Book Review: "Lonesome Dove"

TALL IN THE SADDLE

By NECHOLAS LEMANN;

NICHOLAS LEMANN IS A NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT FOR THE ATLANTIC.

Published: June 9, 1985
The New York Times

LONESOME DOVE By Larry McMurtry. 843 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $18.95.

THE practice of trail-driving herds of beef cattle over long distances from ranch to railhead flourished for just a moment after the Civil War and before the widespread use of barbed wire. It was the tiniest fraction of our national experience and did not directly involve more than a few thousand people. But maybe more than anything else - more than wars, more than slavery, more than urbanization or immigration - it has animated a part of our imagination out of which flows a vital branch of popular culture. Cowboyana in the form of dime fiction and stage shows flourished even before the short era of the trail drives ended. It nourished movies and television when they were young. Even today, it seems to be everywhere: in clothing, in advertising, in political rhetoric.

Unlike other themes that have obsessed us, though, the trail drive has not made the transition from low art to high art very well. The South has ''Gone With the Wind'' but also Faulkner; the cowboy has ''Red River'' and J. Frank Dobie. It seems mysterious that so rich a subject has not produced a great novel - perhaps it has become so stylized that there is no juice left in it.

Readers who held out hope have been getting sustenance for years from the rumors that Larry McMurtry was writing a big trail-driving novel. As much as anyone, he knows the subject: he comes from a large west Texas family that he has described as ''cowboys first and last,'' and his essays show that he has done considerable digging around in obscure first-hand accounts of trail drives. Also, if the myth-making machine has expropriated the subject, well, Mr. McMurtry knows about that too. It is hard to think of an American novelist who has been so lucky in Hollywood for so long (''Hud,'' ''The Last Picture Show,'' ''Terms of Endearment'') without becoming a part of it. By now a cowboy novel probably would have to show some underlying awareness of the movies. Mr. McMurtry seems ideally equipped for that.

At its beginning, ''Lonesome Dove'' seems to be an antiwestern, the literary equivalent of movies like ''Cat Ballou'' and ''McCabe and Mrs. Miller.'' The novel's title comes from the name of a Godforsaken one-saloon town on the dusty south Texas plain near the Rio Grande. Two former captains in the Texas Rangers have retired from the long wars against Indians and Mexicans to run the Hat Creek Cattle Company - when a customer wants horses or cattle, the former lawmen drop into Mexico at night and steal them. One of the captains, Augustus McCrae, is a lazy, hard-drinking, falsely erudite old coot; the other, W. F. Call, is strong and silent in circumstances that don't call for strength or silence. Surrounded by a motley crew of cowboys, Mexicans, old Rangers and flea-bitten animals, they have been living this funky life for nearly 15 years.

Then an old Ranger comrade of theirs rides into town, on the lam because he accidentally killed a man in Arkansas. He suggests they drive a herd of cattle to the unsettled country in Montana, where he has been on his wanderings. In no hurry to stop the picaresque fun, Mr. McMurtry lets the idea of a cattle drive gradually take hold among his characters. Call steals some horses and a herd of cattle and lines up some cowhands; grumbling and wisecracking and pulling on his jug, McCrae ambles along; the old friend brings the town prostitute as his guest.

As they get under way, the novel's scope begins to become clear. Mr. McMurtry weaves a dense web of subplots involving secondary characters and out-of-the-way places, with the idea of using the form of a long, old-fashioned realistic novel to create an accurate picture of life on the American frontier, from Mexico to Canada, during the late 1870's. He gives us conversationless cowboys whose greatest fear is that they will have to speak to a woman, beastly buffalo hunters, murderous Indians, destitute Indians, prairie pioneers, river boat men, gamblers, scouts, cavalry officers, prostitutes, backwoodsmen; open plains and cow towns; the Nueces River and the Platte and the Yellowstone. Everything about the book feels true; being anti-mythic is a great aid to accuracy about the lonely, ignorant, violent West.

Mr. McMurtry plows right into the big themes. The lack of a good reason for Call and McCrae's epic trail drive - ''Here you've brought these cattle all this way, with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don't have no reason in this world to be doing it,'' McCrae says to Call at one point - makes the drive seem oddly profound. It becomes a way of exploring whether what gives our lives meaning is the way we live (as Call and McCrae believe, though in different ways), or what we accomplish, or nothing at all. The trail drive and the turns of plot provide many loves and deaths by which to measure the degree of meaning in the frontier's codes and imperatives. Even Call and McCrae's ages - just at the far edge of middle age - are conducive to mellow, sad tallyings-up.

