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McMurtry western examines shape and reality of current world
Book Review
By Derryll White
McMurtry, Larry (1988). Anything for Billy.
Like the gunfighters in this story, Larry McMurtry is dead and gone. Also like in the novel, the literary and western historians are tearing him up.
Larry McMurtry loved the myth of America. He was often unhappy with the reality, Hollywood and otherwise. In ‘Anything for Billy’ he takes his understanding of sad destiny, his thoughts on an America that killed John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, and creates a huge landscape of an emerging America, a country that can kill anything.
Myth has always been the land of the thinker, the explorer, the trickster. Ben Sippy in this novel bears witness to a tale that is still emerging. The movie ‘Thelma and Louise’ portrays an updated release of Sippy’s views (and McMurtry’s). America absolutely needs its myths to be whole, to understand itself. Otherwise, it is simply a playground for the Oklahoma Bomber and every self-styled freedom fighter that comes along.
Larry McMurtry does a great job of leading the reader, through picturesque western landscapes and larger than life characters, to examine the shape and reality of the world we now live in.
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Excerpts from the novel:
BILLY BONE – …but Billy Bone didn’t spend many hours of his life thinking about his fellow human beings. The notion that they had some sort of a right to life probably never entered his head, and might have struck him as comical if it did.
The long and short of it was, killing people just didn’t bother him. It didn’t excite him, as it does some killers, but I don’t believe any of his killings caused him a moment’s depression.
WOMEN’S WILES – I felt a little throb of annoyance that she already chose to use his first name. The ways of women never cease to startle, I guess. There Billy Bone sat: young, short, dirty, ugly and violent – and American – a boy with no grace and no learning, and yet the tall, brilliant, beautiful daughter of the Cavendishes and the Monstuarts had chosen to make him her paramour – I could see that plainly.
I don’t think Billy heard the question the first time. He was so entranced with Cecily Snow that if he could have forgotten to breathe I’ve no doubt he would have suffocated then and there.
“Do you think you could kill that nigger, Billy?” Cecily asked again, and this time Billy heard. Cecily had an avid gleam in her eye.
BILLY – “Nobody likes a person like me, Sippy,” he said. “I’m just alone. I was always alone. There ain’t really no place for me. I wish they’d just let me fall. Joe fell, and I bet he’s peaceful.”
HISTORY – Of course like all the rest, the historians and outlaw collectors, he came up against the awkward fact that I was sitting there in Lord Snow’s camp chair, not thirty feet from where Billy fell. He was polite though – he came to see me and told me what happened that day, and when I demurred and explained how it really happened, he smiled and did his best to overlook my bad manners.
I don’t guess I blame those people much – the scholars and the believers. Billy’s death was simple, and yet even the simplest events grow mossy with the passage of years. If the students accepted the simple view of events in past times, how would their stiff brains ever get any exercise.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
