The Desert Rose

B
Y
L
ARRY
M
C
M
URTRY

Paradise

Boone’s Lick

Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways

Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

Duane’s Depressed

Crazy Horse

Comanche Moon

Dead Man’s Walk

The Late Child

Streets of Laredo

The Evening Star

Buffalo Girls

Some Can Whistle

Anything for Billy

Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

Texasville

Lonesome Dove

The Desert Rose

Cadillac Jack

Somebody’s Darling

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Moving On

The Last Picture Show

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Leaving Cheyenne

Horseman, Pass By

B
Y
L
ARRY
M
C
M
URTRY AND
D
IANA
O
SSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd

Zeke and Ned

THE DESERT ROSE

A NOVEL BY

Larry McMurtry

With a New Preface

SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
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New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1983 by Larry McMurtry
Preface copyright © 1985 by Larry McMurtry

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected].

Designed by Irving Perkins Associates
Manufactured in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the
hardcover edition as follows:
McMurtry, Larry.
The desert rose.
I. Title.
PS3563.A319D41983
813’.54 83-4687

ISBN-13: 978-0-671-46143-0
ISBN-10: 0-671-46143-5        
         ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85384-0 (Pbk)
  ISBN-10: 0-684-85384-1 (Pbk)
 eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2883-1

For Leslie,
for the use of her goat.

PREFACE

Writing a preface to a book only published a year ago seems faintly ridiculous. Once I finish a book it vanishes from my mental picture as rapidly as the road runner in the cartoon. I don’t expect to see it or think about it again for a decade or so, if ever.

If one should agree to attempt such a preface, as I have, the first necessity is to avoid all thought of Henry James, whose rich, ruminative prefaces to the New York edition constitute a model of self-criticism which has so far not been surpassed, or even approached. Those prefaces are to novelists as the
Poetics
are to tragedians; we have no more intelligent body of commentary on either the theory or the practice of fiction. Writing in their shadow leaves one feeling no keener than Mortimer Snerd.

John Barth observed long ago, in a fine interview, that writers, like athletes, work by trained instinct. After a game or a book they may wax eloquent about why they made such a move or struck such a stroke; but when they are in motion such decisions are seldom consciously made. They come unprompted from the training and the instincts.

In my own practice, writing fiction has always seemed a semiconscious activity. I concentrate so hard on visualizing my characters that my actual surroundings blur. My characters seem to be speeding through their lives—I have to type unflaggingly in order to keep them in sight. I have no time to refer to manuals, particularly not dense, poorly indexed manuals such as the James prefaces.

Mention of the speed with which fiction can sometimes get written is especially appropriate to a discussion of
The Desert Rose,
which was written in three weeks.

I had been laboring away on a long novel about the 19th-century West called
Lonesome Dove.
Some twelve hundred
pages were in hand at the time; the narrative was not exactly stalled, but it was slowing. My characters seemed to be moving at an ox-like pace up the great plains. They still had a thousand miles to go, and, worse yet, there were two parties of them, one proceeding out of Texas, the other meandering indecisively west and north from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Would they ever meet? And, if so, would it happen in Ogallala, where I needed them to meet? I didn’t know, and in fact was growing a little bored with their slow trek over the plains. I needed a vacation.

Opportunity beckoned, as it usually does, from the West Coast. A Hollywood producer wanted to have a film script written about the real life of a Las Vegas showgirl. Would I write it, or at least go take a look? I had passed on the same project only a few months earlier, but then I hadn’t been so bored with my cowboys. I said I’d go take a look.

As it happens, I am peculiarly ill-equipped to observe the real life of a showgirl. I like to sleep at night—preferably all night. But the showgirl’s work is nocturnal. I dutifully tried to attend a few shows, but found it a heavy chore. My researches were not helped by the fact that I was allergic to something in my hotel room, probably the rug; I couldn’t breathe in my room, or stay awake outside it. After a day and a half I had not been closer than a hundred feet to any showgirl; the charms of my trail-driving novel were beginning to reassert themselves.

I had been supplied with a long list of contacts, most of whom proved uncontactable. But, in the course of ticking them off, I actually met a showgirl. She was living in comfortable retirement, and she raised peacocks. We met only briefly and mainly talked about how I might find a legendary former showgirl who had retired less comfortably than my hostess.

This legend I never found, though everyone in Las Vegas seemed to know her. Not only that, they all seemed to love her. She was said to be somewhat down on her luck; it was rumored she was working as a barmaid.

Meanwhile, I was intrigued by the peacocks. Tits and
feathers were the staples of the Las Vegas shows, as they had always been. Peacock breeding as a retirement career for the beauties who had worn the feathers seemed wonderfully appropriate.

My hostess told me, as others had, that showgirls were a dying breed in Las Vegas. Showgirls are large, full-breasted women who neither sing nor dance. They are on stage to wear gorgeous if skimpy costumes and be beautiful. But fewer and fewer producers want to use them; today’s producers wanted dancers. Only one or two of the larger shows still used showgirls to any extent—the future belonged to small-breasted women who could dance.

I have always been attracted to dying crafts—cowboying is one such. It became clear that the showgirls were the cowboys of Las Vegas; there were fewer and fewer jobs and they faced bleak futures, some with grace, and some without it.

I left Las Vegas on the morning of the third day and told the movie producer I would attempt to write the film. I suggested, however, that I start with an extended treatment. Dying breeds aren’t the only thing I’m attracted to. I also like mother-daughter stories. Why not a mother-daughter story in which the daughter replaces the mother on her own stage, in the show in which she had been a star for some years? It’s the old-matador-going-down-vs-the-young-matador-coming-up motif, except with a family twist.

I had written a number of original screenplays over the years, always with the feeling that I was going about it wrong. I work in textures, and the kind of details that bring a character to life (at least for me) seem excessive (or merely weird) when packed into a scene. They need to bob up in the flow of prose, then sink again, to live in the undercurrents. But in a film the director and the actors account for most of the undercurrents, not the writer. The screenplay is a kind of blueprint, and there are few undercurrents in blueprints.

The producer agreed to let me try an extended treatment,
and before I had written a paragraph I knew I was writing a novel. Harmony’s voice won me at once; I felt I had rarely, if ever, made a happier choice of point of view.

Finding Harmony was a great relief to me, in as much as I had just spent nearly ten years writing books that I didn’t really like as I wrote them, day to day. I
did
like writing Harmony and her friends, and was rather sorry when she strolled out of hearing in Reno three weeks later.

I believe the energy that enabled me to write the book so rapidly was the result of the switch from
Lonesome Dove
, a long, third-person novel about men. The switch from third person to first, if you like the voice you switch into, can itself be energizing.

I didn’t anticipate that Pepper would be such a monster. It was hardly just that she should find someone as considerate as Mel, but there you are, for now. Pepper is very young, and her story deliberately left unfinished. Sooner or later, rainy days come in one’s artistic life, and when they arrive it is nice to have a character available in whom one’s interest is not exhausted.

I’m happy, though, to have spent three weeks with Harmony and Jessie and Gary, Myrtle and Maude and Wendell. One of the nicest things that can happen is to have one’s characters teach you something: that optimism is a form of courage, for example. It’s Harmony’s theme, not one she sings, just one she practices.

In retrospect I’m glad I never found the legendary showgirl who had drifted down. If I had found her, I wouldn’t have had to invent her, and Harmony and her optimism would not have graced my life for those three weeks.

—Larry McMurtry
October 1984