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"NONFICTION: McMurtry recounts life as reader, writer, bookseller

Sunday, Aug 03, 2008 - 12:02 AM


By JAY STRAFFORD
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

NONFICTION

For the true bibliophile, books are as essential to life as air. No book-lover would be caught in a doctor's waiting room, or an airport lounge, or even a traffic standstill, without something substantial to read. Pruning a collection that threatens to overflow one's home can be as painful as watching a child leave the nest, but spending hours in a bookstore -- new, used or specialty -- can be blissful (and never mind the coffee).
OK, so we're a bit obsessive. But as Virginia's own Renaissance man, Thomas Jefferson, once said, "I cannot live without books."
Neither can the distinguished American author Larry McMurtry, whose "Books: A Memoir" is the captivating story of his nearly lifelong devotion.
McMurtry's story, which begins on the ranch in northern Texas where he spent his early years (he was born in 1936), does not start with promise: "I don't remember either of my parents ever reading me a story." On the ranch, he writes: "Of books, there were none."
But one day in 1942, a cousin on the way to enlist in the military for World War II "stopped by the ranch house and gave me the gift that changed my life. The gift was a box containing nineteen books."
And the rest, as they say, is history -- and fiction, and screenwriting, and the eventual accumulation of a personal library of 28,000 volumes, and a sideline (although the word may not convey the depth of McMurtry's passion) as an antiquarian bookseller.
The focus of "Books: A Memoir" is on McMurtry's life as a bookman, but he gives us some insights into the worlds of reading and writing, too.
Reading, he says, gave him a window onto the larger world: "The reason is that, in our country isolation, I came to reading before I came to American popular culture generally."
And reading led to writing. His first book, 1961's "Horseman, Pass By," became the revered movie "Hud" with Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas and Brandon De Wilde. But the prolific McMurtry (28 novels, two collections of essays, three memoirs and more than 30 screenplays) is probably best known for 1985's "Lonesone Dove" -- a book he rightly calls the "Gone With the Wind" of the American West -- and its successors, both sequel and prequels.
Still, the heart of this latest memoir is bookselling, complete with descriptions of the eccentric scouts who keep the antiquarian business alive. His main store is now in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, but he owned Booked Up in Georgetown with Marcia Carter for more than 20 years. The stories he tells of some of Washington's swells are priceless:
Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' snobbish mother, wanted to sell some of the library of her late husband, Hugh D. Auchincloss. But she knew Carter and her mother socially, and she was horrified to find Carter "in trade" and couldn't bear the thought of doing business with her. It was left to the grande dame's latest fiancé to deal with the buyers.
Diplomat David K.E. Bruce owned substantial libraries at his Georgetown house and his family estate, Staunton Hill, in Virginia's Charlotte County. McMurtry's account of acquiring Bruce books in fits and starts is a lesson in diplomacy itself. But mediation was unnecessary in dealing with Bruce's widow, a social lioness in her own right. "Evangeline Bruce could not have cared less that we were in trade. She happily took our check, and banked it."
Despite Washington being a book-lover's dream town, only once, McMurtry writes, did he and Carter sell a book to a member of Congress: then-Sen. Charles McC. Mathias, R-Md. Then-Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., browsed from time to time but, to McMurtry's recollection, never bought.
As entertaining as "Books: A Memoir" is, though, at its heart lies sadness -- an elegy for the many independent bookstores that have closed, as well as a lament for reading: "Today the sight that discourages book people most is to walk into a public library and see computers where books used to be. . . . Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library."
But as long as writers such as McMurtry can string together words such as those, reading will not die, and books will live on. Put this engaging memoir on your summer-reading list, and revel in the stories McMurtry tells of the lovable eccentrics known as bibliophiles."



Am looking for this book ? anyone ?