SOURCE: "Old Corrals: Texas According to 80s Films and TV and Texas According to Larry McMurtry," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 63-73.

For several years now, in conversations at conventions and at cocktail parties, I have noticed Texans arguing about Texas literature. The same arguments have appeared in print from Texas Monthly to The Texas Observer to The Concho River Review. The more notorious of these articles raised literary dust across the state from the stamping of feet of angered Texas critics and writers. Palefaces, Redskins, and bridegrooms all have different and sometimes conflicting notions about what a Texas writer is and what Texas writing is. The Texas Institute of Letters annually awards cash money to the best Texas literature. But, as Jim Lee says in Range Wars, neither the institute, the prize winners, nor observers can figure out its rules for eligibility. No one seems to know what qualifies someone to be a Texas writer, although Clay Reynolds does a good job in his essay in Range Wars. (S.M.U Press). Texas critics and writers may be copying the same phrase that so many West Texans say about art: They don't know how to define Texas literature but they know what it is. Or, so they think.

The same sort of mist surrounds most things Texas. Few Texans can even agree about what a Texan is: a native, a native moved away, a New Yorker with sympathies, a naturalized Texan like my father who, nevertheless, after living in Texas nearly forty years claims not to be a Texan, or me. Texans seem to have an overemphasized love and hate for their territory; yet they don't want anyone other than a Texan telling them about Texas. On the other hand, the nation as a whole has a certain fascination with Texas, perhaps for the same reasons that Texans love it and hate it—the Cowboys (both wranglers and football players), rural poverty and oil wealth, tarball beaches and truly ugly West Texas emptiness. To the nation, Texas is an example of unrestrained Americaness, manifest destiny gone unchecked. Lyndon Johnson showing compassion by declaring war on poverty yet conducting an unpopular war from his toilet seat. I loved to hate Lyndon because of his embarrassing crudity, but I hated to love him because of his naturalness compared to the tight assed, Harvard-trained, Europeanized Kennedy men around him.

So, to say anything about Texas, a critic has to define whether he is talking about a national perception of Texas. Texans' perception of Texas, or some personal observations about Texas. I want to discuss popular artistic portrayals of Texas. In this discussion. I'll address some national perceptions of Texas presented by a television series, a film, and a novel. I'll leave other art out since I don't know much about it and don't want to blatantly reveal my ignorance.

Since TV is the most pervasive American art form (the term art used here for lack of better term), I'll discuss a TV show. Because film is the most popular and dominate medium of the twentieth century, perhaps the form for folk art in this century, I'd like to discuss movies about Texas. And, since he is a bright guy and an icon, I'll discuss Larry McMurtry in regard to a recent book and his own wrestling with his identity to a national audience as a Texas writer….

Sitting On The Corral In Anything For Billy

With his early successes, Horseman Pass By and Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry, perched up on the corral post in the dust jacket photo, saw the God of national acclaim and popular success. With the first movies—Hud and The Last Picture Show—then the academy awards raining down upon Terms of Endearment, McMurtry was nominated for beatification. With the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove and the following media event, the film of Lonesome Dove, "the" TV event of the 88-89 season, McMurtry achieved popular sainthood. As a result, no Texan discussing literature or Texas dare leave out McMurtry. But, as soon as any critics mention McMurtry. Texas readers sigh and groan. For, because of Archer City's golden boy, Texans can't talk about Texas without talking about McMurtry. And, McMurtry can no longer hope to ever escape being labeled a "Texas" writer.

I don't mean to imply that Lonesome Dove is not a good novel or TV show. McMurtry and his TV translators know about the cultural baggage in Americans' minds. Though bounded by the small screen that barely contains the livestock or the story, the mini-series has a visual and thematic complexity rarely seen from a living room sofa. Director Simon Wincer and Austin writer Bill Wittliff (another Texas/Australian writer/director team), understand filming open space and cattle and playing realism against myth.

