Texas essays

I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state ...

Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave

Most books of essays consist of magazine articles, newspaper columns, book introductions and the like assembled for the first time in one place. Larry McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas is unusual in that it was written as book of essays. The nine essays are numbered as chapters, and at the end one McMurtry usually previews the next.

The book was published in 1968, when McMurtry was still a young Texas writer, and reprinted 50 years later. It is a little jarring when he repeatedly refers to the president from Texas and you realize he is talking about Lyndon B. Johnson. Yet otherwise these essays hardly seem dated at all. Well, there is the one about the Houston Astrodome, then the newest wonder of the world.

McMurtry's essays, on the whole, reflect the same theme as most of his novels: the surrender of rural Texas to urban Texas and the cowboy's flight to the city. The author comes from a family of cowboys. He writes movingly of his grandfather, father and uncles, all cowboys who lived to see the end of the cowboy era. Although he grew up practically without books, it was books and not horses and cattle that directed his own life.

McMurtry writes about other Texas writers, and there haven't been many. He is less interested in those like Terry Southern and Katherine Anne Porter — who may have been born in Texas but you would never know it from their writing — than those like Roy Bedichek, W.P. Webb and J. Frank Dobie, who wrote about Texas, although few people outside of Texas have ever heard of them. And, he concedes, few people in Texas have actually read them. McMurtry has read them, and his essay on their books is instructive.

He also writes about how his novel Horseman, Pass By was made into the movie Hud. It was filmed in Texas, and McMurtry witnessed some of that filming. Having lived with real cowboys, his comments about actors like Paul Newman pretending to be cowboys are priceless. Newman actually looked more authentic than most, he says.

His reflection on western movies in general prove interesting. Is he bothered that Hollywood's vision of the West has been mostly fantasy? Not at all. Romantic movies are mostly fantasy, too. Same with war movies and gangster movies. Real cowboys, he says, have always loved cowboy movies. Who doesn't love a good fantasy?

Larry McMurtry's essays, especially half century later, may be about as popular as the works of Bedichek, Webb and Dobie. But I found them to be rewarding reading.