The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 56

Mr. Larry McMurtry

℅ Booked Up Bookstore

216 S. Center St.

Archer City, TX 76351

December 10, 2018

Dear Mr. McMurtry,

I hope this letter makes its way into your hands via your bookstore as I was unable to find your home address. I understand you live in Archer City. I have been to Texas once, Houston rather recently as a matter of fact, but at this point in my life I don’t imagine I will go again. However, if I did I would want to visit your bookstore. I have admired you for years and imagined, if we had ever had the occasion to meet, say, at a dinner party, we would have fastened to each other like magnets.

It is my understanding that you underwent a heart surgery some years ago that had long-term adverse effects, and I am very sorry for the pain and trouble you have had in the aftermath. I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, ‘Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.’ Of course I didn’t say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.

I want to tell you about my experience with having read Lonesome Dove . I have read the book now three times, and I’m sure you are aware of the short television series that was made, which I have also rented from the library a few times and enjoyed very much. Years ago I read the novel for the first time, as I said, when it won the Pulitzer Prize. I used to try to always read the prize winners, and indeed, I happened to read Lonesome Dove during a stretch of my life when I felt that everyone around me was rising up to the fullness of themselves while I was withering, and I will never forget the first time reading that book. It seemed to me that the text was tapping down into some ancient, painful stream of truth, or rather, the story of the cattle drive and its narrative appendages seemed to be somehow coming out of me, rather than going in. Do you think I sound insane, or (I rather think probably) do you know exactly what it is I’m saying? I remember reading that book and getting into, oh, I don’t know, the last hundred pages perhaps, when you see as a reader that you are not in for a happy or neat ending for any one of the characters of which you have grown so fond; you’re in for a hard ending, and you rather know that you are, I think. Or at least I did. And then it comes, you know, and I will never forget sitting there in my bed, with my husband sleeping beside me only a short while before he ended up leaving me, and I was sitting there thinking here in my hands is a book about disappointment. Disappointment for every one of these people. Wretched, bitter disappointment. And I was angry, of course, but it was really that I was dismayed by your mercilessness, the way you dished out blow after blow, refusing to yield, even a little, and provide the reading population with a sense of relief in any measure. It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life, and I suppose, back then, I was reading fiction in search of assurances that there was still reason for hope.

I think I probably wrote to you back then, or perhaps I meant to write but did not (because, as I said, this was a tumultuous time in my life and it’s possible this one slipped by). I read Lonesome Dove again in the late nineties when another book in the series was published, and then over this past Christmas I found myself standing at the bookcase. I take great care with my selections now, knowing my years of reading are coming to an end. Seeing that familiar cracked spine, I was inclined to take the book down and read it again, and this is why I am writing you today.

I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane. This time, when I read your book again, prepared for the feelings I had felt before, I was surprised utterly. What I had seen those years ago as a lack of mercy became to me a presence of…courage—to hurt them! To leave them in dismay! It was courageous because it was unbearable but it was true, and YET, Mr. McMurtry. AND YET. Here was something I had not taken pains to see, but for which I was now looking, indeed hoping to find (as I am hoping to find in my own life): this GREAT VITALITY. Augustus and Call, full to overflowing with the meaning of the life they had made. The text meant something new to me this time around, and I wanted to say that to you. Yes, really, that’s all. I wanted to make sure you knew that. I don’t know what drives a person to be an author; I have no idea. But you should know that this text, this work of storytelling, touched something in me, lit a wick. I suppose I’m moved. That’s what I am trying to say. You moved me.

And here, I know you are all tucked away down in Texas, and we are both caught in the wretched web of aging, aren’t we, but I hope this last stretch of time we both have, I hope it is full for you. This is also, I suppose, what I hope for myself.

With very warm regards I write,

Sybil Van Antwerp