Published: December 10, 2009
Larry McMurtry has won a Pulitzer Prize, for his novel “Lonesome Dove,” published in 1985. His criticism appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, this country’s leading journal of mandarin literary opinion. He won an Academy Award for writing, with Diana Ossana, the screenplay for the film “Brokeback Mountain.” For two years in the early 1990s he was the American president of PEN, the august literary and human-rights organization.
Larry McMurtry
Yet Mr. McMurtry, who is 73 and has written some 40 books of fiction, essays and memoir, nonetheless feels like a man who gets no — or at least not much — respect. His books are rarely reviewed, he complains in his new memoir, “Literary Life,” and the reviews he does get aren’t interesting or intelligent. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long disinterest in me?” he asks. “I shouldn’t, and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.”
Mr. McMurtry is willing to hunker down, in his rambling house in Archer City, Tex., and take the long view. “Time will sort us out, determine who was really good from who was mediocre,” he writes in “Literary Life.” But he adds, sounding deflated: “This does not mean that I think I’m very likely to make the high-end cut. Little of my work in fiction is pedestrian, but, on the other hand, none of it is really great. Maybe it will seem better to readers 50 years from now than it does to me today.”
If Mr. McMurtry has trouble knowing where he stands, he hasn’t made it easy for the rest of us to know, either. He writes so much that supply outstrips demand. A lot of his stuff verges on being — how to put this? — typed rather than written. He’s published more guff, over the past 50 years, than just about any other major (semimajor? majorish?) American writer.
It’s not just that Mr. McMurtry has written his share of not-good novels (“Somebody’s Darling,” his creaky “Berrybender Narratives”). He also tends to muddy the memories of his best ones (“The Last Picture Show,” “Lonesome Dove,” “Terms of Endearment”) by writing sequels to them, sequels that sometimes turn into tetralogies or even into, oh no, quintets.
Mr. McMurtry’s fans have to work to uncover his good stuff, which is often mixed in with the lesser stuff. He may be right to suggest, in his new memoir, that his nonfiction might outlive his fiction. His essay collection “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” (1999) is as sweet, tart and intellectually crunchy today as a freshly made lemon-lime snow cone.
“Literary Life” isn’t going to win Mr. McMurtry new converts. It’s as slack and distracted a memoir as I’ve read in years, packed with scenes and observations that are repeated nearly verbatim from his last memoir, “Books” (2008). It skims the surface of Mr. McMurtry’s life; few moments seem genuinely honest or painful or revealing.
Too often in “Literary Life” Mr. McMurtry will sidle up to an interesting anecdote and then tell the reader to wait for his third and concluding memoir, “Hollywood,” due out soon. He’ll explain then. If Mr. McMurtry didn’t dislike technology so much, I’d swear he wrote this book while texting, or updating his Facebook status. His heart isn’t in it; it isn’t even next door.
As it happens, I’m an ardent admirer of Mr. McMurtry’s work — especially the criticism and essays, but also of early, emotionally resonant novels like “The Last Picture Show.” I’m an admirer too of his crotchety outsider Texas persona and the used bookstores he owns. (If you haven’t read Calvin Trillin’s 1976 New Yorker profile of Mr. McMurtry as used-book-buying maniac, track it down.) “Literary Life” is exactly the kind of slipshod book I enjoy more than many good books, panning for unexpected bits of gold about an interesting writer.
Mr. McMurtry rehashes bits of his Texas childhood in “Literary Life.” He grew up the son of a rancher, in a house utterly without books. He became a reader at the age of 6, when a relative gave him a pile of boys’ adventure yarns. He knew early he wanted to be around books for the rest of his life.
He attended North Texas State College and Rice University, and published his first novel, “Horseman, Pass By” (1961) when he was 25. It was made into “Hud,” the Paul Newman movie. “My novels attract good filmmakers, and they have from the first,” Mr. McMurtry writes. He thinks he knows why. “I believe the one gift I had that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with. My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.”
Mr. McMurtry skims lightly over his time in California in the early 1960s as a Stegner Fellow, his years living and writing in northern Virginia while selling used books in Georgetown, and the “literary gloom” he felt from 1975 to ’83, when he says he stopped liking his own writing. He returned to Texas, where he still lives, though he spent a good deal of time in New York City (mostly unhappy time, it seems) as the American president of PEN.
Strewn through this book’s loose narrative are stories about things like eating chicken gizzards and attending a stock car race in Texas with Susan Sontag, who was a friend of Mr. McMurtry’s. (About spying the stock car track with Sontag, Mr. McMurtry writes: “The world intellectual shed her highbrow trappings for a moment and became a big, excited American girl who was on her way to watch the cars!”)
The book recounts a dinner at Katharine Graham’s; a (supposed) fistfight between the writers Willie Morris and Larry L. King over a woman; Mr. McMurtry’s friendship with Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic; and the fact that James Taylor and then the Eagles optioned the film rights for his novel “All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers,” and Robert De Niro and Mike Nichols pursued it as well. Mr. McMurtry is an outsider with insider stories and connections.
The book is also, happily, filled with his literary enthusiasms, for the little-known fiction of Janet Lewis, for example, and the diaries of James Lees-Milne.
The final sections of “Literary Life” are autumnal. About three years ago, Mr. McMurtry writes, he noticed that “suddenly the tide seemed to be ebbing, although I continued to read and write at more or less my accustomed pace.” He began, he says, to compose more nonfiction than fiction, “in accordance with my long held belief that age doesn’t favor the novelist.”
On the penultimate page of “Literary Life” Mr. McMurtry writes, “What I have hoped to be, all my mature life, is a man of letters.” He is certainly that, even if he mysteriously — and frustratingly — lacks the keys he needs to open and swing wide the doors of his own full-to-bursting life and times.
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