The Watch - The 'Lonesome Dove' Megapod | Bonus Episode

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Welcome to the Summer of Dove. All four segments of Chris and Andy talking about the book and miniseries 'Lonesome Dove.' Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm going to be joined in a second by Andy Greenwald. And what you've got here is a bonus episode, which we do not do very often. But this is a special occasion because it's the collection of our Summer of Dove podcast. What the hell is Summer of Dove?

Andy and I have spent the last two weeks and really like the last year immersing ourselves in the fiction of Larry McMurtry and specifically in the story, the novel, Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove came out in 1985 and it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is considered one of the great novels about the American West and it is a really beautiful story of friendship. It's a story about restlessness. It's a story about fathers and sons. It's a story about this country in a lot of ways, but it's really just like a very well-told tale about two Texas Rangers, ex-Texas rangers leading a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. Andy and I broke down our conversation to match the action that happens in the four episodes of the miniseries adaptation of Blonesome Dove, which aired on CBS in 1989, and start Tommy Lee Jones

and Robert Duval and Angelica Houston and Diane Lane, Robert Urick, and a bunch of other people. So essentially, each segment of this conversation takes up one episode of the miniseries or several hundred pages of Larry McMurtry's novel. And at the end of the fourth episode, we shared our general feelings about it and kind of took a big picture look at the book and the story itself. Just want to say, thank you guys so much for listening to these if you've already checked them out. We just wanted to collect them all in one place in case people are catching up, in case people just wanted to have this in their back pocket to refer to because they can get lost when their own regular watch episodes. Just seeing everybody's comments about this project has been

really heartwarming at a time when I could really use it. I know I speak for Andy. It's been really rewarding to share our passion for something and see it reflected back from so many listeners. It's really really makes it all worth it. So without further ado, let's get into the summer of Dove, Lonesome Pod, our Lonesome Dove Deep Dive. We broke it up into four sections. Kaya's going to drop some strings here and there from the score from the adaptation. Hope you enjoy it. All right, Andy, I guess this is where we find out if we was meant to be Cowboys. This is the first edition, first episode of our Lonesome Pod, our recap of Lonesome Dove the novel by Larry McMurtry and Lonesome Dove the miniseries, which aired, God, I guess what, 28 years ago on CBS when did air?

31 years ago. 31 years ago. We keep it moving. Andy and I have been talking about this for a while. I think both of us, for the better part of a year, have been on this kind of journey where we've been moving in and out of the flowing fields of Larry McMurtry's fiction and essays. and we settled kind of into this shared zone

where we were both reading these Lonesome Dove novels. We started off, obviously, with Lonesome Dove, and its sequel, Streets of Laredo, and then there are some prequals, Day Man's Walk, and Comanchee Moon. We're going to be talking mostly about Lonesome Dove, although there will be references to other works. And we're going to talk about it.

The way we're going to break this up is we're going to do basically one episode of the miniseries at a time, but using that mostly as like a mile marker for where in the story we're going to do. discuss. So this is for my edition of Lonesome Dove, we're going to be talking about the first like 280 pages. It's loosely a couple hundred pages. Andy, I thought I would just say something at the beginning here about Lonesome Dove's sort of journey to us before we talk about our kind of discovery of Lonesome Dove because Lonesome Dove took a pretty long and winding road to its

its great American novel capital letters status. It started out actually as like, as an idea for a movie between McMurtry and Peter McDonovic and he had collaborated with Bogdanovich on the adaptation of Last Picture Show, which obviously launched the careers of people like Sybil Shepard and Jeff Bridges and it's just still a stunning film and a stunning novel. And

it was initially imagined as a script for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne playing the Woodrow call on Augustus McCray roles and Henry Fondo was going to play Jake Spoon. And it was going to be this kind of capstone Western for these guys

careers and it would look back with some, you know, real honesty and sober eyes on the West and the mythology around it. And it kind of floundered mostly because Wayne and Stewart did not want to make the movie. And McMurtry went on... Because they didn't want to be old. I mean, because they didn't want to be a part of closing the book on a book that they and their careers had written. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, McMurtry went on to find tons of success with novels like Terms of Endearment, which were also adapted to famous movies. And I think is one of the most sort of successful and well-known literary novelists probably of, I would say, almost the post-war period from the 60s till today. His books are regularly adapted.

He's a, you know, a really charming public figure when he is in public. His, you know, his sort of commentary is always, is always really acerbic and smart. And this book is a master. And this book is a master. piece. I know, and it's a, it was initially submitted to Simon and Schuster as a 1600 page first draft. And what we get is this huge tone that was sort of modeled after Victorian novels, after Don Quixote and the stories that McMurtry heard from his uncles growing up in, in Archer, Texas about ranching and cattle driving. And it's a phone book of a novel, and it'll break your heart and it'll sweep you away. It won the, the 1986 Pulitzer fiction. And it's probably one of the, I think, most beloved,

novels of the last 40 years. And funnily enough, it remains a bit of a sore spot for McMurtry, who had this to say years later when he wrote the preface for a later edition of Wonesome Dove. He said, it's hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization. Instead of a poor man's inferno, capital I like his and Dantes, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I'd actually delivered a kind of gone with the wind of the West, a turnabout, I'll be mulling over for a long, long time. And we're obviously going to mull over

a lonesome dove in tons of different ways. But why the hell are we doing this, Andy? Like, why in 2020 we decided to dedicate this time to Lonesome Dove? There's a couple of reasons. I think one is circumstance, context, age, and perspective, which is to say that during this awful lockdown and period in American history, both of us have been, like many people, have been looking for escape, joy, wherever we can find it, and picking up a, I mean, my copy is almost 900 pages, or over 900 pages, that seemed like a pretty good way to do it. And losing myself in this book over the course of, you know, almost two weeks was one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences of my life, of my life. I absolutely adored it. I think one of the other reasons

why it interests us is because one of the, something that we love to talk about on this podcast, whether we're talking about albums or TV shows or movies, is there are moments when there is intent behind a work of art and that intent is often multifaceted and complicated and difficult to parse. And then there's the reception. And there's always that excruciating moment like when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand and they can't control it anymore. And we are as much interested in the mythology of Lonesome Dove as we are in Lonesome Dove itself. And you alluded to it, this idea that McMurtry, who is deeply unsentimental, wrote a book that is a sentimental favorite of American culture to the degree that there was a spike in children named Gus

after 1985, that Larry McMurtry, who grew up the children of cattlemen in arid West Texas, rejected the cowboy way of life, was not for him, hid in the barn and read books, went to graduate school eventually in Houston, and just was happiest in the life. library dreamed of being accepted by a literary community that kind of only wanted cowboy stories from people from Texas and sort of expressly rejected him, even though he is as intellectual, as literary, it's just about anybody else. I mean, in addition to being a incredibly prolific writer, as you alluded to, Chris, he's also a bookstore Maven. Yeah. And owns a store called Booked Up in Archer City, Texas that has maybe more books than any other store in the world.

And so for years, he rejected writing a Westerner Cowboy. He was writing about in the 60s what was then his own memories of a changing Texas and then wrote a number of books that you and I adore that go from sort of a swinging Houston in the 70s to Hollywood and books that were well received and were adapted, you know, spectacularly to Hollywood, but kind of never found popular traction. And then he wrote the thing that he said he was never going to do. and it exploded his career, got him the Pulitzer Prize

and all the acumen that he probably secretly did covet. And what we have in Lonesome Dove is, as I said, it's just a brilliant, staggering book. There's an essay by Jeff Dyer that we'll link to or let people see where he correctly says it. This is that kind of

book where the words, you lose the distance between yourself and the page, and it just comes alive in you. And you just spend hours thinking about it when you're not spending hours reading it. But it is also one of those really fascinating events in popular culture where what was intended is so divorced from what it was and how it was received. And I think we're going to get into that as we go through it. Other examples of this

phenomenon would be like born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, which is a song that is harshly critical about what it means to be born in the USA and yet was a, you know, a hallmark of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign and is thought to be a very nostalgic patriotic song by a lot of people who love it. I think about David Chase with the Sopranos, who was just like, my whole life, I've been haunted by the specter of being Italian-American and the mob, and I think that these people are nihilistic monsters, and everybody wanted to go out for Gabagool with him afterwards, no matter how awful he made these people. So obviously McMurtry wrestles with his own legacy in subsequent books, and we won't really talk about it till the end, but Streets of Laredo, the sequel, which is named,

which is actually what the original Bogdanovich screenplay was named, kind of wrestles with it in a much more explicit way, his reckoning with the West. But look, this is a novel that was described by Texas Monthly Magazine on the 20th anniversary as like the ultimate Texas novel. And yet the book is barely in Texas. It's about people who ran out of things to do in Texas and have to go to Montana to feel alive. And it's not like when you're spending time in Texas in this novel, you're like, man, Texas sounds great. No, it's amazing. He thought he was being completely unsentimental and yet everybody fell in love with it. And that push-pull because the book is so loving. The characters, even the worst of them are, well, not all of them.

We're not talking Blue Duck here, but like all the cowboys, even call, you know, are admirable or lovable in all sorts of complicated, wonderful ways. And yet, and yet. So this just felt like a rich text for us to get into. I think both of us come to it as, you know, cowboy agnostic. I think I probably have a lot more fired up about Westerns and, and the old West than you are, like, growing up. Prior to two weeks ago or whatever it was, yes.

Now you just wear chaps. No, I'll echo what Andy said and just say that, you know, the best description I have of my experience with Lonesome Dove over the last couple of weeks is Bastion and Neverending story, like, up in the attic, just crushing, crushing tape, just like reading, just burrowing himself into the world of this novel. And I got to say, like, I always had a little bit of jealousy when I heard my dad talk about experiences he had. had with adventure books, like whether it was reading Robinson Crusoe or whether it was reading, you know, James Fenimore Cooper or these sort of like typical young boy adventure books that you read, because I was like, I never felt transported by novels in that way. I often would find myself thrilled or completely immersed in them, but I never felt myself being carried away on like this river of story, you know, and just forgetting everything around me. And that's been something that I think

in a lot of ways you wonder whether or not this could have happened at any other time for both of us because we are kind of limited in what we are taking in or experiencing in the outside world now, that we were really open to the idea of being completely transported to another place. And I think that McMurtry has talked before about how when he writes essays, and if anybody listening is looking for a good example of his essay work, I would recommend Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which is an incredible collection. It's half literary criticism, half memoir, but it's just stunning. he talks about how when he writes nonfiction, he needs every sentence to make sense.

He needs every sentence to connect to the next one and the next one because he's making an argument. He's trying to make a coherent point. But when he writes fiction, he's essentially doing it in a trance. I think that that can sometimes work against McMurtry. McMurtry has definitely got a body of work that has some clunkers in it. I would say that his clunkers are better than a lot of people's best work. But there is definitely books where you're like, man, I'd love to know what was happening in his personal life when he was writing. this. Right. But Lonesome Dove is probably the perfect balance between refinement and pure expression, where you just feel this story tumbling out of this guy and out of this country, but you also feel

like he is completely in control. I agree with that. I think that you referred to his public persona as charming. I think it's cantankerously charming. I mean, he's kind of a crank and in a wonderful way. I mean, this is a guy who very intentionally wore blue jeans to the Oscars when he won for broke back mountain a few years ago. But you also do get the sense that writing for him is, is pure, and it is what he does, and it is what he loves to do. Not the case for many people, your boy included, who have made a career out of writing. It is hard work, and it is not always fun. But he seems to love it, and it just takes in places. And so sometimes those places are a book, the book he wrote just before Loansom Dove, which is this totally minor, just sort of very

light DC comedy called Cadillac Jack that I'm struggling with, despite having been reading it for eight months. And then sometimes it's Lonesome Dove when he just taps a vein. And there's something else there. And it is contagious when someone clearly was taking as much pleasure out of writing it as you are out of reading it. And there's a lot of, I think not enough scholarship about this book, but Chris and I will link to this Texas Monthly article we're referring to where people are like correctly being like, Cormick McCarthy gets all the attention. But Cormick-McColns, McCarthy is just dark, you know, and it's appealing to people who want things to be. I don't even mean to shit on Cormic McCarthy.

Nobody needs me to do that. He's great, and you can have both. But those books are very, very mannered and written in a way that is appealing to an intellectual mindset. This, Larry McMurtry writes popular fiction, even when it's not popular. And in that, he's more like a Dickens, right? He just somehow wrote great literature that filled 800 pages of a mass market paper, back that anybody, even people who've never heard of Corby McCarthy, could read and find something to enjoy in. And that also mirrors, I think, our taste, kind of in terms of television and other

things we talk about. So it's all lined up for us. Maybe, should we, this is actually very lonesome dovey that, remember, that book is about a cattle drive and it doesn't start until 250 pages in, which is the length of most novels. In some ways, I think, you know, I'll be really curious to see, I've seen on our Facebook page that a lot of people are reading the book. I've seen on our Facebook page that people have just decided to watch the miniseries first and sort of see where they're at with that. They are completely different experiences in this one regard. The miniseries essentially does a very faithful but economic job of moving through the story so that at the end of, I think it's like hour and 17, hour 30 minute, first episode, you are 280 pages into the book.

Whereas the book, and especially the pace of the book, feels very basically intrinsically related to the action on the page. So the time they spend, dilly dallying around Lonesome Dove, this small town in Texas on the border, and kind of trying to decide what they're going to do, whether or not they're going to follow this guy, Jake Spoon's advice that they go take a cattle herd up to Montana because it's the last pure frontier. And what last adventure these guys can have? Because I think everybody in this group seems to know either consciously or subconsciously that this is the last adventure. I mean, I think even would you recall when someone says, well, what will we do when we get back? And he's like,

we're not coming back. But that whole feeling of them, milling around once in Dove and getting ready to go, it's also a very meandering story in the book itself. I mean, he just kind of pokes his head into different people's lives

and introduces us to a lot of different characters. Yeah, I think, and I don't know if we said this at the top, we should say it again. We're going to do our best to not spoil the segments of the book or the miniseries as we go, and the case people are parceling it out

to go along with it. We're going to limit our future conversation. We're not going to say what happens to these characters in part three of the miniseries or part three of a podcast. But I think that's exactly right. And so I kind of wanted to start at the very beginning, which is, you know, you grab this

brick of a book or you dust off your parents VHS tape or whatever you're doing and you feel the weight of it or you see all the quotes, the masterpiece. You hear about how this was the greatest thing ever on television, even though I didn't even realize this. The Emmys totally ignored it, which is hilarious and super Emmys. It's 18 nominations and one win, right? for director, yeah, which is really funny to think about. But so you look at this and you feel the importance of it,

even the painting on the old mass market and hardcover edition, feels like this is an epic of Americana, as Simon Schuster intended to market it as. And it starts with a pig eating a snake. From the beginning, he's trying to tell you this isn't a monument. This isn't a statue. This isn't an ode to greatness of the American spirit.

spirit, this is just some stuff that happened in a dusty, mean place. And if you find moments of beauty, you can enjoy them, but they will be fleeting. And I remember opening this book, and again, it was only a month ago, being like, why am I going to care about this? This is a book about pigs eating snakes. It's incredible to think that this book starts with these characters, and, you know, people I think are familiar, but we'll say it again, these legendary Texas Rangers. And the Texas Rangers were the people who, and they were even exempted from Civil War Service because of it, they were cleaning up the frontier. They were cleaning out Texas. They had a, it was incredibly hard work. It was incredibly brutal. The latter is probably more accurate, right? Yeah. I mean,

they, they went to war and rode against the Comanches so that homesteaders and settlers could expand their territory further west and they could hold the relatively arbitrary frontier of the Rio Grande from Mexico. And when we pick up our story, that's kind of done. It's not the natural starting place for a story. We're down to pigs eating snakes. And Gus McCray and Woodrow Call, who are partners, and I guess friends, although that means something kind of different. Brothers, basically, have given up rangering and have opened kind of like a...

