A life ordered around books

Larry McMurtyr, one of the few contemporary novelists who still write unapologetically about the Old West, once set himself the task of compiling a list of people “who had a hand in inventing the West.” Tellingly, the list was far more expansive and eclectic than we might have expected, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and ending with Andy Warhol.

“In between came gunmakers, boot makers, saddlemakers, railroad magnates, painters, Indians, actors, directors, liars of many descriptions, but not, by golly, very many writers: only Ned Buntline, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L’Amour,” McMurtry declares in “Sacagawea’s Nickname,” a collection of 12 essays that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. Published in 2001, the book has been reissued in paperback.

What McMurtry allows us to see in “Sacagawea’s Nickname,” although he never quite says it aloud, is that he prides himself on being a man of letters. He may have been raised in the “oil patch” around Archer City, Texas, but he aspired to transcend his origins. “In my teens, already a failed cowboy, I realized that -- one way or another -- my work was going to be with words, not herds,” he quips. The point is also made in the title he chose for another book of nonfiction: “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.”

In the pages of “Sacagawea’s Nickname,” McMurtry steps out from behind the vast tableaux of the West, old and new, that he has painted in his fiction, ranging from “The Last Picture Show” to “Lonesome Dove.” On the surface, McMurtry is musing on the work of various fellow writers, living and dead, but at a deeper level he is unpacking the baggage of his own education and putting it on display for readers who know him only by his books.

At moments, McMurtry displays the qualities that have earned him a reputation as a curmudgeon, as when he complains about the geological and climatic diversity of the American West. “I’m not fond of the Rocky Mountains ... they take up entirely too much sky,” he cracks. “I can get by, and even flourish, in what one might call the southern Southwest, a strip extending from the Big Bend of the Rio Grande to the very borders of West Hollywood.” The remark itself is significant; McMurtry is very much an urban cowboy.

Then, too, McMurtry prides himself on a certain degree of political incorrectness. When he sets out to debunk the mythification of Native American history in an essay titled “Chopping Down the Sacred Tree,” he begins by imagining the offense various Native American public intellectuals might take -- men he characterizes as “justifiably tetchy.” And yet, having done so, he proceeds to recast a couple of centuries of conventional historiography about the fate of the first Americans.

Precisely because he adopts the stance of a contrarian and an iconoclast, McMurtry reveals unaccustomed and unsuspected truths. He points out, for example, that Sacagawea was recruited for service on the Lewis and Clark expedition as a translator rather than as a guide, and he reminds us of a simple but crucial -- and mostly overlooked -- problem that afflicted latter-day and Native Americans who encountered one another on the frontier: They did not speak one another’s languages very well, if at all.

“The problem of exact translation is huge; it bedeviled native-white relations from the first,” he writes. “Many a native leader went home from the treaty councils believing he had heard promises that the white leaders then claimed they had never made.”

Mostly, however, McMurtry despairs of the vast gap between myth and reality in the depiction of the West in arts and letters as well as in popular culture. “[M]ost of the traditions which we associate with the American West,” he insists, “were invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men” -- a complaint that casts his own work in an intriguing new light.

He points out that celebrated scout Kit Carson was transformed from a flesh-and-blood human being into an artifact of pop culture in his own lifetime. “[He] had become a dime-novel hero as early as 1847-1848,” McMurtry writes. “Today it would be hard to scare up one hundred Americans who could say with any accuracy what Kit Carson actually did, and ninety-five of those would be Navajos, who remember with bitterness that in 1863 he evicted their great-grandparents from their homes and marched them to an unhealthy place called the Bosque Redondo, where many of them died.”

Here and there, despite his orneriness, McMurtry succeeds in charming us. When he reconsiders the Lewis and Clark expedition, which he characterizes as an epic from the American “age of Heroes,” he pauses to reflect on “William Clark’s orthographical death struggle with the word ‘Sioux,’ ” announcing that he counted 22 spellings of the tribal name in Clark’s journals: “Clark’s efforts to subdue this slippery word,” he observes, “were almost Joycean.”

Toward the end of a tribute to an obscure Western historian named Angie Debo (1890-1988), who documented the dispossession of the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Oklahoma, McMurtry notes that at the age of 14, he found a battered copy of one of her books in the parking lot of a cattle auction yard in a backwater town near the Texas-Oklahoma border.

“Even so, it was a book, and any book was manna to me,” he recalls. After the book lay unclaimed for two weeks on the auctioneer’s lost-and-found shelf, young McMurtry took it home. “[A] woman from Oklahoma had somehow ordered her life around books and study,” he muses out loud. “[B]y ... occasionally reading a few of Angie Debo’s sinewy sentences, [I] gradually arrived at a great notion, which was that it might be possible to organize one’s life around literature.... Having that fact to contemplate was, in context, an inestimable gift.”

Clearly, the essay on Debo, titled “A Heroine of the Prairies,” tells us as much about McMurtry as it does about Debo and her work. Indeed, all of the musings in “Sacagawea’s Nickname” can be approached in the same way; the book is a window on McMurtry’s own work, even if he rarely mentions it in these pages. *