Curtis McMurtry – "Loves Me More" (2017)

You knew I was a snake

So of course I’m gonna bite you

The late novelist Larry McMurtry once wrote that he can’t remember either of his parents ever reading him a story.  He assumes his parents owned a Bible, but remembers his boyhood home as being otherwise “totally bookless.”

Larry McMurtry, author and bookman

Despite that, he became a man for whom books meant almost everything.  (“Despite that” may be the wrong phrase – perhaps I should have said, “Because of that, he became a man for whom books meant almost everything.”)

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McMurtry’s family moved from an isolated into the small town of Archer City when he was in second grade.  Archer City didn’t have a public library, but the high school had a small library where McMurtry spent a lot of his time.  

His senior year, McMurtry began to steal books – mostly English classics – from that library.  The librarian knew what was going on but never reprimanded him – she simply went to his house when he was away on his senior trip and retrieved the purloined volumes.

Years later, McMurtry bought his boyhood house, had floor-to-ceiling bookcases built in every room, and filled those bookcases with some 25,000 of his own books:

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Baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams may have been the best pure hitter ever to swing a bat.  But there were some – including more than one professional fishing guide – who believed that Williams was a better fisherman than he was a hitter.

McMurtry was a great writer.  He wrote 32 novels – several were best-sellers, and one (Lonesome Dove) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – and a dozen or so nonfiction books.  But he may have been as accomplished a bookman as he was an author.

“Bookman” is the word McMurtry uses to describe himself in his 2008 memoir, Books.  It means a person who makes a living buying and selling books – in particular, old and rare books.

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McMurtry dabbled in book scouting and dealing while teaching English at Rice University in Houston.  In 1969 – when he was 33 – he gave up teaching and moved to Washington, DC, where he and a partner opened an antiquarian bookstore he named Booked Up.  He eventually accumulated a stock of 75,000 volumes. 

Eventually rents in the tony Georgetown area rose to a level that made it impractical for McMurtry to maintain his store there.  So he started buying vacant buildings in Archer City, Texas, where he had been born in 1936.  (Archer City – a small Texas Panhandle town that is now home to roughly 1700 souls – was where The Last Picture Show was filmed.)

At one point, those buildings contained some 450,000 books.  He auctioned off most of them in 2012 – he was 76 years old, and had no heir waiting in the wings who wanted to take over the business.

The 2012 auction at Booked Up

The Booked Up website says that the store currently has between 150,000 and 200,000 books for sale. 

I’m not sure what will happen to those books now that Larry McMurtry is no longer alive – I’m hoping that he made arrangements for the store to stay open.

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Of course, McMurtry sold many of the rare secondhand books that he hunted down and purchased.  But being a bookman was never about making money for him.  “For the first twenty years of my career as a book hunter, I actually read almost all the books I had gone to such trouble to find,” he wrote in Books.  “Getting the books I wanted to read was the main reason for the pursuit.” 

When he was still a college student, McMurtry was drawn to bibliographies.  He eventually assembled a reference library of several thousand books about books.  

As Books makes clear, McMurtry was a remarkably well-read individual.  But his love of books transcended the contents of those books.  “A bookman’s love of books is a love of books,” he wrote, “not merely of the information in them.”  

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I was surprised to read that McMurtry – one of the best and most prolific writers of fiction in the last 50 years – stopped reading fiction several decades ago.  

“For the twenty years or so in which I reviewed [books] for newspapers regularly, I mainly reviewed fiction . . . I suspect I reviewed several hundred novels,” he explained in Books, “and the result was that I burned out as a reader of fiction.”  

McMurtry says that the last novel he reviewed was Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist – which was published in 1985.  Later, one of his editors would send him carefully selected works of new fiction.  “But I knew I couldn’t read them, and sent them back,” he wrote.

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Journalist Maureen Orth, who is the widow of the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, met McMurtry while browsing at Booked Up half a century ago, and the two became close friends – so close that McMurtry dedicated Lonesome Dove to her. 

Larry McMurtry and Maureen Orth

Here’s what Orth wrote about McMurtry shortly after his death:

Larry McMurtry loved, respected, and appreciated women more than any man I ever knew. . . .

Larry was supremely generous and stubbornly patient. Through the years there became a small circle of us – women Larry cultivated and cared for, but didn’t necessarily sleep with.  He was willing to wait, he said, for years to see if anything might spark, and meanwhile he would keep writing us letters, buying us dinners or antique necklaces, sending flowers to our mothers, and just generally being a prince while we got our hearts chewed up by less worthy boys.  

“If I thought a love affair would give me six months of intense pleasure but that this woman I had a real affinity for would not be in my life ten years from now,” he once told me, “I would walk around the love affair if there was one to be walked around.  I would go for the long-term friendship.”

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That doesn’t mean that McMurtry wouldn’t have regretted missing out on that love affair.  But he was a realist.  

From Books:

Some years ago I had a sobering realization about women which was that there are just too many nice ones.  One simply can’t fall in love with, sleep with, or marry all the nice women.  One of the saddening facts of life is that there is always going to be a delightful woman somewhere who for whatever accident of timing or attraction simply slips by and recedes to return only in dreams.

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Here’s what NPR’s Scott Simon said about the singer/songwriter responsible for today’s featured song:

His grandfather is author Larry McMurtry, his father is songwriter James McMurtry.  So it’s no surprise Curtis McMurtry’s songs are full of vivid characters.

“Loves Me More” was released in 2017 on his second studio album, The Hornet’s Nest:

Click here to listen to “Loves Me More.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.