I don't even know how you describe it. Like, they rent animals, but not pigs, and they dig wells. It seems like they basically have like a dirt farm. I mean, it's a town that is barely getting by. They have some horses, right? I think they have like a functional like cattle farm, but they don't really seem to sell anything or do anything. It is a one whore town to coin a phrase. Exactly.

It's a place between here and there on the edge of something. And immediately you kind of reminded that the frontier myth, and this is something I, you know, reading this book has gotten me thinking about a lot. When you think about cowboys and all this stuff, like it really was only a couple years in the American experiment. So all those beloved movies and all the things that are parents or grandparents, grew up idolizing decades later was just a blip, essentially, when there was an active frontier and, you know, there was, you could put some heroism on it, at least in your imagination. Then it was over. And so these are two men who have devoted their life to conflict against

something intangible, whether it was the unknown, whether it was the frontier which kept moving, whether it was the American experiment or whatever they were doing it for. They went to war against it, and then they kind of won, and then what? Now they're just digging holes to nowhere in a dust bowl. And where does that spirit? Where does that go? And how does it play out? And that's why, though they've been sitting here drinking on the porch for 10 years, when Jake Spoon, their old Campanero shows up and it's like, I heard Montana's nice. Yeah. Call suddenly is like unlike him because he is, you know, the by the book guy. And is not a cattleman. Not a cattleman. No connection to emotions, hope, anything.

It's like, we're going to go there. We're going to do this thing that we've never done. and we're going to do something no one else has done, because that is the only animating spirit in his body, even at whatever age he is when this book begins. And these guys are, I think that's where he starts to put his finger on the idea of a settled frontier versus a wild frontier. And what these guys are really looking for, because their idea of what civilization looks like,

even if it's something as sort of podunk and goat herding as lonesome dove is in the town itself, their idea of what the frontier should be, is limitless. It's boundaryless and it's boundless. And they want the adventure and they want the danger and they want to cross all these rivers and drive these cattle. The cattle are kind of like almost a macuffin. What they really want to do is get to essentially the Canadian border from the Mexico border. They want to get someplace new. And it's very much a different definition of the American dream. Like the 20th century definition of the American dream, I think was you can buy a house and settle down and have kids there

and milk and eggs will be cheap and plentiful and you can settle in. That's sort of the post-war American dream. The thing about Call and McRae, even though this might not even be, Gus might, I think certainly by the end of the book, and this is not a spoiler, Gus is more aware of this than Call is.

Their dream was to build that world for other people, but they don't want to live in it. That has no appeal to them whatsoever. And you feel that torpor, at the beginning. And I think if you're just starting the book and haven't been doing the things that Chris and I did later, you might not get it yet, right? Because the book's called Lonesome Dove. And yet, they're in Lonesome Dove for 200 pages and it kind of sucks for everybody. Even people who've started the book, if you don't make it to where the first episode of the miniseries ends,

you might be wondering why you even signed up for this ride because they did all of this. And for what? To sit and sweat all day and they don't even have a roof. Yeah. When you when you think about some of the other sort of great cattle drive stories, and I guess Red River would be the number one that comes to mind. Bogdanovich had talked about how he wanted to make a Red River-esque film when he was working with McMurtry, and he obviously idolized Howard Hawks. Red River is essentially, it becomes mutiny on the bounty, but on horses. You know, it's about these younger cowboys who rebel against and then eventually, you know, work with John Wayne's character, who's driving this cattle herd to Missouri from Texas. Blonesome Dove is a little bit more wandering. I mean, I think that these guys are trying to touch something or articulate something that's

just out of their sort of intellectual capabilities to understand, but they just know that they can't sit still anymore. And that is that kind of rambunctiousness and that restlessness that you're talking about, where it's not necessarily about establishing anything as much as it is constant movement. And that feeling of constantly being able to move through and across anything that's in your way, whether it's a river or, you know, three days of no water or whatever it is that they come across. The thing that I think jumps out at me or to jump out at me, even in the early stages of the cattle drive, once they leave Lonesome Dove. And there's like this whole other side

story about a sheriff from Arkansas who's pursuing Jake Spoon for murdering his brother-in-law. And that sheriff's wife, Elmira, who then leaves Arkansas promptly after July's, you know, departure. And she's going off to find the love of her life. they wind up, you know, being the sort of B plot of this novel for the most part. For people who've read these books need to understand, what McMurchy communicates to us is that the West is fucking huge and there are like 20 people there and you run into them constantly. Yes. And I'm cool with it.

I'm cool with it. I mean, I was trying to figure that out because this is something that comes up throughout the novel is that two people will be looking for one another for three months and you're just like, you guys are just not going to bump into each other. One's in Nebraska and the others. I mean, I guess there are only so many roads. It does sound like there's like four roads. Yeah.

And that eventually like if you just like stopped and waited for someone in San Antonio, they would probably come through one way or the other. Also, these people are hungry and thirsty, full stop. But they're also hungry and thirsty for goss. You know what I mean? Like they want to know what's going on. And so that matters. And it also, you know, not to get, not to digress too much,

but the idea of legends and legends spreading faster than reality, I mean, when Gus and Call leave lonesome dove and reenter the world, I mean, there are moments when some people don't give them the respect that they do, but generally people know who they are and they're famous, despite the fact that they've been, again, sitting on porches or digging wells for a decade. Yeah. So news does travel in a relatively small community. But, sorry, I cut you off when you were. No, I was just going to say that just early on in the book, and I think the thing that we could probably take from this first section is the two things that immediately get to. spelled are A, the idea of like Magnificent 7, that this is some sort of like superpowered, you know, suicide squad justice league of cowboys. It's not that. It's basically Colin McCray,

a scout named Dietz, a boy named Newt of unknown paternal origin, which comes up obviously a lot in the novel, a prostitute named Lorena. She's with Jake. And a couple of other people, P.I. Like a couple other, like basically rag tag group of stragglers. This dish erasure will not stand. Dish. Yeah, there's a bunch of different cowboys. Jasper Fant, the O'Brien brothers, all these guys. And they are moving across an absolutely

heartless landscape. Pretty. And there are parts of it that are beautiful and there are parts of it that the people who are moving across it are very in touch with on an almost like subatomic poetic level of just being like there's nothing better than watching the sun come up over the landscape. But McMurtry's view of nature is brutal. And Dave Hickey, in that Texas Monthly article that you were referencing, he said, Larry has something that my grandfather had, which is a ruthless view of nature.

I remember watching a sunset with my grandfather as a kid. I said, isn't that beautiful? And he said, oh, yeah. And while you're admiring nature, nature is looking back at you and saying, yum, yum, here comes dinner. There is in Larry an idea that nature has this monstrous force in which we make our way very fragile. Lonesome Dove is very good about this.

And that's true. Yeah, there is a relentless savagery to this book. It's just, it's a fact of, it is literally a fact of life. It is natural. It's matter of fact. And that is a, you know, that's like a difference between McCarthy and McMurtry in that McCarthy looks at violence as this almost like biblical act of this original thing that we are born with. Whereas McMurtry, I think, looks at it as like a happen, an offshoot of nature and a product of being alive.

And I think that we'll have a deeper conversation as we go along about things that McMurtry does and the way he portrays characters in this book from the 80s, you know, with our contemporary state of mind, which is to say Dietz, the black character in the book and Lorena, who's one of many fascinating women in the book, but is the primary one. And speaking specifically about Lorena, I mean, there is, look, I was going to say certain things seem accurate. I don't know. I am not Texan. I have never. lead cattle. I am not a student of a 19th century American history. But McMurtry has always excelled in all of his books from Horseman Pass By and Last Picture Show all the way through in allowing his female characters, the women in his books to be full-bodied, full-minded, full-hearted human beings with a full range of emotions. And to my eyes anyway, which of course are suspect to any, you know, to all sorts of degrees. She is a fully alive and realized character, partly because he is absolutely unstinting and

again, unsentimental about the limits this society has placed on her and what her options are and what her path has been and what it is likely to be. We don't lose sight of that. And that's something as we begin to talk about the differences between the book and the miniseries. That's something that I struggled with more in the miniseries because we suddenly, that door is slam shut, the window is slammed shut to her inner thoughts, what she really wants, how she feels about what's been done to her and what she has to do. And Diane Lane does a really good job in the miniseries, but I think that's a great example of the limitations of sometimes the limitations

of telling a story on screen versus telling a story in a novel. And the psychological depth of characters in Lonesome Dove is actually quite subtle. You know, there's the old trope of action his character. I think that that's actually really well suited for Lonesome Dove. dove, but there's just not a lot of action. In fact, what it is is just every day kind of moving through these people's very, very, very fucking hard lives, you know, because that's what life was like back then, is that you might do everything right and lose focus for a second and the worst possible thing could happen to you. You know, and that is the reality in which these people are living, but that doesn't mean that they don't daydream or that they don't have

reveries about different parts of their lives or wish that they had something else going on in their lives that they could live for. And sometimes what they're living for is they don't even know. They're just like, I just feel like I'm supposed to keep moving forward. Yeah. I mean, to use Dietz is another example, one of the most amazing characters in the book. There's a moment early on in these, it's in these first hundred pages where we're suddenly with Dietz and it's talking about how he just kind of feels melancholy to the point of suicidal depression at times. And what it means for him to feel that way and what he looks forward to. And there's certain moments in nature that make him, that alleviate that pain and that feeling

that tell us so much about him and who he is and what it means to be a black man in this world, a full partner essentially, but not fully. Full maybe in the Hat Creek outfit, but not in society. Not in society. And even with limitations within the Hat Creek outfit. And as a way to transition to talking about the mini-series as well, in that Texas Monthly Oral History of it,

there's a quote from Danny Glover who plays the part beautifully. Yeah. And he's just like, I wasn't sure about doing it because I wasn't sure how much there was there. And honestly, and so he came up with some more backstory for Dietz in order to bring to bring to his performance. But look, the miniseries is great, but he's right. There isn't room for that internal life. And there isn't room for the depth, although he certainly brought depth to it.

And one of the things that this makes me think of, and maybe this is a way to transition, it's so fascinating to me that this was designed as a star vehicle. This was Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich sitting on a balcony of a hotel in Miami watching Sybil Shepard swim last. saying, let's do a Western. Let's get the Duke back on horseback again, and we'll get Jimmy Stewart saying Augustus and his funny voice. And that's what it'll be. It was a star vehicle. And then when no one wanted to make it,

he bought the rights back and turned what had to have been a, what, a 120-page script into a 900-page novel. It is so rich in detail. You'd have to read it multiple times to get all of it. And then it becomes a miniseries, which was as expansive as something could be at the time. It was six hours on TV. That's pretty good.

as good as you could probably make a miniseries look. Yeah. And yet ultimately, it is a star vehicle in the end, you know, through the weight of Duval's performance and Tommy Lee Jones's performance, but also because the aperture for a story like this in 1989 was to center it in the two old cowboys and not necessarily find a way in through the horror on the side of town or the black man who's a member of the group, but not really a member of the group. it is what it is, to my mind anyway, watching it, I admire it and I'm fond of it the way I think

the sentimental fan of Lenton Dove is, but I just feel, I feel what's missing so much. Yeah, well, it's interesting too, because the order in which you come to those things, I think has a big impact on the other. So I think that I have a really hard time seeing Gus and Woodrow as anybody else, but Robert is all in time. Me too. And crucially, I think, especially for these opening few hundred pages, the book doesn't really have an antagonist. in the early stages other than Jake. You know, Jake is the thorn in everybody's paw, but is not quite a villain yet,

or, you know, is not quite a villain. And I think the interesting thing about this book is, and the story is that even the most monstrous villains that emerge aren't really villains. You know, or they are villains, but they aren't really, they aren't really the centerpiece of the story the way I think I've trained myself to read stories

in terms of who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. In some ways, I don't even know how much we really know about Gus and Woodrow psychologically at the end of this book that we didn't know in the beginning. I mean, some of them they've been changed by their journey for sure, but a lot of what's changed them is literally, physically what they've gone through throughout the journey. I think that's right. And I think that when I was reading the book, expecting something more traditional than what it is, almost having the legend in my mind more than the reality of it. And even my mass market paperback has that thing that books used to do

where on the inside and back cover it's like, you will meet. And it says like, oh, the horror with the heart of gold and the beloved gang and says, and the fearsome villain, blue duck and blah, blah,

and then I'm reading the book and I'm like, man, Larry doesn't give a fuck about rules. Like, he doesn't even introduce the antagonist into page whatever. And when he does, it's, and it was only later that I realized

that of course he knows rules. He was intentionally subverting them. The villain isn't what we, isn't who we think it is. The villain, such as it is, is entropy and time and nature and all of that, right? It doesn't behave the way you expect it to. It fights it at every turn,

even though we, even now, when we're talking about are sometimes still try to put certain narrative clothing back on it. I will say, though, that one thing I thought that the miniseries does really well, and they talk about it in that Texas Monthly Oral History, is the castinger of Robert Yurek, which I know that we've texted back and forth and you've been like, man, I don't know.

It just feels like he was a little, out of his league here. But I thought it was so interesting reading them talk about, reading this various people involved with the project, talk about that was an actual tension on set. That Robert Eurek actually was like, I'm a TV guy, and this is Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval that I'm acting with,

and he had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about it. And Jake Spoon has a chip on his shoulder about things not going his way the way he always wants them to go. And he is this immature brat of a character who's actually not good at anything but women and gambling, but has kind of written on the reputation of the Rangers and Gus and Woodrow throughout most of his life. Yeah, it's amazing.

