Somewhere Boy

A personal history of the Wild West:

For as long as I can remember I was aware of children in old media playing Cowboys and Indians, but it couldn’t have appealed to me less. A 1958 Peanuts strip has Linus eschewing Cowboys and Indians for his favoured game of ‘Liberals and Conservatives’, and I would have been such a child.

At the age of seven I wrote a complaining letter to the Controller of BBC One because my programmed recording of the Laurel & Hardy film Way Out West, broadcast while I was at school, had cut off the end because the start had been delayed, and received an apologetic letter from a minion. No harm done: it taught me the important lesson that you set the recording to end a good fifteen minutes later than the scheduled finish time, not the piffling five I had previously banked on, and someone gave me the film on VHS as a birthday present.

We had an LP of Geoff Love and His Orchestra performing ‘Big Western Movie Themes’ that opened with The Big Country, which was thrilling even if you didn’t want to watch the film.

At the age of nine I came home from school to find my doting mother had purchased this CD, thinking I would enjoy Billy the Kid.

She wasn’t wrong. It blew my mind. The vivid atmosphere of the open prairie, the lilt of the popular songs (‘Goodbye, Old Paint’), the terror of the gun battle (I hadn’t realised music could make you actually, physically scared), the sides-hugging delight of the capture. Before too long I knew every note of it. I can date it to the age of nine because I put it on an early mixtape (compilations, we called them back then) made on our home stereo, whose inlay card I annotated with ’22/5/93′ (a Saturday).

The Sousa marches were from an Eastman Wind Ensemble CD borrowed from the public library that I had to make a copy of before returning.

At ten or eleven, inspired by my love of Copland and probably The Oregon Trail, I took an ‘Extra Study Option’ on the Wild West. An initiative of the headmaster, the ESO was probably a sop to allow various disenchanted teachers to share something they were genuinely passionate about for a change with willing pupils. So once a week for a term I and a small group of similarly naive suckers stayed behind after school with my maths teacher to learn all about about grits and dysentery. To date, they remain the longest hours I have ever spent.

Way Out West notwithstanding, the appeal of the Western eluded me until I studied High Noon for a film music paper at university, and suddenly I got the point, graduating to Destry Rides Again, Bad Day at Black Rock, Red River, Broken Arrow, Shane (which, like Billy the Kid, features a dance to ‘Goodbye, Old Paint’) … and Hud, which is where we’ve been aiming for.

Horseman, Pass By, which would become translated into Hud a couple of years later, was the debut novel of Larry McMurtry and the first of three novels later anthologised as Thalia: A Texas Trilogy and set in and around the town of that name.

The Western films I named above are mostly set in the Old West, but McMurtry’s Thalia novels are set in the present day, in the case of Horseman, Pass By in July 1954. The imagined fighty Cowboys-and-Indians good-and-bad black-and-whiteness of the Wild West was one thing that put me off as a child. If I’d realised what an ache you could get into a Western story I’d have seen the point of them far earlier, and McMurtry is all about the ache.

The acher-in-chief of Horseman, Pass By is its narrator Lonnie Bannon, 17 years old and living on his 82-year-old grandfather Homer’s cattle ranch. Lonnie’s a sensitive, thoughtful boy who helps his grandfather and does a bit of performative chasing after girls his own age but is more drawn to their black housekeeper Halmea, who functions as both a substitute for his dead mother and a sexual fantasy. Increasingly he thinks of escape.

I wouldn’t have minded going with Hermy’s cousin to see what it was like in Oklahoma City, at least it would be a change. Thalia was okay, I really liked it, but I just didn’t want it for all the time. The old cows bawling in the horse pasture kept me awake till nearly morning, and I lay in bed with my eyes open, thinking about all the girls I knew in Thalia, and those in Oklahoma City I didn’t know, all of them with nightgowns on, asleep somewhere and breathing in the night.

Ache. The grit in this situation comes from the unexplained death of a heifer in Homer’s herd, which suggests the possibility of hoof and mouth disease, and from the volatile presence of Hud, Homer’s 35-year-old stepson. Thirty-five’s an awkward age, I dimly recall. If it’s not friends saying ‘It’s much better living it than looking at it, Robert’ then it’s usually a ranch you feel like you’ve been waiting your whole adult life to inherit and a herd of Mexican cows that should never have been bought in the first place.

I guess they had to rename it because the audience for a film called Horseman, Pass By would be close to zero, but from the title of the film you’d think Hud was the central character. (That’s the draw of Paul Newman, though in fact it was Melvyn Douglas and Patricia Neal who won the Oscars. Lonnie is played by soulful Brandon deWilde, ten years on from his turn as Joey Starrett in Shane; it couldn’t be any other way.) You may suspect something similar as you read the book. Hud’s slow to be introduced, and the force of his personality when he does eventually appear contrasts sharply with Lonnie’s meekness. The grandeur of the landscape often lends itself to grand stories, and I kept thinking of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, envisaging Hud as a Prince Hal type, a tearaway waiting for a taste of responsibility to let him blossom.

This isn’t that book, though. With his 1985 masterpiece Lonesome Dove and its sequels McMurtry would create expansive, epic tales of the West, but this book’s scope is smaller, a snapshot essentially of Lonnie’s coming of age. Halmea quits, Hud’s dropped, and Lonnie goes away. There’s a powerfully nostalgic streak in everything I’ve read by McMurtry. Not sentimental for a moment, and this book contains a couple of brutal scenes of slaughter and assault, but the brutality complements a constant awareness of the changing of the seasons, the ends of eras, the fragility of life. The Old West seems to have been dying since its birth, the old ways falling off, and in this book Lonnie is McMurtry’s proxy to observe it all, most of the chapters seeming to end in this sweet, wistful strain.

I went in the church and laid the songbook on a seat. Then I went back outside and stood on the walk in front of the church house, looking at the grass, at the skim-milk clouds, at those blue church-house windows, thinking of the horseman that had passed.

Has Larry McMurtry ever been given his due? Because I think he’s a very great writer. He’s not published by Library of America at the time of writing, but that will presumably be remedied pretty soon. For myself, I need to read the second Thalia book, Leaving Cheyenne (a quotation from ‘Goodbye, Old Paint’; everything connects), and reread the third, The Last Picture Show, probably this year, before saddling up for the Lonesome Dove sequels.