Author David Streitfeld was not yet ready to call “Lonesome Dove” a great American novel.
“But it’s certainly the great Texas novel,” he said. “And it seems like a lot of people — in Texas and outside of Texas — want to read about Texas.”
In his conversation with Texas Standard about his new biography, “Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry,” Streitfeld wanted to focus first on “Lonesome Dove” because it is McMurtry’s most known and beloved work and because it has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years.
“For a variety of reasons, “Lonesome Dove” has in the past couple of years, especially the last year, started selling at an incredible rate,” Streitfeld said. “It sells about 100,000 copies a year, which is just enormous.”
Streitfeld attributed that continued success to the way the novel not only evokes Texas history but also says something about the present.
“It talks about things that people at the moment have questions about that they feel aren’t being answered in their lives, like male friendship,” Streitfeld said.
He also said the book is about dreams.
“About the dreams that you have, that everyone has, and how you can end up middle-aged or older and realize your dreams haven’t quite come true and maybe you’ve fought on the wrong side all your life,” Streitfeld said.
The characters in “Lonesome Dove” are old Texas Rangers — an organization with a complicated history that McMurtry does not ignore.
“Larry felt that the history of Texas and really the whole settling of the West was a very dark story, full of murder, full of cultures trying to kill each other. But he also was proud of his ancestors, his relatives, who had settled Texas. And he thought they were upstanding figures that had much to be admired. And so he was always wrestling with those two things,” Streitfeld said.
Though “Lonesome Dove” is known by fans as a book filled with humor and colorful characters, Streitfeld said McMurtry “felt that Lonesome Dove was a story about the darkness.”
Another of McMurtry’s most beloved stories is “The Last Picture Show,” which Streitfeld says not only reflects McMurtry’s own experience growing up in small-town Texas but is also related in a way to “Lonesome Dove.”
“’Lonesome Dove’ is about the settling of the West and the great dreams and heroic exploits and murderous times. And “The Last Picture Show” takes place a generation or two later when the West has been settled and people are bored out of their minds and would like to escape Texas, would like to escape these small towns and find they can’t. So it’s about kind of the diminishing of dreams over time,” Streitfeld said.
Streitfeld has been working on “Western Star” for decades. He first met McMurtry in the 1990s and did a story on McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City.
“Larry believed very firmly in books, the physical container that is the book,” Streitfeld said. “He started a bookstore on the edge of the Texas plains and put 500,000 books in it and expected people to come and buy them which, in retrospect, is a daffy idea when this thing called the Internet is blossoming everywhere. But he was a man of the book and abided by them and celebrated them and felt that that was his legacy, not the movies — that it was the books.”
Streitfeld said McMurtry didn’t have a career plan or a plan for the books he wrote.
“He sat down and started typing and let the story go wherever it was,” Streitfeld said.
McMurtry’s writing spans many aspects of Texas life and history. It also showcases what Streitfeld calls McMurty’s “ambivalence” about the state.
“He loved Texas and he hated it,” Streitfeld said. “He would miss Texas incredibly, the big open skies, the freedom that he felt there when he was somewhere else. But then he would get to Texas and he’d be like, ‘I can’t stand it here. There’s nothing to eat.’ He was particularly concerned about the bad food.”
Streitfeld said McMurtry was also ambivalent about Texans.
“He was impressed by the people and yet he also found the people as he portrayed them in ‘The Last Picture Show’ narrowminded and stuck in their own concerns and not reaching for a more impressive existence,” he said.
Streitfeld said that aspect of McMurtry continues to speak to readers.
“I think anybody who lives in Texas and is ambivalent themselves about the state will find in Larry an echo that they’ll appreciate,” he said.
Though McMurtry spent more time out of the state in his later years, Streitfeld said he still identified very strongly as a Texan.
“He identified so strongly as a Texan that he told his writing partner, Diana Ossana, to tell the newspapers when he died that he had died in Texas, even though he had really died in Tucson, Arizona. So he wanted to be portrayed in the mediam, in the popular imagination, as so Texan that he died there,” Streitfeld said.
It’s an idea that, once again, is reflected in “Lonesome Dove.” The character Augustus McCrae’s last wish was to be buried in Texas.
“It was a very unusual case of the novel anticipating, predicting the reality that came about, whatever, 40 years later,” Streitfeld said.
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