“I’ve Written Enough Fiction”
Larry McMurtry says his career as a novelist is in its final chapters. But now that he’s settled into his hometown of Archer City, his life as a bookseller is just getting interesting.
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Abby Abernathy, a 35-year-old actor and producer who heads the Royal Theater Fund, bought the theater in 1986 after it had been condemned. McMurtry didn’t want to be involved with early plans to renovate the theater into a movie house. “He said it was a heinous idea,” Abernathy remembers. “He said, ‘Why spend your money trying to recreate something you can’t recreate?’” McMurtry got interested, though, when the project broadened. Abernathy, who also renovated Archer City’s historic hotel, the Spur, says that it has taken longer to get grant money than anticipated and that plans have been scaled back from the 20,000 square feet originally envisioned. But Abernathy, whose father was one of those opposed to the filming of The Last Picture Show in Archer City 27 years ago, vows the Royal will rise from the rubble, perhaps by the end of next year.
All of this is irrelevant to some people in Archer City, who point out that the town doesn’t even have a dry goods store downtown anymore or a full-time physician or a hospital. Most of the big supporters of the Royal Theater renovation aren’t from Archer City. But the town has felt the ups and downs of farming, ranching, and the oil patch for so long that many residents see the book town as their best shot at rejuvenation. “Larry is building us a mountain,” says Tom O’Neil, a local banker and the head of the chamber of commerce, which sits in a small building that looks like a metal storage shed next to one of Booked Up’s stores. “That in itself is going to attract more incremental business.”
OF COURSE, MCMURTRY DIDN’T RETURN to revitalize Archer City. He came back to devote himself to his passion: books. Although this is where his people are from, the move must have been an unsettling one. In one of the essays in his 1968 collection In a Narrow Grave, McMurtry writes about his “deep ambivalence” about Texas and his “contradiction of attractions” about his heritage: “I am critical of the past, yet apparently attracted to it.” Though McMurtry has said he was only “nominally a cowboy” and never liked cattle much himself, his grandfather, father, and uncles ranched thousands of acres in the area.
The modern McMurtrys have avoided the hard-core ranching life, though his sisters Deen (who got out of the book business four years ago) and Judy McLemore have in the past three years started a small cow-calf outfit. Judy also runs the town’s title company. Larry’s brother, Charlie, is a lecturer in the English department at Angelo State University, in San Angelo. His mother lives in Wichita Falls, and his son, singer-songwriter James McMurtry, lives in Austin with his wife, Elena (Larry and Jo Ballard, James’s mother, divorced in 1966). McMurtry tries to visit James’ son, Curtis, regularly. He had to dash out of town to buy Curtis a birthday present the day I visited. One of the staff suggested that he might want to look for something in the F.A.O. Schwarz catalog that had just arrived in the mail from the big New York toy store. No, McMurtry said, he had to drive to Wichita Falls because his grandson had to have a high-tech ray gun.
McMurtry’s extended family includes Ossana, who has homes in Tucson and Archer City. The two met in 1985 and became friends. Ossana, who had done some writing and worked as a legal assistant, took McMurtry into her Tucson home several months after his heart surgery to help him recuperate. While recovering he wrote Streets of Laredo, which Ossana helped edit. He dedicated the book to her and her daughter Sara. They became collaborators, next working on a screenplay of Pretty Boy Floyd, which they sold to Warner Bros. and expanded into a book, published in 1994. This year they published Zeke and Ned together. Some people have wondered whether they have a romantic relationship, but both have insisted they’re just close friends. They see each other frequently and both presided over the opening of the Texas Book Festival in Austin in early November.
