Books

Larry McMurtry
Reviewer: Blair Parsons

            Larry McMurtry’s Texas is that romantically tough expanse of hardscrabble land and weather-beaten faces, cattle drives and barn raisings. His fiction has occupied this long past world for decades. McMurtry abhors this mythical Texas, yet writes almost entirely within it. He writes incessantly about his bookless youth, but never discusses the great gains in Texas letters: The University of Texas Library is a top-ten national library, Texans do read, and the Texas Book Festival draws thousands every autumn for the mere activity of discussing books.
            These dichotomies are what make McMurtry so engaging. He despises cowboys and loves his boots. He loves nothing more than the wide horizon of north Texas yet left it for forty years. He is snobbish and erudite, yet accessible and championed by the vast majority of the state. Books finds McMurtry nestled again in the analysis of what it means to be a bookman from Texas, a twenty-first century reader, and a romantic for a world past.
            The foundation for these dichotomies was laid during his youth, outside of Archer City, Texas. McMurtry grew up in a bookless home, failing to excel in the family business. Despite his distaste for ranching, he knew no other world. Without books and with long evenings to pass, McMurtry benefited from an aural culture with talented family storytellers. Hearing these stories proved seminal. McMurtry differentiates between his ranching reality and the stories heard:

            I was very puzzled by this, because I didn’t realize, at the time, that there could be made-up stories. At that point I was accustomed to concerning myself with things that clearly existed, particularly poultry, a constant threat to one as small as I was. Reality, such as it was on our ranch, required unwavering vigilance if one were not to be pecked by the poultry, kicked by a mule, or the like.

            Perhaps when presented with the looming presence of attack-minded poultry, the imagination can understandably remain stunted. However, these stories ignited his imagination, which proved vital in countering the boredom of the prairie.
            Over decades, McMurtry has cultivated a character all his own: that erudite east-coaster stuffed into a starched shirt and boots. Texan grandparents propagate this character to their grandchildren. We grow up thinking McMurtry drove cattle with Charles Goodnight or the King Ranch folks during the day and penned westerns after dinner. Had I known as a child that he wrote Lonesome Dove in Washington, perhaps I would have been less eager to read it. The writer’s location does not necessarily affect his authenticity, but for someone whose identity is so inextricably weaved together with geography, it matters. Whether writing fiction or nonfiction McMurtry has made Texas and the broader American West his subject. These vast plains and horizons are much different than the lush forests that greeted him in Virginia.

            Books about books typically cannot help themselves and take a pedantic approach, placing the writer as oracle, as the gatekeeper of literature charged with guiding the neophyte. The writer reveals to the neophyte what books are worth his time, what books a proper and respected reader should have read, and what books are mere chaff. There is a fine tradition of this instructive approach. Throughout his memoir, McMurtry typically shies away from referencing books about books, but he can’t stay completely away. He briefly mentions Pound’s ABC of Reading, but knows not to dabble too long in referencing books about books in his own book about books.
            Books is unique. Whereas Maugham and Pound intended to tell readers what to read, McMurtry seems almost to write with no desire for an audience. Books is a pious ode to the inseparable pillars that, for McMurtry, make books wonderful: physicality and content. While most champion axioms and hypotheses contained within a book, McMurtry never strays from his admiration for the physical: the smell, the feel of pages, the sound of stiff spines, and the dust shared between neighboring volumes on a shelf. He says:

            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. Getting the books I wanted to read was the main reason for the pursuit.

            But there can be secondary and tertiary reasons for wanting a particular book. One is the pleasure of holding the physical book itself: savoring the type, the binding, the book’s feel and heft. All these things can be enjoyed apart from the literature, which some, but not all, contain.

            Sure this is part romance, but that is also the point. In McMurtry’s life, he has seen exponential growth in library holdings and access to books, yet desire for books in recent decades has arguably begun to wane. This (d)evolving reltationship between the public and books upsets McMurtry and serves as the impetus for Books. Books will not reinvigorate book reading, but it provides an example of a life intentionally and pleasantly lived among books.
            Further, Books provides a distinct peak into the idiosyncrasies of the rare book trade, which has occupied McMurtry more so than his writing. Like many niche activities, the participants are simultaneously self-effacing and protective of their activity: loving it but wondering why anyone else would be interested. McMurtry addresses this duality of a niche endeavor:

            Here I am, thirty-four chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader—and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy? How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop? Why should they even care that there exists a possible unique copy of the dust wrapper of Anne of Green Gables?