I mean, you read these retrospectives and Duval knew. Duval was just like, and by the way, they went to Duval first to play Call. Yeah. And I think James Garner was in the mix to potentially play Gus. And Duval is basically like, you know, he knows how to ride. He knows how to ride horses. He knows how to do basically everything. And he had just won an Oscar the year before for tender mercies. And he was like, we are doing the godfather of Westerns. Like, we are through sheer force of will, we are going to make a masterpiece here. And somehow achieve that, even though there were all these other concerns at place. Like you learned behind the scenes that when they wanted to cast Angelica Houston as Clara, its character doesn't show up until much later in the book, but casts a very, very long and impressive shadow. And it's an amazing.

section of the book that's, you know, we'll get to. The people involved were like, you know, we need some TV people on this. This is a TV show. Let's get Bob Eric and Ricky Schroeder. Yeah. And that's why they're there. And are they suitable? Sure. But it's part of the limitations they were up against. I mean, whole characters are removed, some, you know, in ways that make sense. Some, like Will Berger that are still going to still annoy me. But I guess I'm curious what other people feel about it, because clearly there's many, many more people whose introduction to this was the miniseries and just feel enormous fondness for it

than have ever read the book. But for me, watching the show as a companion piece, it's amazing to watch Duval and Jones cook and just bring these people fully flesh and blood to life. And then on the margins, it's like, well, it's fun to see. It's fun to see. But it lacks, for me, the depth and the depth and breadth,

because it's just, he just writes so much. He writes so much about everything. Well, yeah, and I think that one of the challenges for the show, at least in terms of looking back at it, is even though you can, even though a lot of the performances have not aged a second, especially that of the leads, some of like the more set PC parts, especially the part that I think will end on here, you know, you probably would have wanted another run at that in 2020, maybe, which is these, for lack of a better term, the snake attack

that ends the first episode of the miniseries and happens about 280 pages into an edition that I have. This is also the moment where I think most people are like, oh shit. Yep. This is a very engaging, lovely, funny,

interesting story for the first couple hundred pages. You're introduced to all these different people. I think I kept getting distracted by July a little bit and just kind of be like, what is up with this guy? Like, why is he getting so much screen time? in the book. Yeah.

And then we get to, they've been on the, you know, out there on the prairie for a little while. And there have been cool set pieces. I think that the,

stealing the horses or stealing the horses back from Hacienda Flores in Mexico is an amazing sequence. But really, they're just kind of like moving along and complaining about horse flies

and dust for a lot of the book until kind of in the middle of a paragraph he says, that's when Newt turned around and heard a scream. That was the worst sound he had ever heard. And this is absolutely, it's anecdotal. It happened to me. Like, this is the moment when you say, oh, shit,

and you realize the book you're reading isn't necessarily the book you thought you were reading. And I know you plan to just finish this chapter and go to sleep, but you're not going to because you have to keep going to calm your heart rate and wonder if anything's ever going to be okay again. Yeah. And this is also a lot of insight into the way McMurtry works, which is there are few writers alive. or who have ever lived, I think, who love their characters as deeply and totally as he does.

I mean, he just almost like a, with a painterly casual stroke, introduces someone, and you know everything about them and you love them. And you feel like they're flesh and blood and part of your life. And, you know, they ride down to Mexico and suddenly they meet these singing Irish brothers. And you're like, okay, sure. And you learn, by the way, from the Texas Monthly, that that's because Bogdanovich wanted to cast some Irish singers in the movie they were going to make. And so these characters are artifacts of that just random desire that he had.

and then you're with nude and he's becoming friends with Sean O'Brien and he's brave and he's learned how to ride a horse and you're like everything is going to work out and all of us and we talk about this and we talk about TV too just have a natural desire for things to work out. That's how we are as people and sometimes we bring that to film entertainment or books and then that's where that dissonance is where the good juicy stuff happens. all of a sudden Sean O'Brien, upon whom much story time has been allotted and bestowed and he's come alive to us, is bitten to death by two dozen poisonous snakes and dies gasping for air next to a river. And you're like, what the? And that's when you realize the book you were reading isn't the book you thought you were. And there were moments before, even as you were talking about, the horse raid on Pedro Flores's compound, in retrospect, I now understand how important that is because Call is like he's our enemy,

He's our mirror on the other side of the border. We've given and gotten as good as it gets. And Cole loves that. He respects being well matched. You're like, oh, is he going to chase them? Like what's going to happen? And then they get away. And I'm like, oh, this is a fantasy.

Like, everything is going to work out for these guys. And then it's casually, oh, old Pedro died. Like, oh, the old guys are dying. That's what the book is about, by the way. But instead, we have the snake attack. And it is so disturbing and haunting. And that is the moment when, dare I say it, Larry's literary fangs latch into you and don't let go.

You watch it on TV. these people who made the miniseries version Bill Whitliff and Austin writer an artist who did the screenplay and Simon Windsor, the Australian who directed it I mean they're no dummies they knew the book, they knew that this was the moment to end the first episode.

Yeah. But woof, I wish we could just gift through time some special effects. Yeah, release the Snyder cut. Like let's just get like some special effects going and get like, like do you don't actually see a snake attack? It's just like a shot of a snake the guy's dangling leg as he enters the river and a scream.

No, no, no, it freezes, Chris. It freeze frames on a snake's split head near my man's Sean Astin looking face. Yeah, that's right. And then it freeze frames, like it's an episode of Trapper John MD or something. Look, it was late 80s, man. That's the thing. It is, it's dated. It's dated.

But that is the moment when you realize, and, and, and, by, the way, they're still in Texas. Like, they haven't gone very far. Yeah. And all of these people along the, he takes a lot of time making it clear that everyone is shook by this. And that sort of brings me to the, to one of the last points I wanted to make for this first section, which is the, the Hat Creek outfit, but then also the whole team that is assembled is split, right, between old hands like Gus and Call and Dietz and PI. and new recruits, whether Newt, who is a kid, but people who are essentially his peers,

whether they're the Irish guys, or Dish and Soupy and Jasper, all who fancy themselves, top hands or whatever. And it's split between, almost to a dangerous degree, between people who don't know anything and people who really should know better. And it romanticizes neither. Like, Newt's innocence is sweet and compelling,

in almost any, like, buildings, Roman story, you're like, oh, he's going to learn about the world and maybe catch a few bruises and nicks along the way. And only later are you, like, why are the people who should be just giving him good advice leading him into this? Yeah, because that was the way of, that was the way life worked back then.

And that's the thing is, there's also this amazing moment where I think there's a lot of, like, trepidation about crossing rivers, and a bunch of these younger guys are just like, shit, I do not want to do this. And it's like, yeah, because this is like the fifth river you've ever seen.

And you've never gone across any of them. also horses can swim like this is just me learning stuff you know what I mean like I didn't know I certainly didn't know pigs could swim but look I mean it's it doesn't seem real easy like is there anything

what's weird is and we should end here but there's so much escapism in our pleasure that we take from this book and this property and I would give anything I mean I love talking to you buddy but I would give anything to be reading this book again right now but that's different than saying, I want to be these people.

There's never, I would never really want to play Lonesome Dove. And in that sense, I think it's like actually a book that I only really felt like I could read now. But you never, you know, you wouldn't imagine yourself in this world

because you wouldn't last a day. You wouldn't last a day. You know, like it's essentially, like it's a miracle. They make it five miles outside of town. Yeah. I mean,

I think Bolivar's cooking sounds interesting. I like the whiskey. Yeah. Whiskey sounds good. That's about it, really, right? Yeah. And for what? To get these cattle from one part of the country to the other.

And it's a testament to the book that you're just like, I'm following along, you know, breathlessly. So we'll wrap it up there. And we hope you guys are as well. Yeah, we'll wrap it up there. I think we're going to get more into specific characters than the next couple. We just wanted to set this up as much as possible. If you guys have questions for us or if there's conversation topics that you'd want

us to hit. I think the Facebook group or hitting us up on Twitter would be the best place to do it. We're interested to see what other people are interested in here. And yeah, thanks for going on this dog days of summer journey with us. I got my bed roll and also a lot of luggage.

Andy, how long do you think you could go without water? This is how you're starting? That's how I'm starting our second conversation for Summer of Dove, Lonesome Pie. We're talking about Lonesome Dove, The Novel, Lonesome Dove, the miniseries. We're covering what the events that take place in the second episode of the miniseries. But I will say, Andy, this is where the sort of, you separate the wheat from the chaff a little bit.

And I don't mean to call the series chaff at all. But the narrative and psychological complexity and depth of what happens in this sort of second act of the book versus what happens in the second episode of the show is astonishing. is it's astonishing. And the attachment that you build for characters that really come to the four in the second two, three hundred pages of the novel, you can watch it and you can feel it. But there's only one moment in the show in the second episode that I felt was almost as emotionally resonant for me as the stuff you see in the books. And that is to get sort of to the end first is the burial of July's traveling party. I just thought that was such a gorgeous shot and such a gorgeous performance from Deval and

Chris Cooper. And that is like really like in my mind, it's one of the moments that I remembered from the first time that I watched the series that had stuck with me over the years. But don't you agree that this is really where the depth of the novel kind of collides with the sort of, we got to get through this of the miniseries. When you talk about how magnanimous McMurtry is as a writer, I think the first thought is that you're talking about just how voluminous is. Like, these books are just so long and they just seem to spill out of him. And we keep referring to this Texas monthly piece where it talks about how once he bought the rights back to the screenplay, it didn't take him that long to write the book, he claims. You know, it just poured out of him.

But what I would say, what I'm talking about how magnanimous he is, what I really mean is the depths of feeling that he has for his characters and also the, I mean, I'm just going to say it, since clearly we're all friends here, almost the literary bravery he shows in his treatment of them. and respect even in mourning them after he himself has killed them. He loves these characters. And so the despair that we as readers feel is almost overwhelming because you are so fully immersed in who they are, even with just a few short paragraphs, where they are emotionally, what drives them, what they want, what they think is possible in the world. And when we talked about the first part of the novel and the miniseries, we were joking a little bit, but basically said like the snake attack is the moment where you're like, oh, no. Oh, this is going to be something different than what I thought. This is not triumphant. This is brutal.

I was not prepared for the entire segment of Lorena's capture, her treatment, Gus's heroism, but mostly what would happen to Roscoe. and Joe and Janie. Because it's the thing that only really skilled storytellers can do, which is exploit the most vulnerable part of you as a reader or a watcher, which is your desperate hope to protect people. Yeah. And then to attack that directly and surgically, but not in a way that feels manipulative.

Because the lesson of this second piece is that this world is unforgiving, this world is rough, and the worst possible things can and do happen. In fact, they will happen. And then what? And then what? You know? And just the amount of emotion packed into that whole segment I can't, I'm still not

recovered from. And I think this is when I began to detach consciously uncouple from the miniseries a little bit. Because for all its good intentions and for its wonderful casting, because Barry Corbyn, I mean, there could be, Barry Corbyn, shouts to Better Call Saul, by the way, even on this last season. That guy's still bringing it. You could not dream of a better casting for Roscoe. But also, there's just not enough real estate. for him or Janie to mean enough.

So for their deaths to matter, if that makes sense. Yeah. You know, it's pretty faithful to the book. It's not that they're not covering things. It's not that they're changing things up or that they've condensed really anything. It's just that the experience that you have watching or reading along and, you know,

if the first part of this book is essentially like a dozen characters who have arrived at a crossroads in their life, the second part of the book is multiple quests happening at once. July looking for Elmira, Roscoe looking for July, Gus and Woodrow taking this herd north, but then Gus deciding he needs to go find Lorena after she's been captured. And it's exhilarating because that's the best part of storytelling

is when you've got all these characters who have something that they want and they're doing something about it. But almost every one of those quests fails in some way or another. You know, almost every one of those quests in this second part of the book, you know, the Lorena that Gus gets back, at least in the moments that, like the initial period after he rescues her is not the Lorena that was captured.

And all these people who are out in the West looking for each other, find one another and then get killed for the most part. You know, it's so brutal. But like what we're taught from such a young age from when we're just watching cartoons or reading or our first experiences of reading through. when we're watching movies for the most part of our lives, you just have this inner brain that's like, well, this is what's going to happen because that's who's playing this part. Now, I will say in this series, given the amount of screen time and the amount of attention paid to people like

Janie, you're just kind of like, that's probably, it's probably not going to work out for Janie. But in the book, in the book, you were like, is Janie the hero of this book? I don't know. She is definitely the most resourceful native to. the land person who seems most ready to survive out here. She's already survived this awful relationship with this older man. And if you approach the Western novels of Larry McMurtry the way one would approach a game of Dungeons and Dragons, the people who don't write animals are awesome.

Yes. Like, Po Campo, Janie, if you read the sequel, Famous Shoes. Like, I love those characters. So I think they're going to do better than they sometimes do it. Can we make the argument that Janie and Po Campo invent farm to table dining? Yes. Yes. Listen, let's literally farm to table the conversation about Pocampo for a minute because maybe my favorite character in the book for his love of Bizarre Eats, shout to Andrew Zimmer.

What you're speaking to about characters in this landscape, we have a tendency, we as people, right, to be unduly nostalgic about the past and in fact often flock to period pieces. and this is what things like Mad Men have attacked so well or criticized or critiqued and curious, in really compelling ways, we take comfort in them because they're settled, right? There's less of a threat because these things already happened and, well, humanity survived okay. Take it a step further.

There's this constant adulation of previous generations, particularly like the greatest generation, because the assumption is, well, they were wired differently because when country came calling or the time, came calling, they rose to the occasion and they defeated fascism in Europe or whatever the case may be. What this book does and what keeps us discomforted throughout the reading experience, even as we're loving it, is that to meet someone like Roscoe, who's just a guy, he just likes to drink whiskey and he likes the town that he lives in and he's fine. He goes fishing with Joe. And then circumstance and or

peach make him go do something. He is clearly not suited to do. Well, he's not going to. Well, he's not going to rise to the occasion. He's not going to bumble his way into a victory. He's going to get killed in a savage, awful, unsentimental way, and that's the end of it. And it's such a profound shock to our sensibilities, right? Because we just desperately don't want that to happen, not just because of the character we've been introduced to, but what we'd like to believe about ourselves. There's a couple of moments. I think there's one where Woodrow, it's either before they've left for their kind of long ride across the desert

with no water, across the plains with no water. And Woodrow is having a memory or sort of just thinking about rangering in the 40s and 50s and 1840s and 50s and the slow, like the advancement and then collapse of

frontiers and civilizations that he is, it was part of protecting. And you really do get the impression in like the world of McMurtry that essentially once you stepped out of your house, you were likely to die. And that is,

Roscoe's a guy who's like, I like to sweep out jails, kind of amble around, but I live in this town. I live in this sort of like weird cocoon that is Fort Smith, Arkansas. It's a construct, but it works for him.

It's a construct, but it worked for America. You know what I mean? Like that is essentially was the premise is that, let's build walls, let's build houses, let's build society.

And then all this other shit gets shut up. off to the side. And I just thought it was like, his character, his demise is so, it's such a gut punch, not least of which because I don't think he has any guts after his interaction with Blue Duck. But you're literally just in mid paragraph and it's like Roscoe sees the shadow man, you know, and you're like, wait a second, no, no, no, this should be the end of a chapter or

at the beginning of a new part or this should have some ceremony to it. Or, and it doesn't. Do you remember in coming to America when they go into the project and they look on the floor and there's the chalk outline of the previous tenant and there's also another chalk outline. And my guy says, it's a damn shame what they did to that dog. Yeah. That's lonesome dove. Yeah. Because even though we are beginning to be conditioned to the cruelty of the world,

you don't believe that they killed the kid. You don't believe that the 12-year-old boy who's like, this is all right. My mother hates me and I'm comfortable with that, but at least I get to go on an adventure, he's just going to have his head beat in, and we're never going to hear from him or see him again. But that happens.

