Larry McMurtry

 I was saddened to learn today of the author and American treasure Larry McMurtry's passing. As it happens, I have read six of McMurtry's books in just the past three months, including the magisterial Lonesome Dove which I just concluded a few days ago.

Aside from a greater appreciation of the Lonesome Dove TV miniseries, what has been most compelling about this experience is the astonishment I have at McMurtry's character development and his ability to capture something essential about the place I call home and the people who belong there. So much so, that for years the West Texas therapist I trust most would assign McMurtry's The Last Picture Show as a mirror into the West Texas people of a certain era. This was the generation of my grandparents who hailed from Wichita Falls, not far from Archer City, the inspiration for McMurtry's fictional Thalia.

McMurtry is said to have known how to write about the strength and complexities of women; and his ways of addressing race, though often understated, were often poignant and truth-telling. When the matter of how black women were treated and mistreated in the mid-20th century Western Horseman, Pass By McMurtry was deemed too controversial, his African-American character Halmea being replaced by a white woman in the book's made for TV version Hud.

As for preachers, we didn't get a lot of respect in McMurtry's books and perhaps deservedly so. McMurtry didn't seem to much like professionals of any sorts -- not even professional writers, though professional book sellers did have some respect. But the clergy in McMurtry's books pretty much got written off for all their hype and demagoguery. McMurtry didn't like people who pretended. And pretending at religion was perhaps the worst, next to pretending at love.

Love was always complex, as in McMurtry's screenplay of Brokeback Mountain and, years earlier, in another taboo relationship described in his 1962 novel Leaving Cheyenne.

In that Western a decades-long love triangle exists between a woman and two men who are also best friends. She has sons with both and one of the boys gets religion where he is taught to hate sin — and especially hate his mother’s sin. When he turns 18 the son comes home talking about “fornication and adultery”. His mother tells him those were “just two words” to her — “even if they do come out of the Bible.” “But you did them,” the son says, “in this house we’re living in too.”

“I wasn’t saying I didn’t" the mother says in her first person narrative. "And I wasn’t saying I’m good. I guess I’m terrible. But words is [sic] one thing and loving a man is another thing . . .”

She loved them both, she said. And those biblical words — fornication and adultery — didn’t describe love at all.

There was a lot of fornicating and adultery in McMurtry's novels. There was also a lot of killing.

Love was rarer found; and so better treasured, even when tragic.

I am going to miss McMurtry. This world needs the kind of guy he was, someone who would dare to show up on stage to accept an Oscar in a Texas tuxedo -- black tie and blue jeans. This world needs a little less pretense and a lot more truth telling -- even when the truth ain't pretty.

No, preachers didn't square all that well with Mr. McMurtry. But neither did they with Jesus. For it was Jesus himself who said to the preachers, "See, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God before you!"

Yes, the tax collectors, and prostitutes, and sinners, and now even the writers too. We should read them. We should read this one.

We should read and see that a prophet has been among us, wearing black tie and blue jeans, and with the sword of unvarnished truth within his hands.

"Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by."