The Art of Manliness - Lonesome Dove and Life's Journey Through Uncertainty

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.180 If you've been listening to this show or reading the AOM website for a while, then you likely

00:00:14.940 know what my favorite book of all time is, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.

00:00:19.520 It's therefore my real pleasure to be able to talk all about that novel today with Stephen

00:00:23.920 Fry, professor of American literature and the author of Understanding Larry McMurtry.

00:00:27.980 We last had Steve on the show to talk about The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

00:00:31.660 In this episode, we unpack Lonesome Dove, beginning with some background on McMurtry and the style

00:00:36.320 and themes he explores in his work.

00:00:38.080 From there, we turn to Lonesome Dove and its surprising influences, from Jane Austen to

00:00:41.760 Cervantes.

00:00:42.620 Steve and I explore the characters of Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, how they can represent

00:00:46.460 the archetypes of the Epicurean and the Stoic, and what we can learn from their friendship.

00:00:50.500 We also talk about the complexities of other characters in the novel, and in our conversation

00:00:53.760 with why Lonesome Dove, despite not having a stereotypically happy ending, such a life-affirming

00:00:58.640 book.

00:00:59.340 A spoiler alert here, we're going to reveal plenty of plot points in this discussion, so

00:01:02.920 be aware of that if you haven't yet read Lonesome Dove.

00:01:05.560 And why haven't you read Lonesome Dove yet?

00:01:07.080 Go out, buy a copy, read it, come back, listen to the show.

00:01:09.860 Out if the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Lonesome Dove.

00:01:23.760 All right, Stephen Fry, welcome back to the show.

00:01:27.180 Well, thanks for having me, Brett.

00:01:29.020 So we had you on last year to discuss one of my favorite books and one of my favorite

00:01:33.040 authors.

00:01:33.680 We discussed Cormac McCarthy and his novel, The Road.

00:01:37.320 We got a lot of great feedback on that episode.

00:01:39.600 I brought you back because you are also an expert on another one of my favorite writers

00:01:44.760 and another, like my all-time favorite book.

00:01:47.940 Now, if people have been listening to the podcast for a while, been reading Art of Manliness,

00:01:51.820 they know what that book is.

00:01:53.000 It is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

00:01:56.020 Just to give people an idea how much this book means to me, I read it about once a year.

00:01:59.840 I named my firstborn son Augustus after Augustus McRae, one of the characters in the book.

00:02:06.040 Before we dig into Lonesome Dove, let's talk a little bit about McMurtry and his background,

00:02:10.840 because I think his background influenced a lot of what he wrote about.

00:02:14.760 Where did he grow up and how did that upbringing influence his later work?

00:02:18.840 Well, he was born in 1936 in North Texas, and he grew up on a ranch in North Texas.

00:02:27.520 And he ultimately, when he was growing up, actually, he said that, you know, in his memoir,

00:02:33.940 he said that he didn't really have many books in the house, but they always told stories

00:02:39.220 around the ranch.

00:02:40.800 And ultimately, an uncle who was leaving to go to World War II dropped a box of adventure

00:02:49.500 novels that McMurtry sort of absorbed and began reading.

00:02:53.700 It's between sort of that reading experience and his experience of this sort of oral tradition

00:02:59.980 of his own family around the ranch life that seems to have inspired him to become a writer.

00:03:05.080 He then went on and got a bachelor's degree in literature from North Texas State University.

00:03:10.720 He went on and got a master's degree from Rice University the year later in 1960.

00:03:16.300 He then became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University's Creative Writing Center.

00:03:22.080 And he studied under Frank O'Connor and Malcolm Cowley.

00:03:25.860 And he studied with Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry.

00:03:28.780 And he then left after he finished his fellowship, and he taught for a while at Texas Christian

00:03:35.260 University and at Rice University.

00:03:38.060 And then he published his first novel, Horseman Passed By, in 1961.

00:03:43.780 And so it seems to be that sort of early life, hearing stories, experiencing life in a Texas

00:03:50.140 that was changing, dealing with and confronting Western experience and life, and also just being

00:03:56.700 a voracious reader, that seems to have brought him to the writing life.

00:04:00.360 It should be noted that McMurtry, you know, we tend to criticize those writers who are extremely

00:04:07.500 popular.

00:04:08.980 But the thing about Larry McMurtry is he's probably the most educated and learned writer in the

00:04:15.340 American tradition, or at least one of the most educated and learned writers in the American

00:04:19.200 tradition, in terms of his reading of English and American literature.

00:04:24.380 And we see that throughout his works.

00:04:26.700 Okay, so you mentioned he grew up in North Texas.

00:04:28.480 And at this time, in the 40s and 50s, North Texas was undergoing a change.

00:04:34.080 What was the change that was happening there?

00:04:36.580 Well, the biggest change, and of course, Texas has a very unique history, but the change that

00:04:41.240 was really taking place there is the transformation.

00:04:44.220 And we see this in McMurtry's early novels, and we see it echoed in Lonesome Dove, or at least

00:04:50.140 sort of rendered in Lonesome Dove.

00:04:52.240 And that is the change from ranch culture or cattle culture, ultimately to oil culture.

00:04:58.200 And that transformation was pretty cataclysmic.

00:05:02.680 And many of the sort of people, the ranch owners became oil barons, became oil, you know, sort of, you know, not just executives, but oil barons and oil workers.

00:05:14.540 And that was really the fundamental basic change, really, that McMurtry wrote about in his early novels.

00:05:20.640 So you mentioned he's one of the most learned, popular writers in American literary history.

00:05:26.480 But you said he's a popular writer.

00:05:28.300 A lot of his books, most of his books have been turned into either movies or TV shows.

00:05:33.360 So Lonesome Dove famously turned into that fantastic miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall and just a whole host of other people.

00:05:41.460 Last Picture Show was turned into a movie.

00:05:43.260 He's also, you know, screenwritten several movies.

00:05:46.380 Why do you think he not only gets critical acclaim, but popular acclaim?

00:05:49.640 Because that's really hard to do.

00:05:51.380 Yeah, it's a challenge.

00:05:53.100 And I think that one of the reasons why he gets both is that he, unlike a lot of authors that get a lot of critical acclaim but not popular acclaim, he's extremely character-oriented.

00:06:08.440 He really focuses in on the inner life of characters, men and women both.

00:06:13.560 And that ends up being something that is frequently very adaptable to cinema.

00:06:18.520 And I think the fact that oftentimes people that encounter McMurtry encounter him first because they've watched a movie.

00:06:27.440 And then they go back and they read the books.

00:06:29.640 And I think that adaptability comes from his tremendous orientation toward character.

00:06:36.320 And he's deriving much of that from the tradition of the British social novel of the early 19th century, the Jane Austen's, the Emily Bronte's, the Charlotte Bronte's.

00:06:46.780 He draws on that tradition and he's actually known as an author who renders the inner life of women better than most male authors do.

00:06:59.240 And part of it is that attention to character and that attention to human behavior and human inner life in a social context.

00:07:09.120 And I think that's very appealing to readers.

00:07:11.860 And just as those early novels of the British tradition were very popular, so is McMurtry.

00:07:17.360 I think that's a good point.

00:07:18.660 I never thought about that.

00:07:19.400 It's very Jane Austen-esque because you get to see the internal dialogue of a character and how they'll respond to the other characters.

00:07:26.360 And I do like what I love about Lonesome Dove and other of McMurtry's books is that they're character-driven.

00:07:31.500 Whenever you read one of his books, by the end of it, you kind of feel like these people are your friends.

00:07:35.620 Right.

00:07:35.940 It reminds me of, you know, if you've watched Downton Abbey.

00:07:39.280 Right.

00:07:39.720 It's kind of like that.

00:07:41.340 Yeah, there is that appeal.

00:07:43.060 And, you know, one of the things that, as we talk about Lonesome Dove, that we'll, you know, I suppose or I hope want to delve into is the idea of friendship.

00:07:53.900 Friendship is a core theme or concern for McMurtry, whether he's writing in a contemporary context or in a 19th century context.

00:08:02.540 So not only does he render characters as friends, sometimes dysfunctional friends, but nevertheless friends.

00:08:08.680 So we end up feeling a certain deep identification with them, even if they're different than us.

00:08:15.680 And it's that many authors like, for example, Melville or McCarthy or even Faulkner to some extent are much more philosophically preoccupied.

