Cadillac Larry Rides Again: McMurtry and the Song of the Open Road

J A N I S P. S T O U T Texas A&M University Cadillac Larry Rides Again: McMurtryand the Song of the Open Road I am large, I contain multitudes. —Walt Whitman Larry McMurtry’s twelve novels, from Horseman, Pass By in 1961 to Texasville in 1987 and Anything for Billy in 1988, range over wide spaces and times—Texas, California, Nevada, Washington, D.C.; the 1800s to today. They include Westerns and urban satires and mixes of both. In struc­ ture they vary from the neatness of Leaving Cheyenne to the more char­ acteristic sprawl of Cadillac Jack or Moving On; in motive form, from the recognizable trajectory of the coming-of-age story to the familiar (but in this case spurious) linearity of the cattle drive to the rambling retrospective. In all their diversity, though, McMurtry’s novels share a common vision of the open road. His people are travellers, their basic impulse, if not to light out for the Territory, at least to go somewhere. The three novels I will consider here—Cadillac Jack (1982), The Desert Rose (1983), and Lonesome Dove (1985)— form a compact chron­ ological sequence within McMurtry’s abundant output, but they are by no means a homogeneous grouping. Indeed, in these three novels we find at least four of the disparate strands that have repeatedly been woven into his fictional world: the cowboy Western, masculine self-testing,1 female consciousness, and contemporary urban rootlessness. These three are as various as any three novels McMurtry has written. Even so, diverse as they are, all three continue the determinant concern with going on down the road that characterized the earlier work. Here, as earlier, his characters, driven by a “permanent restlessness,” pursue a “fruitless geographical 244 Western American Literature search” that carries them along roads leading no place in particular.2 McMurtry continues the American tradition of the road novel, placing particular stress on its picaresque qualities. His novels are typically large, containing multitudes. But it is not so much the sense of a literary tradition as it is a principle of restlessness and an omnivorous curiosity that impel his work. In Cadillac Jack, the freewheeling hero is very much a projection of McMurtry himself, who, in his capacity as rare book dealer, is known to wander the width of America in his own Cadillac, departing on mara­ thon drives at a moment’s notice, carrying his treasures in his trunk. The hero’s occupation, too, is an apt projection of McMurtry’s bits-and-pieces kind of novelistic virtuosity. Cadillac Jack is a “scout” for salable antiques, collectibles, and curiosities of all kinds. Ever on the lookout for interesting bargains, he ranges between Texas and Washington, D.C., just as earlier McMurtry denizens of the highway ranged between Texas and California. And he achieves about as little emotional satisfaction as they did.3Forever the outsider, forever the man who witnesses and comments but does not commit himself, he conducts the more satisfying of his human interactions by car telephone. His repeated conversations with one of his three ex-wives, who calls him on the car telephone mainly to accuse him of inattention, are a paradigm of engagement in disengagement. As the name indicates, Cadillac Jack identifies himself with his car as emphatically as Danny Deck identified with El Chevy in the earlier All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. His velour-upholstered Cadillac, Jack says, is “a comfortable vehicle in which to roam America” (12). To a pair of small children who are the most consistently appealing characters in the book, he calls himself simply “the man with the soft car.” Even his dreams are of cars and highways. When life isgoing badly he has a repeated “backward driving dream” (152). When feeling trapped in the dreary social mill of Washington, his escape wish is a “road revery” in which he imagines himself “crossing the high plateau of northern Arizona” on a “clear day, with a few high white clouds, brilliant sunlight, and nothing to see alcng the road except an occasional Indian” (199). Trapped at one particularly onerous Washington party, he asks himself, “What was I doing in a room full...