Tom's Two Cents : A Larry McMurtry Binge

 

Some sage once said that desperate times call for desperate measures. It doesn’t really matter at the moment who said it, but right now it’s certainly true.

I am in the middle of what I can only call a Larry McMurtry Binge. Is it better than a nightly binge out? I wouldn’t know because in Mt. Vernon, at least, where I am pleasantly stuck, I wouldn’t be having a binge out, even if it were possible. (The closest I have come to a binge here lately was a few weeks or so back, when I had a couple of rum and cokes at lunch at Stevo’s and had to be driven home by my heroic EJK, where I got out of his truck and promptly sat down in the middle of my own flower bed.) Anyway, a McMurtry binge is much safer, and, at my age, surely less embarrassing!

It all started with a re-reading of “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” (1999), a substantive book about McMurtry’s family as much, or more, than the German philosopher of the title. There followed, in 2008, 2009, and 2010, three short volumes of a “memoir,” respectively entitled “Books,” “Literary Life,” and “Hollywood,” each devoted to separate phases of McMurtry’s career: book collecting and selling, book writing, and film-script writing.

Surprisingly, McMurtry says that collecting, not writing, is his real passion, and that script-writing (some seventy in all) rather than fiction writing has been his “bread and butter” over the years. He further contributes his fame as a writer to the success of the mini-series of “Lonesome Dove” (adapted by Bill Witliffe) rather than to the book itself, despite its winning him a Pulitzer Prize. Surprisingly as well, he does not name “Lonesome Dove” as one of his own favorites among his books. Well, all I can say to that is, writers are seldom the best judges of their own work. “Lonesome Dove,” remains, in my opinion, his crowning achievement, and was so recognized by the Pulitzer Committee.

The eldest son of the youngest of nine sons of a pioneering West Texas family, McMurtry didn’t live the Cowboy Dream, but he was surely in a unique position to write about it. It being that unique period in Western U.S. History before the advent of the railroads and barbed wire changed the Cattle Trail Drives forever. If you are at all interested in McMurtry and stories of the old West, try “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” which might lead you to explore one or more of the other memoirs.

McMurtry, now 84, divides his time between Tucson, Arizona, and Archer City, where his book store “Booked Up” still operates.