Photo of the Day: Deli Skelly

Over the last three decades or so, I’ve become accustomed to Halloween décor popping up all over the place—not just lawns outside homes but also businesses. But the other day was the first time I saw this specimen on a bench outside a longtime landmark, an eatery in my hometown.

Seeing it, I was struck with a thought that I’m sure the establishment’s owners would have groaned to know about: Did this fellow assume his current state suddenly, after sampling the food inside?

Flashback, October 1966: McMurtry’s ‘Last Picture Show’ Opens Window on Stunted Texas Lives

Like Thomas Wolfe and Grace Metalious, Larry McMurtry caused a scandal in his hometown with a novel widely seen as based too closely on real events. 

Though he dedicated The Last Picture Show, published 60 years ago by Dial Press, to the residents of Archer City, Texas, many inhabitants were not thrilled by the attention they received in the first of what he called his “Thalia Trilogy,” nor with the acclaimed 1971 film adaptation by Peter Bogdanovich.

David Streitfeld summarized the local reaction in a biography of McMurtry that came out earlier this year, Western Star: 

“There were roughly three camps: Those who thought Larry made it all up. Those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and he should be ashamed of himself. And those who thought Larry was exposing real incidents and real people and, well, good for him.”

Many saw the novelist himself in one of the two teenage friends at the center of the story, Sonny Crawford. He denied it (though he did own up to identifying with the later midlife struggles of Sonny’s buddy, Duane Moore).

Others said they were the originals of certain characters—notably Ceil Cleveland Footlick, who even wrote a 1997 memoir titled Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow? in which she claimed to be the inspiration for the teasing teen temptress who creates emotional havoc for Duane, Sonny, and other males in their high school.

McMurtry benefited from a legal environment in which prior obscenity legislation was being overturned, enabling him to depict multiple affairs, conducted almost as much out of boredom as anything else, in his fictional “Thalia” —a name he appropriated from another community, thereby annoying them, too.

Lacking intellectual stimulation, its residents are soon also without entertainment as the local cinema gets ready to close. Stuck, and barely aspiring to go anywhere, they find in sex an outlet to ward off frustration, cruelty, loneliness, despair, and death.

Particularly at that time in American life, readers (and, later, filmgoers) concentrated more on what seemed like McMurtry’s prurient treatment of such matters than on his poignant examination of aimless lives.

Playing the moral center of Thalia, “Sam the Lion,” veteran character actor Ben Johnson demurred over saying one line he deemed objectionable, concerned what his mother would say if she saw him the film. (Eventually Bogdanovich convinced him it was necessary, and Johnson ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.)

The seeds of the novel were evident in a McMurtry short story, “There Will Be Peace In Korea,” published in the Winter 1964 issue of Texas Quarterly and focusing on Duane and Sonny as they try to reestablish their friendship before Duane ships out to Korea. Even that was the residue of the writer’s discarded idea of interconnected short stories modeled on Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

Two years after the publication of the Texas Quarterly article, McMurtry had completed a novel that, while departing from the Winesburg idea, still managed with admirable concision to depict the stunted lives of a whole spectrum of Thalia inhabitants.

Critical reaction to The Last Picture Show was mixed, ranging from dismissal (“seems derived from other novels about the sexual plight of the adolescent”—The Los Angeles Times) to enthusiastic (“perhaps the most honest, compelling and masterful novel ever written by a Texan”—The Houston Post).

McMurtry’s parents presented a more united front, in opposition, with his mother hiding the book in the closet and his father asking plaintively of college-educated Larry, “Good Lord, son, with all the words you know, couldn’t you have used some others?”

Four sequels to The Last Picture Show followed, steadily more depressing and less acclaimed: Texasville (1987), Duane’s Depressed (1999), When the Light Goes (2007), and Rhino Ranch (2009). How much of that was due to McMurtry’s eye for possible future adaptations and how much to the physical and emotional ills of the novelist’s later years is an open question.

But the achievement of the original novel—and of the exquisite film made from it—remains.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the film The Last Picture Show, featuring, from left to right, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd as Sonny, Duane, and Jacy.)

Quote of the Day (Grace Jones, on Her Chief Precautionary Measure When Pregnant)

“The first thing I did when I was pregnant was to give up quaaludes.”— Jamaican-born singer, actress, and model Grace Jones (with Paul Morley), I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (2015)

I am sure her son is most grateful for this sacrifice!

Quote of the Day (George Santayana, on the Foolishness of the Simple and the Wise)

“The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.”— Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, and poet George Santayana (1863-1952) “Masks,” in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Photo of the Day: Early Voting, Richard Rodda Center, Teaneck NJ

Bergen County, where I live in New Jersey, has 10 locations where early voting is held from October 24 through November 1. I cast my ballot at Richard Rodda Center in Teaneck. No matter what your party affiliation, I hope you’ll exercise this right that others before us have advocated—and even died—for before us. 

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Good and Evil)

“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Four years ago, I wrote this post on Steinbeck’s flawed but compulsively compelling saga of good and evil. Now comes a Netflix adaptation penned by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the director of the 1955 film version, Elia Kazan).

Network TV mini-series of the Seventies and Eighties tend to plunge down a rabbit hole of popular memory, and unfortunately the 1981 adaptation of the novel is no exception. I have not seen the new version starring Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, but it is hard to think of her topping Jane Seymour (pictured) in the role.

I understand that Zoe Kazan has added a scene (not in Steinbeck’s novel) to explain Cathy’s villainy. I’m not against such changes if employed logically and sparingly. But in some cases, evil is so radical that it may be beyond the ability of a “science” like psychiatry to explain it.

 It’s what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in remarks about Shakespeare’s villain Iago from Othello, termed “motiveless malignity”—the most chilling kind of evil.

Quote of the Day (Ellen Glasgow, on ‘The Change From Baseball to Football’)

“I mean, he notices. He can see the color in the sky, and he knows that the change from baseball to football isn’t the only way to tell when it is autumn. Some men don’t know any more than that about seasons.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and feminist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), In This Our Life (1941)

As I write this, fans of the Tampa Bay Rays may be finally about to realize that sports transition, following a third straight loss to the Milwaukee Brewers that leaves them just one game short of elimination from the World Series. Very soon, they’ll have to start watching Tampa Bay Buccaneer contests. (With that squad at 2-5, let’s see how long they can stand watching those.)

Otherwise, the change in the seasons is not as apparent in Florida as it is up here in the Northeast. In fact, a late dear friend told me once that what she missed in her move to the Sunshine State was the turning of the leaves this time of year.