So, in Lonesome Dove a viewer sees the aching realism of the desperately psychologically and materialistically impoverished 19th century Texas yet senses the mythic proportions in the physical and mental struggles in the film. Robert Duvall understands this tone and perhaps even Texas. As Gus McCrae and as the down and out country-western singer, Max Sledge, in Tender Mercies (a historical descendant but literary predecessor of Woodrow Call), Duvall shows the potential greatness in the moves, the physiques, and the voices of his Texas characters (Not that native Texan Tommy Lee Jones doesn't sit a horse and the role rather nicely, but wouldn't it have been something to see Duvall play both leads in Lonesome Dove?) So, Gus' crudity and savagery enable him to survive, yet his attempts at grandiose rhetoric, deeds, thought, and movement show the real becoming myth. Duvall gets the tone just right, but he got the idea for the tone from McMurtry's novel.

But, even with Lonesome Dove's high ratings, TV and moviemakers may not be able to find new explorations of the 19th century West that escape the audience's notions about how the 19th century West should look on film. The West or Texas as part of Western myth, then, is probably best presented so that the audience can't see it. McMurtry has readers and not viewers and thus doesn't have to deal with film apprehensions. But, even with print he has to deal with his audiences' mythic apprehensions. McMurtry, who stole from twentieth century film and fiction and nineteenth century legends, knows about film's and fiction's audiences' expectations. And, he knows what that expectation does to his artistic ambitions. He is, in the eyes of the country and even in the eyes of grouchy Texas critics, "a Texas writer" (who uses the term on what occasion determines whether it is derogatory or not).

Larry is now so closely associated with Texas that each time he picks up a pen or presses his fingers to any of his portable typewriters, he simultaneously comments about Texas, the country's ideas about Texas, and the ideas about Texas that he created. His fame and accompanying money and his own interests and instincts have brought him the freedom to dedicate himself to developing his craft yet put limits around what form that craft will take.

So, readers, mostly those who buy a novel to enjoy it rather than to critique it, fully expect to enter a Texas according to McMurtry when they fold back the spine of any recent McMurtry novel. This past year, after the Pulitzer, after Texasville, while Lonesome Dove was on the screen, readers were turning the pages of Anything For Billy, in which McMurtry perhaps consciously looks at his own dilemma. And, as reader and potential reviewer or commentator, I too am stuck in McMurtry's position.

McMurtry is primarily a realist. Not Barthleme or Barth, he is concerned with what he wishes his text to show rather than with the text itself. But, he at times becomes enamored of his text and pushes it far away from the worldly pastures where he starts. This tendency represents McMurtry at his worst and his best.

When he stays with his realism, he presents an ironic and laconic world and revels in its ordinariness and normality. He makes boredom, whether high plains travel or small town West Texas life, seem funny, touching, or pathetic. McMurtry's simple heroes aren't blessed with much introspection, so they never develop much self awareness. Their own peculiar natures are intriguing to them and us because they never seem able to control themselves or understand themselves. They are caught between neurosis and psychopathy (Gus is McMurtry's freest character and most rounded psychopath and so is not like these characters. Call is like them).

Like the slow motion worked at Lonesome Dove, the dreary, dirty world at Greasy Corners in Anything For Billy's New Mexico presents the figures we assume to be myth in their pre-mythic days. The gunfighters and buffalo hunters gathered at Greasy Corners are a bunch of heroes who are cognizant of their reputations but trapped by their own simpleness and the grittiness of their milieu. These characters thus develop an ironic, if cruel, acceptance of death. McMurtry's point is that this ironic view, hiding a barrel full of insecurities and irritated by a simple mind and hostile environment, sometimes looks heroic and can, with the right coloring, escalate into myth. But the myths, as Ben Sippy (McMurtry's narrator) observes, can never stand in for the specific characteristics of those "sweetheart's" at Greasy Corners:

The dime novelists might portray gunfighters as a confident, satisfied lot—I'm guilty of that myself—but the truth is they were mainly disappointed men. They spent their lives in the rough barrooms of ugly towns: they ate terrible food and drank a vile grape of liquor: few of them managed to shoot the right people, and even fewer got to die gloriously in a shoot-out with a peer. The majority just got shot down by some bold stranger, like that drunk who killed the great Hickok.

