I’m bored to death with the 19th-century West,” says Larry McMurtry, America’s best-known writer of 19th-century Western fiction. “I wrote more about it than I ever intended to.” We were driving through West Texas, along the route his grandparents took when they first traveled to Archer County in the late 1880’s, and he was trying to explain why “Comanche Moon,” his new novel, will probably be his last word on the subject.
In a career that spans 23 books over four decades, only 7 of his novels are really about the frontier, but as we pull up in front of the modest ranch house his grandfather built on a low hill at the southernmost edge of the Great Plains, it’s hard to imagine how he ever wrote about anything else. The spot is still so evocative of the Old West that when he points at the barn and describes how his father and eight uncles sat on that roof and watched the last cattle drives rumble past, you can almost hear the bellowing steers and smell the dust. “It’s still such a strong landscape for me,” he admits, climbing onto the porch and looking out over the flat, empty land, crisscrossed by dirt roads and barbed-wire fences. “I can’t escape it in my fiction. I can work away from it, but I always start here. And whatever place I’m writing about, I’m still describing this same hill.
McMurtry left Archer County more than 40 years ago, but now, at 61, he’s come home with a mission. The landscape that inspired him to write so much about the past — possibly too much about the past — is now tugging him in a different direction. He is buying up commercial buildings in his hometown of Archer City and filling them with used books — hundreds of thousands of used books gathered from all over the country — as part of a quixotic scheme to turn this sleepy rural community into a mecca for book lovers. His dream is to create an American version of H
ay-on-Wye, the legendary British book town that draws visitors from all over the world.
It sounds a little crazy, but McMurtry has always owned bookstores, in Washington, D.C., Texas and Arizona, and he is perfectly serious about the plan. The fact is, he has been in the book business longer than the writing business, and though he would never consider not running a bookstore, he does think about giving up fiction. “After you’ve written 20 novels, the likelihood of becoming your own recycling unit is very great,” he says. “It’s hard to find something fresh.”
Building a giant bookstore in his old hometown fills another need in his life right now. “I spent a lot of time in New York, Washington and L.A., and a fair amount of time in Europe,” he says as we drive away from the ranch and head toward the book-filled renovated house he now owns in town. “I took the measure of several powerful places. But it just got to be where the homing instinct came over me, and I wanted to be in Texas a little bit more. It’s kind of a normal pattern — you go out into the world and then bring what you want of the world back home with you.” In his case, it’s a million used books.
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Larry McMurtry seems like a happy man. He has a sly, slightly bucktoothed smile that makes it hard to imagine his ever being depressed or withdrawn. But behind thick glasses, his eyes have a droopy, hangdog look, which lends a hint of melancholy, and it’s no surprise that all these new developments in his career — moving back to Archer City, building the book town, the disillusionment with writing fiction — have come in the wake of a devastating personal crisis he now refers to as “the change.”
It began with a heart attack six years ago, followed by quadruple bypass surgery. But the real “change” didn’t occur until months later, while he was recuperating at the Tucson home of Diana Ossana, his close companion and collaborator of many years. At first he felt fine — he was exercising, reading Proust, thinking about a new book. In fact, Ossana thought he looked better than she had seen him in years. But then something went wrong.
He started waking up in the middle of the night, filled with terror, and during the day all he could do was lie down on a white couch in Ossana’s living room and stare out the window at the sunlit Catalina Mountains. He didn’t read, he barely talked, he just lay there for days, then months. Ossana watched, horrified, as a friend who had never before complained or indulged in self-pity, the hard-working son and grandson of stoic Texas ranchers, slowly went to pieces.
Ossana is a self-reliant, thoughtful writer with two grown children and one grandchild. She knew what was going on, but she didn’t know what to do about it. “He was falling apart,” she recalls. “It was a scary thing to see.” Depression strikes some 20 percent of all heart attack survivors, though researchers are still not sure whether the heart disease causes the depression, or whether people who tend toward depression get more heart disease. Either way, the effect was startling. McMurtry lay on that couch for more than a year.
“I faded out of my life,” he says. “Suddenly I found myself becoming an outline, and then what was within that outline vanished.” He was convinced that the operation itself created a rupture with his past self — that being on the heart-lung machine for nearly five hours, essentially dead, left an impassable gulf. “Like you’re undergoing an internal protest because of an event you can’t remember. You feel that your personality has died, or been fragmented, so that it’s swirling around and you can only occasionally attach it to your feelings.”
The worst effect, perhaps, was that he lost the ability to read for pleasure — he couldn’t concentrate on the words. Oddly enough, he could still write, but the pages came quickly and joylessly, almost by rote. Every morning, as Ossana got her daughter Sara, then 15, off to school, McMurtry sat down at the kitchen counter and typed. “I felt like a fax machine,” he says, but after 90 minutes or so, he would stop and go back to the couch.