            This passage comes ninety-one pages into Books and marks the spot where it morphs from an ode to books to a eulogy. Books are not eulogized. They will continue to exist. Publishing will continue. Library and archives will still build collections. What scares McMurtry is the passing of the common reader. Books will survive, but the act of reading, McMurtry fears, might meet a different fate. He wonders can civilization “survive the loss of reading?” Rather than attempt an explanation, McMurtry chooses a much wiser path, admitting he does not know the answer, hence recognizing the immense gravity of the question. While no easy answer can be found, asking the question keeps the dialogue going. McMurtry writes: “the complex truth is that many activities last for centuries, and then simply (or unsimply) stop. We rarely bleed people now, although it was a common therapy for centuries.” While pondering this proposition is a worthwhile exercise, McMurtry does not believe it—and I hope—recognizes its incongruencies. Reading is in a slump, but that fails to mean reading as an activity is at death’s doorstep. Humans have been reading for a mere few thousand years, a relatively short time in the spectrum of our species. Despite technological advancements nothing comes close to enabling the conveyance of information quite like reading does. McMurtry is right: the book’s exalted cultural position might decline, but reading—even for the shear lack of a feasible substitute—will continue. People might not read McMurtry’s beloved Woolf and Proust, but they will still read even if only recipes and instruction manuals.
            Surprisingly to many of his fans, writing is McMurtry’s vocation, while book selling remains his lifelong passion:

            One reason I’ve hung on to book selling is that it’s progressive—the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse. No reason to name names, since no one is spared. Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energized or realized forever. Strong talents can simply exhaust their gift, and they do.

            Book selling, though, being based on acquired knowledge, is progressive. At least, that seems to be the case with the great dealers. The longer they deal and the more they know, the better books they handle.

            This dichotomy serves McMurtry well. As his novelist’s abilities—admittedly—dwindle, his book selling alter ego continues to acquire knowledge. Further, being a book man has always remained his passion. He maintains a rigid schedule of writing every morning, and once that deed is out of the way, he can then turn his attention to books for the remainder of the day.
            Not all is doom and gloom in McMurtry’s world. Books are fun and so too is the hunt for them. Throughout Books he sprinkles references to the international vintage pornography market. Maugham and Pound certainly did not include this aspect of the literata in their instructive manuals. Throughout his bookscouting days, McMurtry developed an inquisitive taste for little pornographic comics:
           
            As I was trying to pack my car that sleety day in Vienna, the lawyer for the estate drove up in a car full of what in my high school days were called fuck books. These little booklets were sold in filling stations for a quarter and worked by the flip-the-page method also used in Big Little Books. By flipping the pages the reader-spectator was rewarded with a crude sense of movement.

            Only McMurtry can get away with referring to copulaton as “a crude sense of movement.” These curmudgeonly nuggets sprinkled throughout Books cut the dour. If the world as McMurtry knows it—and prefers it—is going down in a barrel of apathy, he better make some jokes. Perhaps my grandmother would have less eagerly pushed McMurtry on me had she known he possesses such a sizeable collection of pornographic comics.

            Books bounces along at a staccato pace. One moment finds McMurtry describing a bookless childhood while the next sees him buying a library from Jackie O’s mother. Such a disjointed journey seems a little lazy, but from another angle it is not laziness but rather the disjointed ramblings of an old man. A life remembered is not linear. Stories and events pop up unannounced. McMurtry’s use of this random order for his memoir, conveys a pleasantness in which the reader and McMurtry relive oddballs and weird events together.
            While guilty of occasional fits of self-aggrandizement, Books sets out to pay homage to the uniqueness of the book: its portability, its varied content, and its ability to alter cultures. A book can be taken anywhere. It can be read between meetings, in the grocery store line, or in the living room. McMurtry caps this ode nicely: “Sometimes books excite me, sometimes they sustain me, but rarely do they disappoint me—as books that is, if not necessarily the poetry, history, or fiction that they contain.”
Towards the end of Books, McMurtry tells of a gentleman wishing to buy a substantial number of titles for his daughter. The man is quite insistent, but McMurtry stands his ground, saying: “burdening young children with thousands of books was the surest way to make them hate reading.” This is another example of McMurtry knows best, but in this case, it is true. McMurtry’s childhood home was bookless, until the gift of nineteen adventure novels from a relative headed to war. This small library set him on his path and enabled him to cultivate a love of reading. Gifting a thousand books to young McMurtry might have been as bad as remaining bookless. Books and a reader’s taste are odd. They find each other often randomly and independent of others. McMurtry’s small library enabled him to grow as a reader at a comfortable, self-determined pace. Had he been encumbered with thousands of books, we might not have Horseman, Pass By; Terms of Endearment; or Lonesome Dove.
            As Texas and the rest of the country change, McMurtry’s audience might be dwindling, but he is firmly entrenched as Texas’s unofficial writer laureate. McMurtry is Texas’ guy and will always be read. Cattle are now hauled by rail or big-rig, but McMurtry’s cattle drives and Indian raids remain in the generational memory of many Texans. McMurtry, like any good writer, remains hell-bent on writing exactly what he wants. He might not have broad national readership, but grandmothers, reminiscers, and boot-wearers are no small audience. Texans like McMurtry. He could write about Oklahoma and we would read it. Probably.