McMurtry - Books: A Memoir

BY LARRY MCMURTRY

When the Light Goes

Telegraph Days

Oh What a Slaughter

The Colonel and Little Missie

Loop Group

Folly and Glory

By Sorrows River

The Wandering Hill

Sin Killer

Sacagaweas Nickname: Essays on the American West

Paradise

Boones Lick

Roads

Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Duanes Depressed

Crazy Horse

Comanche Moon

Dead Mans Walk

The Late Child

Streets of Laredo

The Evening Star

Buffalo Girls

Some Can Whistle

Anything for Billy

Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

Texasville

Lonesome Dove

The Desert Rose

Cadillac Jack

Somebodys Darling

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Moving On

The Last Picture Show

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Leaving Cheyenne

Horseman, Pass By

BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd

Zeke and Ned

A MEMOIR

Larry McMurtry

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Copyright 2008 by Larry McMurtry

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Designed by Dana Sloan

Manufactured in the United States of America

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

McMurtry, Larry.

Books : a memoir / Larry McMurtry.1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. McMurtry, LarryBooks and reading. 2. McMurtry, LarryChildhood and youth. 3. Antiquarian booksellersUnited StatesBiography. 4. Novelists, American20th centuryBiography. 5. McMurtry, LarryHomes and hauntsTexas. I. Title.

PS3563.A319Z46 2008

813'.54dc22

ISBN 978-1-4165-8334-9

ISBN 978-1-4165-8335-6 (pbk)

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-0767-3

For the faithful

Marcia Carter
William F. Hale and Candee Harris
Khristal Collins
and
Julie and Cody Ressell of Three Dog Books,
without whose efforts there would be no Booked Up

And from the Bookstop in Tucson, Arizona

Claire
Tina
Kate
Rachel (emerita)

May they ever flourish.

I DONT REMEMBER either of my parents ever reading me a storyperhaps thats why Ive made up so many. They were good parents, but just not story readers. In 1936, when I was born, the Depression sat heavily on all but the most fortunate, a group that didnt include us. My McMurtry grandparents were both still alive, and my mother and father and I lived in their house, which made for frequent difficulties. Sometimes there was a cook and a resident cowboywhere they bunked, Im not sure. The fifty yards or so between the house and the barn boiled with poultry. My first enemies were hens, roosters, peacocks, turkeys. We ate lots of the hens, but our consumption of turkeys, peacocks, and roosters was, to my young mind, inexcusably slow.

I believe my grandfather, William Jefferson McMurtry, who died when I was four, did tell me stories, but they were all stories about his adventures as a Texas pioneer and, so far as I can remember, did not include imaginary beings, such as one might find in Grimm or Andersen.

My grandfather told me these stories about himself while sitting on the roof of the storm cellar, a dank cell to which we often repaired at inconvenient timesboth my mother and my grandmother were paranoid about tornadoes. Any dark cloud might send us scuttling downward, into a place that, as I discovered early, was not scorpion free.

Our ranch house, which my father and my grandfather built from plans purchased from Montgomery Wardusually the supplier was just called Monkey Wardwas a simple shotgun house, three bedrooms and a bath on the south side, simple hall, kitchen, dining room, living room on the north side. We rarely used the living room, although my grandfather was laid out in it, once he died. It did have a fireplace, into which my grandfather, before his death, often spat copiously.

As a very small child I was awed by the amount of spit he could summonI didnt realize that most of it was tobacco juice.

Of books there were none. Some of my older cousins tell me that my grandmother, Louisa Francis McMurtry, was a woman with lots of curiosity, who once subscribed to all the magazines. Where did they go? The only magazine I can remember seeing in the ranch house was The Cattleman, the trade journal of the range cattle industry, which once ran an article on our family called McMurtry Means Beef. Since the nine McMurtry boys were all cattlemen on varying scales, that seemed to be fair enough, even though a couple of the brothers came perilously close to being farmers: quite a different gestalt, of course. Of the three sisters only the eldest, Grace, married into agriculture. I remember visiting Aunt Grace once, and the place we visited, in the Texas panhandle, seemed to me to be a farm. But possibly it too was really a ranch.

Nothing was more evident about my father than that he hated farming, he himself being a cattleman, pure and simple, amen.

Still, it puzzles me how totally bookless our ranch house was. There must have been a Bible, but I dont remember ever seeing it. My father did read the range cattle books of J. Frank Dobie, but the only one I remember seeing in our house, which, by this time, was a small house in the village of Archer City, was The Longhorns, which I borrowed for my father from Mr. Will Taylor, a wealthy and elderly oilman who lived in a great mansion just south of our hay field.

I now own Mr. Taylors mansion and have filled it with about twenty-eight thousand books, which took a while.

My fathers reason for needing a book to read in the daytime, when he would normally have been working, was that, inconveniently, he had caught mumps in his fiftieth year: thus was idleness forced upon him.