Ossana was encouraged that he was writing, but once she started reading some of the pages, that began to worry her, too. His new work was unrelentingly grim; whole sections seemed to be a barely disguised account of his own disintegration. After several months, her daughter pulled her into the bathroom and shut the door so McMurtry couldn’t hear them. “Mama,” she said, “I love Larry, but it hurts me to look at him because he’s so sad. When I do I just want to cry.”
Somehow, the pile of pages by the typewriter in the kitchen grew into “Streets of Laredo,” a brooding, powerful sequel to “Lonesome Dove.” “I was in the rhythm of writing a book every fall,” he explains, “so what could I have done if I didn’t? Just lie there and take antidepressants and stare out the window? I wanted to get to the wound, and I did.”
The book is remarkable not just because it came out of his physical and psychological crisis, but because it dealt with a nagging professional problem as well. McMurtry had dug himself into a literary hole with “Lonesome Dove,” the “War and Peace” of cattle-drive novels. Before its publication in 1985, he was known as a contemporary novelist who made a point of denouncing unrealistic, romantic period novels about the frontier. The old myths were destructive, he argued, and they ignored the complex, urbanized realities of the modern West. Then he wrote “Lonesome Dove,” an 843-page frontier epic that seemed to be exactly the sort of book he had been attacking. It was as if Norman Mailer surprised loyal readers with an antipatriarchal tract whose heroine was a militant lesbian feminist — and it turned out to be his most successful book.
McMurtry thought he had written an anti-Western, one that critics and readers then perversely took to be the greatest Western ever. “‘Lonesome Dove’ was a critical book,” he still insists, “but that’s not how it was perceived. The romance of the West is so powerful, you can’t really swim against the current. Whatever truth about the West is printed, the legend is always more potent.”
His response to the misreading of “Lonesome Dove” was “Streets of Laredo,” which takes place 20 years later, and this year’s “Comanche Moon,” which deals with the same characters as young men. In both books (as well as in “Dead Man’s Walk,” the prologue to the series) he tried everything possible to destroy the romantic aura of the original novel. Where “Lonesome Dove” was heroic and sweeping, the subsequent books are bleak and austere. And “Streets of Laredo,” written during the long siege on that couch in Tucson, is the darkest of them all.
Woodrow Call, who survived “Lonesome Dove” intact, is shot several times in “Streets,” finally losing his arm and leg. “He would have to live, but without himself,” McMurtry wrote of his shattered hero. “He felt he had left himself faraway, back down the weeks, in the spot west of Fort Stockton where he had been wounded. … He could remember the person he had been, but he could not become that person again.”
As she retyped the manuscript into a computer, Ossana read those words and started to cry. “For about 10 minutes I couldn’t see clearly,” she remembers. “I couldn’t even type. I kept thinking that it was Larry. This is really how he feels about himself. It was just horribly sad.”
McMurtry doesn’t disagree. “I knew that I was changed. I knew that other person wasn’t ever going to come back, and I wanted to write about it.”
He wrote about the “wound,” but when “Streets of Laredo” was finished, the depression still hadn’t lifted. The book ends with Call, crippled and helpless, being tended by women and children — McMurtry was convinced he would never write again. Ossana was desperate to keep him active and tried coaxing him back to the typewriter to write a screenplay. He refused to do it unless she helped — so they wrote it together. “That was my goal,” she says. “I wanted to get Larry back into writing. I felt not only would it be a loss to the world, but Larry needed to come back to life. And it worked; it brought him out of it.”
They wrote two collaborative novels, “Pretty Boy Floyd” (which grew out of that first screenplay) and “Zeke and Ned.” Some critics were puzzled by the appearance of these double-bylined works, wondering why such a major writer needed a partner. The assumption was that Ossana had become a sort of Yoko Ono to his Lennon, or else he was only doing it to jump-start her career. In fact, it was just the opposite. Ossana even offered to keep her name off the title page of their first collaboration, but McMurtry refused.
* * *
In person, Archer City is smaller than it looks in “The Last Picture Show” and “Texasville” — the two films based on McMurtry novels that were shot there. The old movie theater burned down, but there are still a handful of businesses, including a small hotel, three convenience stores and a Dairy Queen. McMurtry’s bookstore, called Booked Up, occupies four buildings near the courthouse.
“Wait till you see the book town,” he kept saying over the phone, “then you’ll understand.” And there he is, working in the huge back room of the main building, surrounded by towering white bookshelves holding tens of thousands of books. More arrive every month, and as McMurtry talks, he never stops working his way through a new shipment of contemporary fiction, bought from a collector in Virginia. He flips open every book, scans the title page and pencils a price inside the front cover.
