Drive north on Highway 281 out of Austin, Texas, and the hills collapse, the land goes flat, the creeks and heights give way to wide ranches, farms, and small towns, which get smaller and farther between as you approach the edge of the Plains. Oklahoma is due north; the Panhandle, a little bit west; you pass through Lampasas, Hico, Stephenville, Mineral Wells. After about three hours you hit Jacksboro; a few miles north you turn east onto 114; at Olney you turn north again onto 79, and fifteen or twenty miles later you’re in Archer City–which is nowhere, really: one traffic light, a few streets, population somewhere around 1,700, just another little Texas town where they take football too seriously and you can’t get a drink on a Sunday night.
Or anyway, it would be nowhere, except that Larry McMurtry grew up there, and rendered the place in a couple of books–The Last Picture Show and then Texasville–which were made into a couple of movies, which in turn made Archer City something else, the model for mythical Thalia, and hence, if not exactly somewhere, then at least Nowhere: the remains of the great American West after the frontier had been fully settled, the cowboys were extinct, and the oil booms had come and gone. Thalia was–and Archer City is–an archetype by virtue of its obsolescence. Still, it’s a good enough place to live if you have family in the area or a local business to run. McMurtry has both. His sister lives nearby, his brother’s down the road, and in the center of this tiny little town he’s installed one of the largest and one of the best used bookstores in America, perhaps in the world: hundreds of thousands of volumes, representing the entirety of literary production–biography, poetry, history, essays on travel, natural science, the movies–all of it carefully priced and shelved in four enormous storefronts gathered around the town square. McMurtry has turned his hometown into a book town, along the lines of Hay-on-Wye, the little Welsh village that’s become a British center for booksellers, reading festivals, and the like.
Well, Archer City is a strange place. Or rather, it’s a perfectly unexceptional place to which strange things have been done. The bookstore–McMurtry’s named it Booked Up–is a sort of grand folly on the Plains, but in the context of the town’s history it’s just another odd wrinkle. Consider: On the wall of the Archer City Dairy Queen there’s a framed reproduction of a newspaper photograph showing Peter Bogdanovich directing a scene from Texasville, using that very same Dairy Queen as a set. That is, local families sit down to their burgers beneath a reproduction of a reproduction of a photograph, of a man in the act of photographing, yet one more time, a staged scene based on a book, which purports to represent, if not a moment of life in Archer City, as such–for fiction and film both have their prerogatives when it comes to truth (though McMurtry exercises them less, perhaps, than most other novelists, and in fact it was he who first suggested to Bogdanovich that realism would best be served if they filmed in the town that inspired his novels)–then at least a fair approximation thereof. And there it is, that image so many times removed, displayed on the wall of what, for lack of a better term, we might call the original. (If I’d had my wits about me, I would have snapped a picture of the thing for reproduction here, compounding the ontological layering to yet another level of degeneracy.)
Well, big deal. To the locals, it’s just an occasion for a little passing pride: Someone wrote a novel set in town, someone else decided to film the novel there, and someone else took a few pictures of the process. And while there are more antinomies to come, they have the same curious outcome: They make the town seem just a little more normal.
Thus, the movie. The Last Picture Show is a brilliant and beautiful thing. Bogdanovich had studied the French New Wave carefully and well: the handheld camera, the black and white film (this was 1972), the jump cuts and other deliberately clumsy edits. But the setting pushes the style back onto its sources in American cinema–mainly, I think, by way of two elements on the move’s soundtrack: Hank Williams’s music and the prairie wind which blows through almost every frame of the film. In effect, then, Bogdanovich made an American version of a French version of an American movie, and the result is an enduring archetype of Americana. Along the way, even the town’s name passes through a series of transformations, through fiction and back into a kind of fact-once-removed: Archer City is called Thalia in the novel, and Thalia, in turn, is called Anarene in the movie, which is the name of a real town, about nine miles down the road from Archer City (nothing was shot there; Bogdonavich just wanted to use their football jackets). The sum of it all, then, is an improbable nexus of techniques, representations, reversals, and contradictions in the service of debunking the fable of the frontier cowboy, which yields yet another fable about what happens to small towns when their moment of history is gone.
But through it all Archer City remains utterly undisturbed. We drove in on Highway 79, and there it was. Fictionalized and then transferred over into another medium, renamed and then renamed again, the town itself seems to have endured all this metaphysical mayhem without a care. There was the movie theater, there was the water tower, there was the square, and everybody we met was very nice and utterly without pretension, and, to be perfectly honest, I was left wondering if it was only me, if nothing extraordinary was happening there at all. I was just thinking too hard, again.
