Lonesome Dove is one of my favorite novels and my favorite mini-series. You notice I didn’t qualify my statement by writing western novel or western mini-series. That’s because Larry McMurtry was a great writer, without any need for qualification. Writing is a craft, storytelling an art. Stories that live through multiple generations are not only compelling narratives but also are crafted to never take the reader out of the story with poor grammar, meaningless cul-de-sacs, bombast, or dullness.
“When a book, any sort of book,
reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. That
intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or
idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over
the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over a ball.”
Raymond Chandler
McMurtry was a master storyteller in complete control of his craft.
That’s why I found the New York Times obituary disappointing. Although condescension
drips from the obituary writer, some of that disappointment came from McMurtry’s
quotes. A western is a western. Period. There are no anti-westerns. Only good stories presented smoothly with great characterizations or flawed stories carelessly
written with flat characters. For the most part McMurtry did the former and on occasion
soared to greatness.
New York Times Obituary: Larry McMurtry, Novelist of the American West, Dies
at 84
Larry McMurtry, a prolific novelist
and screenwriter who demythologized the American West with his unromantic
depictions of life on the 19th-century frontier and in contemporary small-town
Texas, died on Thursday at home in Archer City, Texas. He was 84.
Mr. McMurtry wrote “Lonesome Dove” as
an anti-western, a rebuke of sorts to the romantic notions of dime-store novels
and an exorcism of the false ghosts in the work of writers like Louis L’Amour. “I’m
a critic of the myth of the cowboy,’’ he told an interviewer in 1988. “I don’t
feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I
feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.’’
Why must any author apologize for writing westerns. It not like there’s no junky poetry, crummy detective stories, yawn-inspiring historical novels, or utterly boring slice-of-life attempts at a literary masterpiece. Only a few authors in any genre have the skill to rise above the chaff to give the public an awe-inspiring venture into another time and place.
In another paragraph, the obituary writer uses a single
word at the start to diminish an entire genre of literature. Yet! Like it’s
surprising that a western author might know his craft or be friends with proper
intellectuals.
Yet Mr. McMurtry was a plugged-in man
of American letters. For two years in the early 1990s he was American president
of PEN, the august literary and human rights organization. He was a regular
contributor to The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote on
topics relating to the American West. His friends included the writer Susan
Sontag, whom he once took to a stock car race.
