Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry | Religion Dispatches
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Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry
Amy Laura Hall
Published on
May 3, 2021
Last Updated
May 3, 2021
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Anti-LGBTQ & Anti-Transgender
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“Shooting fish in a barrel.” “Loaded for bear.” “Bring in the big guns.” Many West Texas sayings involve firearms. Or cows. “All hat and no cattle” describes a man who struts around wearing a symbol of power on his head but who holds no actual value. The opposite of a mensch. A big gun (a man connected to power) who loads for bear (using all the power at his disposal) in order to shoot fish in a barrel is one way for a writer to be all hat and no cattle. Using fancy words to describe those people, in withering terms sufficient to elevate a discriminating reader, is one way to make a writerly living. J.D. Vance, writer of Hillbilly Elegy, has made a mint. Larry McMurtry did the opposite. McMurtry died in March, having spent much of his 84 years arranging words to help readers sympathetically hear life in West Texas.
He’s best known for Lonesome Dove, due to the abiding allure of the very myth of the West that McMurtry wrote at a slant. Dwight Garner notes in his New York Times obituary that McMurtry offered “unromantic depictions of a long mythologized region.” “Now a Triumphant CBS-TV Event” my copy of Lonesome Dove announces. I’m not hating. But I love McMurtry for his smaller, sparer stories. “Prose,” he wrote, “must accord with the land.” “A viny, tangled prose would never do for a place so open; a place, to use Ross Calvin’s phrase, where the sky determines so much.” McMurtry used his genuine, literary power to describe life alongside people smaller than the sky, who neither wield nor hire big guns.
The quote above comes from McMurtry’s 1968 collection In A Narrow Grave, specifically “Here’s Hud in Your Eye,” about his visit to the set of the 1963 movie “Hud” based on his first novel Horseman, Pass By (1961). The producers needed a sexier name for the movie; a man on a horse just passing by being insufficient. They considered “Wild Desire.” McMurtry proposes paring it down to “Coitus on Horseback.” McMurtry fashions humor from the mix of meaning, myth, and manhood going on as Hollywood makes “Texas.” He recommends Pauline Kael’s review of “Hud,” and Kael brings in London and New York, noting that critics watching “Hud” from above mistakenly discovered significance, unable to process that McMurtry’s American West, a “lonesome country,” is not a serviceable morality tale.
I’m currently writing a book on muscular Christianity and know the publishing pressure to shoot fish in a barrel. “Send us a manuscript with guns on the cover.” That’s almost a direct quote from an acquisitions editor. Nothing has perked up ears more than my research on “Cowboy Church.” Put the Marlboro Man on a Bible, and you can sell both the Bible and a book deliciously skewering the tacky people who buy it. A marketing strategist for white evangelical publishing calls this “Reaching Men by Tribes,” using psychographics to create a market, divide by market, and control Christianity. (Another “tribe” is “Fight Club Church.”) Most offensive to me, a girl born 40 miles south of McMurtry’s Archer City, is the inanity of “Cowboy” and “Church” in the materials for this scheme. Amazon recommends The Great Cow-mission. Reading McMurtry has helped me stay sane.
McMurtry had a keen eye for absurdity posing as purpose. A key scene in the filming of “Hud” requires buzzards, the intended symbolism redolent as they “soared into the blue Panhandle sky.” But the local buzzards are uncooperative. The filmmakers import live buzzards by jet 1,000 miles from Laredo to Amarillo and wire them for electronic release on cue. “As soon as they were wired to the tree they all began to try and fly away. The wires prevented that, of course, but did not prevent them from falling off the limbs, where they dangled upside down, wings flapping, nether parts exposed …” This was “unaesthetic,” and unlikely “to beguile a movie-going audience.”
Finally abandoned their efforts to fly away and resigned themselves to life on their tree … Their resignation was so complete that when the scene was readied and the time came for them to fly, they refused. They had had enough of ignominy; better to remain on the limb indefinitely. Buzzards are not without patience. Profanity, fire-crackers, and even a shotgun full of rock salt failed to move them. I’m told that, in desperation, a bird man was flown in from L.A. to teach the sulky bastards how to fly.
Describing one un-felled swoop, McMurtry has made mythologizing silly, the filmmakers merely human, and bestowed practical wisdom on the buzzards.
What McMurtry most impressed on a teenage me was that an adult understood some coaches are sadists, being young is as...