The characters in ''Lonesome Dove'' seems always to be putting their horses into easy lopes that could be sustained all day, and this is the way Mr. McMurtry writes. His writing is almost always offhand and laconic, with barely any sustained passages intended to be beautiful or fervent. He always has time for another funny minor character to pirouette on stage, or for McCrae to produce a new bon mot. And he leisurely pursues familiar themes - two friends in love with the same woman (''Leaving Cheyenne''), a 17-year-old coming of age (''The Last Picture Show''), a formidable middle-aged woman surrounded by terrified men who love her (''Terms of Endearment''). During the last decade or so, the idea that eccentricity is the best way to deal with life has permeated Mr. McMurtry's work, and he makes an awfully good case for it again here. The question is whether it is possible to be eccentric and ''major'' in the same novel.

The scenes that best put the matter to rest are the most traditionally Western ones - the gunfights, stampedes, hangings and horse-stealings. Every one of these is thrilling and almost perfectly realized. In describing violence, Mr. McMurtry does not need to raise the stakes with labored prose - they are already high. When a young boy rides into a nest of poisonous snakes in a river and dies of the bites, or when McCrae single-handedly fights off a band of Indians on an open plain with only a dead horse for shelter, it is unforgettable.

SUCH moments give ''Lonesome Dove'' its power. They demonstrate what underlies all the banter, and they transform Call and McCrae from burnt-out cases into - there is no other word - heroes. They are absolutely courageous, tough, strong, cool, loyal, fabulously good fighters. They and their men live through incredible travails, and, once they get to Montana, it is a paradise, worth everything. When McCrae explains the journey to the woman he loves by saying ''I'd like to see one more place that ain't settled before I get decrepit and have to take up the rocking chair,'' it is moving, not silly. Whether this response is justified by the grandeur of their mission to tame the frontier, or conditioned by popular culture, it is there and cannot be denied.

All of Mr. McMurtry's antimythic groundwork -his refusal to glorify the West - works to reinforce the strength of the traditionally mythic parts of ''Lonesome Dove,'' by making it far more credible than the old familiar horse operas. These are real people, and they are still larger than life. The aspects of cowboying that we have found stirring for so long are, inevitably, the aspects that are stirring when given full-dress treatment by a first-rate novelist. Toward the end, through a complicated series of plot twists, Mr. McMurtry tries to show how pathetically inadequate the frontier ethos is when confronted with any facet of life but the frontier; but by that time the reader's emotional response is it does not matter - these men drove cattle to Montana!

The potential of the open range as material for fiction seems unavoidably tied to presenting it as fundamentally heroic and mythic, even though not to any real purpose. If there is a novel to be written about trail-driving that will be lasting and deep without being about brave men - and about an endless, harsh, lovely country where life is short but rich - it is still to be written. For now, for the Great Cowboy Novel, ''Lonesome Dove'' will do.



Larry McMurtry

HERDING WORDS For ''Lonesome Dove,'' his latest Texas novel, Larry McMurtry reached back to the stories he had heard of that vanished era when cattle were driven from his native Texas to railheads in Missouri and Kansas. ''It grew out of my sense of having heard my uncles talk about the extraordinary days when the range was open,'' he said by phone from Washington. ''In my boyhood I could talk to men who touched this experience and knew it, even if they only saw the tag end of it. I wanted to see if I could make that real, make that work fictionally.''

Since his reputation has been fashioned on portraying the degeneration of those myths in today's West, in novels like ''The Last Picture Show'' and ''Horseman, Pass By'' (on which the movie ''Hud'' was based), his latest book was something of a departure. But this time he was intrigued by the myths themselves, by how they endured so powerfully even though the trail-drive era lasted 20 years.

''I don't know,'' he said, ''except most of the men who participated in it were young men and the country they were going into was young country.

Almost everyone who participated felt that it was about the finest experience of their lives.'' Mr. McMurtry, who is 49 years old, once observed that Texans have retained something of the frontier spirit even though the frontier is lost, and he is a wry example of that notion. Like cowboys of yore, he too migrates - from Washington, where he is part-owner of a rare-book shop, to north central Texas, where he has a ranch near his boyhood home, to Hollywood, where he writes screenplays.

''I grew up in a herding tradition and that's determined everything I've done. I was never good at herding cattle, but writing is a way of herding words and rare books a way of herding books, and I suspect by my constant driving around the country I'm practicing a form of trail-driving, driving whatever happens to be ahead of me, the cars and the trucks, rather than cattle. There's a grain of truth in that.'' - Joseph Berger