You know, and the other thing about this segment, though, and I think it speaks to the appeal of this book as a popular entertainment, but I think it also speaks to something that we keep referring to as we discuss it, which is McMurtry's own ambivalence about this book in particular and what he contributed to the national discourse or understanding about the West, is that for as human and just sad, as July's limitations are or Rosco's,

Gus is a superhero in this section of the book. Yeah, it's the single most heroic thing that happens in the book is what Gus does in this section. And it's thrilling. I mean, you remember that McMurtry's a screenwriter and that a lot of this was a movie as well. And maybe he was thinking about this as, you know, as what Jimmy Stewart was going to do to some degree. But the scene, I mean, he's single, he just rides off. And everyone's like, see you later.

Well, up to this point, all those guys have done is like steel horses, pretty much. Yeah, we didn't know. We have no evidence of this sort of outsized reputation, you know, that they have that moment where they go into the bar. And he's like, you know, Gus kind of beats up the bartender. is like you should show me some respect for what I've done for this part of the country and everything. But there's no action to point out where you're like, these guys, these guys are the real deal.

And then Gus basically pulls the all-time hero ball move. Now, again, looking at this with a little bit of hindsight, you could read this section and be like, it's not necessarily that Gus is a superstar, superhero. it's that his opposition, Blue Duck accepted, because Blue Duck's an old head too. His opposition is kind of sad and pathetic, kind of like July's crew,

just not up for this, not good at this, thinking it's a time that it's, thinking it's still a different time, right? And that what Gus is capable of as a relic himself just isn't possible anymore. So in retrospect, you can kind of be like, well, he wasn't up against the toughest competition, I guess. because you'll cut your own horse's throat

to scare off the other horses with the rich scent of horse blood and then ride into a cat. Also, he's just like, I mean, it's a little while where he's just like, well, okay, Sheriff Johnson, come with me, but I'm going to single-handedly shoot nine people without breaking a sweat to rescue someone.

And if we're really going to do this, I should also add, not clear on Blue Duck's motives here. Like Blue Duck is a, maybe we should just pivot to a minute to talk about Blue Duck because. Yeah, I think we touched on this. a little bit in the first episode, but

Blue Duck is ostensibly the villain of The Lonesome Dove, and yet I'm never really convinced of his, not his evil, but of his part as an antagonist in this book and in this show. And Frederick Forrest, obviously, is

one of the all-time bummers because I think, you know, and they had been talk about, I think what they wanted is somebody who was like Charles Bronson or something, right? Apparently, some of the actors thought Charles Bronson was booked and that he was coming to set. And then Frederick Forrest, who was a fine actor

and has been good in a lot of things, shows up. And apparently Duval was not having it. It was really rough on and relentless on it. And those guys are in apocalypse now together. I'm sure they've probably got some like poker debts that they needed to settle anyway. So I don't know if it was entirely about Forrest's acting, but he's not done any favors.

And there's like this whole thing in like the oral history where it's like Frederick Forrest's agents were like, he's half Native American. And then they're like, no, he's not. You know, like, so yeah. This is this, this is also the part, I mean, we could say this, that like, they, to use a lonesome dove vesting metaphor, they gave it their all when they made the miniseries, but they didn't have the horses.

And sometimes quite literally, like part of Blue Ducks thing where he runs into Gus and they're sort of feeling each other out at the creek, and that's a very good scene. He then, in the book, creates an enormous distraction by setting the horses loose in the middle of the night, the remuda, right? And then the cattle are loose and there's a whole, and in the confusion, Lori is taken. And Newt gets knocked out and et cetera, et cetera. And this is just like, Newt, go, nude, you are a 17-year-old boy who's only crossed one river. Go defend against the scourge of the West and he gets knocked out and then he takes her. And it's all just compressed storytelling in a way that is kind of a bummer.

But yeah, the Blue Duck thing, I mean, I guess the other thing is that when you're watching a filmed entertainment, it kind of wants to bend into the shape of a more familiar narrative where Blue Duck is literally the antagonist of the series when in fact, a more like a broad reading of it is that Blue Duck kind of just wants to exist in this large space the same way he always has, much like Call and Gusto, which is playing their outsized roles in this rough, enormous world. and they kind of stumble over each other and trip over each other, but in a weird way,

they don't want to take each other out because they certainly don't, you know? Like Blue Duck's whole thing where he's just like, I'm going to bring this woman to you and I'm going to lure the Ranger, but you guys go kill the Ranger and then when we have a chance to draw him out,

I just won't be here. Yeah. Is a little strange. It's a little confusing. I think, I mean, it's, but the interesting thing without getting too into it is that we never get the confrontation

with Blue Duck. There's never like this huge battle with Blue Duck. And that is probably way more true to life and way more the way things kind of played out in the West. It wasn't always like this guys, you know, hold up in this saloon and we're just going to shoot it out for the last 20 minutes in this movie. It's like, no, he disappeared and we never found him.

Also, it's not war. I mean, in theory, they're just trying to move some cattle, you know, and then there's just a lot of other stuff going on, they're getting in their way. What else about that? I mean, the other thing that we should talk about, I think, that gets a little bit of a short shrift in the miniseries is the slide of Jake Spoon. You know, we spend a lot more time with Jake and Lori in their little tent, you know, in lightning storms and afterwards as he gets increasingly fed up with doing this. He just wants a nice bed and he wants women to be nice to him and take care of him. and we maybe understand a little bit more

the internal, all of it that allowed him to leave her. When it's laid bare in the miniseries, obviously streamlined, he seems pretty villainous. You know, it's pretty unconscionable what he does. And then his continued slide just, it just sort of happens almost effortlessly.

Yeah, I think that the idea is that this adventure tests the metal of the characters involved. And even if they die, you learn a lot about them. And Jake just seems like a guy who was never really ready for prime time who would kind of always... Unlike Bob Eric.

But kind of posted on the coattails of call and Gus's reputation and just being a ranger and it kind of gotten a lot in his life. But it's essentially always outrunning debts and bad luck and bad news that follow him from town to town and that he is definitely responsible for.

I mean, the whole, the sort of triggering event of this entire series is Jake kills a dentist in Arkansas and on the lamb comes down to Texas and makes an offhanded comment about how he had done some scouting for the army in Montana. And that basically starts this entire adventure. That one gunshot with the elephant gun or buffalo gun or whatever it is is the butterfly wing that changes so many people's lives. Exactly. So many people's lives. The other thing that's worth track, oh, go ahead, please. No, I was just going to say in the novel, it's much more

sort of like Father's Son, Holy Spirit where the new Jake and Gus are all sort of in their own way vying for Lorena's affections, and they're all at these different points in the spectrum of understanding what it, what being

in love with someone really is. For Jake, you know, it's obviously she's just another thing that he has in his life like whiskey and cards. And he only is interested in her in so much as she makes feel good. And if there's anything else, he gives her a slap and he's a piece of shit. Newt is idealizing her and he's just like in love with her and he just can't, you know, he's like,

that that's her, his first real, you know, attraction. Newt or dish. Sorry, no, dish. I'm sorry. That's my bad. Well, Newt has a lot of feelings for her too, but they're more comfortable. Yeah, I mean, they both do. But and then Gus is obviously this almost like quasi-paternal figure, but is like only 98% there with her because I think that there's still that two percent. that's for somebody else that we'll get to. One of the things that I love about McMurtry in general is that he just doesn't give a fuck about what is supposed to happen, which is why, though he loves movies, he is

a novelist through and through, because you're reading the book and even seeing the way it's playing out, like Dish is pining for Lorena and Jake sucks. Dish should win her, right? Like, Dish should have a chance. But that does not happen. it doesn't happen. And that's a lot more like life. But it's just, it's another one of those little things that doesn't bend the way you expect it to bend. And then you spend so much time with it. You almost come to respect it and admire that choice. You mentioned Newt. Newt's paternity is given a little bit of short shrift here as well. Because one of the things that you know when you spend a lot of time in his head in the book is that he kind of hopes his dad is Jake. Right? Like that's a possibility. Jake's always been the guy who treats him the best or, or, or, Makes him feel the best. Yeah. And so then when he comes back drunk and blames him for losing Lorena, like that is, that's a huge, huge thing. But like with everything, you know, TV, shorter running

times starts to kind of smooth things over. And so the Gus Lorena relationship, which is fascinating, because if you're reading the book, they're in no way equals. He's an older man who is buying sex from her. I mean, I don't want to suggest otherwise. But he treats her in a different way than other people. and she speaks to him in a way that she doesn't speak to other people. And there's some connection there that is fascinating and not in any way traditional. The fact that she projects onto him and in some ways falls in love with him because of his rescue is a lot more complicated, I think, in the telling in the book. Whereas here, it's Bobby Duvall striding around in a creek. You know what I mean?

It's just like he's the star of the picture. And it's played very much like a love story. and she's going to be in love with him, which is less interesting, although fun to watch, because they're both beautiful, great performers. I will say,

sometimes I think we love the book so much that we're a little critical of the show or the other miniseries. Duval's fucking incredible, man. Yeah. Duval, I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is his last great performance

because I'm sure he has others, but. Well, there's the judge, for example. Well, but here's the thing is that that's a good example of Duval, kind of like in his you pay for what you get on Bobby Duvall. Here I am on set. Like we're going to do

these seven scenes and then I'm... Let's go. Like when you see Robert Duval in the paper, he's really good. But he's not good the way he is in Lonesome Dove. You know? And I have no doubt that he really was like, I'm in the paper's a good movie. Like I'm enjoying myself. I'm happy to play a supporting role in this movie.

But Jesus, man. Some of the stuff he does in Dove and he's still has enough youthful vigor that you buy him as the guy who outruns half a dozen pursuing vigilantes and creates a horse fort in the middle of nowhere, right? Absolutely. And one of the reasons why, if not the reason why, that the miniseries is so beloved, is the way that he and Tommy Lee Jones complete each other and their performances. I mean, it is, it's so many things, but it's also it's a classic buddy comedy in a lot of ways. You know, one guy, is one guy's humorous and thoughtful and reflective and seat of the pants and the other guy, you know, has never cracked a smile in his life. And yet they need each other to balance each other out and to get things done. Someone has to sit on the porch and drink. Someone's got to do the work. They clearly, this isn't inside baseball. This isn't just from reading the stuff behind the scenes. They clearly enjoy each other's company as performers, not just as characters. And they bring something to the surface that isn't always there in the book. And I think people have,

pointed to this that like, again, obviously you had to tie it off in a different way and build something in a different way than you would in a 900-page book. But like Tommy Lee Jones smiles more in the first two episodes of the miniseries than Call does in four books. Right. And yes, it's kind of necessary, I guess, because otherwise, I mean, like, Call in many ways sucks. Like, he's not that great of a guy. He doesn't know how to be a full person. And it's only kind of spending, All he knows how to do is work. And when you spend time in his head, you feel him run up against his own limitations in a way that makes him a more sympathetic, if not empathetic figure. But when it's him and Duval's just lecturing him on why he sucks and how he has to be nicer and you should say women's first names, even if they're ladies of the night.

Like, it's a fuller, rounder picture that draws you in. And those are, without question, that's the highlight of the show when they're on screen together. Yeah, it's a different experience. And I think that I had this idea in my head from my early viewing of the miniseries when I was younger that that was the relationship with these two people who sort of, you know, had very different worldviews or did things in very different ways, but were essentially best friends. And they are best friends, but not in the way that, like, you and me are best friends. Like, they, they are work friends in a lot of ways. And Call does not. like laugh it up in the bar when Gus

lays that bartender out in the book. He thinks it's a waste of a bullet when he shoots the glass. That doesn't mean I don't love the scene. Yeah. I'm just saying it's different. It is different. And Tommy Lee Jones, it's interesting because Tommy Lee Jones, you think of as a very, I mean, I definitely think of him as a call type guy. Like, he seems like a very like

hard guy. But he plays call in this miniseries almost more warmly than I read him on the page. does that what effect does it have on your reading of his performance when I remind you that he was the same age we are now when he filmed it dude I don't want to talk about it also I don't also I almost sent you a text message about kind of being like not not not intrigued by Robert Duval's hairpiece I guess but just being like that's kind of a cool look just like the wisp of blonde

on top we we got two pieces of business to finish this segment on we're going to get to Campo in a second. Any thoughts on the great, she was part of our child growing up in movies, the great Glenn Headley as Elmira and the great lost rap name Biggs Way and the earliest, maybe one of the first appearances on screen of Steve Bissemi. Man, Elmira. This is sort of the other side of the coin from what we were talking about earlier where in the book, we're introduced to Janie and Roscoe and Joe in July and their journey seems as. important as the Hat Creek journey across the plains.

And you're like, this has to have some this huge significance. And then when they die, you're like, fuck. Maybe nothing has significance. And I wonder whether or not El Mair, I don't really, I've never really gotten my head around what El Mira's journey is supposed to be and what it's supposed to mean.

Like I definitely follow it avidly. Like across the book, I was never bored by it per se. Although I think that she is, would you say that she's unlikable? Well, what I like about her and I like about her creation and her presence in the book is that Larry, and this is in the 80s,

this is when we weren't having more nuanced conversations about is a female character who rejects her son, unlikable or whatever. Like, he runs right at that. And in a way, her dream

is no less absurd than Woodrow Call's dream. in fact, it's more deep-seated than his dream of putting cattle in Montana. Sure. She just wants to see-D. Yeah. She wants to be happy. She just doesn't want to be where she is.

She doesn't want to be reduced to the circumstances that life has given her as not just as July's wife, but just as a woman in this world. And so she's like, I'm going to get what I deserve, which is, you know, any hero's journey. To get there, she gives up a lot. And again, you know, Call's ignoring his kid, too. Sure. Yeah. No, I thought like Woodrow calls a super cool hang. I don't need to set you up as the straw villain of this.

But that aspect of it, you know, for her and Lorena as two women who are dangerous because they want things, you know, and the lengths they go to get them and the lessons that they are unfortunately taught along the way about what's possible, I think are really important correctives to the larger myth-making of the West. And again, we're not really going to talk specifically about the follow-up books, Streets of Laredo, but, like, El Mira's arc feels a lot more, like, that's more Laredo. That's more of where Larry wanted to be going or what he kind of wanted to say once he

shook free of the Hollywood movie that inspired this. I almost wonder if the juxtaposition between Elmira and Rosco, for instance, is really intentional because Elmira is... singular in her vision and is not making any sort of pit stops for humanity along the way. Whereas Roscoe and July

are constantly kind of of being like, well, I gotta go help this person because that's just the way that society works and they wind up paying a price for it. I also,

before we wrap up here, I do wanted to shout out my favorite character, Po Campo. Absolutely. It is another... Grasshopper king of Texas. It is another, I think, I'll say it, failing of the miniseries, but also a failing that, you know, that McMurtry set up, which is, and that he remedied, I think, to a great degree in Streets of Laredo and the other books.