00:08:29.800 They're asking grand philosophical questions.

00:08:32.640 I kind of like to place McMurtry more in a kind of Shakespearean tradition in that Shakespeare is only philosophical insofar as human beings have thoughts and ideas that are philosophical in nature.

00:08:49.600 Right. So when Macbeth gives us his nihilistic pronouncement at the end of the play where he says tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, he goes on and says that life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. 0.98

00:09:10.360 Well, a lot of people take Shakespeare as a guy who is articulating a nihilistic philosophy there.

00:09:16.700 We have to remember that Macbeth has usurped the throne, committed mass murder, committed regicide, and any of us are going to become nihilists at that moment.

00:09:31.040 And so Shakespeare is not so concerned about philosophical, taking philosophical positions as an author, but more about people in action.

00:09:41.380 And I think that is McMurtry.

00:09:43.900 Insofar as they embody philosophical ideas, they embody them as people living lives.

00:09:49.420 And in living lives are naturally drawn to ideas and thoughts.

00:09:55.080 Authors like McCarthy, for example, and certainly Melville, they are asking those philosophical questions much more directly, sometimes even outside the context of character.

00:10:07.080 And I think that's distinctive about McMurtry.

00:10:10.180 I think that's a great point.

00:10:11.340 As you read, I've noticed that as I've read Lonesome Dove, you can tell McMurtry, he's making a point, but it's subtle.

00:10:18.060 You can tell that it just happened because that's how the character developed.

00:10:21.420 It wasn't something he thought, like, I've got to make this point about change and transformation, so I'm going to have this siloquy about change and transformation.

00:10:28.380 It is, you see Woodrow and Gus talking about it, or July Johnson, who we'll talk about, just feeling perplexed and confused.

00:10:36.960 It's never in your face, never punches you in the head.

00:10:39.920 And I think, actually, it's a lot more memorable when it's done that way.

00:10:44.300 Right.

00:10:45.160 Well, I think there's a lovely sort of ponderous quality to McMurtry's writing.

00:10:49.700 I think it attains a kind of order in Lonesome Dove because it's organized around the journey narrative.

00:10:57.520 But if you look at novels like Moving On, for example, a very lengthy novel that he wrote about Patsy Carpenter, it's in many ways kind of plotless.

00:11:06.900 And I really want to excuse that in McMurtry because he's really operating out of the kind of realist tradition where our lives tend not to be organized around recognizable sort of Aristotelian rising actions, climax, denouement, etc.

00:11:23.460 So it's that orientation toward characters dealing with a kind of chaotic world that makes McMurtry in some ways plotless.

00:11:38.080 And that plotlessness is less a feature of Lonesome Dove only because it's structured around the journey to Montana.

00:11:45.120 Otherwise, the characters are sort of thinking and pondering and changing and reflecting at all points in time and are often quite confused by the circumstances they face.

00:11:55.740 Okay, so you mentioned his writing style.

00:11:58.120 It's very character-driven.

00:11:59.280 There's a lot of dialogue.

00:12:00.500 And it's really snappy.

00:12:02.460 You can tell why these things are turned into TV shows or movies because it's just fun to read.

00:12:08.480 So we talked about some of the themes he hits upon.

00:12:10.640 Change in societies or in cultures.

00:12:13.600 How people react to that change.

00:12:15.740 How people respond to chaos.

00:12:18.980 And just things being in flux.

00:12:20.640 Friendship is another theme you mentioned.

00:12:22.340 And I hope we can talk about that once we discuss Lonesome Dove.

00:12:24.760 Any other themes you think are important to bring up in McMurtry's work?

00:12:29.120 Well, you know, those are the major ones.

00:12:31.600 One of the things that I would want to emphasize is the need for not just the writer to be funny,

00:12:39.000 but for the characters to respond to those chaotic sort of experiences in their lives with a certain amount of humor.

00:12:46.320 And again, one of the things that we've noticed about Larry McMurtry is his focus on gender.

00:12:53.320 He creates some of the most heroic, and this is in the context of all of his work,

00:12:59.260 but particularly in Lonesome Dove, some of the most heroic women characters that we might ever find.

00:13:04.920 And it's because he's redefining heroism in a certain way.

00:13:09.280 The old kind of what we might call prototypically male model heroism usually involved men accomplishing something,

00:13:18.920 building something, winning something.

00:13:22.280 And this more modern concept of the heroic that is embodied in the main characters in Lonesome Dove

00:13:29.640 as well as the women characters in Lonesome Dove is a heroism that's defined not by what you accomplish,

00:13:35.360 but what you endure.

00:13:36.340 And it's that endurance and, in a sense, that sort of stoic willingness to confront the chaos of experience

00:13:44.040 with a certain kind of courage.

00:13:45.720 And so this interest in understanding heroism in a context that is shared by both genders

00:13:52.840 is a central theme in McMurtry.

00:13:54.900 Okay, so let's turn to Lonesome Dove.

00:13:56.680 And for those who have never read Lonesome Dove or have not seen the miniseries,

00:14:01.040 you probably want to stop listening at this point.

00:14:03.400 Go out and buy the novel.

00:14:04.560 It costs, let me see, how much did my novel cost me here?

00:14:07.720 It's like $20, $14, $14, no, yeah, $18.99.

00:14:11.760 It's the best $18.99 you'll spend.

00:14:14.120 So we don't want to, we're going to have, there's going to be spoilers in this.

00:14:16.500 So like big picture, can you give us the Reader's Digest version of the story?

00:14:20.680 And that's going to be hard because this is a complex, a complex story.

00:14:25.020 Right.

00:14:25.140 But I think the basic premise and the basic plot are certainly something we can sort of

00:14:30.480 start with.

00:14:31.380 You have two Texas Rangers who are in middle age, even close to perhaps late middle age.

00:14:37.080 And they had once been quite famous and quite heroic in their battles against the Comanche 1.00

00:14:44.400 and the Kioway Native Americans in Texas.

00:14:46.960 Well-renowned Texas Rangers.

00:14:49.640 But now they are past their prime.

00:14:52.020 They run a small cattle company in a South Texas town called Lonesome Dove.

00:14:56.960 They work, particularly one of the characters that is Woodrow Call works, but their efforts

00:15:04.320 really are kind of fruitless.

00:15:05.780 They steal cattle from Mexican bandits and just kind of function around their ranch.

00:15:12.620 But after a time for, after a series of circumstances that have transpired, they decide to take a large

00:15:19.480 herd of cattle north to the Montana Territory, one of the last wilderness territories that existed.

00:15:26.140 This is all taking place, of course, at the height of the great cattle era in the late 19th

00:15:31.360 century.

00:15:32.460 So basically, Lonesome Dove is a story, is a journey narrative that tells the story of

00:15:38.340 both the adventures, the heroic adventures, and even the misadventures of these two characters

00:15:44.280 and their friends.

00:15:46.120 And there are some ancillary characters that are important as well.

00:15:50.100 That includes a young prostitute by the name of Lorena Wood, who travels with them. 0.52

00:15:55.260 One of the main characters, Augustus McRae, has had previously fallen in love with a woman

00:16:02.360 who is in Ogallala, Nebraska.

00:16:04.040 That drives him forward.

00:16:05.860 And so there's a number of ancillary characters that sort of play into the story.

00:16:10.180 But it's really the story of that journey and what it brings out in them.

00:16:14.520 Yeah, I like to describe Lonesome Dove when I tell people it's the cowboy odyssey is how

00:16:19.640 I describe it.

00:16:20.240 Right.

00:16:20.780 Yeah.

00:16:21.940 Exactly.

00:16:22.700 Exactly.

00:16:23.280 It's very much that.

00:16:24.580 And so this is a historical fictional novel.

00:16:27.960 Did McMurtry base any of his characters on what happened on actual historical figures and

00:16:32.560 events?

00:16:34.120 Well, no.

00:16:35.120 He's quite explicit about saying that he created these characters on his own.

00:16:40.060 Now, that said, he draws some incidents from the life of some famous cattlemen of the late

00:16:46.800 19th century, particularly Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, who were very good friends.

00:16:52.720 And the incident where Woodrow Call in the novel carves a sign for Josh Dietz, who has died,

00:17:00.820 that actually happened when Bose Eichard, who was the scout for Charles Goodnight, died.

00:17:08.640 Charles Goodnight carved a sign for him.

