legitimize the destructiveness of macho individualism. He hung out with Ken Kesey in 60s San Francisco, eventually marrying the Merry Prankster's widow whose spirituality fit well with McMurtry's conservatism. Cybill Shepard, Diane Keaton, and Susan Sontag numbered among his besties. The women he loved (but did not bed) also included Polly Platt, whose work on screen adaptations of two of his novels--The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment--elevated them to the film classic status his novels never achieved. Collecting and selling books probably gave McMurty as much pleasure as writing them, and he accomplished the unlikely feat of temporarily transforming his rural home town north of Wichita Falls into a mecca for people who shared that interest. Go figure--there's a novel called "Fool's Errand" in that effort!
I began reading McMurtry shortly after graduating from college. My desperation to escape Texas meant that his early books never interested me but All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers resonated because I easily could imagine myself as Danny Deck, a young writer who embarks on a road trip from Houston to seek fame and fortune in California, leaving three women behind. My degree in English had required reading a lot of books I didn't really understand, so McMurtry's novel delighted me as much as it did a paranoid schizophrenic woman I worked with at the New York Public Library. Janice insisted that nobody ever had written more believable female characters, an assessment with which I agreed in part because, like McMurtry, I also always had enjoyed the company of women more than men. Just ask The Real Girls.
And then McMurtry published Terms of Endearment, perhaps the most moving and true novel ever about a mother/daughter relationship. Nearly 50 years later I recognize that the book meant as much to me as it did because it reversed my own situation. My mother--no Aurora Greenway, but definitely a force to be reckoned with--died around the same time and McMurtry's novel gave me permission to grieve our conflicted relationship vicariously. And the movie was even better, perfectly cast. It was the first film I saw after returning from Australia, just around the time it won Best Picture. Tears gushed like an oil well in West Texas.
I stuck with McMurtry for a couple more novels, which he published so regularly that it brought to mind Truman Capote's dismissal of Jack Kerouac: "that's not writing, it's typing." Writing came easily to McMurtry. He wrote ten pages every day in much the same way that a fitness enthusiast exercises but as I became more secure in my gay identity, his characters didn't hold the same appeal. Bad reviews led me to ignore McMurtry until the Pulitzer-prize winning Lonesome Dove, a novel I felt I had to read because of its critical reception. No doubt about it, he can spin a good yarn when he puts his mind to it, although the subtext eluded me completely: I didn't really think of it as an indictment of cowboy culture.
For Tracy Daugherty, that lifelong theme pretty much elevates McMurtry to first rank among American authors. It's not a bad argument--has the Lone Star State ever produced another writer so acclaimed and widely read?-- but his most convincing evidence comes at the end of the book, after McMurtry has met his longtime writing partner, Diana Ossana. She insists that he read a short story--a genre which didn't interest him in the least--by Annie Proulx called "Brokeback Mountain." Suddenly everything clicked: this extraordinary examination of what some called "homos on the range" provided him with the material he needed to explode toxic masculinity once and for all, with absolutely no doubt about his intentions. For the first time in his career, he really stuck his neck out and crafted with Ossana a perfect screenplay about Ennis & Jack with as much nuance and sensitivity as he had written about Aurora & Emma three decades earlier. Once again, tears gushed from these eyes and those of anyone with a heart. He and Ossana took home the 2006 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
McMurtry likely wrote his ten pages the next day, but for my money, less is sometimes more. He probably knew it, too. "Mid-list" is how you reach people, sometimes even changing their lives.
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