Lonesome Dove Novel, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Character, Prejudice, The American Dream,
The reluctant son and his steady were reading the Lonesome
Dove and invited me to join them on the adventure late this spring. Eight hundred and fifty some pages! It was a pleasure to be invited, but I am not
a fan of long books. I aspire to hang in there with these tomes, but often fail to
make it over the hump in the middle. A
couple of summers ago I got started on Moby Dick, but the seas got too
choppy. A few years before that, a
friend liked a post on the Hobbit and suggested I try the ring trilogy, but I never
got through the first book…
Reading a much shorter novel, A Book of Common Prayer by
Joan Didion, she referenced the book in an interview with Studs Turkel. In the interview, she talked about her
characters, her delight in them, and her ambivalence about killing them off,
noting that McMurtry didn’t seem to have any such compunction in Lonesome Dove. Then Virginia Evans, in her book The Correspondent, had her hero write to Larry McMurtry after her third reading of
the book – and she talked about how it spoke to her in different ways at
different times in her life.
OK, I thought, its not just the lovely invitation from my
son and his steady, but the Universe itself that is encouraging me to read this
book. As summer turns to fall, I am
finally straggling into the corral, having enjoyed the long ride more than I
would have expected and the book did, as Virginia Evans’ character described
it, roll out of me, rather than coming in.
There is something essential and visceral in these pages and these characters
and they speak to me as Achilles and Odysseus must have spoken to the Ancient Greeks;
it seems to be telling – or even allowing me to tell – the story, not just of
my life, but of our lives. It is the
history of a people bent on getting there at any cost – and the price they pay
to do that.
As both Didion and Evans agree, this is a brutal book. McMurtry clearly delights in his
characters. They come to life slowly, in
the sleepy town of Lonesome Dove in the middle of nowhere South Texas on the banks of the
Rio Grande. We meet Augustus McCrae, a
talkative, seemingly lazy, often drunk retired famous Texas Ranger who runs the
Hat Creek Cattle company with his partner Woodrow Call, the silent, hardworking,
co-leader and equally famous ex Ranger.
The group they oversee and live with are largely remaining members of
their ranger company, plus a few strays who have joined them along the way. Gus and Call are the bright lights in this box
of otherwise dim characters, each of whom seems a bit more myopic and dopey
than the one before.
Gus spends a bit of time in town with the local whore,
Lorena, but, unlike the naïve cowboys, he does not idealize her or put her on a
pedestal but connects with her as a person, in addition to paying to poke her,
something they both see as a reasonable business transaction after a game of
cards.
It is hard to imagine that this motley crew is really of
much interest, but then Joshua Deets, an African American member of the gang
returns from doing the group’s banking in Dallas (Gus assumes that others think
that no one would trust an African American to carry money, so they won’t try
to rob him) and brings with him a card shark and lady’s man and ex-member of
the Rangers group, Jake Spoon. Jake takes up
with Lorena and convinces Call that Montana is Shangri- La, and pretty soon we
are mounting up for an epic journey.
A note here: Josh Deets is not referred to as an African
American anywhere in the text. The
language that is used to describe his ethnicity is true to the late 1870s, but
not language I will use here. He is, as
are all of the characters in one way or another by the end of the book, heroic. Unrealistically so. In this, McMurtry seems to be echoing Mark Twain,
but also the heroes of films about the old west. They are larger than life – but therefore,
somehow, truer to life than the muddled figures that most of us experience
ourselves to be.
The western is not my preferred form of literature (or film - though I haven't widely sampled either genre), but I do
love the novel Shane. Unlike Lonesome Dove,
it is short and very spare. But the
characters are similar, and the time frame and the context are similar. Shane, however, is like Tom Sawyer. The story is told from the side of the
farmers who are putting up the barb wire that will spell the end of the epic
cattle drives and lawlessness of the wild west.
And the story is circumscribed. I
like the comfort of a story that stays put.
I suppose the Iliad, focused on the battle between the Trojans and the
Greeks and between Agamemnon and Achilles, is similarly circumscribed.
Lonesome Dove, like Huckleberry Finn, blows the doors off
the small town and takes us out into the world where we are confronted by
dangers unknown in the small town. It
explores racism, as Huck Finn did in antebellum America, and includes anti-Mexican
and Indian racism, but does so more by embodying racist ideas than by
confronting them. But the threats of weather,
animals and humans are real and vividly portrayed. Life certainly wasn’t safe in the Iliad, but
there was a strange kind of order, while The Odyssey, Huck Finn, and Lonesome
Dove throw us to the wolves and raise questions, because we leave it behind,
about what home is and what we are looking for when we go in search of it.
