A few times I’ve taught a long term course called “Literature of the American West." The idea came from a comment I once read that something like 90% of the texts high school students study in a typical American Literature course come from east of the Mississippi River. Based on my recollection of the textbooks I had taught from that imbalance rang true to me, so when we changed 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 one of my favorite courses to teach, but I always feel a little insecure about it, as though it has to be legitimized – I assume people will think it is kid stuff pretending to gravitas, Hoss Cartwright displacing Hester Prynne. Perhaps because of that course content insecurity, in Lit of the West I take care to deliver premium substance and approach it in a serious way: All the Pretty Horses, True Grit, My Antonia, Little Big Man, True West, High Noon, and lots of talk about the Olympian cowboy and sacralization of gun violence and the national urge to self reinvention and the racist subtexts of Manifest Destiny. Louise Erdrich and Joan Didion and Bass Reeves get time in the spotlight. The Western itself is right up there with rock and roll as our most influential pop culture export (the "Bedouin Western" Theeb is a wonderful example). It also 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 some of his work over the years, starting with a beautiful short essay on faith and mortality that ran in New Republic after the 1993 Waco disaster. 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 but also because what he says about the role of media in creating our conception of the West becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for our interpretation of Western American literature. He writes, “In my view the main reason the Old West became so popular as entertainment was that the great engines of the media were well stoked before the actual settling was even half completed.” To illustrate this point he shares a reputedly true story about Kit Carson. Late in life the famous tracker was engaged to locate some Apache raiders who had kidnapped a settler family. Carson and the posse came too late – the family had been massacred by their desperate captors – but amid the debris of the murder scene Carson discovered something amazing: a dime novel about himself! That moment is an almost-too-perfect encapsulation of the twisted partnership between the actual West and the created West, one of the core concepts I emphasize in 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 (with a Texas accent) has chided “Don’t be so such a tenderfoot, Pardner, you know it’s probably as great as everyone says it is." Last month I finally saddled up and started 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 what makes it special. 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 the region's 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. Particularly illuminating in this case was West’s rich account of the utter craziness of the boom in the cattle business in the West after the Civil War. Like a tech boom but with livestock.
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.
This view cannot be original with me. I imagine the first reviewers noticed it. I’m just saying that as I got further into the Hat Creek Outfit's mother-of-all cattle drives it gradually dawned on me that Lonesome Dove is so expansive and lush that it's kind of a Bruegel Western, a banquet of narratives in just about every sub-genre of the form, going all the way out to the edge of the canvas. It's the whole warehouseful of Western materials, in all their glory and perniciousness, deployed by someone who knew them all by heart and had reached a point where he could do something ambitious and brilliant with them.
Among the familiar kinds of storylines from other Western novels and films that I recognized in Lonesome Dove:
The Homesteading Woman – McMurtry’s Clara Allen, out there under the big sky in the endless Nebraska loneliness, building a life for herself and her loved ones, a nascent feminist who has run out of patience with pigheaded men, doing hard things that don’t show up in any of the stories about comfortable East Coast ladies she reads in magazines. A formidable woman. It seems to me that McMurtry is in love with Clara, just as Willa Cather was in love with her own pioneer heroine, Antonia Shimerda, on the same Nebraska prairie in those same rough times. Cather calls the spirited Antonia “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” That’s Clara, too. She's even got two squabbling young daughters - Ingalls girls for a revisionist Western.
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 dialogue 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 during the post-Little Big Horn final subjugation and removal of the Plains Indians. Like Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man, McMurtry’s characters (the sensitive ones, anyway) do a lot of melancholy musing about what greed and lust for power have cost the world. Augustus McCrae’s surreal passage through a land of buffalo bones and the violent death of Josh Deets as he tries to protect a blind Indian child - these moments are especially bleak in their evocation of the idea that whenever you talk about "the winning of the West" you're talking about somebody else's loss.
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). 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 that dangerous back-and-forth, 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 - Some of the most memorable Westerns make a point of providing caustic commentary on the role of the media in creating the West of legend. They give you some version of Kit Carson finding a Kit Carson book at the scene of a massacre. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford shows us starstruck newspaper reporters interviewing Ransom Stoddard about his famous gunfight (and preferring the legend to the disillusioning truth he tells them). At the end of Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood shows us Beauchamp the dime novelist grilling William Munny for the sensational details of a shootout so he can get the story to the printers while it's still hot. McMurtry does it, too. He waits to the very end of Lonesome Dove to do it, but he does it. In a moving coda (or an appallingly misguided one in Clara's view), Woodrow Call travels across a continent to bring the body of his partner Augustus McRae back to Texas. Word gets out about this quixotic journey, and in Santa Rosa an eager young journalist accosts Call to get his story: “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.” Now tormented with doubts about the purpose of his life, Call turns down the invitation to participate in his own mythologizing. This scene is about as redolent as redolent gets of Westerns commenting on their own artifice.
That’s just five. There are a lot more I could identify and explain, storylines that in their hearkening back range from Shane to the Man With No Name. Lonesome Dove features epic fistfights in saloons and do-or-die confrontations with outlaws and haunted boys in search of their distant fathers and terrifying captivity narratives and stark meditations on the violent roots of civilization and complex human relationships with oddly named horses and vulnerable women navigating a vicious world and hallucinatory accounts of extreme endurance in the desert and charming but pathetic barroom gamblers destined for a bad end 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.