00:17:11.200 So McMurtry derives that directly from the experience of these great cattle ranchers of

00:17:16.520 the late 19th century.

00:17:17.420 More particularly, the scene or the event where Gus McCray dies and Woodrow Call takes his body

00:17:27.360 back to Texas, that actually happened.

00:17:30.940 It was a different route.

00:17:32.780 But Charles Goodnight took Oliver Loving's body back to Texas to bury him after he was actually

00:17:39.600 killed by Native Americans somewhere in the north.

00:17:42.820 So there are some of these incidents that are drawn from actual history.

00:17:48.120 But McMurtry says that if there is a basis for both of these characters, it's in fact Cervantes

00:17:54.520 and Don Quixote.

00:17:56.520 Oh, yeah, that's interesting.

00:17:57.780 Yeah, I mean, I think it's very interesting that you talk about this as the sort of Western

00:18:02.780 odyssey, and it very much is.

00:18:04.700 It's also a kind of Quixote-like narrative in that McMurtry actually said that really he

00:18:12.360 based Augustus McCray on Don Quixote, that kind of romantic, that life-embracing idealist.

00:18:20.400 And he based Woodrow Call on Sancho Panza, who was the pragmatist.

00:18:26.200 And there are other ways in which we could sort of talk about the novel in terms of Cervantes.

00:18:32.500 But those are the characters, really, that he derives these characters from.

00:18:38.740 And primarily, that's just a framework for characters that take on a life of their own.

00:18:45.060 Now, I'm glad I heard—now that you mentioned that, that does make sense, the Cervantes-Lonesome

00:18:50.140 Dove connection. 0.95

00:18:50.900 Because Don Quixote is just about these guys, they continually get their butt kicked over 0.63

00:18:56.000 and over again, to the point where it's just hilarious, some of these instances.

00:19:00.900 The same thing happens to Lonesome Dove. 0.99

00:19:02.300 Everyone is just getting their butt kicked over and over again. 0.97

00:19:04.580 Yeah, exactly. 0.71

00:19:06.420 You know, and if you'll allow me, Brett, to make another reference to Don Quixote, and

00:19:13.300 I don't know that McMurtry has said this, but in one sense, I see him as kind of an American

00:19:19.740 Cervantes in this broader sense, right?

00:19:22.480 We think of Don Quixote, and we know that Don Quixote is a sort of proto-novel that Cervantes

00:19:29.500 wrote in order to satirize and create a parody of the medieval romance tradition.

00:19:36.320 And we know that he does so.

00:19:38.280 He gives us a very comic rendering of that tradition.

00:19:40.780 But it's been argued almost universally that Cervantes ultimately ends up reaffirming some

00:19:47.460 of its central values and the virtues that we associate with the medieval quest night.

00:19:54.500 McMurtry is doing the same thing with the Western.

00:19:57.180 It's probably might come as a surprise to some folks to realize that McMurtry was highly

00:20:03.180 critical of the Western genre.

00:20:04.680 He's particularly concerned with the way in which the Western has embodied kind of an

00:20:11.840 unequivocal embrace of manifest destiny.

00:20:14.460 He's articulated concern with the way that the Western has not particularly been conscious

00:20:20.940 of environmental devastation.

00:20:22.900 So he's critical of the genre.

00:20:25.160 And he sets out in Lonesome Dove to mount that parody and that critique.

00:20:31.920 And the first book, that is the section of the novel before they leave, is almost entirely

00:20:38.540 comic in nature.

00:20:39.940 We're told that these characters are heroic, but we don't see examples of their heroism really.

00:20:45.860 And then as they enter on their journey, we start to see them tested in a way that demonstrates

00:20:51.980 that heroism.

00:20:52.980 And so what McMurtry does is he sets about to critique the Western genre, to parody the Western

00:21:01.080 genre.

00:21:01.740 And he ends up, in 1985, reaffirming it in many ways.

00:21:06.820 And in reaffirming it, in many ways, redefining and enriching it.

00:21:11.080 Well, yeah.

00:21:11.480 I think I've read interviews, too, where he was frustrated with the response to Lonesome Dove

00:21:16.500 because people were like, people missed the point.

00:21:19.540 Like, they were like, I was trying to make a critique on the Western.

00:21:23.100 And now everyone just loves Gus McRae and Lorena and Clara, and they romanticized it.

00:21:29.460 Right.

00:21:30.920 And it's a little hard to know, you know, the miniseries, which is a fine miniseries, in

00:21:37.300 my view, was so popular that it tends to be conflated a bit with the novel.

00:21:42.540 And there are some real similarities.

00:21:44.120 And I think it's a wonderful translation or adaptation, excuse me.

00:21:48.880 But at the same time, there is a certain kind of darkness, humor, and absurdity to the novel

00:21:56.760 as written that the miniseries doesn't quite capture.

00:22:00.500 You really have to look at the nuances of character and how heroism is being defined and

00:22:05.940 reconceptualized in a Western context and in a naturalist context.

00:22:09.980 And then you start to see that the prototypical Western hero is very different.

00:22:17.100 The prototypical Western hero is the sort of John Chisholm figure, the guy who actually

00:22:22.260 carves out the ranch and creates a successful cattle empire.

00:22:27.660 The Hat Creek Cattle Company is never successful and will never be successful.

00:22:32.220 So their virtues are not defined because they build something, but because they endure a lot

00:22:38.400 of things and stand up against a naturalistic world that is much larger than them.

00:22:44.500 And also, we need to understand, too, that Gus and McRae are irremediably violent.

00:22:50.380 They tend toward violence in a way that is less justifiable than maybe some prototypical

00:22:57.360 Western heroes do.

00:22:59.520 Yeah, maybe we'll talk about some of those propensities for violence in our discussion.

00:23:03.440 So yeah, I think it's important for people who haven't, who've seen the miniseries, which

00:23:07.820 again, is fantastic.

00:23:08.700 It's one of the best ever made.

00:23:10.780 You need to read the book because what the book does, the way Mary Mercury writes, she 0.91

00:23:14.960 writes in third-person omniscient.

00:23:17.340 So you're able to read the thoughts of these characters.

00:23:20.420 And there's a lot of things that you miss in the miniseries because you can't see what

00:23:26.080 the character's thinking.

00:23:27.060 So for example, we'll talk about this, the tension that Woodrow Call is having to wrestle

00:23:33.300 with about whether to claim Newt, this boy that it's his son, but he says it's not his

00:23:39.100 son.

00:23:39.620 Well, there's internal dialogues in the novel that you can read and are really heart-wrenching.

00:23:44.280 You're like, man, this guy is kind of a, man, come on, Call, get it together, just do it.

00:23:47.840 You don't see that in the miniseries as much as Tommy Lee Jones was a great actor.

00:23:52.420 You're not able to convey that.

00:23:54.960 Well, that's absolutely true.

00:23:55.960 You have to take both the miniseries and the novel on very, very different terms.

00:23:59.420 And it's back to what we've been saying, and that is that Mercury, his great gift is

00:24:05.660 the detailed rendering of character in exposition, the interior life of character in exposition

00:24:13.620 throughout all of his novels, but especially in Lonesome Dove.

00:24:17.160 So you're absolutely right.

00:24:18.240 I mean, the idea there is that you just don't get a sense of what their inner conflicts are

00:24:23.700 and how they respond to the chaos and the sort of random and transitory nature of their

00:24:30.920 experience.

00:24:32.060 And it's that third-person omniscient that's tremendously important for all the characters.

00:24:36.400 Okay.

00:24:36.840 So we talk about themes in Lonesome Dove.

00:24:38.660 Friendship is one.

00:24:39.420 We're going to talk about Gus and Woodrow's friendship.

00:24:42.000 You know, it's a tense, fraught friendship.

00:24:43.900 It's a friendship nonetheless.

00:24:45.260 The whole theme in there is just complexity and change and how characters deal with that.

00:24:48.860 I feel like a lot of Western novels, particularly after McMurchie, I think McMurchie redefined

00:24:55.100 the American Western novel.

00:24:57.080 The West is just this great place setting to explore how people respond to chaos.

00:25:03.460 Why is that such a great setting?

00:25:06.620 Well, I think it's something, the West is a very unique place.

00:25:10.040 And that's why there is a regional tradition that a number of authors embody.

