Larry McMurtry at the Kwik Kar
I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds.
Larry McMurtry
The Texas state inspection on my F-150 pickup is due every January. Fulfilling my annual duty, at the Kwik Kar in McKinney I opened Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Dairy Queens, particularly in suburbia—even if you could find one—are no longer the places to interact with fellow citizens. Starbucks coffee houses might have replaced Dairy Queens in that regard, but everyone at Starbucks is either meeting a friend or on some electronic devise connecting with “friends” and strangers on the Internet; no one has time for real conversations with strangers. However, that isn’t necessarily true at your local oil change/inspection service center. And unlike conversations at rural Dairy Queens, conversations at suburban car centers last only as long as it takes a scraggly-faced twenty-something to drain and replace the oil in your vehicle. For introverts who generally don’t like to interact with strangers, even though they might be neighbors, the annoyance of bumping into a conversationalist at one of these places is relatively painless—fifteen or twenty minutes, depending on how fast the oil drains out of your engine.
I’m the extrovert introverts want to avoid at the local Kwik Kar or Jiffy Lube. But on the day that I took my truck in for it’s annual physically I wasn’t much in the mood to talk to my neighbors. I had brought along a friend—Larry McMurtry. I had to wait because there was a car in front of me doing the same thing I was doing. No problem, I brought a book. I sat down in the waiting room to read and notice there was a woman getting her oil changed and two city employees waiting on who knows what. The gentleman getting his car inspected was pacing the room like an expectant father who was strictly forbidden from watching his wife give birth. I couldn’t blame him, I know the anxious feeling of waiting for the news of whether your vehicle passed or not.
Settling in, I opened my book. I bet I read the first sentence three or four time before I had to walk out. There was nothing wrong with Larry’s first sentence—there rarely ever is. But between the nervous expectant car owner carving a path in the linoleum, to the city workers laughing as if they were at a comedy club, to the banal and brain-sucking talkshow on the television (turned up too loud, I might add) I couldn’t hear Larry at all. If I had wanted to talk to anyone besides Larry there was the woman, but she had a look like that she would have much rather skewered my liver than suffer as much as a “Howdy-do” from me. So I did the only thing a respectable bookman would do. Larry and I when back to my truck where we talked in quiet, until the inspector knocked on my window and we were once again consigned to dreaded waiting room. The one consolation was that the expectant father was no longer there. He had—or rather his vehicle had—given birth to a passing score. He could now commence a yearlong celebration with a new sticker on his windshield.
Of course none of this has anything to do the relative merits or demerits of Larry’s book. But since he opens Walter Benjamin reflecting on a Dairy Queen in Archer City, during the summer of 1980, extolling the virtues of lime Dr Peppers while reading Benjamin’s Illuminations I thought I would open this essay with a recollection of when I first opened Larry’s book. (I cannot, however, extoll the virtues of lime Dr Peppers. I’ve not had the pleasure of imbibing one and Kwik Kars to my knowledge do not serve them.)
Larry always writes in a clean, clear hand; often humorous, sometimes profound. But his writing frequently seems detached from his real self. He holds back. It’s as if he wants to fully enter into whatever he is writing about—to become emotionally invested—but is afraid to make the commitment. This was certainly the impression I got from reading Walter Benjamin. Larry is man divided. At times uncomfortable with himself; at other times eminently comfortable—he had, after all, refused to attend the ceremony after winning the Pulitzer Prize in literature for Lonesome Dove. He told John Spong, “It’s a journalist’s prize.” Larry, I’m sure, would think my comment about his detachment stupid. He would call it ambivalence—about Texas, Archer City, and his ranching background. Perhaps. But he has spent the whole of his writing life creating Texas characters set primarily in Texas. I suspect he is somehow embarrassed about his pioneering and rural roots. He also revealed to Spong that he wants to be “considered a man of letters, functioning over fifty years.” Fair enough. I think he is and will be. But I also think he is a man who fits uneasy within the world he would like to fully inhabit (the literati of New York), as well as the world he cannot fully turn his back on (the non-literati of Archer City). Larry clearly is more intellectual and intellectually curious than the average cowboy of his youth, which he was for the first twenty odd years of his life. And yet, even though befriended by the likes of Susan Sontag and Peter Bogdanovich, he is still a man of the plains, of the soil—a man of Texas, of Archer City (where his book store resides, and where he lives part of the time).
In Walter Benjamin we get the closest thing to an autobiography as we’re ever likely to see—though he does expand on themes touched upon in the book with his later biographical volumes as a bookseller (Books), a fiction writer (Literary Life), and a script writer (Hollywood). But Walter Benjamin isn’t an autobiography in the strictest sense. He writes about how his people came west and settled near a seeping spring in frontier Texas, in what would become Archer County. He writes about how his uncles left the ranch and cowboyed in the Panhandle, and how his father stayed and cared for aging parents and keep the ranch together. The language is evocative and beautiful; it is also emotionally disconnected, except perhaps when he talks about his boyhood fears of pecking poultry. The only other time he seems fully invested emotionally is when he writes about book scouting (which I contend, if he could have made his living selling books or reading books—he is a great reader—he would have preferred that to writing books), the aftermath of his open heart surgery, and the end of old-time cowboying. In the last chapter he writes:
I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds. The first thing I wrote that had any value at all was a story about a cattleman’s funeral. My interest in the melancholy of those who practice dying crafts has been lifelong and is evident in many books. . . . I’ve spent much of my writing life dramatizing, in one guise or another, the death of the cowboy, while, in this every essay, I’ve been writing the diminishing of the second-hand-book trade, which, if not actually dying, is changing almost beyond recognition.
Like the vanishing breed of his youth—crabbed-up cowboys who told stories of trailing great herds up the trail—Larry, himself, is a vanishing breed. Like Elmer Kelton and J. Frank Dobie, men who wrote with elegance and passion about Texas that was not that long past from their own eras, Larry is the last Texas writer who has such a personal and memorable link with that history. For that, if for nothing else, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen is worth the read. It is a connection with a man who was connected to old-timers who worked cattle on the open range—and who changed their own oil.