On one level, the characters in Lonesome Dove – even those
that are deeply drawn, like Gus, Call, Jake, Deets and Lorena, are two
dimensional. They read like they were written
for the screen – and for particular actors to play them. And they were. Gus was written for John Wayne and ultimately
played by Robert Duvall in the mini-series after Wayne passed on the script for
a movie because he found it too dark. And
yet that allows for something to occur that pulled me away from philosophy and
into psychology.
The questions that are being asked in this book are deep,
existential questions. And the answers,
such as they are, are varied. There is no cookie cutter answer to the nature
of a human being and his or her quest. They vary based on our
character – including things like our gender – and on our individual lived
history – a history that has unfolded in the context of a particular culture
that reacts to the gifts that we bring to it in very different ways in
different times and places. Psychology –
and psychoanalysis perhaps even more – in the study of personality and
psychopathology, focuses on the individual and their
functioning – it does not focus on us as a unitary species but a species of particular individuals who have been born into a culture that has been woven together in a particular way.
One of the ways that I read this book at this time was
through the eyes of a man pushing seventy.
A man who used to think that seventy-year-olds were ancient and largely
irrelevant, and who thought that seventy years was an unimaginably long period
of time. One way of reading this book is
that it is a protest against the end of an era – a very brief era – one that
the chief protagonists – Gus and Call – fought tooth and nail to bring to an
end, but they also didn't want it to stop. They lived in and for the flux - the change - not for the desired end state. They sought to tame the west – to bring
law and order, though the brutality that they used to do that echoes down through
the ages from long before the Iliad, through the Roman Pax Romana, the
Mongolian unification of the steppes and forward into our own teetering post
world war role as brutally benign enforcers of a post second world war “peace”
that allows for unprecedented global commercial integration and prosperity –
especially for those already wealthy.
And suddenly two thousand, or four thousand, or even six
thousand years – the time since the trojan wars were fought and the pyramids
were built, does not seem long at all – but a mere blink of an eye. Call’s excitement about Montana, though never
explicitly stated in this way, evoked for me the hope that there is still a
frontier – still a place that hasn’t been conquered, and I – western hero that
I am – am not dead yet.
The irony is that Call has never been, on some level, alive
at all. His bewilderment at the end of
the novel – his existential despair is confusing to him because he never knew
what tethered him to life – what made living worth it for him. Gus did.
He was careless because he valued life so much more than Call seemed to –
not because he valued it less. He wanted
to suck every last bit of goodness out of it – and, in doing that, he was
conscious of its transience.
Before I leave this lovely book with many aspects of it necessarily
untilled, I do want to comment on the sex and concomitant gender issues in
it. As I was just starting the book, I
commented to the reluctant son and his steady that there was a lot of sex in a
book that only included one female character.
They, who had finished the book a while ago, agreed, and warmly recalled
the characters. They went on to let me
know that there would be more women – and more sex. And there were and was.
The author paints the women – they are not all prostitutes –
as understanding the power that they wield over men. Indeed, it is remarkable that this book gives
the impression that the woman who are being used in various ways by many men
are disempowered only in the most brutal of conditions. At that point, when they have become traumatized and
need to recover – sensitive men can help them do this.
While this narrative arc captures an important aspect of the
empowerment that women have always had – especially from the position of the
male gaze – it minimizes the impact of treating individuals as second class
citizens based on an aspect of their identity.
This is equally the case for women, Mexicans, Indians, and African
Americans. It is also the case that the
empowered white men are disempowered each in their own way by the particular
character flaws with which they have been gifted or have crafted for
themselves.
That paragraph leads me to conclude that the privilege of
the white male in this version of the history of America is to be foisted on
his own petard, rather than a predetermined petard that others have forced one into. The author, I think, highlights
the virtues of the marginalized characters (the whore with the heart of gold is
the standard here) to highlight their individual triumph over the stereotype,
but this relegates them to a relatively narrow fight – to not be true to type –
rather than the broader lack of type – the individually determined character –
that is only afforded to the white males who are at the center of this epic
tale. None of the minorities, for instance, have sex with white women, or even expresse dreams of that - unless they are brutally raping them.
Of course, I may have spoken too hastily above. It might be that McMurtry is pointing out
that the white male is cursed to believe that heaven on earth is possible and
therefore we search for it – in idealized women, idealized places, in wealth –
and only the rare characters, the Guses of this world, can overcome that class
based prison, and realize that the world as it is, as complicated, wet,
dark, and dangerous as it is; is more than enough.
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