Daugherty, Tracy. Larry McMurtry: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2023.
In the 1990’s, I lived in west Texas, a mere 100 miles from Archer City. I visited the multi-building Booked Up bookstore twice and came away with remarkable books. Tracy Daugherty’s description of the openness, large sky, near constant drought conditions, etc. of the area are spot on. As I worked my way through the stacks, I was stunned that a place so devoid of people and the luxury of time to read could possibly have such a remarkable bookstore.
Larry McMurtry wrote several nonfiction books including two memoirs (Books: A Memoir in 2008 and Literary Life: A Second Memoir in 2009) that explain how Booked Up came to reside in Archer City. Daugherty’s biography enriches McMurtry’s recollections with a comprehensive picture of the complicated, moody, loving, observant, and opinionated man that is Larry McMurtry. Daugherty introduces us to Larry’s parents, their origins, and then takes us from Larry’s birth to his death.
Daugherty had the cooperation of McMurtry’s family, first and second wives, and many friends. He visited many of the places that McMurtry lived, worked, and wrote. He had access to McMurtry’s letters and other writings. Daugherty uses all the resources available to him to provide us with a fine introduction to Larry McMurtry. The text is 473 pages long. Neither a word nor sentence was ill-used or unnecessary. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Daugherty is a remarkable researcher and writer.
In addition to McMurtry’s relationships and Hollywood work, Daugherty treats us to an examination of McMurtry’s major and minor writings. I don’t intend to read much more of McMurtry. Although, some day in retirement I may re-read Lonesome Dove. I do not always enjoy his characters moral choices or their development. But, I sure do appreciate how McMurtry used his wealth and influence to continue to promote a book culture in America.
McMurtry did mourn the ongoing demise of bookstores in general and used bookstores in particular. A case in point is found on 436: “McMurtry said that, in 1963, when he’d first arrived in Los Angeles, there were 115 secondhand bookstores between Long Beach and Van Nuys. All gone.”
Once upon a time, bookstores could be found in nearly every city. Not anymore.
Here are a few other quotes that I have written down and will eventually paste into my journal.
“She’d (Khristal Collins, store manager) hung a guide to Booked Up’s holdings on the side of a shelf in the second building:
Q: How are books arranged?
A: Erratically/impressionistically/Whimsically/Open to Interpretation.” Page 437
“Remember that Brokeback Mountain was a book before it was a movie,” McMurtry went on. “From the humblest paperback exchange to the masters of the great bookshops of the world – all are contributors to the survival of the culture of the book, a wonderful culture which we mustn’t lose.” Page 432
“Writing in The American Scholar in 2010, William Zinsser lamented the fact that ‘men and women of letters were once the workhorses of the literary enterprise; they saw that the caravan kept moving…their universe was held together by a specific object (the book), sold in a specific place (the bookstore).’ But now, he said, ‘The republic of letters has largely sputtered out. Little bookstores where writers once dropped in to chat were put out of business by big bookstores where the general populace dropped in to drink coffee: the republic of latte.’” Page 7
“Houston was my first city, my Alexandria, my Paris, my Oxford,” McMurtry once wrote. “At last I was in a place where I could begin to read, and I did.” For him, migration from Archer City was not just a practical decision or a forced march. It was a stirring in the blood. “The tradition I was born into” – as the son of a Great Plains cattleman – “was essentially nomadic, a herdsman tradition, following animals across the earth,” he said. He confessed he was incurious about the animals; from his earliest youth, he was after different game. In Houston, he immersed himself in a world of books and movies – more accurately, in bookshops and movie theaters, repositories of culture. “The bookshops are a form of ranching,” he said. “Instead of herding cattle, (booksellers) herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraphlike clusters.” Page 5
Overall, this biography was time well spent.
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