Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [166]
I was thus understandably interested when an agent I knew only slightly, Dorothea Oppenheimer, called to tell me about a new novel by a young writer from Texas. Larry McMurtry, she explained, had published three novels, two of which had been made into very successful motion pictures, Hud and The Last Picture Show, which was gratifying in its own way, of course, but had not led to any real sales of his books.
In a world of agents who make more money and get more publicity than their clients, Dorothea Oppenheimer was perhaps the last of a dying breed. That she was an Olympic-level kvetch cannot be denied, but beneath all that was a woman endowed with extraordinary taste, courage, humor in the face of adversity, and loyalty. She was completely devoted to her clients’ interests, but once she knew that you shared her enthusiasm for an author’s work, she was fair and never asked for the impossible. Shy, retiring, and always apologetic for not asking more for her clients, Dorothea shied away from conflict, but she more than made up for that by sheer stubbornness and patience. In one of those odd twists of fate that are so common in publishing, Dorothea had chosen Irving Lazar, of all people, to handle her movie rights (most East Coast authors’ agents find it expedient to use a West Coast agent to sell movie rights for them), and Lazar criticized her endlessly for not being tough enough. Dorothea had few clients, but they were all real writers. “She’s sitting on a gold mine, but she doesn’t know what to do with it,” Lazar said about her, implying that he did, which only made her more nervous. Most people complained that Dorothea drove them crazy; she drove me crazy, too—the mere sound of her voice was enough to transform me into Lazar, shouting, “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” to her over the telephone, while she sniffled gently, but I liked and respected her, and at the end of every conversation, we always made up and reverted to friendly banter again. If Dorothea said something was good, it was worth taking seriously, which was more than you could say for Lazar.
I quickly read McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (the novel on which Hud had been based), Leaving Cheyenne, and The Last Picture Show. Though in later years I sometimes jokingly referred to McMurtry as “the Flaubert of the Plains,” he was already an unusual phenomenon in American writing. He came out of the gate (to use rodeo terminology) with a remarkable ability to write about women and an absolutely sure eye for the bleak landscape of small-town Texas and the isolated ranches of the Panhandle, as well as the history of the West. You can count on the fingers of one hand (and still have a lot of fingers left over) the number of male American novelists who can create believable, sympathetic women characters—or who really like women, for that matter. In most of American fiction, the women are cardboard cutouts, not living human beings, reflecting the prejudices or the fears of the author. You can read the whole of Hemingway’s work without finding a single really convincing woman character or the slightest hint that the author knew or cared what made women tick, and much the same can be said of every other male American fiction writer from Melville to Mailer. McMurtry, it was apparent, liked and understood women and wrote about them sympathetically and intelligently. He came with a perfectly developed sense of place, which gave all his fiction a deep, solid bedrock, but he was able to put women into that landscape as no other Western writer ever has, and he did it in his very first novel with the sure touch of a mature artist.
Unfortunately, as Dorothea Oppenheimer made clear, East Coast reviewers just didn’t get McMurtry. It was, she thought, a question of urban prejudice—they simply couldn’t take seriously a novelist who had been born in Archer City, Texas, was raised as a cowhand, and wrote about life in Texas. There was some truth to this, I thought. Most reviewers were urban or had come to New York City anxious to leave their