GoKawiilAt most McMurtry family reunions at the Clarendon Country Club, the days were split between mealtime and storytelling. After lunch, the aging uncles—all of them cowboys—would gather round and tell stories of their gallant youthful suffering on the Texas frontier, aggrieved that the days of their heroism lay behind them, that their bodies were now failing them. But the story that stayed with a young Larry McMurtry, more than any of the cowboy exploits, was the one about a molasses barrel. It was fall, at the turn of the 20th century. McMurtry’s grandfather, William Jefferson, had traveled by wagon 18 miles to the small town of Archer City in search of winter provisions. He returned to the family ranch with the wagon loaded, and sitting among the supplies was an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses, “in those days the nearest thing to sugar that could be procured,” McMurtry wrote.
Such sweetening as the family would have for the whole winter was in the barrel, and all gathered around to watch it being unloaded. Two of the boys rolled the barrel to the back of the wagon and two more reached to lift it down, but in the exchange of responsibilities someone failed to secure a hold and the barrel fell to the ground and burst. Eighty pounds of sweetness quivered, spread out, and began to seep unrecoverably into the earth…. They could speak with less emotion of death and dismemberment than of that moment when they stood and watched the winter’s sweetness soak into the chicken yard.
Yet at the end of this retelling—in his 1968 book of essays on Texas, In a Narrow Grave—McMurtry included a sardonic footnote of correction. What “really happened,” he wrote, was that a sow had come along and pulled the spigot out of the barrel, causing it to run dry. The emptied barrel was discovered, and the children lined up at the scene of the catastrophe to cry. The fault was no human folly but an animal’s. Nevertheless, “as with many family stories,” McMurtry concludes, “I think I prefer the fiction to the truth.”
Truth and fiction have been two threads in the grand yarn of the American West since before the West was even settled; they are wound so tightly together that it becomes moot to distinguish one from the other. In fact, as McMurtry knew intimately, “the selling of the West preceded the settling of it, sometimes narrowly but other times by decades.” It was an “inescapable fact” that the American West’s so-called traditions were actually “invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men.” To tell the story of the West, then, the teller needs to voice the truth about its fictions, even if that means telling fictions about its truths. McMurtry devoted his whole career to doing just that, across dozens of novels, essay collections, memoirs, a biography, and over 30 screenplays.
In his fiction, McMurtry chronicled the lives of Texas Rangers and Comanche warriors, the lives of cowboys turned suburbanites, of Houston city slickers studying for their PhDs. And in his essays and histories, he took aim at the many figures who had a hand in inventing the formidable myth of the West: Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Kit Karson, and P.T. Barnum. In each of these settings, McMurtry refused the seductive invitation to write in a register of high romance. His subjects might have been tragic, dark, or absurd—but they were never treated with nostalgia.
McMurtry was not interested in clawing back the “reality” of the West from its complicated illusions, either. He wrote with the knowledge that the myths were inextricable from the history of the place itself, at once bloody and banal. McMurtry saw that any idea of the “real” West was as fabulated as the illusions were, and that the pursuit of it was equally harebrained. “To do the cowboy realistically would have amounted to a sort of alchemical reverse English: it would have meant turning gold into lead,” he wrote. In other words, it would have meant turning the cowboy into something he was not and never was and losing hold of him entirely. Instead, McMurtry approached his subjects by exchanging one kind of fable—the high romance of myth—for another: the picaresque. Through his rogue’s gallery of hucksters, deadeye bandits, and hardheaded Rangers, he unveiled the West as a place of absurd, mythical invention. His great and lasting contribution was to teach Americans how to see their country and to read its history—as legend, reality, and advertising.
Unsurprisingly, then, McMurtry’s inventions went beyond the page. “I have this compulsion to fictionalize,” he once confessed. “And I don’t make a good journalist, either. I just can’t stick to the facts. By necessity, I invent.” It turns out that the writer who devoted his career to reweaving Texas’s yarns could not help but tell yarns about himself. This is the motivation for a new biography, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, written by McMurtry’s longtime friend the journalist David Streitfeld. “I wanted to rescue things [in McMurtry’s life] that were hidden or even scorned,” Streitfeld writes early on, “and to see beyond his self-inventions.” By treating McMurtry like one of his rogues, one finds that he—like all Americans, yarn-tellers every one—occupies an ambiguous relationship to his country’s history. Which is to say that we, Americans, all indulge in some kind of mythmaking, and it was McMurtry who understood how integral that was to the place we call “the West.”
When McMurtry was born in 1936 in Archer City, he, his parents, and his paternal grandparents lived under one roof—a simple shotgun house that his father and grandfather had built with their bare hands. At that time, “the Depression sat heavily on all but the most fortunate, a group that didn’t include us,” McMurtry later wrote. The family had a cook and the occasional resident cowboy, but no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone.
There was also a conspicuous absence of the thing that would go on to define McMurtry’s entire life: “Of books there were none,” he recalled. Perhaps there was a magazine or two, and surely there was a Bible (whereabouts unknown). But mostly, McMurtry described growing up in an aural culture: “My mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, and whatever uncles or cowboys happened by, sat on the front porch every night in good weather and told stories.” That changed one day in 1942, when McMurtry’s cousin stopped by on his way to enlist in the Marines and dropped off “the gift that changed my life”—a box of 19 books.
Those books were a godsend for a bronchial kid who considered the many animals on the family ranch his first “enemies,” and remembered with measured disdain the time he tumbled off the front porch into a pile of cow manure. Or the time his cousins threw him into a pig pen. Or how he suffered the torments of his schoolmates on the 80-mile bus ride to school: “They did make fun. It did not scar me for life. I overcompensated,” McMurtry later told Streitfeld. He read the 19 books to tatters, often sick in bed, staying home from school, “closeted like a tiny Proust.” (The stack included Sergeant Silk: The Prairie Scout, Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, and Jerry Todd in the Whispering Cave, all of them boys’ adventure books that would have been McMurtry’s first introduction to the western as a genre.) He didn’t remember learning to read at all or who, if anyone, taught him. But he quickly decided that reading was the thing he was meant to do, even if he had no idea what kind of vocation he could make of it.
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