00:25:17.420 Wallace Stegner, who, again, obviously gives his name to the Writing Center or the Stegner

00:25:23.280 Fellowship at Stanford, characterizes the West by a number of features or characteristics.

00:25:30.460 He talks about aridity, the lack of water, and the fact that that leads to transience and change.

00:25:38.320 And so it's transience that defines the Western experience.

00:25:43.400 And Stegner actually talks about movement as a perpetual and characteristic feature of the

00:25:49.340 West.

00:25:50.040 But at the same time, that experience of transience and movement and change that is driven by landscape

00:25:58.000 and by the nature of our relationship with an inhospitable land has become in many ways characteristic

00:26:04.600 of the American experience as a whole after the settling of the West.

00:26:09.400 You know, I often tell my students a story of when I talk about the literature of the American

00:26:13.900 West, when I was a three-year-old child, my grandmother and I used to walk over to a grocery

00:26:20.400 store.

00:26:20.820 And that grocery store on the side of the store had, it was, this was in the early 1960s,

00:26:28.740 and it had these sort of space age lampshades that I still vividly remember.

00:26:35.200 Well, 20 years later, after I'd moved and lived other places, a friend of mine became a dentist

00:26:40.420 and that grocery store had actually been leveled to the ground and rebuilt and into a mini mall.

00:26:48.840 And my friend had a dentist office there.

00:26:51.120 And I would go in my 20s to get my teeth cleaned at the dental office and reflect upon, you know,

00:26:57.240 the idea that, wow, a place that had been built after World War II was decimated 15 to 20 years

00:27:07.140 later, leveled to the ground and rebuilt again.

00:27:10.980 That sense of constant change and transience is very much a feature of Western experience.

00:27:17.480 But more and more and more, it's become characteristic of the American experience in general.

00:27:22.620 So a lot of very human themes, our need to deal with the reality of perpetual change become

00:27:31.180 almost an exaggerated reality in the West that writers like McMurtry, McCarthy,

00:27:37.140 Louise Erdrich, Wallace Stegner, J. Frank Dobie, all of these writers have touched upon.

00:27:42.720 Okay, so like we said, like we have said, McMurtry likes to create these environments

00:27:47.560 where things are changing and he wants to see how people respond.

00:27:50.480 He wants to explore how different types of people are going to respond to change.

00:27:53.780 So I think the best way to organize this conversation is talk about, you know,

00:27:56.760 some of the big characters that stand out and like their response to change.

00:28:00.280 Sure.

00:28:00.620 Let's start off with my favorite character, which is Augustus McRae.

00:28:05.060 So again, reminder, he used to be a Texas ranger, famous.

00:28:09.860 Now he and his partner, Woodrow Call, started this cattle ranch.

00:28:13.380 He lives in a world where his skills are no longer needed because everything's kind of settling down.

00:28:18.600 The Indian War is starting to come to a close in that part of Texas.

00:28:22.840 How does Augustus McRae respond to that change?

00:28:27.520 Well, he responds by being playful.

00:28:31.540 And, you know, he's the character who understands the need to be malleable, the need to be adaptable,

00:28:38.120 the need to accept daily circumstances and whatever pleasures might be derived from those circumstances.

00:28:44.820 He accepts the moment as it comes to him.

00:28:49.300 McMurtry himself said that he partly based Augustus McRae on the philosophy of Epicurus.

00:28:55.520 And, of course, Epicurus was a 3rd century BC philosopher who was responding to the tradition of transcendental philosophy

00:29:06.080 that came out of the classical period, and that is Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

00:29:10.600 And Epicurus said, you know what?

00:29:12.740 The only way that we can constitute any kind of knowledge,

00:29:17.180 the only way we can know the world is through our sense experiences.

00:29:20.560 And, therefore, the only kind, the only way that we can achieve happiness is, in fact, through pleasure,

00:29:28.680 particularly physical pleasure.

00:29:30.920 And that is an attitude that we can see McMurtry embodying in Gus.

00:29:36.220 He enjoys everything from a glass of whiskey to a sip of buttermilk to a lovely woman like Lorena Wood.

00:29:43.500 And he also enjoys the momentary joy of a good conversation.

00:29:49.680 It's that kind of life-embracing quality that really defines Gus as a character

00:29:55.480 and really redeems him from his less, I suppose, admirable traits,

00:30:01.260 such as his tendency to be indolent.

00:30:04.380 So that's, I think, in part what defines him.

00:30:06.800 And then, of course, once he's back on the frontier and on the journey to Montana,

00:30:12.060 he takes on this heroic quality, this bravery and this courage and this grit

00:30:18.440 that we find appealing in any kind of heroic rendering of character.

00:30:23.720 Okay, so Gus is an Epicurean.

00:30:26.180 And as we'll talk about here in a bit, Woodrow Call, he's more of the Stoic.

00:30:30.720 And McMurtry, well, I mean, we're going to be using these categories of Stoic and Epicurean

00:30:37.080 more loosely than their strict philosophical definitions.

00:30:42.720 But yeah, Gus, for the most part, he likes to go with the flow.

00:30:46.040 If given the choice between pleasure and pain, he's going to choose pleasure.

00:30:49.460 But as you say, I mean, he does have a heroic side as well.

00:30:53.180 And I would say, you know, he can access a Stoic streak when he needs to.

00:31:00.660 I mean, yeah, he can be a real cool customer.

00:31:04.860 I mean, sure, he'd prefer to be lazy, but he can rise to the occasion when needed.

00:31:09.180 So, I mean, are there any particular scenes in the novel that you think really, you know,

00:31:14.340 really stand out and sort of encapsulate the character of Augustus McRae?

00:31:19.500 A couple.

00:31:20.280 In fact, there's almost too many to enumerate.

00:31:23.980 There's the one scene when he's being tracked by the Comancheros and the band of bad guys. 0.98

00:31:30.420 And he stops and very, very quietly, bravely, and stoically kills his horse and ultimately

00:31:38.780 sort of fights them off with a real kind of calm and reserve.

00:31:44.360 And that's a moment of sort of quintessential kind of heroism, right?

00:31:48.160 And he is so totally adapted to place that he doesn't even get nervous when he's being

00:31:53.940 chased by some dangerous men.

00:31:57.300 And I think some of the other scenes that we might think of are when he actually tries

00:32:03.120 to get Lorena to sleep with him by betting her and cutting cards.

00:32:08.700 That scene just sort of shows his kind of wisdom, wit, and whimsy.

00:32:13.380 And finally, I think the death scene as he and Woodrow finally, we start to see the real

00:32:18.800 substance and beauty of their friendship in spite of their differences.

00:32:22.760 So all of those scenes, I think, are pretty important and render his character kind of

00:32:27.960 beautifully.

00:32:29.200 Another one that stands out to me that I always think about is that really harrowing scene

00:32:33.520 where one of these two Irish brothers that this cattle crew, they find in the middle of

00:32:39.000 nowhere in Mexico.

00:32:40.540 They're trying to get to Gableston.

00:32:42.120 This is one of those absurd moments.

00:32:43.540 They're riding a donkey and they don't know where they're at, these two Irish guys. 1.00

00:32:47.880 One of them dies.

00:32:49.300 The youngest brother dies.

00:32:51.360 It's horrible.

00:32:52.180 He gets bitten to death by a bunch of water moccasins in the Nuesa's River.

00:32:56.800 And so they had to bury this guy right away.

00:32:58.840 They couldn't go back to town.

00:33:01.980 And Augustus's approach says, here, I'll read it here.

00:33:04.940 So they had the funeral.

00:33:06.940 Augustus says, dust to dust, he said, let's the rest of us go on to Montana.

00:33:11.840 And then Augustus waited for Alan O'Brien, the brother that survived, who was the last to

00:33:15.660 mount.

00:33:15.900 He was so weak from shock.

00:33:17.680 It seemed he might not be able to, but he finally got on his horse and rode off, looking

00:33:21.380 back until the grave was hidden by the tall gray grass.

00:33:24.340 It seems too quick, he said.

00:33:26.160 It seems very quick just to ride off and leave the boy.

00:33:29.280 He was the babe of our family, he added.

00:33:31.580 If we was in town, we'd have a fine funeral, Augustus said.

00:33:34.800 But as you can see, we ain't in town.

00:33:37.060 There's nothing you can do but kick your horse.

00:33:39.720 I love that line.

