A few times I’ve taught a long term course called “Literature of the American West”, an idea inspired by a comment I once read that something like 90% of the literature high school students study in a typical American literature course comes from east of the Mississippi River. Based on the textbooks I’ve taught from that imbalance rang true to me, so when we undertook a change in the arrangement of our overall literature curriculum and realized we needed to offer different flavors – so to speak – of American Literature, I began to offer Literature of the American West. It’s a course I always feel a little insecure about, as though it has to be justified – I assume people will think it is kid stuff, the Lone Ranger taught with the idiotic pretension that it is Hawthorne-caliber. Perhaps because of that course content insecurity, I’ve endeavored to deliver premium substance in Lit of the West and approach it in a seriously intellectual way: All the Pretty Horses, My Antonia, True West, High Noon, and lots of talk about the national mythology and the cult of gunfighter. The Western itself, right up there with rock and roll as our most influential pop culture export, provides a great case study in the evolution of a genre, from its most primitive Buffalo Bill manifestations to the classic to the adult to the revisionist.
Of course Larry McMurtry is one of the indispensable names in that course. I’ve read a good deal of McMurtry over the years, starting with a beautiful short essay on faith and mortality that he published in New Republic after the 1993 disaster at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. I’ve also read Horseman Pass By (the source material of the film Hud), The Last Picture Show, and his short biography of Crazy Horse. In the early days of Lit of the West my students read McMurtry’s essay “Inventing the West”, partially because it is so brilliantly written and partially because what he has to say there about Western media becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for our interpretation of Western American literature. McMurtry shares a reputedly true story about Kit Carson, engaged late in life to track some Apache raiders who have kidnapped a pioneer family. Carson and the posse come too late – the family has been massacred by their desperate captors – but amid the debris of the murder scene Carson discovers something amazing: a dime novel about himself! That moment is an almost-too- perfect evocation of the troubling symbiosis of the actual West and legendary West, one of the core concepts I endeavor to make a central part of our study of Western narratives.
McMurtry was prolific, but of course the book his reputation will always rest on is Lonesome Dove, the epic that won him the 1985 Pulitzer Prize. I have always avoided it and I am not ashamed to say why: 900 page books are not for me, I don’t care how good they are. But for a few years now a voice in my head has chided “don’t be so soft, you know it’s probably as great as everyone says it is”. Last month I finally gave in and took up Lonesome Dove.
It is as great as everyone says it is. I won’t go into all the “whys” of its greatness, but I’m glad I didn’t try to read it until a couple of things happened to make me more open to that greatness. One is my reading last spring of Eliot West’s prize-winning history of the American West in the age of expansion, Continental Reckoning. The proud Texan McMurtry knew ranches and horses and cowboys from extensive first-hand experience, but he was also a voracious critical reader of Western history. That extensive knowledge, and the consciousness of complexity that it fostered, is one of the strengths of all his fiction, including Lonesome Dove. Continental Reckoning took my appreciation of that quality to another level. West’s account of the utter craziness of the boom in the cattle business in the West after the Civil War was particularly illuminating.
I’m also glad that I had taught “Literature of the American West” a few times before I read Lonesome Dove. I needed that background or I might not have been able to really get what I think McMurtry is up to in this novel. Lonesome Dove is not 900 pages because he’s long-winded or overcomplicated or trying to be the Charles Dickens of Texas. It’s 900 pages because in Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry tries to do all the Westerns.
I’m sure this cannot be an idea I came up with before anybody else did, it is so obvious. I imagine the first reviewers commented upon it. I’m just saying that as I got further into the Hat Creek Cattle Company’s eventful cattle drive it gradually dawned on me that Lonesome Dove is a homage not just to the entire Western genre but most of its many sub-genres. A homage, mind you, not a ripoff. It’s a distinctively McMurtryan homage, imbued with both his trademark acerbic worldview and his tenderness toward his characters.
Among the familiar kinds of storylines I recognized from other Western novels and films:
The Homesteading Woman – McMurtry’s Clara Allen, out there under the big sky in the endless Nebraska loneliness, doing things to survive that don’t show up in any of the stories about comfortable East Coast women she reads in magazines. Read how McMurtry narrates Clara's beauty and fortitude and tell me he’s not in love her. Just as Willa Cather was plainly in love with her creation, Antonia Shimerda, on the same Nebraska prairie. Cather calls the spirited Antonia “a rich mine of life.” That’s Clara, too.
The Motley Crew on a Manhunt - The hapless July Johnson and his deputy Roscoe Brown (from Fort Smith, Arkansas no less!), in the company of a preternaturally bold girl in pursuit of a fairly-unimpressive killer through a wild country – it’s True Grit! In this storyline McMurtry even features multiple lines that could have been written by Charles Portis himself: “The name Roscoe don’t inspire confidence. People named Roscoe ought to stick to clerking.” Rooster Cogburn wishes he had said that.
Twilight of the Wilderness – Lonesome Dove is set as the mass slaughter of the great buffalo herds reaches its end and the post-Little Big Horn final removal and subjugation of then Plains Indians is underway. Like Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man, McMurtry’s characters do a lot of melancholy musing about what has been lost. Augustus McCrae’s surreal passage through a land of buffalo bones is especially evocative of the nature of the disaster.
The Border Story – This one disrupts my timeline a little bit because Lonesome Dove (1985) predates the best example I have of another manifestation of that storyline, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992), so I can’t really say that McMurtry’s cowboys crossing the Rio Grande to raid South of the Border are an echo of McCarthy’s John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins doing the same – it’s really the other way around. But the drama of the historically hostile yet intimate relationship between the United States and Mexico has always been there for Western novelists who dare to engage with its complications of power and politics and culture. McMurtry does it well.
The Meta Story - In a moving coda to Lonesome Dove, Woodrow Call has gone through a 2000 mile ordeal to bring the body of his partner Augustus McRae back to Texas. A young journalist accosts him in San Antonio: “Captain, they say you were the most famous Ranger. They say you’ve carried Captain McCrae three thousand miles just to bury him. They say you started the first ranch in Montana. My boss will fire me if I don’t talk to you. They say you’re a man of vision.” It’s Kit Carson and his dime novel. Who doesn’t hear in that exchange an echo of the reporters interviewing Ransom Stoddard at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and preferring the legend to the dispiriting truth he tells them) or the dime novelist trying to get the gunfighter lowdown from William Munny at the end of Unforgiven so he can get it to the printers? It is telling that three of the great Western storytellers - McMurtry, Ford, and Eastwood - all felt compelled to say something caustic within a Western about the whole mythmaking project of the genre.
That’s just five. There are many, many more I could identify and explain. Lonesome Dove features bloody confrontations with outlaws and boys in search of their fathers and meditations on the violent roots of civilization and accounts of barely surviving in the desert and many, many more kinds of Western stories you already know the template for. Like I said – it's got all the Westerns. It is most fitting that an insanely ambitious cattle drive is at the center of this insanely ambitious novel.
