James McMurtry – "Choctaw Bingo" (2002)

You know he had to leave Texas

But he won’t say why

“To the extent that I’m known to the general public at all,” the late Larry McMurtry wrote in 2008, “I’m known as a novelist whose books make excellent movies – Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove.”

McMurtry wrote 32 novels – several were bestsellers, and one won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  But during the years he lived in Washington, DC, the frequency with which he was invited to fancy dinner parties “rose and fell according to the success, not of my books, but of my movies.”

The four movies based on McMurtry novels that the author mentioned above are all excellent.  (Lonesome Dove was actually a TV miniseries, not a movie, but close enough for government work.)

But the books that inspired them were just as good.

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McMurtry’s greatest talent was his ability to create characters that the readers of his books and the viewers of the movies and TV series based on those books cared about.

“I believe the one gift that led me to a career in fiction was the ability to make up characters that readers connect with,” McMurtry once wrote. “My characters move them, which is also why those same characters move them when they meet them on the screen.”

The characters he created not only made the movies based on his novels great, but also were responsible for those movies being produced in the first place.

“I can write characters that major actors want to play, and that's how movies get made,” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  “People want to play my characters, major actors that you can get money for, from a bank.  You've got to finance it, and nobody's come up with a better way to finance it than the star system.”

The actors who have won or been nominated for Oscars or Emmys for their work in Hud, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove are a remarkable group: Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Ellen Burstyn, Cloris Leachman, Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and Diana Lane.

All told, the three movies in that group were nominated for 26 Academy Awards, winning ten.  Throw in Brokeback Mountain – McMurtry won an Oscar for its screenplay, which was based not on one of his novels but on an Annie Proulx short story – and those numbers climb to 34 and 13.

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As good as those movies were, they don’t match up to the epic four-part miniseries that was made from McMurtry’s most well-known novel, Lonesome Dove, which won the 1986 Pulitzer prize for fiction.  The public and the critics loved it – it attracted huge audiences, and was nominated for an astonishing 18 Emmy nominations.  

“People are always telling me that I had everything to do with [the Lonesome Dove miniseries],” McMurtry told an interviewer in 2009.  ‘The people that had everything to do with it are the producers, the writers, the set designers, all the people that actually worked on it.  I was never on the set.  I turned the key in the ignition. I didn't drive the car.”

McMurtry’s modesty is admirable, but he did quite a bit more than just turn the key in the ignition, as Robert Duvall – who starred in both The Godfather and Lonesome Dove – observed:

I was fortunate enough to be in the biggest thing in American cinema history and American television history, The Godfather, parts one and two, and Lonesome Dove.  Now, The Godfather was better directed, but the novel was only okay; the movies went beyond it.  For Lonesome Dove, we had to do everything we could to come up to the level of the novel.  Whether we really did, I don’t know.

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

Here’s what his father wrote about him in 2008:

[I]t seems to me his best songs are as good as anyone’s best songs.  Indeed, I suspect that the mark he has made artistically is more likely to be indelible than the mark I have made.  Great songs outlast all but the greatest prose.

I’ve just scratched the surface of James McMurtry’s recordings, but it looks like his songs – like his father’s novels – are full of interesting characters.

James McMurtry

That’s certainly the case with today’s featured song, “Choctaw Bingo,” which is about a family reunion at the home of an aging ex-bootlegger from Texas who has moved to Oklahoma, where he cooks crystal meth and plays bingo every Friday night at the local Indian casino. 

Two of the meth-cooker’s nieces are sisters who make the drive from Baxter Springs, Kansas – a town that was only a stone’s throw from the small city I grew up in.  The singer of the song doesn’t hesitate to admit that he has had impure thoughts about them:

Ruth Ann and Lynn, they wear them cut-off britches

And them skinny little halters

And they’re second cousins to me

Man, I don’t care, I want to get between ‘em . . .

Do some sister twisters ’til the cows come home

And we’ll be havin’ us a time

The family get-together takes place in a small town just off U.S. 69 – a highway I used to drive from my hometown (Joplin, Missouri) to Houston when I was a college student there.

Back when I drove U.S. 69, it was mostly a two-lane affair that nonetheless attracted a lot of truck traffic, who moved slowly enough that other drivers were constantly making risky attempts to pass.  As a result, someone printed up a bumper sticker that I saw more than once on others cars that were navigating that road: “Pray For Me – I Drive U.S. 69.”

Click here to listen to “Choctaw Bingo,” which was released in 2002 on McMurtry’s Saint Mary of the Woods album. 

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

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.