There's not much room for other, others in this story. You know, whether they're Native Americans or their Mexicans, it's just not their story. The camera's not as interested in them, just as the way I would argue it's not really as interested in Lorena and Elmira as McMurtry himself is. So when you have Pocampo on screen, there's a little bit of like, oh, this magical wise man is going to toddle along with him. And some of that's in the book too. But what I want to communicate to people is people have listened to me talk on this podcast for over eight years now. And they know that I'm a complicated grasshopper. I love samurai gourmet.

And I love zero zero zero. Pocampo is the distillation of my interests. he is a fellow who in the same conversation will say, this is a wild onion, this is hail, and I'm going to put molasses on it, and by the way, grasshoppers are good to eat, and then say, my wife is in hell because I sent her there. This man contains complexities.

He is at once a food network fantasy and like a character cut from a James Crumley, novel because he was too extreme. And I love it so much. And it's also, there's a greediness that you can do in books that you can't do in TV. You can't just do 20 minutes of eating or cooking. There's no room for it. Nor is there room for like, there's a moment like in this section of the book where McMurtry is

just like, you know what? I'm going to add six more characters. Yeah. Because why not? If we were doing Lonesome Dove now as like a HBO Mac show and it was. And they did an episode where these guys were all kind of concerned they were going to, they They've been eating old beans and tortillas, and the, you know, bowl had gone back to Texas. And they were like, what are we going to eat?

This sucks. And this is the episode. And then Po comes along and is like, here's the bounty of this land if you only look down off of your horse to see it. And it was just like the smitten kitchen out in the west. I don't know. I mean, we might be like, dude, why are they wasting time with this? What are they going to get to Blue Duck? But at the same time, that's the stuff in the book that you're just like, oh, my God, man.

I could just hang out here for pages and pages and pages. It's so rich. And it's worth saying then in defense of the miniseries, which I agree. And I don't know if I expect this going in. But because we love the book so much and we watched it in that, we experienced it in this order, we are much more critical of the miniseries than probably a lot of our listeners are who saw it first. Well, no, I want to say one thing is that for as much as we may knock it for it being a little anachronistic or some of the things that haven't aged well, the landscapes, that is what I think this looks.

like that is like the outdoor stuff that they do the stuff that they do with the horizon the way texas looks at different times of day the uh perfect moment of dawn you know that they capture routinely and especially the uh the set piece of gus outrunning uh blue ducks guys i think that's just it's still pretty fucking awesome all these years later it is and you know considering the challenge of turning something 900 pages into something six hours, Whitliff, the guy who adapted it, I mean,

he did it right. I was going to rail against the Willbarger or razor, for example, like Willbarger, a great supporting character and presence in the book, who comes back when you least expect it, totally gone from the show. But of course he is.

Like, that's the right call. You don't actually need that character. You need to focus on the characters you already know. Similarly with like the, you know, the cattle going wild because of the blue duck, like you can't do it.

So pick your spot. and they picked the right spots. It's just worth remembering that if you want to know what came between those spots, you've got a 900-page brick you could pick up, and it's worth expanding your journey with it. Absolutely, man. All right, so, Andy, we'll do on Monday's show.

We'll do the third episode, and then on following Thursday, we'll do the fourth episode. I hope people are enjoying this. If you guys have questions, we'll set up a post in the Facebook page if you want to do mailbaggy, kind of ones of dove questions. I hope people are following along with this.

It's really fun to talk about. All right, Andy, let's get into Summer of Dove Part 3. So we have been modeling these conversations around the narrative structure of the CBS miniseries. So this episode or this episode of our pod

will go up into the end of episode three of the miniseries. Chapter wise in the book, what is that about? It's a little smeary because it jumps a bunch of stuff around. you know, it's not an even division into quarters, but basically page chapter 90. Yeah, it's chapter 90.

So this takes us up to chapter 90 in the book, but there's a little bit of moving and shaking going on with how the miniseries depicts things versus how the book handles things. Andy and I wanted to talk about two specific things here, but we were going to do it through characters. So the two people we wanted to talk about from the book and from the show today are Clara who is portrayed by Angelica Houston in the miniseries, and Dietz, who is portrayed by Danny Glover. And are two of the most beloved characters, I would say,

not only in the novel, but maybe even in the series itself. So, Annie, explain how you wanted to, because you had a good idea about, like, how you wanted to sort of juxtapose these two characters. Yeah, so I want to talk about Clara first. But the thing that I wanted to say is just to point out again how Larry McMurtry breaks every single rule that you're ever taught about fiction writing or every single rule that even casual readers of fiction might believe matter,

even if they haven't ever put it into words. And the reason I say this is because there's an argument to be made that Clara Allen is the best character in the book. There's an argument to be made that she is the strongest character in the book, the main character of the book in kind of in a sort of a shadow way. I would definitely say that the treatment of Kara, like the treatment he gives her, I don't mean treatment, like as in behavior. I mean, like, the way he portrays her is the most psychologically in-depth portrait of a character in the novel. And frankly, like, maybe among all the books I've read.

Yes. And in my mass market brick paperback edition, she appears for the first time on page 647. Yeah. That's outrageous. Let's talk a little bit about the structure of this book, because this is a good. way of getting into it. I think for a lot of the novel, there are these dual tracks of the Hat Creek cattle drive, and then there's the sort of the two lines converging, where it's July and Elmira and Roscoe sort of meandering their way towards this cattle drive and the intersection and then the splitting apart. And as you're reading along, and I think another character I want to talk about

today is Elmira, you know, I think that it takes a while to train your brain to not be rewarded for these two paths immediately. Because when you get to this third part, they don't intersect the way that you think that they are. Not at all. And they don't, quote, unquote, pay off the way I think we're taught to expect parallel storylines to pay off. Something that McMurtry believes in very much, I think, is, I mean, all writers do cause and effect. But I think he also believes that there is a cost for every action, that there is a recoil for every rifle shot, if you will. And one of the things that Lonesome Dove does that's so compelling, I think, to a lot of people, us included, is that it teaches you how to read it as you're reading it.

And so you adventure with Gus and Call for 600 pages. And, you know, you see things you've never seen before and you experience things. In some ways, you're distracted by the delight of Newt seeing the... these things for the first time as you are. But the thing that you're not keeping track of is the other side of the ledger, which is that to adventure, to range away, means that there's something back that you're leaving behind. And it's certainly not lonesome dove, which is a dried up hole, basically. It's the well that they don't finish digging. What they've spent their lives rangering away from is life as most people live it. And I think,

Clara, more than any other character, represents that. She has lived a life and a rich and deeply painful life at that. A life that McMurtry just, it's just dazzling the way he psychologically submerges us into it. Yeah, her domestic life, so to speak, is as wild as the cattle drive. I mean, even the way that McMurtry describes it, her flowers getting destroyed by these sharp winds coming off the plains of Nebraska. The way he describes it is no different than them being stuck without water out on a plane. It's given the same sort of consideration and it's got the same level of danger. The reason why I was bringing up these sort of these parallel storylines of July and Elmira and the

cattle drive is because when we get to Clara, I think it's almost like, oh, we're going to just introduce this other person who's kind of existing as the E plot or the F plot of this book. And this is why novels are fucking amazing, man. And this is why sometimes, you know, you get a book this size, the size of two bricks together, and you get lost in it's, it makes the rules.

You know, and Larry McMurtry makes the rules in this story. And if he wants to do Madam Bovary in the middle of the goddamn novel, he's allowed to. And when you start to get three, four, five pages into the Clarice section of this book,

you realize, oh, I'm about to go deep, deep, deep down this hole with this person. Like, this is who this book, this book is about Clara in a lot of ways. And that is almost unfathomable as like a writer. To just imagine the balls it takes to do that, the, to have that saved up and just have Clara mentioned, what, 15 times over the course of the novel, but seemingly like kind of as this memory that Gus can't shake, you know, because he goes to the springs where they've had their,

date and he's like, this is where, this is where I want to be. You know, like, this is where I was last happy and he's tearing up. I just think that the gear shift he does is jaw-dropping. It might be the crowning achievement of these books. I agree. And I think that it's also the time that you begin to realize, and we've been talking about this, obviously, because we've been doing it at hindsight, that this is kind of the root of McMurtry's own discomfort with the legend of the book because I think that he felt to some degree, and I think it's borne out, certainly by the way this book ends and then certainly by the subsequent books, that Call and McRae are kind of failures at life, certainly when it gets down to it, when it really matters. And I think Clara is the

counterweight to that. You know, she yearns for adventure, too, whether it's in the form of the stories and novels that she orders away from or her affection for the wild horses that she gelds and tames in lieu of her husband. But she also had limitations that she couldn't dance around, whether it's Gus literally, you know, joking and hoaring his way past them or call just ignoring them. I mean, this section of the book corresponds with some dialogue that happens earlier in the miniseries when they talk about Maggie, who is Newt's mother. And there's a long psychological section, internal section for call in this part of the book,

where he just sort of circles his failure, where he's like, he couldn't do it, he couldn't go to her, he couldn't admit anything, and so he just sat by the river night after night. Well, sitting by the river night after night is not an option for a woman in this period in American history.

So Clara married someone who was solid and did her best to live a full life. And not to ding the miniseries too much, although I can't help it. One of the subtle things that I think it got wrong, and I will back this up with something that I think it did right, it seems minor but it's not.

In the book, there's a lot of talking about Bob's body, right? Bob, Clara's husband, big body who got kicked by the horse and he's... He's basically in a coma. Yeah, yeah. The actor or extra that they cast as Bob in the miniseries is a smaller, frailer man. And I feel like that kind of ruins the whole thing. Because you kind of have to understand why Clara didn't choose Gus. And I think she chose someone who was physically solid as opposed to Gus,

is always laughing and dancing and poking, right? And so I feel like that undercuts it. But let's pivot to a positive. To me, the clarissection with Angelica Houston, particularly the long conversation that has to be about everything between Angelica Houston and Robert Duvall. That's the high point of the miniseries for me.

I just think that her performance is so rich and warm. Their affection for each other is so palpable, which is amazing, since I don't think they'd ever work together before they met on the set of this. It could be wrong about that. It has to accomplish so much. And I think one of the reasons why the miniseries

is so beloved by so many people is because this dance, this two-handed dance between these characters, where basically Gus is there to marry her and she's so happy to see him. She just kisses him on the mouth in front of her whole family, but she can't marry him.

I mean, Larry takes chapters, maybe a chapters, but he takes dozens of things. of pages to unwind this. Well, and it's also very, it's somewhat ambiguous when he's kind of bringing Lorena to Nebraska to see Clara with him. And she is just convinced that he is going to leave her for Clara when he gets to see her. And it's not exactly, I mean, I read it as Gus could be kind of lying, Lorena, where he's just like, oh, come on, I'm not going to, I just want to go say hi.

And how could I ever leave you and you're the best and yada yada? And, But going through that whole section, you're just like, I don't know. I don't know whether or not he's just telling her what she needs to hear because she's been rescued from Blue Duck and she's completely shattered as a person and she can't deal with any more abandonment. In the show, it's a little bit more straightforward. The thing that the miniseries does is in the book you get to Clara and you're like, oh man, another character. I guess this is Claire. I guess this is the person Gus has been talking about the whole time. In the show, in the movie, Angelica, fucking Houston puts her head out the window and you're like,

like, oh yeah. Like, one of the best actresses of her generation just stuck her head out of window. This is going to be really important. And it lives up to every single thing I could have possibly hoped for from Clara. I mean, the portrayal by her is so stunning. It's so complicated, and it does so much

of the heavy lifting of the internal monologues, basically, of the writing, right? Because you have to convey that this woman is not like other women in this world that no one has seen anyone like her, whether it's old Cholo who's kind of in the margins in the miniseries, but more present in the book, or Lorena when she sees her for the first time and immediately her heart sinks because she's like, well, of course Gus is going to marry this spectacular woman. But you also need the history and you need the sadness, you know, but you also need the vibrancy. Because one of the most amazing things

about Clara is that she keeps getting knocked down and she keeps living. keeps living at 110% and it's deeply inspiring in the book. And it's very moving even in its relatively short screen time here. To accomplish all that, I mean, my hat's off to the screenwriter, Bill Whitliff. And this was where he's shown because I think he understood how vital this moment was. And this is the part where, you know, this book, as we mentioned before, originally started off as a screenplay that Larry McMurtry was writing with an eye for Pierre Bogdanovich to direct and for John Wayne and Henry Ford and Jimmy Stewart to start him.

So he was thinking in terms of it on screen from the beginning. And it almost feels like at the Clarissection is when it is fully a novel. It's when it does things that only novels can do. It goes to places that only novels can really go. And so to have it be executed so well on screen is really a testament to the,

to the, how good this production really is. I think in some ways, you and I have maybe been a little bit more tepid about the miniseries that I even imagine we would be because we just read the novel. And it's almost impossible to watch a CBS, albeit the greatest, maybe the greatest miniseries ever made. It's impossible to watch them try to capture it when these characters live, for real, like live in our imaginations right now. And in some ways, like, I saw the miniseries first. And, you know, I still, I still remember watching for the first time Jake's hanging and Duval's flinch and the way that scene is played out and the music that plays and the way that the different

actors react and the, you know, the look Danny Glover gives that moment. And that to me was how I saw it in my mind. But for a lot of this book, I have my personal relationship to this story and I'm sure you do too and these characters that just is like a little bit different in the way that the miniseries portrays it. I agree. And I also think, and when we talk about what happens to Jake and we talk about what happens to Deeds, which we're about to do in more detail, those feel very much of a piece with the movie that it was going to be and lend themselves potentially to epic moments of visual storytelling. For me, the clarisection is exactly as you said, which is that's the moment

when you can sort of feel Larry turning the wheel and beginning to subvert the Hollywood story that this was initially intended to be. And that subversion is complete by the time you get to Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk. But particularly because the first, I mean, everything about this book delighted me. You know, and I certainly didn't expect Sean O'Brien to get eaten by snakes on page 250 or whatever. And, you know, we've talked about these other moments that leave you gasping. But the truly subversive surprise is that, you know, we spend all these pages with Gus in this, you know, imagined love triangle that he's going to see the woman that he's loved his whole life and he's now has Lorena very much in love with him. And the women choose each other.

I mean, that is so wild in any time period or any story. And yet it feels so right. And he just slipped it in there. You know, I didn't see that coming whatsoever. But it's, it's beautiful. Yeah. And it's appropriate. And it speaks to. you know, it's beginning to tell us what we need to know about the rangering life, particularly, you know, in these waning days, the American West. But like, that is a moment that is so pure. And I, you know, I'm happy to see it in the miniseries. But I wonder if that, I do wonder how all that played in 1989, because there's some elements of it, like, oh, Blue Duck is haunting this. Blue Duck's the villain. Gus and Lorena, what a classic love story. And it's like,

nope. Neither of those things are really true. And it's around here. in these late six hundreds and seven hundreds that you begin to realize that. You imagine, trying to imagine the notes that would have been given to this as a script. Especially now, the Suggs brothers are not scary enough.