McMurtry is at his traditional best in Anything For Billy when he positions his narrator in space and time to observe a shooting contest between Katerina Garza and his legendary gunfighter Hill Coe. Katerina Garza, like many of McMurtry's women, has the self assurance and conviction that his males so often lack. Even McMurtry's narrator can not quite figure out Katerina and is awed by the other female characters, including his own wife. She squats, takes careful aim, and shoots twenty bottles in a row. Next, Hill Coe will shoot his twenty. He misses the first one. Embarrassed and disgraced, Hill Coe falls into a whiskey bottle. Billy, the famous outlaw, then tries his hand and hits only two of the twenty. The Yankee narrator, who is seen as something of an ineffectual oaf in the West, nearly matches Katerina's marksmanship. The tone of this scene—the manner in which McMurtry, while letting his narrator revel, down-plays the skill and what we know about who will become myth and who will not—reveals McMurtry with his feet firmly planted in reality yet achingly dealing with a contrary myth.

With Billy, already a myth, McMurtry has to down-play the character because of the mythic baggage, so I delighted in Billy's normality, in fact his sub-normality. But when he goes about creating his own characters, McMurtry destroys his realistic tone by endowing these characters with god-like prowresses. It grew tired of Isinglass (clearly John Chisum), Lady Snow, and Mesty-Woolah. Too much seems exaggerated. McMurtry grows too extravagant. The trappings and architecture of Will Isinglass's ranch house, a castle-like creation; Will Isinglass' sexual appetites at age eighty-five; Lady Cecily Snow's icy and deadly character and expertise in botany; Mesty-Woolah's deadliness and red camel all seem like characters from Ben Sippy's imagination rather than from his observation. And, as all of the characters converge at once to observe Billy Bone's death, McMurtry seems to give in to Sippy's sense of melodrama. The characters stop the novel and stomp the delicate play between the ordinariness and simplicity of the characters and their future mythic proportions.

I have heard McMurtry say in his lectures that he writes for character and not plot. In the best Realistic tradition, he lets his characters lead his plot wherever it might go. Ironically, though, McMurtry's fondness for his extravagant characters (perhaps the creations that earned this literary and commercial success) leads his novels away from their realistic tone. It is as though, with his characters, he tries to jump out of the world that he observes and into some world of his creation. But, McMurtry can't jump as high as the magical realists. He sometimes ends up creating his own stereotypes. He spends perhaps needless pages describing these characters being characters. I put down Terms of Endearment several times because I got tired of Aurora Greenway and General Scot being eccentric. My first McMurtry Book, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, first introduced me to this tendency when I read about Prof. Godwin Lloyd Jons, while naked, hanging on the bumper of a co-ed's car. I was amused but didn't know what end these characters and their scenes served.

These characters seem attempts to escape the myth, or McMurtry's liberating himself from the public's expectations of a "Texas" writer. So, these characters become "McMurtry" characters rather than the similarly grandiose "Texas" characters.

Ironically then Texas and the myths that cling to Texas provide McMurtry with the models for these characters. Even his extravagant non-Texans have this extravagant Texas-like feel to them. This extravagance stems from folklore. McMurtry has heard the Texas stories, jokes, and metaphors so that he is familiar with them. But, fiction requires more restraint, and McMurtry is trying to figure out just how much restraint he needs to have.

The epic proportions of Lonesome Dove accommodated this extravagance. The thin narrative line of getting a herd to Montana kept him mostly on track with several detours so that the extravagance seemed to match the subject matter. But, in Billy, the characters seem extravagant for their own sake, for the sake of escaping yet staying within the corral that surrounds McMurtry. To American readers, McMurtry is like Dickens. He can create villains and super real characters that welcome parody or play against myth, but though they serve to show social or literary indignation, their very colorfulness makes them complete in themselves, loose from mythic or social relevance, so readers divorce these characters from substance. We delight in Dicken's or McMurtry's characters but don't ask what they mean.

