Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry
Shedding light on the Great American Novel and why we shouldn't care
I read Lonesome Dove (“LD”) last year. It’s a masterpiece. How it is not on Wikipedia’s list of Great American Novels is beyond me.
I hazard that it’s because it’s a Western. There’s something about the genre that is perceived as low brow. A kind of cheap trick deceiving the common American imagination. Cowboys, Indians, and whores or translated into modern woke parlance, Colonizer, Colonized, and the Patriarchy. Yeah - maybe, LD’s absence is entirely unsurprising!
The issue is when Larry McMurtry wrote LD, he didn’t try to write a Western. He tried to write-an ANTI-Western.
The first thing to know about Larry is that he “swore he would never stoop to writing a western.” His early works take place in the “West,” but the modern West — a West that is fully “colonized” where traces of frontier life remain but in unexpected ways and places. His first three novels (Horseman, Pass By, Leaving Cheyenne and The Last Picture Show) all take place in the 1950s - firmly after the typical post-Civil War setting for a Western.
The mythologizing and romancing of the West was exactly the kind of thing that really bugged McMurtry. To McMurtry, the West could not be simplified into a single narrative of the glory, conquest, and infinite possibility at the “edge” of the American imagination. No, no, Larry says, the frontier is in fact a brutal place where every day is threatened by tragedy and sorrow.
So, LD was supposed to be the anti-Western — a book to blow up the common myth. And so he wrote it. LD was published in 1985. Yet, in an ironic twist, it would achieve precisely the opposite of what it set out to achieve… it reified - instead of countering - the West’s common mythos.
So fast forward. After LD wins the Pulitzer in 1985, the novel is adapted and becomes a TV series starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval in 1989. 26 MILLION HOMES WATCH. It wins all these awards and is really the biggest tv of that time period. So everyone is freaking hooked. The producers were probably saying stuff like “holy cow, we've struck gold here. We’ve really tapped into something.” So they start planning “Return to Lonesome Dove.” But Larry hasn’t even started writing the sequel yet.
Here, the public imagination of what LD was totally was coopted by the TV series and spin offs. And when your novel is adapted for mass media consumption, I think it’s fair to guess that you lose the thread of your own novel. It contorts into something entirely “else.” And how many books turned into TV shows make the holy Wikipedia list for Great American Novels?! ZERO
So, all of this doesn’t sit well with Larry. In interviews he seems uneasy with the TV adaptation.
Then he has a heart attack. He undergoes quadruple bypass surgery. His recovery is slow. He gets depressed. His family worries about him - he’s increasingly a broken man physically and now mentally. It’s in that space that he writes Streets of Laredo.
But when you read Streets of Laredo (“SL”), this greater context breathes life into a story that is quite different from LD. The story is like a black cloud that just never goes away. You keep looking up expecting some sign that it will pass, but it doesn’t. The comedic and entertaining interruptions by Gus are gone. In fact, Gus is dead and there is no replacement. So, was this Larry’s second attempt to dispel the myth of the West? YES. YES IT WAS.
The lone survivor of the iconic LD duo, Call gets a blistering anti-hero treatment. Call isn’t quite killed - he’s maimed into permanent incapacity. Legless and armless, Call loses his purpose and is reduced to being stowed away whittling sticks all day. People come to meet the famed ranger in his hermitage and all suffer a “never meet your idols” moment.
The parallels between Larry and Call are hard to ignore. Larry is ailing from surgery while LD has become a symbol of the very thing it tried to protest. Call is ailing from multiple amputations and has become a legend, whose symbolism is called into question.
Was Call evil? Or was he a hero?
The answer is again. complex. On the one hand, yes, Call was a ranger of the highest repute, keeping the frontier safe for new American settlers. He killed bandits and thwarted Indian tribes from violent attacks on Americans. On the other hand, he admits that he killed a lot of people — innocent people. Several passages reveal that Call admires many of his foes and hints that he would likely fight with them had he been born there instead of here.
Call: “Death is the price you pay for trying to be a hero. I’ve been lucky so far, but I know the cost.”
For Call, the cost is a burdened mind, something similarly detailed in LD.
Gus McCrae: “You’re so serious all the time, Call. Do you ever think about what you’ve done?”
Call: “I think about it enough. I don’t need you to remind me.”
It’s here that a reader might wonder if Call’s stoicism is not some high-minded moral philosophy but instead a coping mechanism to get through the world as a living being. Because as Call makes clear, living is a violent struggle in a morally blank world.
Call: “I don’t reckon there’s a right way to live and a wrong way to die. Just living and dying.”
SL is dedicated to Larry’s two primary caretakers when he was writing SL, Diana and her daughter Sara Ossana. Apparently they were very, very worried about Larry and his post-surgery depression.
But the Ossanas appear to have saved McMurtry from what he wrote happened to Call. Larry not only began to write again, but would go on to write more than a dozen novels.
[McMurtry] spent his time sleeping in Ossana’s guest room, writing “Streets of Laredo,” the sequel to “Lonesome Dove,” on a manual typewriter in her kitchen or just staring out the window.
Ossana, who lived with her teen-age daughter, called his behavior “disconcerting.”
“I let him stay at my house because he seemed to be comfortable there, and waited, hoping that this would subside,” she said.
The collaboration began when McMurtry asked Ossana, who had written for pleasure since childhood, to help edit “Streets of Laredo.” He had been so out of it that the story seemed “faxed from a former self,” he recalls, but Ossana improved it.
Meanwhile, he was rejecting screenplay offers, insisting that he couldn’t focus on a job that was structured.
When Warner Bros. wanted a script for “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Ossana put her foot down. She researched the story and persuaded McMurtry to tackle it.
Ossana also taught Larry to “let go” of how his novels are perceived and in particular, how they were adapted to TV. His embracing of this “second wind” led to the two writing the screenplay, Brokeback Mountain, which won them Oscars.
I’m not sure how, but at some point Larry took a chance on this writing partnership and avoided ending up like his beloved character, Call.
May we all be so lucky.
I think Larry died not caring that LD wasn’t considered a Great American Novel.
I think he died not caring what anyone thought of his novels — except maybe the Ossanas.