Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove features an epigraph from T.K. Whipple that nicely encapsulates the theme of Continuity & Persistence that underpins Frontier Partisans:
“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”
McMurtry, who went up the long trail last week, seemed perpetually bemused by the impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the immortal miniseries it spawned. He didn’t set out to craft a new Myth of the West to fit the sensibilities of the late 20th Century — quite the opposite. But his creation, strangely, did just that. He wrote that:
“I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s ‘Inferno,’ filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of “Gone with the Wind’ of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.”
In one of those moments of synchronicity that seem to happen with thrilling frequency at our campfire, I was privileged to be invited to Malcolm Brooks’ virtual campfire last Wednesday, March 24, to talk about his very fine new novel, Cloudmaker. The conversation turned to Lonesome Dove (and Teddy Blue Abbott). You can hear the profound impact the novel had on Brooks starting at about the 44-minute mark:
The reception of Lonesome Dove — the novel and the picture, both — and the love so many people hold for the characters of Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, is testament to McMurtry’s manifest skills as a storyteller — but they also point to the fundamental resilience and power of the frontier hero archetype. Even when McMurtry was cutting his ex-Texas Rangers down to human size and revealing that the purported heroics of the Western Myth are actually kinda sordid, sometimes absurd, often brutal and full of folly and disappointment… well, we love ’em still.
I pride myself on a willingness to look with a clear and unflinching eye at the harsh realities of frontier history. I realized long ago that if I was going to “keep it real” and seek truth on these trails, that I was going to have to embrace this history in all of its messy, even grotesque, humanness. And that’s what McMurtry gave us in Lonesome Dove. He allowed us to embrace what he called “the phantom leg of the American psyche” — the West — as a truly human epic. And in doing so, his antiheroic intentions found themselves manifesting something oddly… heroic.
Gus and Call’s plaint that the Rangers had killed off everyone who made the border country interesting always felt very real to me. They embody The Frontiersman’s Paradox. They reminded me then, and still do, of Simon Kenton gazing with bemusement at the civilization he had helped to make possible in what, mere decades before, had been a wild hunter’s paradise in Kentucky.
I don’t know how many times Marilyn and I have reflected on friends and loved ones’ sometimes desperate efforts to find an elusive happiness and satisfaction in the “geographic cure,” or a new job, or a new… whatever… with Gus’ advice to Lorena:
“Lorie darlin’, life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life.”
The full quote is damned fine living philosophy, you ask me:
“Lorie darlin’, life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life. If you want any one thing too badly, it’s likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.”
Matthew says
McMurty said that Woodrow was a Stoic and Gus a Epicurean in the sense that they represent aspects of those two dueling philosophies. I lean toward the Stoics myself (I don’t think the point of life is to avoid pain), but I think that Epicurus’s great gift to the world was that he taught the greatest pleasures came from the simple things. Not wild hedonism or “sophisticated” pleasures. It is thoroughly ironic that Epicurean has come to be a label for people who enjoy fancy meals when the old philosopher lived like a monk.
I hadn’t realized that McMurty had passed on. I’ve only read Lonesome Dove, but it is definitely a major work.
JimC says
Good stuff.
Allan Godsiff says
Only recently read the book after watching the series numerous times over the years. Made me see what a great job they did casting Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as I heard their voices clear as a bell as I read the book. The byplay between those two is definitely epic !
RIP one of the great western authors.
Rick Schwertfeger says
IMO “Lonesome Dove” is the great Texas novel – a perhaps always will be. (I think that Philipp Meyers “The Son” wins the silver medal.) But for those who may not have read them, McMurtry’s first two novels are terrific. “Horseman, Pass By” (1961) – described as his “classic novel of the post-World War II era” – is magnificent.
And “Leaving Cheyenne” (1962) affected me even more. It’s one of the books that when I finished it, I couldn’t let the strory go. So I turned it over and read it again right away. I love the characters: “Gideon Fry, the serious rancher; Johnny McCloud, the free-spirited cowhand; and Molly Taylor, the sensitive woman they both love and who bears them each a son.” “Leaving Cheyenne” is one of my all-time favorite books.
JimC says
I’m surprised this has never come up before. I, too, loved Leaving Cheyenne. It’s been decades since I read either book. Maybe I’m due. As for The Son, I think you could argue that it could not exist if not for the path blazed by Lonesome Dove.
Paul McNamee says
“If you want any one thing too badly, it’s likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.”
That is a helluva quote. One I think I’ve needed lately. Thank you.
JimC says
One we all need these days. You’re welcome.
Norman Andrews says
Sad to hear of his passing ,his books have given me many hours of pleasure .
Norm.
wayne says
I place Lonesome Dove on the same level as The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie as the very best of Western literature.
Not to take anything away from Lonesome Dove, but I recall reading that McMurtry originally envisioned the story as a screenplay with John Wayne as Woodrow and Jimmy Stewart as Gus. At the time they would have been the right age to play the roles. When it didn’t pan out, he wrote the novel instead. I think it’s a gift to all of us that the screenplay was a failure.
deuce says
Larry was a good man, from the sound of it. R.I.P.
He also owned–and presumably enjoyed–the second edition of A GENT FROM BEAR CREEK.
https://www.bookedupac.com/pages/books/4977/robert-e-howard/a-gent-from-bear-creek?fbclid=IwAR1u5n8MBsFamAV647Gr8jn76pxMAVF0-MPVszH4GWuo4GYHaMW_R_lLmKc
Worth a few pesos and put up for sale early this year. He didn’t part with it until near the end.
JimC says
Well that is damn cool.
.lane batot says
“Lonesome Dove” was indeed a classic, and the TV miniseries honored it splendidly, almost verbatim! I cannot imagine Augustus or Call any other way than how they were portrayed by those two great actors. HOWEVER–I was SORELY disappointed in ALL of the sequels–both written and on film(I read and watched them all)–they just never really captured the same realistic sense of the original, and they committed one of my greatest pet peeves–utilizing real historical characters in very inaccurate historical contexts!(My three greatest disgusts of these sequels were the portrayals of Judge Roy Bean, the Texas frontiersman Bigfoot Wallace, and the houndsman Ben Lilly)–best to just make up characters perhaps based on these real people, rather than tarnishing the real people’s memories and portraying them incredibly falsely! But both the book and ORIGINAL TV series “Lonesome Dove”?–CLASSICS!…On the quote about learning to love and live for the simple things–having worked for and been around some very wealthy(financially) people, I was often surprised–and saddened–how UNHAPPY so many were, despite their financial wealth. And I think it is because they never learned to enjoy and be satisfied with the “simple” things, which are often not so “simple” after all….
Quixotic Mainer says
“It ain’t dying I’m talking about Woodrow, it’s livin’,”
I have far too many “Gus’isms” in my daily lexicon. Sad to see the man who really wrote them go. I greatly enjoyed all of the books in his LD saga, especially Comanche Moon.
The only one of his that I can’t quite get straight is ”Anything for Billy”. I don’t often put down a book having both enjoyed it, but saying aloud; “WTF did I just read?”
JimC says
Yeah, I don’t think much of “Billy.”