You know, the Suggs brothers who Jake links up with in Dodge, I think. Yeah, he's playing cards. And they wind up... And there's that whole thing with the drug addicted madam that he's sleeping with

and all that. Right. But the Suggs brothers are like every other villain in this story where you're just like, is that it? So they were just like

recklessly cruel. They were just willing to do the thing that nobody should do which is just attack this farm and ride their horses into this person's mud roof and kill people for nothing

because they're just bastards. Yeah, and then when they catch them there's that whole thing where the younger Suggs brothers are like, Dan, ain't you gonna fight him? Ain't you gonna whip him?

Like, he doesn't, he's worthless. No, they're fucking bullies. Yeah, right. They're bullies with guns. And, you know, Blue Duck, I think, is a little bit more mysterious and Mox Mox and and, like, the people that are kind of like around that, that, that whole thing is a little bit stranger, but we should say Mox Mox not in this book.

Oh, sorry. Retconned into the book. Right. Later. But, like, you mean like dogface and those guys? Yeah, like those guys. It's like those characters have a little bit more aura, but in the same way that the villains are not super villains, maybe not even villains.

Maybe they're just people who broke back. the heroes are our heroes. And in that way, Claire really is like the only hero in this book. She's the bravest person in this book. She's the most honest person in this book. She's the person who is living a life according to certain principles. And her character is sort of easier to grab onto, whereas, you know, and I think the other person that you would maybe say that about in the novel is Dietz.

Absolutely. Before we talk about Dietz, I just want to say one more thing about the, two quick things about the Suggs brothers and the Jake thing. There's a line, let me say it this way. There's something that Jake says when he's caught or says to himself in the book that really reflects what you were just pointing out

about the landscape that McMurtry gives us, which is he says very, I think he says it very clearly to Gus. I didn't see no line. He thought that he was, he's like, you cross the line and he's like, well, yeah, I didn't see it. If only I'd done this and not that,

And in a very low-key way, that's one of the most profound things in the entire book, that these are people who as Rangers, their job was to ride out where nobody else, no other white people were. And they made up their own justice. They made up their own rules. And they made up their own country, right? Like, there weren't state divisions. You know, there weren't like postal codes or whatever. Like, it just was country. Yeah.

And then all of a sudden. time moved on and Jake's just puzzled at the end and I think that you're you know we've given him a hard time in talking about the miniseries but he captures that

York does a good job I think that's a really tough moment where in the book there's a lot more explanation to Jake is fully aware of what's about to happen to him you know when he gets caught with the Suggs brothers he's he's sort of like

oh shit and he's kind of dazed and he's trying to think. And then so when he says, when Gus says, I just want you to know that I got Lori back and Jake says who.

In the movie, I think you're supposed to think this is it for Gus's like, hang this dude. You know what I mean? Like, this guy doesn't even care about Lorena.

But in the novel, I think it's almost like he's lost. Like he doesn't even, you could say I found Santa Claus you know, on the other horse here. And he would just be like,

what are you talking about? Like, I just can't believe I made five bad misdecess decisions. Because we have, have all these ideas about Rangers and sheriffs and marshals in the West and how they had this principled idea of justice and the law and they brought civilization to the wilderness and that's the mythology. What you read about in Lonesome Dove is a bunch of people getting away with what they

could get away with. And if they didn't get caught, they were fine. And throughout the novel, throughout a lot of the, you know, any stories you read about Gus McCray, he's constantly thinking about cutting corners. He's constantly thinking about how he might want to just go get drunk or hang out with a prostitute rather than do any work. And he's constantly thinking about maybe I'll just abandon this cattle drive, maybe I'll just go do this, or maybe I should stop here. He doesn't, for whatever reasons, but he never crosses a line. You know, he never does something that costs anybody their life or anything like that. Jake did. And that's what happened to him. And one of the things, and I said this before, I'll say it again, if you're,

screenwriter and you're adapting this book to six hours, the first thing you do is cut Willbarger. I get it. Will Barger's not. You fucking hate that, though. But, and here's why, because I revisited that section, and it really speaks to what you were just saying. In the book, for people who've just seen the miniseries, the people that they shoot at, where Frog Lipp gets killed and the horses are stolen, that sort of leads them on the Suggs Brothers chase that leads them to Jake. The people that they, the Suggs brothers and Jake ambush is this guy, Wilbarger, who's been on his own kind of cattle drive in the margins and has visited them in Lonesome Dove and then is out in the world. Then they find him dying shot and dying and Gus sits with him. And it's one of those really just, it's really a

powerful and kind of beautiful scene where Will Berger's like, you know, I basically like I should have listened, you know, I could have listened to my brother and I'd be living in New York with him and you'd be eating oysters. But I never wanted to be civilized. Yeah. And so when I know I made a choice. and it's that same thing about making choices. I didn't want to be civilized. That world exists. I mean, the Edith Wharton novels happened at this time, too, just in a completely different universe. And Will Barger was a guy who was like, no, I want to live free and die, I guess, sort of subvert the motto.

And it's kind of powerful and it's beautiful. And just a side note for people who are fans of the whole series or who are looking to be, one of the things that is true about Lonesome Dove, and I wonder if it speaks to its origins as a screenplay, is that, it's very agnostic slash averse to actual history. Dietz, and we're going to talk about Dietz in a second, is inspired, if not completely ripped off of a real man named Bozacard, who was the scout for a cattle farmer named Charlie Goodnight, who shows up at the end of this book very briefly in the only real. But is one of the characters that would call him McCraer based on?

Yes. But he himself shows up at the end of this book. He is a bigger character in the sequel. and prequels. And I feel like Will Barger is meant to be him a little bit too, a little terse, more educated, more successful in this world. And it's interesting to watch the dance here, as McMurtry's like, well, is this the real West or is this my Hollywood West? And then among the many things that he, I think, reckons with in the subsequent books is, no, no, this is the real. I'm going to start populating this book fully with real characters, whether they're

Comanchee chiefs like Buffalo Hump or Charles Goodnight himself or Boe Sikard, who Dees's based on who shows up in Dead Man's Walk briefly. So we should talk about Deeds. Okay. Let's talk about Deets. Because you, earlier in the episode, when we were talking about Lovecraft Country, talked a little bit about McBain. And the staging of Deets' demise in the miniseries is one of the all-time McBain moments.

Oh, my God. Now, I always thought it was really, you know, we read this oral history of both the novel, the whole production process of the novel. votes in Texas Monthly, I believe. And there is, I think, a few Danny Glover quotes, if I remember correctly, but there's one that basically stands out where he's like, I read it and I was like, there's not much to this guy, to Dietz, in the screenplay. I will imbue him with my own sense of what his backstory is and who he is, and I'm going to do it. And I think Danny Glover gives a deeply felt, if largely wordless, performance in this miniseries. And,

strangely, the Robert, the Jake death in the miniseries, I think, is, is handled really, really, really well and shot really. And it's so deeply moving. The Dietz thing is kind of hard because I think that staging-wise, it kind of comes off a little bit more like the snake attack in the river. where in the book, this is the part where you're, you will be lucky if you don't just push through and finish this novel, because you're so heartbroken

by the loss of this character in the novel. I read it standing up in my backyard. I couldn't put the book down at this moment. It's heartbreaking. It's crushing. It would take someone who's more of a student of filmmaking than either of us to comment on this, but there's something, maybe this was just TV.

But the way that, that this and the snake attack are shot is so, it's the antithesis of the way things are shot now for dramatic purposes in anything, which is to say that it just, it leads you. I mean, it shows the boy with the lance getting ready to strike and then the slow motion and the no, just like it showed the snakes. I mean, there's no element of surprise and the book just cuts your heart out. So just in terms of the staging, it's all wrong, A, B, there's something incredibly visceral and awful that is really only in the novel where

Dietz is being the way he's been for his entire life, the fictional life that we know, and certainly his life in the book, which is that he is decent and helpful, and he's helping. And the scene that he's involving himself in is such, you know, we hear about how scary Indians are and what McRae and Call used to get up to.

And now it's just this haggard band of children, a blind child, and the very, rotting meat out on a plane. Yeah. Just to be alive. And the whole scene is slick with horse blood. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a horror show. Yeah.

And there's something really just, you know, devastating about that. But so, but to speak to the bigger point, there's no room for Dietz in this, in this miniseries. There's just simply no room for him and it's heartbreaking. Now, you could say it's a casualty like Woolbarger of the six hours. I think it's probably something more systemic than that, certainly in the late 80s, through very relatively recent times, considering the way that we just spoke about Lovecraft Country, that if you're looking for people to shortchange or cut or to leave out of the narrative, you're not going to cut Robert Duvall swaggering around in his pajamas in a river.

So you have Danny Glover, who's a beautiful performer, imbueing every moment that he's on screen with something, just robbed of almost everything, which is such a bummer. The book, to its credit, and again, I think that the treatment of deeds on screen, and even within Lonesome Dove, is something. that in small ways McMurtry tries to address in subsequent books. Call is basically like he's the best man I've ever had, the only one that can keep up with them that can track and do all these things.

The other thing that the book suggests that I miss in the miniseries is that like McMurchy is pretty clear about this, even though it's obviously not his focus. Dietz and Clara, because of their stations in this world, are much more in touch with reality and the world. And there's a moment before this all happens, when Dietz is just like, I don't like it up here. I don't like this north.

It's too cold. It's hard to see where we're going and I don't and I don't like it. And Call's like, maybe he's sick. I don't know what's wrong with him. And Gus is like, he's very sensitive. Like he knows things. Maybe he's going to maybe, maybe he says maybe we're all going to get killed by Indians in the next two weeks. Which, spoiler alert.

And basically what's happening here is Dietz is just like, we shouldn't be doing this. This is stupid. Yeah. He's like, I never really wanted to leave. Texas. I never really did. And the book is so focused on Call's ambition and the legend and myth of the West is so fixated on men's ambition to conquer and go and go and go that we fall prey to it and we fall into its sway and it's we want that

too. We want them to adventure. But Dietz is right. They shouldn't have done this. Yeah. And okay, but the other thing is this interesting is like I really take your point about Dietz being marginalized in the adaptation. Yeah. That being said, the kind of of scenes or the moments that Deeds has throughout most of the novel are the kinds of scenes that you just don't put in a movie or a television show, which is four or five guys hanging out, drink a coffee, and kind of commenting on the day's events. And he acts, he and PI are kind of like this Greek chorus for their journey. And he offers a certain point of view and

PI and Dish and, you know, Jasper. All these guys are kind of commenting on this. But for the most part, Dietz is just incredibly, like you said, helpful. He's a scout. He's got his own story. But by the time they get to this point in the novel, and I think, as we'll see in the series, and, you know, they, the, the Deets burial in the novel, I think is probably the hardest thing you're going to, one of the hardest things you're going to read. And the, and the, and the memoriam that's written for him is copied, plagiarized from the one that Charles Goodnight wrote for, boasts. That's something McMertrace talked about. Right. And this is the part where you're like, oh, it's pointless.

This whole thing that even if it was hard and it cost all these lives, I thought we were going to get some Montana or wherever we're going and find out this is how we made the West. And this is the sacrifice. And it was like, nope, this is pointless. It actually wasn't worth this guy's life to do this. I also think you're really right in pointing out. And all the people on that drive agree. Yeah, they do. Yeah. And you're, I really, I think you're right in pointing out the role Dietz plays in the novel. McMurtry is not some, he's, he's not some, like, radical hero here who is prioritizing the lived experience of black men in the old West. He, he's of his time, maybe he's a little bit forward thinking for his time. He gives Dietz a great amount of soul and character and presence.

But also, there are very few people, this speaks to the general tension of the soul project. I mean, there are very few people who are as adept in both mediums as McMurtry, right? He's won a Pulitzer Prize for writing this book. He won an Academy Award for adapting Broke Mac Mountain. He knows what gets adapted. Sure. And this was meant to be a script. He knows that Dietz sitting in a cornfield looking at the sky discussing clinical depression

before we had those words is not going to make it into any version of this whatsoever. And one of the really fun meta things about continuing to read the Lonesome Doves series, if you do, is feeling him try to correct those things. And there's a scene. This is not a spoiler because people know. know that there are prequels and sequels. So I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Dietz exists again in another book. But like when Dietz and P.I. meet for the first time, there is a scene that is so crisp and clear

that it, like it fell out of a Robert McKee's screenplaybook. Right. As if he's saying, here's what we could have done or here's what someone can do to give him back some lived humanity on the screen. It's just disappointing that Danny Glover didn't get a chance to play because he would have played the hell out of it. But I have to say, that being said, I think that we judge the series a little bit harshly because we have this book, which is also an un- okay, but it's an unparalleled achievement what this novel is. I think if you just watch the series,

Danny Glover's portrayal, and a lot of this stuff would feel differently. I think that the other, the thing, the reason why we're bashing the miniseries, which is not fair for people who love it, the Claire stuff alone in this and the Jake Hangy, I mean, they moved me. I'm not immune to its incredible charms. It's that we're not just criticizing it from the perspective of people who love the book. We're also criticizing it from the perspective of contemporary TV fans who know that now it's possible to do 12 hours instead of six or to just richly harvest something like this. I mean, honestly, like there's a worse version of it today. Yeah. Pitch Lonesome Dove is a three-year adaptation, right?

We're 30 episodes. They don't leave for the first season. drag. Seriously, there's the Perry Mason version of it. Yeah, I just don't think you could keep people as attention if you were like, don't worry in 10 hours they're going to leave Texas. They're going to go on this cattle drive eventually. Yeah. It doesn't

really work like that. Anything else you wanted to touch on in this section? I think the next section will be largely about Woodrow and Gus, so I wanted to kind of get a lot of the supporting characters in this one. I guess I sort of want to ask you about Amira. I mean, we've had a lot of conversations

the two of us about Amira. I think as I was reading it, I was like, what's your read on the Elmira character? What are we supposed to be kind of like learning from this? Is she clinically depressed? Is this, you know, what was this a portrait of postpartum depression in a time before we were able to kind of put a name on it? Is she just a lonely, sad person who's unmoored from the world

and is like just going to keep chasing her own doom across the plains because she can't be still, which makes her just like all these other. people in the book. But she is given so much page and screen time to come to such

a sad, brutal ending. Which I guess is a lonesome dove. Lonesome dove. But like, what did you think? Her ending is much more explicit in the in the show. I mean, in the book, it's,

yeah. I think it, for me, it comes back to Clara. I think that Clara is the center of gravity in this book and in this world because she's the only one who sees it plain and calls it as she sees it. There's a moment when Lorena's like she's not going to be nice to me because of what I am. And Gus is like, no, she will. And she is. She has this seemingly endless reservoir of kindness and empathy for people, even for El Maira when she crosses her path. And she raises her child after that. But she also has no tolerance for the rules of society. as they should be as someone else's rules.