Meeting McMurtry didn’t help. Three of the four branches of Booked Up are unstaffed and often left open overnight; you wander the stacks on the honor system, and take whatever you find over to the fourth store when you’re done. My friend and I did just that, and we were paying for our goods when McMurtry himself wandered in; so I chattered with him for a while. A nice man, thoughtful, erudite, obviously much enamored of books and the business of selling books, and I couldn’t get him to drop the “Yeah-I-opened-one-of-country’s-largest-bookstores-in-the-middle- of-nowhere-and-so-what?” attitude. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a book-length essay McMurtry published in 1999, he says, with regard to his relationship to Archer City, “Stay in one place long enough, or return to the same place often enough, and some interesting ironies are likely to accumulate.” And yet no such ironies, no sense that he had done anything strange at all, came through in his answers to my questions. Some of his affectlessness was simply Texas style, which understates, as a matter of honor, the obvious (one riot, one Ranger); the rest, I think, was the natural reticence of a man who knows that he can’t give a quick answer to a complicated question, and perhaps can give no answer at all. So I stopped asking. Instead, I walked back out and wandered through the stacks a little bit more, and after a while I began to think, Yes, in fact, I have come to a perfect place. And somehow–trust me, follow me on this–I began thinking about the Strategic Air Command, up outside Omaha.
You see, there are enormous missile silos dug into the Nebraska Plains, as far from any human settlement as you can get in this country. They’re packed with state-of-the-art electronic equipment, computers, security and communications systems, and they’re staffed by highly educated and well-trained technicians. I’ve seen the silos, and wondered how they would seem a few hundred years from now, when they’re abandoned edifices in the barren heart of the continent. To the military men who built them, they are crucial elements of an effective defense, but to me they’re the emblems of our hubris, seemingly permanent, but sooner or later to be as defunct, and therefore as chastening, as the broken statue in Shelley’s poem:
TWO VAST AND TRUNKLESS LEGS OF STONE STAND IN THE DESERT … NEAR THEM, ON THE SAND, HALF SUNK, A SHATTERED VISAGE LIES, WHOSE FROWN, AND WRINKLED LIP, AND SNEER OF COLD COMMAND, TELL THAT ITS SCULPTOR WELL THOSE PASSIONS READ WHICH YET SURVIVED, STAMPED ON THESE LIFELESS THINGS, THE HAND THAT MOCKED THEM, AND THE HEART THAT FED: AND ON THE PEDESTAL THESE WORDS APPEAR: “MY NAME IS OXYMANDIAS, KING OF KINGS: LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!” NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS. ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK, BOUNDLESS AND BARE THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY.
“Despair!” the statue says, not just to Oxymandias’s rivals but to us, for the statute’s fate is obviously ours, as well. To recognize as much is to acknowledge that there’s always an element of desolation lingering at the heart of any compilation of human knowledge, any exercise of human powers. You don’t feel it in cities, or on college campuses, or anywhere that culture lies optimistic on the landscape. But in Archer City, as I made my way down the aisles of Booked Up, I scanned shelf after shelf, read the spines of title after title, each representing an enormous effort on the part of its author, each once the pride of some publisher and the possession of some now dismantled library, most of them probably never to be read again. Outside, the wind blew down the wide streets and across the town square, and I wondered, I really did, at the ephemerality of the entire endeavor, the vanity and futility, and the inevitable anonymity of almost any effort one can make. The Texas Plains are harsh and lonely, Archer City is isolated, and Booked Up is a suitably melancholy place, where culture and its ambitions come looking to be reborn, and find that they are mostly to die.
I browsed for copies of my own books, which weren’t there, not even among the 500,000–never made the cut, I assumed, though I prefer to think that their owners had thought them too precious to sell. Later, I found a first edition of James Merrill’s Divine Comedies, as permanent a book of poems as post-war America has produced–whatever that may mean, around the time those Nebraskan missile silos are uncovered by some future archeologist. Anyway, I put down ten dollars for it, and then I took it home and read it. And I was glad to read it, in part because of its virtuoso rhyme-schemes and luminous language; in part because the poems themselves were communications with the dead, written to bring back some extraordinary men and women who would otherwise be gone; and in part because I knew the volume, small and jacketed in silvery gray, would have another life, for a little while anyway, on the shelves of my own library.