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 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 reported 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 legtimated – 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 take care 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 mythologies and the cult of gunfighter. The Western itself, right up there with rock and roll as our most influential pop culture export (you should watch the film Theeb), 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 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 pioneer 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 evocation of the troubling symbiosis of the actual West and the mythical 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 (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 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 rich 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 up in the trail in 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 hardbitten worldview and his uncommon 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, building a life for herself and her loved ones, doing hard things that don’t show up in any of the stories about comfortable East Coast ladies she reads in magazines. I defy you to read how affectionately McMurtry depicts Clara's character 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 in those same rough times. 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 during the post-Little Big Horn final removal and subjugation of the Plains Indians. Like Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man, McMurtry’s characters (the sensitive ones, anytway) 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). 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 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 - The most thought-provoking Western writers show you the man behind the curtain. McMurtry waits to the very end of Lonesome Dove, but he does it. In a moving coda, Woodrow Call travels across a continent to bring the body of his partner Augustus McRae back to Texas. In San Antonio a young journalist accosts him and it's all Kit Carson finding a Kit Carson book at the murder scene: “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.” Who doesn’t hear in that appeal 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 the story to the printers? It is telling that three of the greatest Western storytellers - McMurtry, Ford, and Eastwood - all felt compelled to implant in their stories a caustic comment on the whole mythmaking ethos 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 extreme endurance 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.
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