There's a whole passage about this in one of the prequels that I read recently, where it's just basically like, why should she live under societal rules set by men that she would never even meet anyway? And I think that just as Jake is kind of on a certain path, but just isn't cut out for it and bends, I mean, Elmira just wants, she wants to ranger. You know what I mean?

Like she just wants to ranger. That's the metaphor. for what all these people want to do, but she can't. And she did a version of it that was incredibly dangerous when she was living as a prostitute and then did the thing she was quote unquote supposed to do, right? I mean, there's this whole section in this in this part where Call is like he probably should have married Maggie. There were a lot of men who wanted to marry Maggie's.

If Maggie's only, Maggie being Newt's mother, that's her path to legitimacy, right? Elmira took the path to legitimacy. She married the sheriff of a town. I mean, good job, right? Like, that's a heroic outcome for a woman in 1870 or whatever, but she wouldn't accept it. And so the thing that I love about the book is that McMurtry never judges her. Sure. He lets her ranger and meet, you know, an awful end.

Again, because it's a, it's filmed. It's not in people's heads. She's tougher to parse in the show, I think. I mean, Chris Cooper sells it a lot. I think in Glenn Headley sell it with their performances. Chris Cooper is just so uncomprehending and sad about it that it actually helps you understand how...

I think... I would say in one way, I would say that Chris Cooper's performance as July was a lot more illuminating about that character than the rendition of him in the novel. Like in some ways in July, when you're reading July in the novel, you're just like, especially once he gets to Nebraska

and is still showing up outside of Elmira's door and just kind of like constantly... I mean, I understand they have a child together, but just always kind of pawing at this idea that Elmira is going to suddenly wake up and be like, yeah, let's go back to Arkansas. It sounds great. She's not built for the world.

But it makes a little bit more sense as Chris Cooper. His hang dog look and his dignity is different than the way I'd sort of read that. I completely agree. And I think that's another notch in the credit of the miniseries. Because the traditional thing you would expect from a character like July is that maybe he's like a different version. of Newt, where he starts one way, and he learns, and he becomes a capable horseman or lawman or sheriff, or he somehow uses the experience to become better. But one of the things that

make McMurtry books so incredible, and it makes him such a keen observer of humanity is that sometimes people don't learn. Sometimes they don't get better. That's certainly the case with call, as we'll see over the next section when we talk about him. But July just, it doesn't make sense anymore. You know, it's not unlike Dietz saying we shouldn't have come this far north. you know, once you go where your compass doesn't work anymore, you're kind of lucky to get a job in the side room at Clara's Horse Farm. You know what I mean? Because everyone else, everything else you do, you kind of screw up and even screws that up to a degree.

I know. Well, we can put it cork in it there. So on Thursday, we'll do our last episode. Dern it, Chris, I could talk about this book all day. But what I think we'll do is, like you said, we're going to put all these installments together for a bonus megapod. And then hopefully maybe for that one, we could do any questions you guys had or we could do a little bit of a mailbag about Dove for that.

But yeah, I love talking about Lonesome Dove. We got one more to go. Saddle up. We're almost to the Milk River. All right, Andy, we're back. And this is the return. This is the long walk home to bury one another under some pecan trees and talk about the final episode of the Lonesome Dove miniseries. And I think, you know, obviously the last few hundred pages of Lonesome Dove, the novel

by Larry McMurtry. We've been talking about this for a couple weeks now. We're going to put together all four segments of the Wonesome Pod so that people can just listen along whenever they get a chance to watch the show or listen to the novel. It'll be available as a bonus episode. We've spent a lot of time

talking about a lot of different things. The genius of Larry McMurtry. Last week we talked a last episode we talked a lot about Clara and Dietz. We've talked about some of the differences between the miniseries and the novel. I wanted to try and focus more Or weirdly we haven't talked about this as much as I thought we would have.

I want to talk more about Woodrow and Gus, the central sort of friendship, partnership, the two characters, what they meant to us, how they're rendered on screen, and what the end of this book says to us about those people and maybe what McMurtry was trying to say through them. So generally speaking, I guess I wanted to ask you, I don't know whether to start at the very end or start as we sort of move up. I mean, how would you like to kind of open up this combo about these guys? Well, I think one of the places to start is to say, again, for people who are doing the TV half and not necessarily the book half, is that we have been maybe not top hands in the management

of that particular part of the herd. But I wanted to begin by saying that this fourth and final episode of the miniseries is to me the best of them. And it might well be because of the way it focuses on that relationship. and brings it into much sharper relief than I think it had been before. And also that I don't want to overlook the fact or gloss over the fact that in 1989, a time on television, on CBS, so not a context known for its free, autourish artistic visions, Bill Whitliff and Simon Winster and the producers, they did Larry McMurtry's story,

And this story doesn't end the way you might have expected it to if you were just coming to it blind being like, oh, there's an Western epic and Robert Duvall's on a horse. And it's grim and it's bleak. And it's really surprising and unsettling. And I wonder, and I hope people will fill us in on this, if you only saw, because I'm watching it like you are, Chris, hearing the missing pages in my head, hearing the missing internal monologues in my head. wondering how could anyone get the full weight of what it means for Gus to die, what it means for call to do this, how could they be processing it with a degree that we are? And I guess I'm wondering, because there's less fanfare in internal thought processing and monologuing or whatever, is it even more brutal? Is it even more surprising? I think it's more surprising.

Was it more satisfying? Because again and again, it's like, well, he made it. He made it to Miles City. Oh, he has a doctor. Oh, look, Woodrow made it there. Oh, no, he's, none of that's going to matter because he's still choosing to die with most of his legs rather than live with none of them. I feel like that's the story of this story. I feel like the going to great lengths

to do the right thing, P.I. walking across this barren wasteland, essentially, naked in the novel. In the book, it's a hundred miles naked. Yeah. and seeing the ghost of his dead friend guide him to safety. And then that safety, and he gets there and he delivers the news and call goes to rescue Gus. And he's not too late like Gus died right before he got to him.

He's too late because Gus is like, I don't want to lose both my legs. It's just vanity. And I've decided, and that's what this book and these books over and over again teach you is that you do the thing that's right because it's right, not because you're going to get the result you want. To me, because there's also the whole other lesson of Lonesome Dove,

which is the world is just fucking brutal and kills everyone you love. And that's tough to swallow sometimes. So I like to look at the moments of heroism, even if they're not necessarily heroic in the minds of the people who are committing them and being like, sometimes you just do what you're supposed to do

because it's the right thing to do even if you can't save the person. You have to try. Or save yourself. And that's a recurring theme in this whole book series as well, this idea of duty and honor and following orders and giving structure, literally giving frontiers to what is a unstructured existence, let alone country. And the Gus and Call thing that we've been talking about is interesting. I think someone on Twitter said this at us or maybe he's on the Facebook group, basically because we've been talking about each section of the story with the hindsight that we have from having read it, let alone the other books, someone was wondering like, oh, do you? even like these guys? Are they anti-heroes to you? And first of all, I adore them. And I love

their partnership. I love in all forms, whether it's in a prequel, whether it's on screen with Duval and Tommy Lee Jones. I love it. And I was thinking about why it feels so primal and why it's connected to people so much. And I, what I, what I settled on was, I mean, these two guys represent a vision of America that America has for itself collectively, which is work hard, play hard. One is work hard. One is play hard. One does nothing but work and one does nothing but sit on the porch and drink whiskey and make amusing comments about the work. And it's very telling, if not downright grim and depressing, what McMurtry says about that here as the country turned into the 20th century that birthed him and birthed this novel, which is that play died. That the spirit of

adventure died when everything was settled. And which one survived to build the 20th century, the one who is grimly going about his task without room for poetry, basically. The fact that a miniseries that we have at times criticized for its lack of, you know, this is so unfair, but here it is, you know, of like of cinematic grace or novelistic depth really does devote its last 25 minutes to a stern, unemotional, deeply broken on some level man, trucking around a cart full of a corpse and memories. Yeah. And to return to nothing.

I mean, that's really intense and powerful. You know, one of the things that makes it difficult to talk about Call and McCray is that I have learned all of my life in school and then in writing about writing and movies and television. or thinking about these things to try and put things in boxes, give things shape, think about things in juxtaposition to one another,

this person represents this, and this person represents that, and the collision of these two things means this. And the thing that I think that I found so bracing, I guess, about Lonesome Dove reading it, was even though you can tell, and McMurtry has said this before, that he essentially wanted to write a story

where you had a pragmatist and a romantic who were sort of bound together and the ways in which they saw this world, you know, go through those filters. I don't know. I forgot about those designations after a while. They just really do feel like people. And you think about the people in your life

and you think about people that you might have lost over the years, especially as you start to think about them as memories, you start to think about how complicated they were and how they weren't just one thing. They weren't just an intellectual or a class clown or physically, gifted or always there on time. Enough about me.

Enough about me. No, you know what I mean? But that's the thing about these. But how amazing is it that, and I want to give some credit to Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval because I did see this first before I read it. And I think a lot of my emotional relationship to these characters and to this title are tied up in this last episode. They're tied up in probably the shock of when I first saw it and seen McCrae die.

And also the just absolutely brutal last half hour or so of it from when he refuses to give Newt his name through Clara being like, you're a piece of shit, essentially, to him burying a guy going all the way back to zero and finding out back at zero, it's less than zero because the town has essentially been raised while he was gone. Lonesome Dove is essentially... And why has it been raised? Because of the love of a irrational love for a... woman, which is the one thing that Call has never understood. Right. And then you get the last scene. And I think that in a lot of the same ways that Call is sort of an apparition through some of Lonesome Dove as a novel. You know, he is this, he's an Ahab, but without a boat or something. Like, I can't even describe what he is sometimes

in the novel. I think that Tommy Lee Jones steps fully into his pass. Like, you know, he's like, he finally gets his moment and he just absolutely fucking crushes it at the end of this miniseries. I mean, what's amazing about this is you could say in the novel you have two characters who are willing to ranger as they do in their previous life out beyond the border of what they know with some confidence that they'll be able to come back. Often any job in the creative field is like that because you don't actually know what the product is going to be and you watch Lonesome Dove the miniseries. and all you can leave feeling is that Duval and Tommy Lee Jones knew the ending when they started at the beginning. Yeah. Not just because they knew the scripts.

They had to get emotionally. Yeah. Yeah. And they, and they, it's all, you know, it's one of those things where I bet if you ask Tommy Lee Jones, he'd say, fuck off because I've heard he's very ornery. But then he might say, yeah, you're goddamn right. I took this part for what I would do at the end, you know, and I wanted to see if I could chart the best course to get there.

And to your other point about the, don't know, don't know. diversity of human experience and people not being just one thing or the other. I mean, hey, that's why you do 900 pages. That's why you do six hours. But also, it made me, this reminds me of the thing that I texted you about, but I wanted to bring up anyway, which is, I just, I, it seems simple, but it's not to have the generosity of spirit and of talent that McMurtry has to present without question or judgment or putting a thumb on the scale, different views of the same person. I mean, there's a reason why a lot of writers tend to do first-person perspective, right?

Because omniscient is really hard for a lot of reasons because you're juggling a lot of personalities. You also have to spend time thinking about different people's emotional reactions to the same thing. And not everyone is as good at that. And that is the thing that Larry McMurtry is better at than almost anyone I've ever read. All of which to say, endless respect for the white-hot loathing that Clara Allen has for Captain Woodrow Call across not just a miniseries, but for, fat books that span different eras. The one constant, the one true north of the Lonesome Dove saga.

She thinks he's an alien. She fucking hates this prick and never hesitates to tell him. And he's nominally our hero, or certainly half of our hero. And that's true, right? It's like what you're saying. It's we get why she hates him. We get why he hates himself secretly. But also we know why he behaves this way and we have empathy for him. It's such a fascinating image of, well, it's not even an image. The idea that Clara obviously blames Call for Gus's death. But especially in the series, I feel like this came across where she is saying, just bury him next to my sons.

Like, I want this guy to be with me forever. And he's like, I won't do it because that's not what he wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And he, call is just sort of so stubborn about if. a person says that this is what they want. They make you promise. If you say you're going to do something,

if you have put a task to mind. It's what a man does. That's what you have to do. And it doesn't matter if along the way, multiple generations of people are like, I loved this person more than myself. Please let me have this moment, this experience with them.

He's like, I can't do it. It's out of question. When he's like, do you want me to go to the South Pole because he would do it. He would do it if that's what he was asked to do. And one of the things that I really appreciated about the clarity of the miniseries is that Whitlift did a brilliant job in this, in the Gus's deathbed scene of, which I reread this morning before the podcast. And it's, you know, it's a knockout. And I think I said to you that I spent the next two weeks just occasionally catching myself staring off into the middle distance thinking about Gus McCray. I mean, that's how powerful this book is and was and is in my life. But he boiled it down to the essentials to a degree that was really helpful. So that the line where Gus is like, I have two favors, one for you and one for me. The one for me is take my corpse to Texas and the one for you is take my corpse to Texas

because you don't want to be a rancher and you would get bored and you would die and I need to give you an adventure. And my last gift to you is one more because that will sustain you. And that that remind, I mean, that's everything. That's a thesis statement that we've been building to and it just drops like a jackhammer. And I think that the crucial thing and the crucial failing of Woodrow is that he can't do the other thing that Gus asks him to for.

No, and so let's talk about that scene for a second. First of all, I now get it. I now realize that the mustache you've been growing was an homage to Ricky Schroeder's I've been on the trail for one year. And now I'm a grown man and the ranch boss mustache. So it is a beautiful tribute. I ain't got no kid in this world, yeah.

two, like, let's talk about that because this, the miniseries also does something different in that it puts in his, it basically pushes the call as his newt's father chip earlier, much earlier. And does its best to keep that central because it kind of is. And then it plays out relatively quickly in the very end, right? There are a few shots that we don't really, we get a sense of in the book, but it's much more explicit to see it. Where Call is like, I'm the proud smile. That boy is good with horses like you are. And then he can't actually bring himself to do anything about it. And it's, you know, I don't want to disparage Ricky Schroeder who is not on the same level emotionally in that moment as Tommy Lee Jones is.

I appreciated the way the watch. Basically, like, he's willing to give any object that he can give because for him, like duty, these are concrete ideas. He says to Clara, I value the animal more than the name. It's a very convenient and structured way of thinking about something that's actually bullshit because a watch that you've never seen before doesn't mean anything unless the person that came from was your fucking grandfather, not the guy that's employed you for all 17 years of your life. But I don't think that call is arrogant. That's the thing, is that I think when he says that. to Clara, he's not lying. He's not saying...

No, it's honest. It's the most honest what he says. I think he's saying, I am just a vessel for work. And I may have some good qualities, and I may have done some things that were good and some things that were terrible. But ultimately, my name means nothing. You know, my name is nothing compared to, like, the horse that I gave him.

