The younger McMurtry tried to 'subvert' some grand Western fallacies, only to end up reinforcing them: 'I thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicising, but instead it became a kind of American Arthuriad. But he can't shake a sense of having failed, the way his father kept failing at ranching. He realises that in his novels he's been 'filling that same emptiness' the cowboys once roamed, 'peopling it' with his own creations. McMurtry tries, for example, while considering 'the distance that separated me from the European writers and historians I have spent so much of my life reading', to compare the overcivilised, neurasthenic Europe before World War I with the 'prairie derangement' suffered by lonely settlers of his own locale: 'How much easier was it to be mad in London, rather than Archer County?'Īs always, ancestry, personal and cultural, stays on his mind. It's a peculiar effort part memoir, part commonplace book, part tour de force. McMurtry's book also has a sunset feeling, as the author begins a 'long descent toward the country we won't be back from'. The Dairy Queens of West Texas, he declares, 'by providing a comfortable setting that made possible hundreds of small, informal local forums, revived, for a time, the potential for storytelling of the sort Walter Benjamin favoured.' McMurtry then reflects, glancingly, on 'the resilience of a story' in an age when 'we are all so oversupplied with information' that human memory seems almost unnecessary.īenjamin was writing his essay, McMurtry reminds us, at the 'sunset' of his life. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, McMurtry's tentative, poignant new book, subtitled 'Reflections at Sixty and Beyond', begins in the summer of 1980 with the author reading Benjamin's 1936 essay The Storyteller in the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas the town long since made famous as Thalia to readers of McMurtry's novels. As for writing, 'What is it but a way of herding words?' Literature has been 'a vast open range' across which he's felt 'free as any nomad to roam'.

But even now his father's occupation supplies the metaphors for describing McMurtry's own life with the written word as reader, novelist and antiquarian bookseller. Thomas Mallon catches up with Larry McMurtry and life after 60įrom the moment, almost 60 years ago, when an older cousin gave him a box of 19 books, Larry McMurtry has been more interested in reading than ranching.

Walter benjamin at the dairy queen