00:33:40.740 Like I tell my, that's something my wife and I tell each other when she's like, there's

00:33:43.240 nothing you can do about a situation.

00:33:45.100 The only thing you do is you just get on your horse and kick.

00:33:47.380 Like that, that's it.

00:33:49.360 Right.

00:33:50.600 Right.

00:33:51.000 And I also noticed throughout the novel, if you read closely, Augustus is often comparing

00:33:55.100 life to a stream or water.

00:33:57.640 He often tells people, well, life's a twist and stream.

00:33:59.940 Right.

00:34:00.200 You can't really predict it.

00:34:01.240 You just kind of have to go with the flow.

00:34:02.720 Right.

00:34:04.020 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:34:05.860 And now back to the show.

00:34:09.820 Okay.

00:34:10.060 So, uh, Gus is McRae.

00:34:11.360 He's the Epicurean.

00:34:12.520 His friend and partner, Woodrow Call, McMurtry said that Call's the Stoic.

00:34:18.380 Yeah.

00:34:19.060 And that, that, uh, that's a, you know, you can see how that works out in Call's character.

00:34:23.420 You know, Stoicism, we typically associate with the Roman era and that is Epictetus and Marcus

00:34:28.980 Aurelius and the idea of Stoicism as, as, as, as is often articulated is that life is largely

00:34:37.940 defined by suffering and virtue is more or less defined by our capacity to face that suffering

00:34:46.900 with a kind of stiff upper lip and a kind of courage.

00:34:50.700 The way that Call does that is that he organizes the chaos of life through the ritual of work.

00:34:58.980 And that's really the reason why he has to go on the cattle drive.

00:35:03.400 What's different about Woodrow Call than say the classic archetypal American rancher is that

00:35:09.040 he really doesn't aspire to have a great ranch.

00:35:12.320 What he aspires to do is to have work to accomplish.

00:35:17.160 And there really isn't any fruitful work to be done in Lonesome Dove with the Hat Creek

00:35:22.240 Cattle Company.

00:35:23.200 His work can only have meaning if he goes off on a journey again, and then he's able to

00:35:28.020 organize his life.

00:35:29.360 So the idea that, that we confront a difficult experience through ritual and through endurance

00:35:37.900 is in many ways what defines Call's, Call's character and makes him at the same time somewhat

00:35:43.980 frustrating, right?

00:35:45.700 Yeah.

00:35:46.160 So, yeah, I think the other thing about Stoicism is Stoicism is deontological.

00:35:50.100 It's duty.

00:35:50.620 Like you're focusing on duty.

00:35:51.720 You want to do what you're supposed to do, even if you have to suffer for it.

00:35:55.840 And Call, for him, the duty was to work, and he liked to have a duty.

00:35:59.280 I think there's a great section here that kind of describes what you were describing,

00:36:01.980 Call's approach to life.

00:36:03.260 This is Augustus kind of thinking about Call.

00:36:05.940 For years, Call had looked at life as if it were essentially over.

00:36:10.320 Call had never been a man who could think much of reason for acting happy, but then he

00:36:14.720 had always been one who knew his purpose.

00:36:16.960 His purpose was to get done what needed to be done.

00:36:19.380 And what needed to be done was simple, if not easy.

00:36:22.220 The settlers of Texas needed protection from Indians on the North and bandits on the South.

00:36:26.780 As a ranger, Call had had a job that fit him, and he had gone about the work with a vigor

00:36:31.560 that would have passed for happiness in another man.

00:36:34.300 But then the next line, but the job wore out.

00:36:37.740 Right.

00:36:39.280 Absolutely.

00:36:40.000 Yeah.

00:36:40.440 And I imagine, I think a lot of men can relate to Call, right?

00:36:44.620 Like you just, you feel like what you're supposed to do is just work.

00:36:48.340 And if you don't have something to do, then you seem lost and listless.

00:36:52.400 Right.

00:36:53.580 Well, you know, in many ways, Call's a victim of his own history, right?

00:36:58.000 When he's a very young man in Dead Man's Walk, and both he and Gus are young men, they're

00:37:03.660 really just discovering kind of who they are and how to cope with the violence around them.

00:37:09.380 And part of Call's identity is born out of fear.

00:37:13.960 The idea is the only way he can deal with the fact that there is this threat, that is

00:37:20.320 specifically the threat of the Comanche in the character of Buffalo Hump, that the only

00:37:26.240 way he can do that is through this kind of stolid embrace of work, as you say, duty, in an

00:37:34.340 uncompromising sort of way.

00:37:36.040 And the beauty and the tragedy of Lonesome Dove as a novel is that all of the characteristics

00:37:43.740 that have defined these two men, the experience that's led to how their identities have been

00:37:51.180 constituted, those circumstances have changed.

00:37:54.040 So they're like, they're like people who, they're like blacksmiths in the 21st century.

00:38:01.660 And that's the tragedy is that, that it's very difficult for them to find a place for

00:38:07.760 their particular virtues.

00:38:09.840 And yet we as readers still see value in them, even in the midst of a very sort of confused

00:38:17.180 modern world.

00:38:17.980 And we're reading the novel from the perspective of people who are in the 20th and 21st century.

00:38:24.040 And we see, we see that world just beginning to emerge, right?

00:38:29.280 When Call says, you know, we know that lawyers and bankers are going to take over even the

00:38:34.540 Montana territory.

00:38:35.700 They've already done it in Texas.

00:38:38.140 This is really a last frontier.

00:38:40.420 And so we're confronted with a sort of poignant tragedy of what do we do as human beings when the virtues that have been

00:38:52.100 forced upon us by experience no longer have an immediate relevance and we have to at least find their relevance in some other way.

00:39:01.420 And I think the, the novel offers real hope there once we finally realize who these characters are.

00:39:08.860 Well, yeah, I think it's just as relevant today.

00:39:10.940 I mean, you can see this in former industrial towns like Detroit or Philadelphia.

00:39:16.500 People, men who, you know, they were tradesmen, they worked in the factory.

00:39:19.480 Well, you're, you're no longer needed.

00:39:21.460 We got robots or it's going to, we're outsourcing it to somewhere else.

00:39:24.960 And they're in that same sort of position.

00:39:26.360 This is kind of a theme you see throughout American literature.

00:39:28.660 I can, I think you make the case that the American tall tale, talking like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, that's the same sort of stories about these guys who had this virtue, this skill that was needed in the frontier, and it's no longer needed because of mechanization.

00:39:43.760 Right.

00:39:44.480 Yeah.

00:39:45.100 Exactly.

00:39:45.680 And one of the things, one of the major themes in, in American literature is, is the theme of work.

00:39:51.960 And you can look at novels all the way from, from the inception of, of, of the tradition in American literature, from the leather stocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper to Melville and Moby Dick and the work of, of the whaler onto the artist of the beautiful, the artist working as a tradesman in Hawthorne.

00:40:12.220 Right.

00:40:13.120 And all of it usually involves the dynamic alteration of experience as people are trying to constantly adapt to a nation that seems to be defined by perpetual change.

00:40:29.160 And yet I, I do think that, that, that, you know, the virtues that we can associate with Woodrow call, that is this sense of duty and the virtues that we can associate with Augustus McCray.

00:40:43.640 And that is this embrace of actual experience and lived experience in the moment are things that, that are virtues that do transcend.

00:40:53.740 They just have to be reapplied.

00:40:55.960 And I ultimately think the novel invites us to take that positive message away.

00:41:01.980 Okay.

00:41:02.800 Okay.

00:41:03.380 So Woodrow, he goes to Montana because it's one last chance to do what he's, what he's good at, to face the frontier and kind of harness it.

00:41:10.900 There's this one thing that throughout this novel, we alluded to it earlier.

00:41:14.160 There's this boy at the Hat Creek cattle company named Newt.

00:41:17.000 He's about 17 years old.

00:41:18.520 The Hat Creek company took him in, but everyone, well, not everyone, but Gus knows that Newt is actually Call's son.

00:41:26.760 But Call can never call Newt his son, or he doesn't even call him Newt.

00:41:31.540 He just calls him the boy.

00:41:32.740 What do you, what do you say about Call that he's never able to claim Newt as his son?

00:41:37.240 Well, I think that, that, that says something about his character in a significant way.

00:41:41.800 And that is, we know that it's, you know, this idea that he's oriented toward work.

