Giant Country: Essays on Texas

Anything for Larry

Anything for Larry he last time I saw Larry was in t 988 when he came to the University of Texas to give a talk. Actually give is not quite the word. Larry is not into giving, as they say. I don't even want to know how much he was paid to give this talk. But he was still riding the crest of Lonesome Squab and I know the amount was in the neighborhood of five thousand plus. Anyway, I was asked to give the introduction, which I had no choice but to do. And do happily, I might add, because that is what I do when the administration asks me to do something: I do it for free and hope for a crumb later. It's called Being a Professor. Anyway, during my brief and incredibly witty remarks which I read with studied casualness, a front tooth that I'd forgotten had even been capped fell off in mid-sentence, clattering onto the slanted podium in front of me and rolling down to the bottom where, covertly, I managed to snare it. A faint odor of decay filled my mouth, like the opening of an ancient, long-sealed tomb, but 193 Giant Country 194 the worst problem was that my voice began to emit a low whistle , and the louder I talked, the more I sounded like a wind tunnel where they were testing a new supersonic jet. I staggered through to the end, once again humiliated in the presence of the august and fabulously wealthy Larry McMurtry. Larry's speech that day was one of those off-the-cuff, thinking -out-Ioud deals. He doesn't have to prepare anything; he just talks for a specified time and they write him out a check. It was sort of interesting, though, when he said he was tired of writing novels, that men over fifty-five or so, whatever age he was at that moment, couldn't write novels anyway (the thought of Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, and John Updike momentarily flickered across my mind as, furtively rubbing my tooth like a talisman of failure, I sat sunken and dejected beside the president of the university). Larry went on to state that he was perhaps going to write some travel books in the future but he certainly didn't intend to write any more novels. Since then, he has published five or is it six novels and signed a $10.2 million contract for four novels. That they seem to be getting progressively worse is perhaps a point of interest to some readers, though I wonder whether Larry cares or not. The truth is, though Larry's much on my mind, I haven't read all of his work. I've read only two of the what is it now, five sequels that he continues to bring out like an aging TV producer hoping to hit pay dirt one more time; these novels that are beginning to feel like one of those reunion shows, the Waltons twenty years later, the Brady Bunch reassembled, etc. Still I think about Larry all the time, though I'm sure he never thinks of me except when he reads one of my brilliant, insightful and less than charitable appraisals of his recent work, and then I know what he thinks, he thinks: "It's that dipshit Graham again." I know he thinks of me as a dipshit because that is the word he used to describe David Koresh in a marvelous meditative essay on the Branch Davidians that he wrote for the New Republic (Larry is a wonderful essayist) in which he called David Koresh a "dipshit Anything for Larry guru," which is a phrase I wish I'd written in an essay I wish I'd written but if I had it wouldn't have been published in The New Republic for $1,000 to the delight of every intellectual in the country , but in The Texas Observer for $75 and the total oblivion that a $75 royalty can guarantee. Although I call him Larry, I probably shouldn't. What shall I call him? I've met him enough over the years to feel awkward calling him Mr. McMurtry, and in a rambling bit of post-modern memory criticism like this, I must eschew the rather cold lit-crit convention of "McMurtry," and since this is an entirely imaginary journey-well...