Larry McMurtry – Essays on Texas. 1968
* 1936 Wichita Falls, TX - † 23.3.2021 Archer City, TX
Liveright paperback, New York, 2018.
excerpts from Foreword/ The God Abandons Texas:
The death, however moves me – the way of life that is dying had its value. Its appeal was simple, but genuine, and it called to it and is taking with it people whom one could not but love. (S. 27)
When I think about the passing of the cowboy, my mind inappropriately hangs on the poem of Cavafy’s (Kavafis/ Καβάφης), from the sentence of Plutarch’s: the poem in which god abandons Anthony.
(…)The god who abandoned Anthony was Hercules – what is the name of the god who now abandons Texas? Sometimes I see him as Old Man Goodnight, or as Teddy Blue, or as my Uncle Johnny – all people the reader will meet if the reader reads on – but the one thing that is sure is that he was a horseman, and a god of the country. His home was the frontier, and his masculine ideals appropriate to a frontier. (S. 28 f.)
excerpts from Cowboys, Movies, Myths & Cadillacs: An Excursus on Ritual Forms in the Western Movie:
Warshow (Robert Warshow’s The Immediate Experience), of course, was right in pointing out that the working cowboy has never been very important in the Western movie. The Gunfighter has been the central figure, and cowboys and gunfighters were very different types, neither very good at the other’s specialties. A Western may start out with a cowboy hero, but nine times out of ten the plot will require him to learn gunfighting, so that Right may prevail.
Certainly, though, the effectiveness of the Western as a genre has never depended upon realism. The Winning of the West is a romantic subject – doing the cowboy realistically would have amounted to a sort of alchemical reverse English: it would have meant turning gold into lead. As a figure of high romance, the cowboy has remained compelling.
(…)
The West definitely has been won, and the cowboy must someday fade. (S. 54 f.)
Also, unhappily, the cowboy’s life is umbilically joined to a dying mother: the American range-cattle industry. (S. 58)
The cowboy has been diminished, but the Indian was destroyed. The great homeward march of the Northern Cheyenne in 1878 is a subject for a Sophocles(…) (S. 60)
exzerpts from: Southwestern Literature?
(…) Webb was writing not as historian of the frontier, but as a symbolic frontiersman. The tendency to practice symbolic frontiersman ship might almost be said to characterize the twentieth century Texan, whether he be an intellectual, a cowboy, a businessman, or a politician. One of the purposes of this book is to explore the ramifications of that tendency. (S. 72)
As late as the forties the hem of the garment of the Great Frontier could still be touched in rural Texas – (…)
If I were recasting the statement (of W. P. Webb on touching the ‚hem‘ in his novel The Great Frontier) to fit myself I would first of all change the figure and eliminate the word „hem“. It suggests the feminine, and the frontier was not feminine, it was masculine. The Metropolis which has now engulfed it is feminine, though perhaps it is an error to sexualize the process even that much. The Metropolis swallowed the Frontier like a small snake (The female snake and the forbidden fruit! BG) swallows a late frog (the prince): slowly, not without strain, but inexorably. And if something of the Frontier remains alive in the innards of the Metropolis it is because the process of digestion has only just begun. (S. 73 f)
Dobie (J. Frank Dobie) never quite shook off the feeling that he ought to apologize for his book learning, a feeling one comes naturally in the rural Southwest. Even today, in the country and the small towns, bookish interests are apt to be equated with deficient masculinity; (…) (S. 77)
For all his love of books he could never be quite sure that so much reading and writing did not constitute a betrayal of nature, or at least, a divorce from her which might entail a loss of natural goodness and natural strength. (S. 78)
exzerpts from Eros in Archer County:
For the novelist, the principal difficulty is one of language, since the novelist needs not merely knowledge of attitudes but knowledge of language and, indeed, the tones in which the attitudes are expressed. It is the private speech of one’s grandparents and their contemporaries that one would like to have heard – what they said to one another in the morning in the kitchen or at night in the bedroom, if indeed they bothered to speak in either place. (S. 86)
Before leaving erotic vocabulary to discuss other forms of erotic behavior I should like to consider what seems to me a dominant characteristic of sexual life of West Texas, and this is the widespread tendency to confuse the genital with the anal. (91f.)
(…) Sex is clearly and frequently equated with the waste products, and energy given to sex is thought to be energy wasted. (92)
(…) Scatology is also widely used as a method of sexual intimidation. In it’s crude form this generally involves the stupid flinging shit at the smart, for in small town the person with brains poses a direct threat to masculinity (or femininity) of the person without them. (92)
There are, however more subtle and more damaging aspects of the anal-genital confusion. In the late forties and early fifties adults still felt it incumbent upon them to stifle adolescent sexuality if at all possible, and the basic element in their strategy was to equate sex with shit, physical love with filth. Masturbation was filthy, and copulation, a process known to involve not one but two sets of human genitals, could only be filthier still. (93)
(…) the second element of adult’s strategy: athleticism. (…) The adults of the town, and particularly the men, tent to participate vicariously and over-zealously in high school athletics, and to make them in a sense, a form of sexual compensation. Their compensation. This in time has its effect on the boys, for it is made repeatedly made clear to them that the adults regard them as approvably and sufficiently masculine in proportion to how good they are chasing the balls. Football is the glory sport. (94)
Years ago someone pointed out that Texas is hell on woman and horses. He was wrong about horses, for most horses are considered valuable, and are treated well. He was absolutely right about woman, though: the country was simply hell on them, and remained so until fairly recently. (S. 98)