“WORKING IN RARE BOOKS AND ANTIQUARIAN books is a progressive thing,” McMurtry says. “You don’t always get better as a writer—you get old, you get tired, you exhaust an original gift. But in books you’re dealing in knowledge. The older you get, the better you get. It’s almost the opposite of being a writer.” McMurtry says he’s winding down as a writer of fiction. Comanche Moon, his fourth and final novel about Lonesome Dove’s Gus and Call (the book takes them through their prime adulthood), came out last month from his longtime publisher, Simon and Schuster. (His two other novels about Gus and Call were 1993’s Streets of Laredo and 1995’s Dead Man’s Walk.) “I got very tired of it,” he says, picking up a prepublication copy of Comanche Moon. “Four is really stretching it.” But, he adds, “I think it works.” McMurtry reportedly received a multiyear contract of at least $10 million from Simon and Schuster for his last four books. He won’t comment on that, but says that Comanche Moon was the final one in that group and that he’s not seeking another multiyear contract. It’s also questionable whether Comanche Moon will be made into a television miniseries, as were the other three Gus-and-Call novels. “It’s not encouraging at the moment,” he says. “The miniseries is getting harder and harder to get going. The networks are getting more and more nervous about it.” Whether he’ll do much more work with Hollywood is “unpredictable,” McMurtry says, adding that he continues to be interested in good projects.
McMurtry is more interested these days in writing nonfiction and essays, a literary form he seized early in his career with In a Narrow Grave. Its essay on Southwestern literature took the first hard look at the literary contributions of the then-holy trinity of Texas letters J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek and stirred up a hornet’s nest of debate about the state of Texas letters. Another collection of essays, Film Flam (1987), took an entertaining look at his experiences with Hollywood. He has continued to write essays and reviews for publications like the New Republic, the New York Times, and American Film. The New York Review of Books in October ran an essay he wrote about Southwestern historian Angie Debo. His next project will likely be a short biography about the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse for a new series to be published by Viking Penguin Books.
BACK AT THE MAIN BOOKSTORE ON SOUTH Center Street, McMurtry perches on a stepladder in a cavernous room—the former garage of the old Ford dealership—filled with rows and rows of bookcases. He scribbles prices in the books without consulting a price guide. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” he says, “and there aren’t many books that I haven’t seen before.” The workers share a clear camaraderie; McMurtry jokes with his three young staffers and chats with several out-of-state dealers who are buying many boxes of books. A newly adopted shop cat, a calico named Colette (after the French writer), darts about. In the front room glass cases hold rare first editions, books with ornate covers, and unusual, expensive items—such as a batch of letters from poet Ezra Pound ($2,500). Browsers can spend hours going through the buildings, looking at books on everything from art to Continental literature (many in their original languages) to poetry—one of Booked Up’s buildings has a whole room of poetry, mostly acquired from one poetry bookstore in New York.
McMurtry isn’t just indulging his passion for books—he’s making a profit. He says that in recent years Booked Up’s sales have doubled annually. McMurtry started advertising the store in international antiquarian book publications for the first time last December and expects sales to triple this year. The average book sells for $20 to $50, but some are less than $10. The staff put together a small bookcase behind the front desk filled with McMurtry’s books, but he says he doesn’t like to sell his own books himself. First editions of his books, especially early ones, have become collectible in recent years, fetching hundreds of dollars. “They’re expensive,” he says.
In another touch of irony, one of the most expensive books in the shop is by J. Frank Dobie, the Texas writer McMurtry whiplashed as a provincial folklorist many years ago. A signed, limited edition of Dobie’s The Mustangs sells for $4,000. Texana is popular at the store, but McMurtry says “it doesn’t excite me much unless it’s really good.”
McMurtry has a story for just about every book. He’ll pick up a copy and talk about the author, where he bought the book and from whom, and why it’s in his shop. He gets rid of a lot of books that aren’t collectible, sending them to prop shops in Hollywood or secondhand bookstores like Half Price Books. I couldn’t pass up a first edition of America and Alfred Stieglitz, a collection of essays about the photographer and champion of modern art that had a signed note inside from artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who was married to Stieglitz. O’Keeffe wrote the note on a bookplate belonging to one Miles Hart. Hart, McMurtry explains, was a Glen Rose lawyer who was adept at getting writers and others to correspond with him. When McMurtry bought Hart’s library, he also acquired some letters from poet Robert Graves. “It’s always entertaining because there are little surprises,” he says. “You never know what you’ll find.”
McMurtry has been in the book business so long that he’s seen books that he owned while going to school at Rice, with his signature inside, turn up in a load of books he’s bought. Sometimes copies of his own books that he inscribed and gave to someone have come back to the shop. “Larry will say, ‘Well so-and-so must have gotten divorced because one of them had to sell their books,’” Deen says with a laugh. “Larry has always said that books go the full circle.”
And so, it seems, has he.
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