And, yeah, I think that the way it's done in the book where it's sort of an open secret but no one says it. And then when it does get said, it drops like a hammer, especially when Clara talks to, especially when Clara talks to nude about it. It just means a lot. But in some ways, it's one of my favorite parts of the book

because I know, you know, we've read interviews with McMurtry where he says that essentially that's the story he wanted to write, was this guy, this kid, Newt, who wasn't sure who his father was. You know, I mean, there was about a boy growing up. and in some ways, in the same way that we were talking about Clara kind of taking over the narrative and Clara taking over definitely

the psychological depth of the story. Newt's emotional journey is both the central one of the book and a complete, like, fizzes. It fizzes out. It does it, it's actually like, oh, so your dad does not, like, ever recognize you. And he just gives you a horse, and he leaves.

And also what lasts in this world? You know, I mean, there's the, there's the list of the dead that called Delivers to Ball at the end where everybody is buried. That's how he says, how is everyone? He's like, well, this guy's buried here. This guy's buried there. He brings the Hat Creek Company sign back on the wagon. And by the time he buries Gus, there's almost none of it left. And he has to use a rock to scratch AM into a, you know, piece of plywood that's on a pile of rocks in a place that doesn't even have a name.

none of this is going to last. I mean, as he says earlier, this country, this world is a boneyard. It's so dark without those fleeting moments that you're not, you're not, he's call isn't wrong. The name doesn't really mean anything. But call also can't give him the recognition or the validation or the emotion or anything that he requires. Did you feel since we're, this is in my head since we're at this section of the story,

the one thing that I wondered if it was. intended to be a little bit of a sop to those who wanted more resolution at the end of the story is Lorena stays up all night by the casket and then faint. This is not in the book. And Dish, who has traveled blizzards to become July's, you know, gelding pal, is up all night watching her and then rescues her, lifts her and carries her into the house. And that's our last vision of her. Those of us who read the book, and even subsequent, well, I won't say anything. Those of us who read the book know that much like Clara and Call

like Lori's just like hard pass to dish is a bedrock of her character but was this an attempt to be like Young Love might flourish after all you know I thought that that was probably like we need to tie up some loose ends and unless this is going to be seven episodes

or however long we can't do every single page of this book you know I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Lorena is the major character of Streets of Lorena in a lot of ways. And that her story goes on and it doesn't get any easier, but that it does go on. I thought it was interesting that they did it that way because her story in Streets of Laredo is not that.

It's not I fainted and dish grabbed me and we lived happily ever after. Couple more things before we even steer towards the conclusion of the ride. I do want to talk about specifically the way the writing in the book feels at the end before we wrap up. a little more credit to the miniseries, and I just kind of want to get your thoughts on it, having watched it before and then rewatching it, because for as much as I've kind of dinged it, it really, in a lot of ways, invented contemporary television,

maybe too early to have fully taken advantage of it or dazzled us in a modern way. But that year, 89, 90, I mean, Lonesome Dove and Twin Peaks are the things that probably hold up the most. And in its devotion to grandeur and scale and scope, its willingness to engage in tough stuff and not wrap it all up and not smooth everything out, it's wild, truly wild cast, movie stars doing TV, the idea of an event series.

I mean, all of this is the bedrock of our last five years, let alone 20 years of TV. And there it all was then. And it was deeply beloved, although, as we said at this, top, much less rewarded by like the Emmys than we expected. Sure. It's, I would never, ever really want anyone to remake this. I would never want anyone to take another shot at it.

This is the one thing where I'm like, I wish they'd let James Cameron go in and fix the snakes and fix the Diet scene, you know, like just get a little bit of VFX going on a couple of these things. Because I don't think for as much as my imagination is greater than the sum of what you see on screen in the in the show i do think that devala and jones own these parts so significantly and so truly that it's hard for me to imagine them trying it again i think they could do dead men's walk i think they could do comanche moon i think they have uh in the past but yeah you're right i mean in some ways it was a little early for its time in some ways i wonder whether or not

if we could have just gotten this in 2002 or 2003 is this a different looking a different feeling movie miniseries, but it does feel like such a perfect time capsule and a real peak at what was to come. The other thing I wanted to say in terms of context, that's contextualizing the show, contextualizing the book. We started this series talking a lot about Larry McMurtry and why we just unapologetically stand for him and adore him. And that's going to keep going. I think I said that when I was at a used bookstore the other week, I got six more. Just keep going. I just finished Dead Man's Walk, and I'm about to start Comanche Moon tonight, probably. I'm 250 into Comanche.

The thing about this book, and Larry McWartry himself has resisted and fought this as his, like, one of the Pulitzer Prize, it's the thing he'll be remembered for. It'll be the first line of his obituary if, you know, hopefully many, many years from now when that is written. But it's not just because it's so great and it is so great, but because it is him distilled. What I mean is, it is unapologetically epic, and it's also unapologetically pleasurable. but inside of it, as it develops, as it unburdens itself, it twists and it turns into something that is just inarguably literary and inarguably intellectual.

I mean, call is a classic hero of complicated American literature that gets taught in college. He's like Gatsby, right? Like, he just doesn't know when to stop. He just keeps going because that's what Americans do. It's mentioned in the show. It's made more of in the book. He almost kept going.

into Canada. There was no end game here. There was no point, right? And Dish calls him on it. And you see that in the miniseries and in the book. He only stopped because everyone was going to quit. And then he immediately almost turned back around or it's time to start building the cabins. It's so fascinating to discover this book as we did later, not later in life, but like we've been reading books that we thought were like popcorn paperbacks and heavy stuff and trying to find the sweet spot where they overlap, but this is the sweetest spot that I've ever found, where it is absolutely both all at once. You know what I think that is?

There's very little pleasure in this book. Sex seems bad. The drinking makes people go blind. Any kind of wound could lead to amputation or death. You basically ride over unforgiving country to get to a place that you thought was going to be, you know, Eden, and then you turn around and go back to hell. The pleasure is in the writing. It's Lonesome Doves essentially about the pleasures of reading, you know, and you wind up loving and caring and getting deeply involved with the people and the places that they go, even though he is not blinking about who these people were and what these places were, what these people did to take these places away from the people who were there first.

And I think that that's a really meaningful accomplishment. And, you know, the miniseries obviously canonizes some ideas people have about cowboys and about heroism. And I think that Jones and Duval are so irrepressible that you can't help but feel like these guys are a little bit more larger than life. But one of the great things about the book is that throughout the novel, they're going to these towns and they're saying, I'm Captain Woodrow Call. People are like, who are the Rangers? Like, who are you? Like, this is San Antonio now. this is Austin now or whatever.

Like, we built this place. We don't need you guys anymore. And it's basically like a victory lap with no victory. And yet throughout all of these sort of moments where they are deflating what should be triumph, triumph. You're like, fuck, this book is good. Man, I'm enjoying myself. I love what you just said because you're absolutely right. There's that great gust line from the book where he's just like, how humiliating is it to be killed by an arrow in this day and age?

He's a relic who got killed by a relic by an act. accident. But you're right. Like what's, what are the moments of actual pleasure in this book? Gus's biscuits, I think. The picnic with Clara, the picnic day. But they have to sleep on the ground. They seem to have no trouble with that. That seems to be okay. The picnic day is nice. That's about it. I guess the water in the Yellowstone is kind of fresh and refreshing when they get there after five months and multiple deaths. But you're right that the pleasure here is the experience. And it's totally changed me. I mean, I am now someone who buys nonfiction histories of the Comanche Nation for pleasure.

It's changed my view of the country, which speaks to maybe how ignorant I was of all of this stuff. And not that this is a historical record by any stretch, but just the scope of the imagination required to call this up. And the era that he's obsessed with and keeps returning to was new to me. And I'm now equally obsessed. But I wanted to call out, we've mentioned a couple times the essay that the writer Jeff Dyer wrote about. reading Lonesome Dove. And he quotes another great writer, Wallace Stevens. Basically, Wallace Stevens referred to the greatest experience in reading.

It's like a magic spell where this is a quote, the reader became the book. And this is dire now saying it's an experience I've had multiple times. I'm paraphrasing, but with Lonesome Dove, it was stronger and stranger. I was not reading a book. There was no book and no reader. There was just this world, this huge landscape in its magnificently peopled emptiness. and it's an experience that I just am so glad that so many other people have chosen to share with us and with each other and with the book because it absolutely you know in like black

mirror episodes where there's an alternate alternate virtual reality and there's the moment where you see them touch the button attached to their retinas and then it zips you into the underworld where they are like remember the the jesse plumman space captain episode or whatever the star trek one yeah that all ends well right but but that is the this is the closest is experienced to that kind of movie moment that I've had where I would look up and I'd be in my world and this world and it's a very challenging world in its own ways at the moment and I would put my head back down and I would be somewhere else totally and completely enveloped by it and that's no small thing. Right when I right before I read Lones of Dove I reread all the pretty horses and you

know Blood Meridian which is another Cormac McCart, all the pretty horses by Cormac McCarthy it's considered one of the great books about the West ever and it's absolutely astonishing and you know, McCarthy and McMurtry a little bit linked. I think McMurtry has at least been public. And he's not always like high praise from McCarthy, who I think he thinks is very good, but also has his like hangups about him. But I had read,

you know, I read all the pretty horses and I had kind of been paging through Blood Meridian as we were doing this conversation. And I was thinking about the differences, which are many. But one of which is that McCarthy spends a lot of time talking about the land. You know, and there's a lot of description of what,

what is, you know, the rocks look like, what the trees look like, and what the dirt feels like, and what the sky looks like. And it's honestly, like, some of the best writing I've ever read. So it's not a knock against him. But I realize how little of that murtree actually does.

Yeah. And the thing that you're talking about is your imagination. That's a 900-page book. But think about how long and deep it is because of your imagination. You know, and I don't mean to sound like,

I'm on reading Rainbow. I'm being serious. I often will read a book and start thinking about it in visual terms and as if it's happening in a movie because a lot of books are written like scripts. A lot of books are action. I mean, even if you read Elmer Leonard novels and I think his books almost read like scripts. He's like dialogue. There should be no description. There should be just like you're moving through story and telling character through dialogue. But when I read Lonesome Dove, Like, it's not like I see it on a screen. It's like it's happening to me or something. It's almost an experience that's pretty unique in my life.

So it's been lovely to actually have somebody to share that with in that regard. And it is like Jeff Dyer says that in his essay and we behaved it this way that bears it out. It's something that's passed to people. You know, it's proselytized for it's not recommended. And there's a reason for that. And it's a beautiful experience. And I think just in terms of house cleaning for our conversation, I think it's worth mentioning next steps for people who have completed this drive. And so on the filmed side, on the TV side, the chronology of this is it was a big ratings hit, as we've said many times, CBS wanted more.

And so CBS commissioned and made a miniseries that is also streaming on stars called Return to Lonesome Dove. This is deeply non-canon. We are not going to be discussing it. And in fact, Larry McMurtry disavows it, had nothing to do with it. And kind of think that some of the choices, although he was writing the sequel, Streets of Laredo at the same time, might be intentional thumbs in the eye of it. It is exactly, at least by description, exactly what you'd imagine a sequel is. Call, who's played by John Voight in this miniseries, is like, I think I'll go back to Montana now and turns around and goes back. And Newt has more adventures and Clara has more adventures.

and only a few actors returned, the dude who played PI and Chris Cooper among them. So feel free, not canon. What McMurtry did next, and we cannot recommend this enough, and maybe one day we'll do a minipod about it, is write a sequel called Streets of Laredo, which is the original title for the script

that he was going to do with Buckdanovitch that turned into Lonesome Dove. And it is one of the most bleak, powerful, devastating, and overwhelming books I've ever read. in my mind, it is burning brighter and hotter, honestly, than Lonesome Dove in some ways. Partly because you can't have one without the other, it is the recoil of the shot. It is him dealing with in a really gnarly way. I think all of his frustrations with the reception and misunderstanding of Lonesome Dove,

the phenomenon of Lonesome Dove, but also really having a pretty visceral reckoning with things that he and others may feel that he overlooked or downplayed, such as truly the, the experience of being a woman in this world, truly the experience of being Mexican or Native American Indian in this world. He forgot about trains. He said that in a number of interviews, he completely forgot the trains and train tracks existed when he wrote Lonesome Dove. Not a problem, streets of Laredo. Trains are a big part of it. And all of the threads that we've been trying to pick out about Woodrow Call and what makes him tick and what makes sense or doesn't make sense in the world anymore are just pushed spinal tap style

all the way to 11 in that book and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I will say one thing about this. Yes. If you were going to do Streets of Laredo, do yourself favor and also then read Dead Man's Walk. Yes. Next.

So chronologically, he wrote the sequel next and then he wrote two prequels. Yes. And I want to tell you, if you've been listening to us talking about Lonesome Dove, if you haven't done this already and you wanted to go do Streets of Laredo,

which in some ways I think I agree with Andy I think I have a little bit more mixed feelings about the writing in Streets of Laredo in certain places, but the end of Streets of Laredo, the last 200 pages or so, are among the best things he's ever written and some of the best things I've ever read. Do yourself a favor.

Make it a project. Go read Dead Man's Walk next because... Next, after Laredo. After Laredo, because you are going to want the chaser. Let's just say that. Yeah, and Dead Man's Walk is an excruciatingly gnarly, gnarly book. It's not about, it's not a live man's walk. You know what I mean?

But it is about the formative experiences in first rangering days of Gus and Call and to be able to do what he does, basically take these characters that we only knew in one stage of their life and reinvent them for us and make them feel like the same people is astonishing. Comanche Moon is chronologically the second book. It was the last book in the series that he wrote. and that's the one that kind of fills in the gaps. It gets you from Dead Man's Walk, basically up to Lonesome Dove, and you'll meet people like Dietz and Clara and other characters again. That's the order we read them in, to the chronological order he wrote them in. It's worth it.

I imagine if you've read this far, you might want to get into it. There were mini-series of all of these, some James Garner, one with Steve Zon as young Gus. I can't recommend them, but they might be fun to check out. But what are we going to do? about the, what are we going to do about the West once it's, once it's settled? We got to start watching TV now. You got to talk about Ted Lassow. I'm ready to do it.

I just think that, you know, Chris and I, if we've made bones in this business, they weren't Buffalo bones. They've been talking about TV, but on some way our first love and one of the things we first bonded on was great books. And to be able to do this was a total pleasure. And I, I feel like we should end this by quoting one of Gus McCrae's greatest lines, not the one about pokes and how he wants pokes

and now he'll pay $50 for a poke but what he says McBain style when he went with P.I. Before he gets hit with what turned out to be fatal arrows, he says, I like being free on the earth across the hills where I please.

Which really is a great motto and our attitude towards podcasting which is why we've spent hours this week alone talking about three decade old of entertainment. I loved it, man. We'll be back on day we'll be talking Lovecraft. We've got a bunch of other stuff. I think we're going to do a crossover

episode with the big picture next Thursday, but we have tons of shows to talk about. So thank you so much for going on this adventure with us. Give me the whiskey.