But, I have yet to elaborate on what intent I sniff in the dust that McMurtry raises. In Lonesome Dove, McMurtry took on the cowboy myth; but with Billy he takes on a more specific legend. And perhaps, more than with Lonesome Dove, the specificity of this legend and its familiarity and popularity, particularly in films, create an even more formidable problem for McMurtry. So, to deal with this problem, he obscures historical facts, changes Billy Bonny's name to Billy Bone to buy poetic license yet keep us informed about whom he is really writing about, and most important, creates his middle-aged narrator, Ben Sippy.

With Ben Sippy, McMurtry has a foreign point of view to register the drama. Ben looks at occurrences with a mixture of sense of strangeness that a Philadelphia gentleman would have, yet with all the mundanity and banality of a participant. He is at his best in his discussion of the massacre at Skunkwater Flats:

They've all made a study of it, you see, whereas I was just there. The very fact that I was there—it's about the only fact they can't dispute—just makes them edgy; in fact, it make them jealous and produces much resentment. They'd all like me better if I were dead, like the other mighty men who fell that day (pg. 220).

They're part of legend now, the sweethearts who died at Skunkwater Flats: they died and were raised to glory: I lived and became deflated and old. It's a melancholy thing because, hard though they were, I liked those gunmen who died in that windy gully. They only warred on one another, as near as I can see, and they brought some spirit to the ragged business of living, a spirit I confess I miss (pg. 223).

McMurtry, through imagination and craft, must closely approximate the excitement of what really happened. A good history of Billy, one like Evan Connell's Son of Morning Star would be the most intriguing account of Billy because it would achieve a more factual rendering of his less than romantic reality. But, McMurtry is also interested in myth, and thus his fictive narrator also provides insights in myth.

Ben writes dime novels, so he helps create myths by distorting truth. In fact, Cecily and a nun read his novels that distort the reality that they are stuck in and find excitement and truth in his novels. So, Ben—when he discusses his life, observes his cowboy heroes, or tells us about his novels—constantly juxtaposes reality and myth and the tension between the two. Then, when we realize that Ben is myth or perhaps a potential myth because he is in a McMurtry book, we get real confused about which is more real, myth or reality. This is McMurtry's point.

But, McMurtry also uses Ben Sippy to comment about the effect of the tension between myth and reality on the mythmaker. In fact, Ben Sippy may be a device for self criticism, a means for McMurtry to criticize his own work. At the end of the novel, in 19th century fashion, is the writer's signature, but the signature is not Sippy's but McMurtry's. Anything For Billy is not just Sippy's reminiscences but McMurtry's novel. It is both realistic and reality shattering.

And Ben, now with Larry's signature, gives something of an eulogy to McMurtry's and all writers' careers and truths. McMurtry says in lectures that novel writing is a middle-aged activity, that the writer reaches literary maturity in middle age but exhausts it before he reaches old age. Ben Sippy discovers the "real" west and "human depth" in middle age during his trip to New Mexico but bumps into the limits, his own corral posts, in old age.

Sippy has seen the real Billy and Billy's real death and tried to write a real novel, which we should expect, because of Ben's style, is overwrought and overly dramatized. He, after all, coins the nickname Billy the Kid. Ben states that, despite his literary pretensions, he fails at literature and leaves only a few notable dime novels. He does find something of a resurrection with his nearly accidental collaboration with the movies. Like Ben Sippy and his version of the "White Star of the West" (Billy the Kid), McMurtry created grandiose character out of legends or mixtures of legends and imagination that in turn make McMurtry even more popular and more rich through the movies that they inspired. For, McMurtry's extravagant characters became great roles for stars wishing to act or character actors looking for better billing: Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Ben Johnson, and Shirley McClaine. McMurtry cons both Ben and the movies. He shows us Ben's insight into "human depth" but failure to reproduce it in literature or to recapture the heart of his recalcitrant wife, Dora. And, if Ben is the butt of these jokes and is a stand-in for McMurtry, perhaps, then McMurtry critiques his own sense of failure in dealing with a Texas or Western myth. McMurtry is perhaps his and his subject matter's best critic.