00:41:46.700 We need to drill down on that a little bit and understand that work is an organizing principle.

00:41:51.620 It can be ritualistic in nature.

00:41:53.540 It's an ordering and, uh, and almost, almost psychologically ordering reality for Call.

00:42:00.760 And he is addicted in some ways to being in emotional and physical control.

00:42:08.840 And it's that moment where he let himself go with Maggie, the prostitute that led to the birth of Newt, that he had lost control. 0.82

00:42:17.620 And he laments that, at least quietly.

00:42:21.000 And, you know, Augustus McRae, you know, sort of calls him out on it any number of times.

00:42:25.620 Says that was the one moment when you were actually human.

00:42:28.440 But that's not how Call is defining humanity.

00:42:31.200 He's defining humanity by that stoic endurance that sort of gave way at the moment that he allowed himself intimacy with, with Maggie.

00:42:40.040 And so it becomes a real challenge for him to then look at Newt and fully and completely acknowledge him as his son.

00:42:48.960 Although he's done everything he can to take care of him.

00:42:52.540 He's even very protective of him.

00:42:54.740 I mean, Newt's relatively old to not be able to go on their forays into Mexico.

00:43:00.440 But Call doesn't want him to go.

00:43:02.940 And we can assume that Call is quite afraid that he might be harmed.

00:43:06.480 That's a father's love for a son.

00:43:08.360 But it's hidden underneath this stoicism.

00:43:12.000 Well, there's also that one scene.

00:43:13.840 You're talking about these guys' propensity for violence.

00:43:15.840 I think they're in Ogala.

00:43:17.080 They're in Nebraska.

00:43:18.200 They go into town.

00:43:19.200 And there's this army that wants to buy some horses.

00:43:21.600 And one of the captains starts whipping Newt.

00:43:25.000 And Call sees this.

00:43:26.440 And he just goes berserk and almost kills this guy.

00:43:29.100 Yeah.

00:43:29.140 Yeah, exactly.

00:43:31.240 That's a wonderful scene.

00:43:32.620 That's a wonderful scene as described in the novel.

00:43:34.580 And it's that moment.

00:43:36.120 You can see Murtry being very intentional there about saying,

00:43:39.840 I want you to know that it is not just responsibility that Call feels for Newt.

00:43:47.280 It's not just duty.

00:43:49.360 But a deep emotional attachment and affection that a father has for a son.

00:43:55.220 That his value system will not permit him to articulate.

00:44:01.660 And in that sense, the inability to articulate is part of his tragedy.

00:44:06.320 But it also is somewhat characteristic of the 19th century father.

00:44:10.920 It's been said that that was Abraham Lincoln's relationship with many of his, with a number

00:44:16.960 of his sons, that he sort of stood apart, even as he wanted to be playful and more personal

00:44:24.040 with them.

00:44:24.540 So, he might, McMurtry might be embodying a certain pattern that is historically accurate.

00:44:30.100 So, I think another character in this book you see throughout the novel is the relationship

00:44:36.280 between Gus and Woodrow.

00:44:39.700 These guys, they've been together, as you said, they started rangering when they were young

00:44:43.180 men.

00:44:44.100 Now, they're done rangering.

00:44:45.280 They're in middle, late middle age, and they're still hanging out with each other.

00:44:49.560 They're completely different.

00:44:51.320 Gus the Epicurean, Woodrow was the Stoic, wants to work all the time.

00:44:55.140 How did these guys remain friends despite being so different?

00:44:59.160 Like, and despite, you know, the thing that brought them together was rangering and being

00:45:02.980 violent and killing and, you know, whatever.

00:45:05.260 They no longer have that thing in common anymore.

00:45:08.300 They're not doing that together, but they still stay together.

00:45:11.880 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:45:13.720 I think that that's part of McMurtry's exploration of what he might call the nature of true friendship.

00:45:21.220 You know, it's actually fairly easy to constitute a friendship on the basis of commonality.

00:45:28.240 If we, you know, share things in common, if we share a sensibility and an attitude toward

00:45:34.880 life and a personality.

00:45:36.900 But I think what McMurtry wants to suggest in these two characters is the idea that he's

00:45:43.720 one, each character is uncertain.

00:45:47.780 While Augustus might be the Epicurean, he's able to see, and part of his frustration with

00:45:54.300 call is the irony that he sees its virtue.

00:45:57.440 Part of call's frustration with McRae is the irony that he wishes that he might be able

00:46:03.280 to enjoy life in that way.

00:46:05.360 And I think that, so there's that uncertainty on the part of both characters and therefore

00:46:10.120 the ability to sort of respect the other character.

00:46:13.880 But I think more particularly what is fascinating about McMurtry's exploration of friendship is

00:46:21.220 that real friendship occurs when one is able to transcend differences and see a common humanity

00:46:28.260 even amidst those differences.

00:46:30.240 So it's important that there be this tension because ultimately these are two men who care

00:46:36.860 very deeply for one another.

00:46:39.440 And when we find out in the end that McRae is actually giving call a gift and asking him

00:46:47.720 to take him back to Texas, call's willingness to keep that promise is indicative of that friendship

00:46:55.020 that they cannot articulate.

00:46:57.340 It's not a part of who they are perhaps as men to articulate it in conventional terms.

00:47:04.200 And so there's an affection built into how they battle each other.

00:47:08.420 And it's a real friendship because it's a friendship that transcends difference.

00:47:12.820 That would be my perspective on it.

00:47:14.420 I think you're right.

00:47:15.920 I think that Gus asking Woodrow to take him back to Texas, that's like 3,000 miles.

00:47:22.280 There wasn't I-35 back then either.

00:47:25.020 Everyone else thought that was crazy.

00:47:27.340 But Gus knew that what Woodrow needed, he needed a mission.

00:47:30.540 He needed to be duty-bound again.

00:47:33.340 And that was the last gift he gave him.

00:47:35.460 That's absolutely right.

00:47:36.720 And he recognizes that in him.

00:47:38.700 He knows that.

00:47:39.360 He says, you know, I know you and the gift I can give you is to allow you to be yourself.

00:47:44.980 And that is to engage in this act of loyalty and duty and work.

00:47:49.060 And he permits him to do that.

00:47:51.240 And, you know, Call, you know, could do otherwise.

00:47:54.980 Remember that he leaves the Hat Creek Cattle Company in order to do this, which is a risk.

00:48:00.680 He hands the reins of the company, so to speak, over to a group of people, but particularly to Newt.

00:48:08.280 And in that context, he's taking a grave risk to engage in that act of duty.

00:48:14.500 And then also, all the while, Gus is always just bugging Woodrow to be better, like to step up and, like, claim Newton.

00:48:23.960 It bugs, you know, Call just kind of doesn't talk about it.

00:48:26.260 He just kind of shuts up.

00:48:27.720 But, you know, Gus never gives up on him.

00:48:30.080 He says, I know you can do this.

00:48:31.320 Like, you can be better than this.

00:48:33.400 Just do it.

00:48:34.260 And I think that's another sign of friendship.

00:48:36.300 And that's one of the hard things about friendship.

00:48:37.860 That pestering for your friend's sake, for their own good, can often destroy a friendship, but it didn't for them.

00:48:46.520 Right, right.

00:48:48.080 There's something I think that Call probably recognizes and that McRae probably recognizes as, you know, as Call, you know, points to some of the flaws in his friend.

00:49:01.200 And I think that really is that each friend is looking at the other very different person and saying, I want you to transcend yourself.

00:49:11.880 And I trust that you can.

00:49:13.820 If you don't, I'll still be there.

00:49:16.360 But I'm going to also be there to encourage you to be better than you can be.

00:49:20.940 And, of course, there's a certain kind of tragic comedy in Call's ultimate failure to do that with Newt.

00:49:27.620 But he still maintains, you know, his allegiance to Newt as he sort of allows him to kind of take more control than he's really capable of ultimately in the end.

00:49:41.320 So two characters that I think about a lot in the novel, these are ancillary characters.

00:49:45.560 One is a young sheriff from Fort Smith, Arkansas named July Johnson.

00:49:50.480 July Johnson.

00:49:50.940 I say July because I've seen the miniseries.

00:49:54.460 That's how Roxy calls them.

00:49:55.620 July Johnson.

00:49:56.460 And then a former ranger companero of Gus and Woodrow named Jake Spoon.

