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Bury My Heart at Lonesome Dove
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11497 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
3,531 Words |
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Arthur Quinn
Arthur Quinn is chairman of the Department of Rhetoric at the
University of California at Berkeley. "San Francisco Bay" is a
fragment from his new book Czeslaw Milosz: An Introduction to
His Work, co-authored with poet Leonard Nathan. A guide to
the abbreviations used in this piece appears on page 355. |
LONESOME DOVE
Larry McMurtry
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985
843 pp.
Two prejudices, I must admit from the outset, made it impossible for me to read Lonesome Dove with suitable critical detachment. First, I can't stand big, sprawling commercial novels. Faced with the 843 pages of Lonesome Dove, I involuntarily started to make impertinent comparisons. For instance, Lonesome Dove is longer than Moby Dick and Paradise Lose combined. This prejudice would have doomed me as a reader of any kind for McMurtry's novel, were it not for my second - and, in this case, contrary - prejudice.
I am a sucker for anything about the Old West, especially the passing of the Old West. The owl of Zane Grey flying at dusk and all that. I can't help feeling, although I certainly know better, that there is more poignant truth about the human condition to be found in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance than in the collected films of Ingmar Bergman. And Lonesome Dove is, most emphatically, 843 pages about the passing of the Old West.
While I was starting to read Lonesome Dove, there was nothing for me to do but sit back and watch my two prejudices - my fictional impatience and my western nostalgia - fight it out. In retrospect, my fictional impatience had about as much chance as the Clantons did at the OK Corral. Fifty pages into this novel, I was feeling about as mushy as any young thing over her Silhouette romance. Bury my heart at Lonesome Dove.
Lonesome Dove is, as one of the characters quaintly describes it, "a little fart of a town in south Texas on the Rio Grande." There two fabled Texas Rangers, Capt. Woodrow Call and Capt. Augustus McCrae, have chosen to spend their retirement years. The Captain and Mr. Gus, as they are respectfully called by their hands, run the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium. They get the cattle and horses they sell by slipping across the border and stealing them from the extensive ranch of Pedro Flores, a retired bandit who was a chief adversary when the Rangers were making Texas safe for gringo settlers.
Two events permanently disrupt their calm. First an old Ranger associate with a slightly shady reputation, Jake Spoon, shows up with tales of Montana, a still-wild country perfect for cattle-raising. Then they steal with suspicious ease a large herd of horses, only to
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