And finally Billy is like McMurtry's Texas background. Preprogrammed to be mythic by McMurtry's technique and his own legend, Billy just can't quite live up to anything. Everyone in the novel will do anything for him, but he is limited by his own ordinariness. For this reason, for his pathetic nature, I like him more than many of McMurtry's fully blown characters who beg to be myths. Ben Sippy loves Billy yet is disgusted by him, wants to dispel the myths about him but helps nurture them, desires to look at "human depth" within Billy (his ordinariness) but winds up fenced-in by the myth and the mythmakers. As Ben Sippy says, "I suppose they'll argue it forever—or until all the black dirt of life finally washes off Billy and leaves him a pure, clean legend" (315).

So, in Anything For Billy, McMurtry, perhaps consciously, complains about being trapped as a Texan, as a Texas writer, or as a myth. Unlike Benton and Zinberg et. al. from The Yellow Rose, he knows what he is up against. He hates his Texas roots, and he bitches about them in his two most up-rooting essays. "Southwestern Literature," and "Ever A Bridegroom: Reflections On The Failure Of Texas Literature." Yet, he loves the past as is evidence in Lonesome Dove, Anything For Billy, Horseman Pass By, and all the rest. Thus, a Texan is corralled because of the way the rest of the country sees him. He is corralled because of the way other Texans see him. He perhaps even corrals himself. Yet, he likes the old, scarred boards. So, any narrative about Texas—whatever Texas it deals with, whether myth, reality, nostalgia, old South, or Old West—must confront the myths and overcome them. What is real, what is myth, and what people think is myth and real get many storytellers lost.

The Texas corral encloses subject matter and audience expectation. It provides Places In The Heart's nostalgia and The Yellow Rose's attempt to show tension between past and present. But for some like McMurtry, who knows the arena and the fence around it, it is both resource and trap. In the old dust jacket photo, Larry sits on a Texas corral post and, like the Kid, looks to be just an ordinary guy stuck with his peculiar obsession. He has some virtue and some insight from his vantage point. But, he doesn't know whether to stay put, to jump into the middle, or to kick the damn thing down.

works cited

Abramowitz, David, story editor for The Yellow Rose, Warner Brothers Televisions. Telephone interview, 27 October 1965.

Bazin, Andre. "Theatre and Cinema," What is Cinema? Vol. 1. ed and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, rpt. in Film Theory and Criticism. eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cobern, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 356-369.

Benton, Robert, writer and director Places in the Heart. Tri-Star Pictures, 1984.

Beresford, Bruce, director, and Horton Foote. writer, Tender Mercies. EMI Films, 1985.

Cawelti, John G. "Chinatown and Generic Transformation In Recent American Films." 1979, Film Theory and Criticism eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 503-520.

Goodman, Bob. "Big Screen-Stars Turn to TV," Family Weekly 25 September 1965, pp. 4.8 (exact part of article).

Lee, Jim. "Arbiters of Texas Literary Taste" Range Wars: Heated Debates, Sober Reflections, and Other Assessments of Texas: Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. pp. 125-136.

McMurtry, Larry. Anything For Billy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

―――――――. Lectures. Sam Houston State University 27 February 1987 and The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. 5 April 1988.

―――――――. Lonesome Dove, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Reynolds, Clay. "What Does It Take To Be A Texas Writer?" Range Wars: Heated Debates, Sober Reflections, and Other.

Schickel, Richard. "A Search for Connections." Time 24 September 1984, pp. 70-71.

Stewart, Bob. "Yellow Rose' Series Will Be Deep In The Heart of Texas." TV Week, The San Antonio Light, 2 October, 1983. p. 4T.

Wilder, John. The Yellow Rose (TV Script), Revised draft 14 March 1983.

Wincer, Simon, director, and Bill Wittliff, writer. Lonesome Dove, CBS Televisions, 1989

Zinberg, Michael and John Wilder, executive producers. The Yellow Rose. Warner Brother TV. 1983–1984