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BIOGRAPHY
Larry McMurtry: A Life
Tracy Daugherty
St Martins Press, $59.99
When Larry McMurtry died, Cybill Shepherd said: “We’re talking about one of the greatest men who ever lived.” McMurtry would have laughed bleakly but the power of her acting shows forth in Peter Bogdanovich’s film The Last Picture Show in large part because of the haunted tragic nature of McMurtry’s script (and novel). He climbed the heights of Hollywood success while also being a real writer, though he would have insisted a minor one.
Gone With the Wind was a good book, he said, not a great one, and so it was with Lonesome Dove, McMurtry’s western epic. “It all comes out of Don Quixote,” according to McMurtry. “The visionary and the practical man.”
Shirley Maclaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson in the film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel Terms of Endearment.Credit:
In 1963, Hud , from McMurtry’s early novel Horseman Pass By, was compared to Eugene O’Neill by the then New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther. The character Hud, played by Paul Newman, has a brutal narcissism as if the film captured the egotism and coldness overtaking the country, its ruthless self-absorption. McMurtry came to see the film as the culmination of his vision.
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You might say he had the best of all possible worlds. Janet Maslin described him as the father of chick-lit because of Terms of Endearment, but if you watch the 1983 film with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson at the height of their powers – and Debra Winger a power, too – you realise what fire and poignancy are in this tearjerker the Baby Boomers might have sneered at.
Norman Mailer said McMurtry made him imitate him and Joyce Carol Oates compared The Last Kind Words Saloon to Waiting for Godot. But there is a sense in which McMurtry was bigger than his talent or in some ways separate from it. He would remark “real cattle people are sad with the sadness of gorillas”, thinking perhaps of his father on whose ranch he grew up.
He was a great bookseller as well as a writer of them, with massive stores in Archer City, Texas, and in Washington DC. He devoured books and gloried in them. He was academically trained and had read everything.
Larry McMurtry unloads books in his Archer City shop.Credit: Ralph Lauer
He eventually – inevitably – broke up with his first wife, Jo, for all the mutuality of their affection, but as Tracy Daugherty says, his relationships with women were all characterised by longing. He had deep romantic friendships that had a slow-burning, potentially erotic element. He wrote to that magnetic woman and lofty critic Susan Sontag, “I’ve been feeling not knowing you as a gap in my life for some time”. That was in 1988 and led to his improbable presidency of PEN, but not to a sustained intimacy, though she didn’t for a moment doubt how formidable he was.