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 In Larry McMurtry's new novel, "The Last Kind Words Saloon,"
Earp and his sidekick, the dentist-gambler Doc Holliday, are a
lazy, mean-spirited, violence-prone pair. It's a portrait that's
truer to history
"They weren't heroic. They were surly for the most part. They
drank a lot, they were mostly drunk for all this time. They were
easily ticked," McMurtry said.
"Wyatt hardly ever held a job. Usually his brothers got to be
the sheriff and Wyatt spent his time whoring and drinking and
hanging around," said McMurtry, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his
beloved cattle-drive epic "Lonesome Dove".
Just published in Britain, McMurtry's latest is a short work set
in the dying days of the Old West. It is chock full of
gun-toting rowdies, taciturn ranchers, saloon girls, cruel
Indians and even a British lord.
Some are historical figures, among them Irish journalist William
Howard Russell and an aging Buffalo Bill, while others are
imagined. It is laced with McMurtry's homespun humor.
In one scene, Doc and Earp try to practice their shooting but in
a display of ineptitude, miss most of the bottles.
"I think of this as a rather light-hearted take on the ending of
the West. I like to play around with it. I don't take it too
seriously," he told Reuters, speaking in a gruff drawl down the
telephone from Tucson, Arizona.
The story moves towards the infamous Gunfight at the OK Corral
in Tombstone, Arizona, when Earp, his brothers and Holliday take
on the Clantons and McLaurys. When the smoke clears, three men
are dead.
Unlike in the many movies of the incident, the showdown takes
place almost by accident and is over in less than a minute.
McMurtry deals with it in just a few paragraphs.
In his preface to the book -- whose cover of Frederick
Remington's painting "The Fall of the Cowboy" adds to its
end-of-era mood -- McMurtry quotes director John Ford's words
that if you have to choose between history and legend, print the
legend.
McMurtry said it was still hard to strip away the legend.
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"The West is very mythologized. I tried to knock it on the head in
'Lonesome Dove' and it didn't work. You can't de-mythologize it.
People are going to want the myth whether you want them to or not.
So I've given up."
Despite his own depiction of Earp, his favorite movie portrayal was
by Henry Fonda in Ford's "My Darling Clementine".
"He was just so graceful and it's one of his best movies."
Now aged 78, the Texas born-and-bred McMurtry is one of America's
most popular contemporary writers. His novels have been turned into
classic movies, including "Hud", "Terms of Endearment" and "The Last
Picture Show". He won an Oscar for the screenplay of "Brokeback
Mountain". Westerns account for only part of his vast output.
Asked what drew him to the genre, he said: "My family background is
all you need. All my uncles were cattlemen. So that history was
something I grew up with. I didn't start out writing Westerns. The
first half of my career was more or less modern and I turned to
Westerns later on."
Two uncles worked for rancher Charles Goodnight, the former Texas
Ranger and trail-blazer who features in the novel.
"They regarded it as the most searing experience of their life. He
was very profane and difficult."
His grandparents were pioneers who came West at the turn of the
century.
McMurtry said he was not sure if he would write another Western, but
he dismissed the oft-expressed notion that the genre, in novel or
movie form, was a dying breed.
"It's very much alive. You just can't get rid of it."
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Larry King)
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