00:50:04.460 And I think about them a lot because I think they're both the same in a lot of ways, but really different.

00:50:11.840 And I think the way that they're the same is that they both seem to take a very passive approach to the complexities and change of life.

00:50:21.200 Like, if you just read how July and Jake talk about life, like, life just happens to them.

00:50:27.400 Jake talks about being lucky, unlucky.

00:50:30.040 July just talks about being, I'm just, I don't know what to do.

00:50:32.700 I'm befuddled.

00:50:33.360 But what I find interesting about these characters is that July's passivity, it seems to, it arouses contempt from everyone that he encounters.

00:50:43.260 While Jake's passivity, he's kind of able to, he's kind of like a rascal. 0.63

00:50:47.900 Like, people are like, oh, Jake, you rascals.

00:50:50.280 What do you think is going on there?

00:50:51.240 Like, why, why do I, why does July annoy everyone?

00:50:53.960 Like, why do I, why do I want to flick him in the back of the ear while Jake Spoon is sort of like, you know, he's contemptible, but at the same time, he's kind of got a rascally aura to him.

00:51:03.340 Right.

00:51:04.720 Well, yeah, it is interesting that they, they both share those kinds of similarities.

00:51:09.260 That kind of passivity, I think, is the best way to put it.

00:51:12.560 I think it's, it's important sort of to understand that, that one of the reasons why characters in the novel like Jake in ways that they don't like July or have contempt for July in ways that they don't have contempt for Jake is that, you know, he is charismatic.

00:51:29.360 He's naturally attractive, both in terms of conversation and in terms of physique.

00:51:34.460 So there's just that reality.

00:51:36.680 We all know that person, right?

00:51:38.680 We all know the person who is likable in spite of the fact that if we really think about who they are, they're really kind of contemptible.

00:51:46.980 There's an irony there.

00:51:48.520 And that's, that's to McMurtry's credit that he's able to draw Jake Spoon's character in that way.

00:51:54.400 I think what frustrates me most about July emerges from the fact, or my frustration emerges from the fact that we have to remember that Jake is in probably early middle age.

00:52:07.000 July is 24 years old, and he's been given a tremendous amount of responsibility.

00:52:13.500 He's a sheriff.

00:52:14.320 He's been sent off to find Jake Spoon, and we're told that he will have to confront potentially two famous and formidable Texas Rangers in that process.

00:52:25.360 And he's all doing this as a very, very young man.

00:52:29.120 And I think I, for one, don't have a lot of hope for Jake.

00:52:32.840 In the end, to me, he's contemptible.

00:52:34.500 In the end, he's lazy, he's indolent, he's self-serving, and I don't have a lot of hope for him.

00:52:41.540 But because of July's age, I think all of us as readers think, you know what, he's, there's potential there.

00:52:49.300 I want him to act on that potential.

00:52:51.300 I want him to do something different.

00:52:52.980 And the fact that that hope is still echoing in the background makes us frustrated when he doesn't act in the way that, at least immediately, he should.

00:53:05.340 Because he is a man still in the making.

00:53:08.200 And it's easy to forget that.

00:53:10.240 Yeah.

00:53:10.800 I guess you're right.

00:53:11.620 That's what's frustrating about him.

00:53:12.680 He never learns.

00:53:13.480 It's just like, at a certain point, you got to realize, you got to learn.

00:53:16.260 Like, even with his dealings with women, that's one thing that frustrates me. 0.95

00:53:20.280 So, he marries this woman named Elmira, who's, she's, you know, she's an awful person, but she came from awful circumstances, obviously. 0.97

00:53:26.980 She's a former prostitute. 1.00

00:53:28.720 But Elmira just treated July like garbage. 1.00

00:53:31.760 In July, he just kept trying to be nice to her and just was basically a doormat. 0.99

00:53:35.740 But, and then, you know, even when he interacts with other women, he just sort of, like, acts like a doormat to them.

00:53:41.580 He just thinks, well, if I just do what they say, they'll like me.

00:53:44.360 Yeah.

00:53:44.660 And, you know, even Clara, he ends up at Clara's house, and she's like, July, just talk to me like a human being.

00:53:49.520 You can disagree with me.

00:53:51.180 That's what I'd like that, instead of just being this doormat.

00:53:53.860 Right.

00:53:54.140 He never learns.

00:53:55.360 That's what's so frustrating about it.

00:53:57.500 Yeah, we just, we don't know if that's just who he is, and ultimately, he will always frustrate us.

00:54:04.620 Or if there's a possibility that he might change.

00:54:07.620 But I think it's, as I said, in that possibility, the idea that there's, that we at least want to have hope for him, that makes us frustrated.

00:54:17.240 Whereas we kind of give up on Jake and accept him for what he is.

00:54:20.560 Yeah.

00:54:21.040 So we've been talking about the men of Lonesome, Dov.

00:54:23.000 You mentioned that McMurtry also explores the perseverance and, you know, a heroism that women could display in the frontier.

00:54:30.280 I mean, I think the one character that I think, so there's Lori, obviously. 0.79

00:54:35.260 She's the prostitute and lonesome dove. 1.00

00:54:37.100 Everyone loves her. 1.00

00:54:39.000 All the cowboys fall in love with her. 1.00

00:54:40.940 She has to persevere a lot of terrible things.

00:54:44.080 And she, I mean, for her, I think she takes, like, it's a very passive approach.

00:54:46.660 Like, life just kind of happens to Lori.

00:54:48.120 She wants to, she wants something better for herself.

00:54:51.020 But she gets kidnapped and abducted and things just kind of happen to her.

00:54:55.000 But, I mean, in the end, I think things turn out pretty well for Lori, at least in Streets of Laredo.

00:55:00.380 But, like, the one character in Lonesome Dove, I think, does a good job of balancing how to approach the changes and setbacks of life while still trying to order it at the same time is this character named Clara Allen.

00:55:15.840 Tell us about Clara Allen and her approach to the vicissitudes of life.

00:55:19.660 Yeah, Clara's a really fascinating character.

00:55:23.700 And, again, another of McMurtry's women who are rendered with a real kind of complexity and sort of paradoxical nature.

00:55:33.120 You know, the thing of it is that Clara falls in love at some level with Gus, not with Cole.

00:55:39.960 And yet she shares a lot in common with Cole, her practicality, the fact that she marries Bob Allen and she has, you know, children with him and begins a horse ranch with him.

00:55:53.580 So there's this practical dimension to her character.

00:55:56.980 And yet, ultimately, she has to endure the loss of her boys.

00:56:01.800 She has to endure, ultimately, the loss of her husband and the loss of Gus in that sense.

00:56:08.680 And I think what characterizes her more than anything is she shares so much in common with Cole, really, in that pragmatism.

00:56:16.800 But what I think is unique about both Laurie and Claire Allen is that this is where McMurtry breaks down the gender boundaries as he reconceptualizes the heroic.

00:56:32.000 And this is where we see these characters, that is Clara and Laurie, enduring in a way.

00:56:39.000 I mean, Laurie is abducted and massively abused. 0.59

00:56:44.520 And Clara endures the hardship of life on the frontier in Nebraska.

00:56:49.660 And theirs is a heroism that's defined by that endurance.

00:56:53.320 And, ultimately, that's what Gus and Cole also do.

00:56:59.280 They endure more than they accomplish.

00:57:00.900 But we're now encouraged by McMurtry, through Claire especially, to see her on a kind of par with the male characters in courage and in fortitude.

00:57:14.920 No, I think that's a good point you made about Claire.

00:57:16.880 I never thought about that, that she's more like Cole.

00:57:19.680 She's a lot like Cole.

00:57:20.580 She's very, you know, practical and pragmatic.

00:57:23.420 But the thing is, like, she hates Cole.

00:57:25.580 Like, absolutely hates Cole.

00:57:27.100 Yeah.

00:57:27.280 And I think that's funny.

00:57:28.280 But I also think, you know, she's got that practical, pragmatic aspect to her.

00:57:31.540 But she also has that bit of Epicurean in her. 0.98

00:57:33.760 She likes to make cakes. 0.93

00:57:35.880 Right.

00:57:36.060 She bought it.

00:57:37.040 She saved her money up to buy a piano for her daughters.

00:57:39.620 Yeah.

00:57:39.800 She likes to read magazine articles.

00:57:41.800 And she even thought about writing magazine stories herself.

