Coming of Age in Texas: The Novels of Larry McMurtry
1969; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1969.0013
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
ResumoC H A R L E S D. PEAVY University of Houston Coming of Age in Texas: The Novels of Larry McMurtry Larry McMurtry recently published his first non-fiction book, a collection of essays on Texas customs, beliefs, and cities.1 It will be interesting to compare this book with his novels,2 all of which display a knowledge of and respect for the land. But McMurtry displays no sentimentality or nostalgia for the country, however descriptively he has written of it. In a Houston Post interview (October 30, 1966) he says, “I like nature, but I still feel as if I am part of it, that I have never really separated from it, even in the city.” But, he continues, he likes “bigger and better cities.” He considers this attitude to be what separates his generation of Texas writers from older writers (“We don’t seem to have this yen for the country and need of the country that Dobie, Bedichek and Webb had”). In the same interview he says that the big city’s appeal to him is mostly cultural, but it is also “a kind of emotional excitement that cannot be reduced to better theatre, more music, better movies, and more book stores.” This echoes his statement in “Texas: Good Times Gone, or Here Again?,”3 that “there are fewer and fewer reasons for an imaginative person to stay in the small town,” and the idea that is fully developed in The Last Picture Show—that life in a small town can be hell after the last picture show closes. The Thalia of The Last Picture Show is modeled on Archer City, Texas, which McMurtry describes as being even more isolated than when he lived there (“the movie operates only intermittently, and the railroad tracks have been taken up”). McMurtry has written about life in the country and in the dead or dying little towns from first hand experience. In doing so, he has chronicled what becomes a major theme in his fiction: the initiation into manhood and its inevitable corollaries—loneliness and loss of innocence. Hn A Narrow Grave (Austin: Encino Press, 1968). 2McMurtry’s three novels are Horseman, Pass By (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961), Leaving Cheyenne (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), and The Last Picture Show (New York: The Dial Press, 1966). sHoliday, XXXVIII (September, 1965), 58-9, 75, 77-9. 172 Western American Literature McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961) examines the initiation theme that is developed further in his later novels. A general feeling of loneliness permeates this first book. In the prologue Lonnie speaks of how the saddest and loneliest time of day, twilight, was passed on the Bannon ranch. The whole family would gather on the front porch, and in the fading light they would watch the cars rushing across the plains on the highways a mile away. The growl of the big diesel trucks reached them through the thick prairie dusk, and during the shipping season the freights chugged by with carloads of calves. The bawling of the calves “was a lonesome sound at twilight,” and it often made the grandfather think of “other times he had heard it, and of the men he had heard it with.” It was then that he told stories about cowboys like his dead foreman, Jericho Green. But the saddest sound of all was the whistle of the nightly Zephyr, which always made the old man restless and sent him off to bed. After his grandfather was in bed, Lonnie would climb up and sit atop the windmill, staring at the lights of a little town twelve miles across the plain. Often the loneliness of the characters is underscored by scraps of hillbilly songs. In one scene Lonnie moodily flips a stick into a big water tank and watches it bob in the water. He recalls, “It made me think of an old hillbilly song by Moon Mulligan, called ‘I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.’ With all the dreams I own. Sail it out across the ocean blue.” Similarly, a scrap of song underscores the loneliness of the cow boy, Jesse, who has always been a womanless wanderer...
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