After emerging from his depression, McMurtry began to think seriously about an old dream: the idea of owning a huge bookstore like the ones he used to visit as a young book scout, hunting for rare volumes on behalf of established dealers. “I began to realize that with real estate as it is now in urban centers,” he explains, “the only way you could have a giant bookstore is to have it in a small town. I’ve watched it in my own time: the giant bookstores died in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Washington, D.C., in Long Beach, in Cincinnati, in Chicago. I just love the possibilities of really big used bookstores — vast repositories of knowledge — and the only hope of preserving them for another generation is to build one in a small town.”
As old stores in other parts of the country went out of business, he bought up their stocks and shipped them to Archer City. He’s well known in the trade, and offers come in more and more frequently. Booked Up currently owns the remaining stocks of several famous but defunct businesses, like Battery Park Books and the Phoenix Bookshop, both of New York.
Owning books has always been central to McMurtry’s life, perhaps as a result of growing up in a place like Archer City, where they were always in short supply. As far as he’s concerned, you just can’t have too many. He’s bought a large prairie-style mansion in town — a wealthy oilman’s house, built in the 20’s, that McMurtry used to admire as a child — and he’s filled it with his personal library of about 16,000 volumes. As a bookplate he uses a tiny strip of paper marked with the McMurtry brand, the same one his father and grandfather used to mark their cattle.
McMurtry’s first bookstore in Archer City, called the Blue Pig, was run by one of his sisters, Sue Deen. It opened in 1987 but outgrew its small space, so he bought a larger building and changed the name to Booked Up — the same name as the Washington store he founded in 1971 with his old friend and longtime business partner, Marcia Carter, a formidable collector in her own right, who still runs the Booked Up in Georgetown.
“I want to have the biggest bookstore I can, and still have good books,” McMurtry says. “I like expensive ones, but I also like humbler books that people can read.” Right now, the Booked Up in Archer City has more than 100,000 volumes. Young employees move like worker ants between the four buildings, wheeling handcarts loaded with new arrivals. The main building — a former car dealership — holds rare books, biographies, belles-lettres and Western Americana. Across the street, history, poetry and 20th-century English and American fiction are housed, while down the block a separate building is devoted to 19th-century books, literature in translation and books about books. (An annex opposite the courthouse handles drama, music, dance and film.) The staff is small, and some buildings are often left unlocked and unattended, but McMurtry is unconcerned. “I don’t think we have many book thieves here in Archer City,” he says, smiling.
Advertisements for the book town have been appearing in antiquarian book journals, and a steadily increasing number of dealers and individual buyers show up every weekend. McMurtry hopes that Archer City, which is two hours northwest of Dallas, will eventually attract other stores driven out of the big cities by high rents, and he’s involved with a plan to rebuild the town’s old movie house and turn it into a regional theater. He’s confident that cafes, bed and breakfasts and other amenities will follow.
Still, standing there in back of the main store, sorting fiction and predicting the future, McMurtry sounds a little like a Texas Noah, building his ark and filling it with books. He even reveals that when he first left Archer City at 18 — a bookish teen-ager escaping a world of decidedly nonbookish cowboys and roughnecks — he vowed that if circumstances ever forced him to come back, he would bring one copy of every book he would ever need — and in a way, that’s just what he has done. It’s too early to tell whether a Texas book town makes good business sense. (McMurtry predicts that it will make a profit this year.) But even if the book town never makes money, all those volumes will still have found a safe haven in Archer City, there for some other young Texan to find. “It would be a very good legacy to my region,” he says, “to bring a million books.”
That promise of rebirth through books, a rebirth closely tied to McMurtry’s past as well as to his own recent return to life, has a nice novelistic ring to it. As his own advertisement announces: “Miraculous birth! … Visit the newly born book town of Archer City, Texas, and help the endless migration of good books continue.”
During our last drive around town, trying to find some place to eat other than the Dairy Queen, the green light from the dashboard illuminates McMurtry’s face as he reflects on the personal drama of the last few years. Earlier, he spoke about not writing any more fiction, but now he seems to be saying something else. “The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.” Does that mean he’ll keep writing? “A year ago, I thought I was finished with fiction,” he finally answers. “Now I’m not so sure.”
He still has the feeling that he’s not the person he used to be, that he’s reconstructing his old self as he goes along. As part of that process, he just finished a book-length essay about Archer City, about his youth and about “the change.” He’s working out some sort of new accommodation with the past, and that, too, may be part of the essay. After returning home and remodeling a big old house, he’s bent on remaking Archer City into a place with books and theaters and restaurants and a steady stream of visitors from all over the world — the Archer City of his dreams. If it works, it will be “The Last Picture Show” with a happy ending, a strange and touching and unexpected reconciliation. Whatever happens, this is the closing of another chapter for McMurtry, and the start of a new one. He is rewriting his hometown.
Mark Horowitz 