00:57:45.820 So, I think it's interesting.

00:57:47.200 You mentioned that one of McMurtry's big influences was Jane Austen.

00:57:51.020 And, you know, what Jane Austen did with her novels was explore the sociality of different people interacting.

00:57:58.500 But I also think one of the big themes of Jane Austen was it's Aristotelian in a way.

00:58:04.140 She tried to figure out the best way to combine, like, sentiment and logic, right?

00:58:12.620 That sense and sensibility.

00:58:14.580 Like, you know, use your head, but also you have a heart at the same time.

00:58:17.440 And I think what maybe McMurtry was trying to do this or maybe unintentionally did, like, Claire Allen's that synthesis of sense and sensibility.

00:58:25.700 Well, you know, I think, too, that we can continue to ponder this idea of the Stoic and the Epicurean in Claire, as you already have done.

00:58:34.440 And that's, I think, again, McMurtry's gift is that while he may begin with McRae as the sort of – or with the sort of Epicurean model, the pleasure-seeking model, ultimately he becomes more than that.

00:58:51.240 And with Claire, you have these – she – I don't even want to say vacillates between the Epicurean and the Stoic, but she blends them.

00:59:00.860 She sort of comprehends as a character the idea that you have to be different things at different times if you're going to survive.

00:59:07.780 You don't want to make a cake as a Stoic, and you don't want to train a horse as an Epicurean. 0.55

00:59:13.560 And in that context, you have to be different things at different moments on any given day.

00:59:19.160 And so she sort of blends those characteristics, I think.

00:59:23.180 And I wonder, certainly, if McMurtry was kind of aware of what he was doing with her.

00:59:28.880 She cannot stand call, but she also cannot marry McRae.

00:59:34.740 So as much as she might want to.

00:59:37.940 And that's the – she has to keep a distance between both of them.

00:59:42.440 And that's just part of what circumstance has given her.

00:59:46.700 So I like to gift Lonesome Dove to friends.

00:59:50.580 And I recently gave a friend a copy for her birthday.

00:59:53.900 And after she read it, she texted me,

00:59:56.660 Not one happy ending, Brett.

00:59:59.280 And she's right.

01:00:01.720 Lonesome Dove isn't a happy book.

01:00:03.580 Everyone – like Augustus dies.

01:00:05.960 Elmira, she dies.

01:00:08.100 Deets, the scout.

01:00:10.220 That's one of the most harrowing scenes ever.

01:00:13.220 He dies.

01:00:14.560 Call can't claim nude as his son.

01:00:17.220 Oh, she said, like, you know, the bartender in Lonesome Dove, Wands.

01:00:22.400 You know, after Lori left Lonesome Dove, he burns the place down.

01:00:28.600 So it's not a happy book, but why is it that I still enjoy reading it so much?

01:00:32.820 Like, I mean, it's the same thing with The Road.

01:00:34.320 Like, The Road is just an awful, terrible, sad book, but I still love reading it.

01:00:38.340 Like, what is going on with Lonesome Dove?

01:00:39.900 Well, you know, that's fascinating, really.

01:00:43.540 I think that the way I look at it is that when we think of happy endings, we think of sort of quintessential moments in our life,

01:00:52.440 like when we marry or when we have children or when our children marry and have children.

01:00:58.160 Those are the moments that sometimes we want the book to end there.

01:01:03.440 But the reality is that while we, those of us who are lucky, who have those various moments in our lives,

01:01:12.700 those moments of genuine happiness and joy, we also have to face old age and ultimately our mortality.

01:01:21.120 And so in that sense, the happy ending, if you're attentive to it, is somewhat unsatisfying because you know it's not complete.

01:01:31.260 I really don't see this book as unhappy in that sense.

01:01:36.100 It's real, right?

01:01:38.060 Ultimately, these characters are going to live and die.

01:01:43.560 And if you don't mind, Brett, I would like to sort of read a passage and sort of think about that.

01:01:47.980 Would that be okay?

01:01:49.060 That'd be great.

01:01:49.640 I'd love that.

01:01:50.040 So this is the wonderful scene when Josh Dietz has died and we see Call deal with that fact.

01:02:00.440 And I'll just go ahead and dive in and start reading.

01:02:03.800 They walked down to the grave.

01:02:06.440 Call had finished his hammering and stood resting.

01:02:09.680 Two or three of the cowboys trailed back to the grave, a little tentative, not sure they were invited.

01:02:15.420 Captain Call had carved the words deeply into the rough boards so that the wind and the sand couldn't quickly rub them out.

01:02:23.860 Josh Dietz served with me 30 years, fought in 21 engagements with the Comanche and the Kiowa, cheerful in all weathers, never shirked a task, splendid behavior.

01:02:38.380 The cowboys came down one by one and looked at it in silence.

01:02:43.140 The cowboys came down one by one and looked at it in silence.

01:02:43.340 Po Campo crossed himself.

01:02:45.360 Augustus took something out of his pocket.

01:02:48.000 It was the medal of the governor of Texas, the medal the governor of Texas had given him for the service on the border during the hard war years.

01:02:55.900 Call had one too.

01:02:56.960 The medal had a green ribbon on it, but the color had mostly faded out.

01:03:02.380 Augustus made a loop out of the ribbon and put the loop over the grave, the grave board and tied it tightly.

01:03:08.660 Captain Call had walked away to put up the hammer.

01:03:11.560 Augustus followed.

01:03:12.960 Lippy, who had not cried all day, suddenly began to sob.

01:03:17.360 All right.

01:03:17.940 What I would suggest is that we're nearing the end of the book there.

01:03:21.800 And one of the most endearing characters in the novel has died.

01:03:25.800 And we can look at that and we can say, this is sad, this is tragic, and it certainly is.

01:03:31.280 But ultimately, the legacy that Dietz leaves is this legacy of a group of men who genuinely loved him and are brought together in his death in this moment of communion.

01:03:43.540 And the fact that those moments are possible, the fact that you can have the friendship of Augustus McRae and Woodrow Call, the fact that you can have this community of lost souls function in that way, to me is ultimately redemptive, if not happy.

01:04:04.100 And, you know, as a reader of literature, that's the kind of ending that I walk away feeling positively about, rather than, you know, that sort of, in some ways, contrived moment where you're finishing on a moment of happiness that you know does not complete the story.

01:04:21.600 I would say that that's why I walk away from this book with a sense of, a positive sense of the meaning in friendship and in human experience.

01:04:34.780 Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation.

01:04:36.640 Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?

01:04:38.780 My work?

01:04:40.460 Well, certainly, yeah.

01:04:41.860 You know, I'm the professor of English at Cal State Bakersfield.

01:04:45.100 I have a website under stephenfry.org.

01:04:49.280 You'll see all of my work there, all of my scholarship, and the novel that I wrote, which is called Dogwood Crossing.

01:04:56.460 And if anyone wants to email me or chat with me about anything, I'm happy to respond.

01:05:03.500 Fantastic.

01:05:04.020 Well, Stephen Fry, thanks for your time.

01:05:05.400 It's been a pleasure.

01:05:06.740 Thank you, Brett.

01:05:07.560 My guest today was Stephen Fry.

01:05:09.680 He's the author of the book, Understanding Larry McMurtry.

01:05:12.180 It's available on Amazon.com.

01:05:13.880 Also, check out Stephen's novel, Dogwood Crossing.

01:05:16.280 It's also available on Amazon.com.

01:05:18.180 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Lonesome Dove, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

01:05:30.800 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

01:05:33.540 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives,

01:05:37.000 as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of.

01:05:40.500 And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.

01:05:44.100 Head over to stitcherpremium.com.

01:05:45.600 Sign up.

01:05:45.940 Use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial.

01:05:48.360 Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS.

01:05:50.820 Then you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast.

01:05:53.280 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us your view on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

01:05:57.100 It helps out a lot.

01:05:57.820 And if you've done that already, thank you.

01:05:59.640 Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.

01:06:03.260 As always, thank you for the continued support.

01:06:04.940 Until next time, this is Brad McKay.

01:06:06.240 Remind you on the Listen AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

01:06:09.760 We'll see you later.

01:06:27.060 We'll see you later.

01:06:27.340 Bye.

01:06:27.720 Bye.

The Art of Manliness - August 08, 2022

Lonesome Dove and Life's Journey Through Uncertainty

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript