James McMurtry – "Copper Canteen" (2015)

Honey, don’t you be yelling at me

When I’m cleaning my gun

“I was a minor regional novelist from Texas,” the late author Larry McMurtry once told an interviewer. “That’s all I was.”

McMurtry’s novels were often set in Texas, and those that weren’t usually featured Texans or former Texans.  So I won’t quibble with “regional novelist from Texas” as a description of McMurtry – although that terms understates the variety of his fiction.  

Larry McMurtry in 1972

But “minor” is another matter.  I don’t see how anyone can think that someone who wrote 32 novels over a 53-year span – many of which are excellent, and one of which is as credible a contender for the “The Great American Novel” crown as any other novel yet written – can be described as “minor.”

McMurtry was more than a novelist, by the way – he wrote about a dozen non-fiction books, all of which are worth reading.

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I haven’t lived in Texas in well over forty years, but Texas is a very important part of my identity – my time there in the 1970s had a significant influence on who I am today.

Doug Sahm’s music and Larry McMurtry’s books were quintessentially Texan, although neither man was what you would picture when you heard the word “Texan.”

Sahm died over 20 years ago.  Now McMurtry is gone as well – he died last week at age 84.  

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I first became aware of McMurtry when I saw the movie that was made from his third novel, The Last Picture Show, in 1971.

I was a sophomore at Rice University in Houston at the time.  McMurtry had gotten a master’s degree in English from Rice and taught there for several years – I think he left Rice the year before I started there.  

I naturally read The Last Picture Show after seeing the movie – the movie was truly remarkable, but the book was just as good.  

But what hooked me on McMurtry’s writing were three novels he wrote in the early 1970s – while I was a student – that were set in Houston and that featured characters who were Rice graduate students.  

When I say I was “hooked” on McMurtry’s writing, I’m not kidding around – I’ve read 25 of his 32 novels and several of his nonfiction books.  I hope to read the rest of them by the end of this summer.

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I think the key to McMurtry’s success as a novelist was his gift for creating characters that his readers cared about.

An appreciation of McMurtry that appeared in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette after his death hit the nail on the head:

Larry McMurtry had a way of creating perfect characters in his writing.  You fell in love with his characters.  You wanted to meet his characters. You wanted to be in the book with his characters.  Then he’d put his characters through a meat grinder.

Indeed he did.  McMurtry killed off his characters without hesitation.  I still remember the shock I felt when one of the characters in his 2002 novel, Sin Killer, died a violent death.  I don’t remember anything about the character except that he was male and that I immediately liked him – but before I really got to know him, McMurtry killed him.  It seemed like such of a waste of a good character – a character who could have contributed to making that novel satisfying.

But McMurtry seemed to have no compunctions when it came to finishing off his characters.  “Plenty more where he came from,” seemed to be his attitude.  And he was right.

McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Oscar 
for their “Brokeback Mountain” script

More from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette appreciation:

There was something very un-romantic about Larry McMurtry's writing, even when romance was involved for the characters. . . . McMurtry didn't dress up his stories and present them with a nice bow.  That's not real.  That's not life.  Sure, romance is a part of being a human, but anybody who thinks we all end up with romance isn't living in the real world.  Or at least not living in Texas.

Life is difficult.  Texas is difficult.  The only thing (seemingly) effortless was the way Larry McMurtry created characters. And let them lead the way into his plots, and their own lives. It seemed so effortless that we sometimes got the feeling that Mr. McMurtry didn't know where the characters were going, either, and he was only documenting their travels. And their eventual crossings.

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The 19th-century British novelist Anthony Trollope was a remarkably prolific and disciplined writers.

For much of life, Trollope was a high-ranking civil servant, who travelled extensively, and lived an active social life – he was particularly fond of fox hunting – but managed to write almost 50 novels.

From an article on the Trollope Society’s website:

[Trollope] would usually rise every morning at 5:30 to get his writing done before he went into the office. “Three hours a day,” he declared, “will produce as much as a man ought to write.  But he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours – so have tutored his mind that it, shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas.”

He finished each of his novels within a few months of starting it, working literally to a timetable: “When I have commenced a book,” he explained, “I have alway’s prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face – and demanding of me increased labour.”  If he wasted a week or even a day he would scrawl, “Alas!” in his diary and repent bitterly of his sloth.

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McMurtry – who was a busy dealer in rare books as well as a writer – was equally disciplined.  He got in the habit of writing five double-spaced pages a day when he was a 23-year-old graduate student, and never really stopped until his death.

After the success of Lonesome Dove – a best-selling book that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was turned into one of the best and most successful TV miniseries of all time – you might have thought McMurtry might have been content to rest on his laurels.  But he wasn’t.

From a 2016 Texas Monthly piece about McMurtry: 

What he did was continue to write – relentlessly, pounding out his five pages daily on [a manual typewriter]. . . . He seemed to issue forth a book every year or so, sometimes twice a year. He wrote another Old West novel [and] a sequel to The Last Picture Show [and] a sequel to Terms of Endearment . . . . He wrote more screenplays and composed book reviews and literary essays for such publications as the New York Review of Books.

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According to the author of that Texas Monthly article about McMurtry, he was anything but introspective when it came to his writing:

[A]sk McMurtry about his writing – why he became a writer in the first place, or what inspires him, or if there’s an underlying meaning to his fiction, or any other such forced attempt at introspection – and he is steadfastly unreflective.  “I like making stuff up,” he told me, simply.

When I tried again – What about process?  Did he ever get stuck developing a plot?  Seize up sometimes before a blank page? – he sighed.  “I just write,” he replied.  “You either do it, or you don’t.”

Nor does he have any particular desire to discuss the characters he has created or the books he has written.  “As soon as I finish a novel and ship it to the publisher,” he told me, “I almost immediately lose interest in it and never read it again.”

“Even Lonesome Dove?” I asked.

“I’ve never reread it.  I don’t hang on to any of my books.  If I did that, I wouldn’t have time to think about what I’m going to do next.”

I looked at him for a few seconds to see if he was joking.  He looked right back at me, his face impassive.

(You can click here to read that entire Texas Monthly piece – it’s well worth the time.)

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I would never compare myself to McMurtry as an author – I may have a big ego, but I’m not delusional – but we’re not totally dissimilar in our approaches to writing.

Like him, I just write – even when I don’t really have anything to say.  (That’s not an infrequent occurrence, as my regular readers know.)  But when you commit to producing roughly 125 posts a year, you don’t have the luxury of waiting for your muse to inspire you.  

McMurtry in his bookstore in 2012

And like McMurtry, I don’t spend much time looking back.  Once I’ve finished a post, it’s on to the next one – on occasion I will revisit an old post, but that’s the exception, not the rule.  

A reviewer once said that McMurtry writes so much that “supply outstrips demand,” and that “a lot of [McMurtry’s] stuff verges on being . . . typed rather than written.”  

I agree that not all of McMurtry’s novels are good – I would say that roughly half of them are nothing special.

I won’t try to put a number on how many 2 or 3 lines posts are nothing special, but it’s certainly more than half.  

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Larry McMurtry’s only child, James, is a singer-songwriter who has released a dozen albums.  

Today’s featured song is from his most recent one, 2015’s Complicated Game.

From Allmusic:

[McMurtry] is one of the best American songwriters in the game, inhabiting the lives of the people he writes about with an unaffected sincerity . . . and filling his lyrics with telling details that are sometimes witty, sometimes affecting, and always brilliantly observed.

Sounds like he learned a few tricks from his father.

By the way, James’s son (and Larry’s grandson) Curtis is also a recording artist.

James and Curtis McMurtry

Click here to listen to “Copper Canteen.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.