Larry McMurtry
The 68-year-old novelist and screenwriter on leaving Archer City, working in Hollywood, eating in Tucson, and whether the cowboy myth is dead or alive.
Here we are in Tucson, Arizona, where you've been living since late last year. Let me ask the obvious: Have you left Archer City for good? That's the rumor.
I should probably start by explaining why I moved back to Archer City in 1997. I'd been living in Santa Monica—we'd produced two miniseries, The Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk—and a terrible crisis came up at my bookstore, Booked Up. It was a problem with the manager, though it turned out to be not as bad as I thought it was. I had, by that time, nearly 400,000 books in Archer City, and they were not well organized. The business was not set up the way it should have been. I decided that if I was going to stay in the book business and be serious about it, I had to devote a few years to shaping up this bookstore and this book town. That process took six years. We worked and worked and worked—400,000 books is a lot of books. Booked Up is now as well organized as any major secondhand bookshop in America or the world.
During that time I wrote, I believe, six nonfiction books. Another reason for being in Archer City was that it was useful to have access to my personal library of 26,000 books. I could write the biography of Crazy Horse; I could write Walter Benjamin; I could write whatever the six books were without having to go to libraries.
For those two reasons I needed to be in Archer City. Both of those tasks were completed. So I don't need to be there. Well, I don't need to be there very much. I need to be there some. And I am there some, about three nights a month.
You haven't sold your house? That's another rumor.
Oh, Lord, no. Though a lot of the time I don't even stay there. I have a wonderful house, but in the windy months I don't sleep as well. The wind whistles under the door; you feel like you're in a windstorm. So I stay with my friend Mary down at the Lonesome Dove Inn.
And you have no plans to get out of the book business?
In January I bought the largest library I've ever bought: 57,000 books in Pasadena, California. If there had been a moment when I was to leave the book trade, that would have been it. It was a horrible move. It belonged to a lady who had been a dealer but was mainly a collector. She had 27 sheds full of books! And I was not in the greatest of health at the time. I had come to Tucson because there was a freak outbreak of cedar fever. I got very allergic in October, and I had never been allergic before. I had such a powerful reaction to cedar and juniper that I just had to leave. A few weeks later this library came up. It took me maybe a month to get the allergy out of my system. I was not nearly in shape to move 57,000 books. It was such an interesting library that I decided if I didn't buy it, it meant I'd given up. But I didn't give up. I bought it. I got friends from Washington, D.C., to come and help me pack it. So I'm very much in the book business.
Okay—how's business?
The book business is in such terrible shape. It's paradoxical. Hundred-thousand-dollar books are selling like hotcakes. If you have a $100,000 book, you can sell it tomorrow. A $20 book? Not so easy to sell. A $35 book? Almost impossible to sell.
I guess it's like the housing market: Million-dollar houses sell better than—
Hundred-thousand-dollar houses. It's just that way. There are still some high rollers, mostly dot-commers, who are buying expensive books. They had two or three sales this year at Sotheby's and Christie's in which stupendous records were set. Books that when I started out as a bookseller forty years ago were standard $200 books—some of Hemingway's not particularly common ones—now go for $75,000.
And you have a number of those?
I don't have any of them anymore, because they've all been bought. My end of the business is $500 down to about $50. And that's the problem.
Let's talk about Archer City. Leaving aside the issues of the bookstore's management and your nonfiction book projects, your relationship with the town has been famously up-and-down over the years. I wonder if the conclusion of those tasks allowed you to leave a place where you're not entirely comfortable even in the best of circumstances.
Well, it's not complicated. You can say it's because of food. I've lived most of my life in Houston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York. I'm an urban person. I'm not a natural small-town person. Even if you discount the fact that I have to deal with my family and have to deal with being the focus of too much local attention, there's nothing to eat. It's one hundred miles to a good restaurant. There's one in Fort Worth, the Chop House, right across the street from the Renaissance Worthington. I'd go down, have a good meal, spend the night at the hotel, and go back. That got to seem weird. There was nothing wrong with it, but I wanted to live in a place where I could eat a really good meal every night by myself if I wanted to. A $100 dollar meal. I don't eat a $100 dollar meal every night, but I'd like the option.
One reason it's particularly pleasant in Tucson is because I've adopted a little Italian restaurant. It's the best place to eat in the city, and it's three minutes from my house. I eat there every night—I'm very much a creature of habit. I sit at the same table six nights a week. I'd eat there seven nights, but they're closed on Sunday.
I really struggle with this problem. I don't cook. I can grill fish; I can boil an egg; I can do rudimentary cookery. But I'm very social. I like to go out at night. I like to sit in a nice room and look at beautiful women. I don't want to just sit on my back porch drinking scotch, and there isn't much more to do in Archer City.
Can you imagine a situation in which you would go back and live there?
I really can't. I can't imagine it. If I got crippled I wouldn't want to be in Archer City. I would want to be here, or I would want to be in L.A. Something might propel me back, but it's not too likely. I've always had three jobs: I've been a writer, a screenwriter, and a bookseller. If I reached a point where I didn't need the first two of those jobs and I just wanted to spend five or six years truly being a bookseller, then that would be the place. But I haven't reached that point yet.
On the subject of being a writer: I reread a story that Texas Monthly ran in 1997 in which you said, "I've written enough fiction." And the reality is, since 1997 you've published quite a bit of fiction. What happened?
If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can't. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I'm getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That's a lot of novels. It's kind of embarrassing. I don't even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, "Do I really want to mail this one around?"
What about the screenplay piece of the puzzle? You recently wrote one based on an Annie Proulx story, "Brokeback Mountain," about two cowboys in a romantic relationship. It's being shot in Canada, right? How did it come about?
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later