TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.003

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 13KB | 234 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 70

He's Left No Stone Unturned


Determined to bury his desperado past, novelist TOM MCGUANE is
back in the saddle with a new book and hard-won, tempered
confidence

By Guy D. Garcia


    An autumn snow has glazed the Crazy Mountains and left a
confectionary dusting on the hills and gullies of Montana's
West Boulder valley. Atop his horse, Thomas McGuane is silent
for a moment as he surveys the Turkish carpet of prairie
juniper, sage, buckbrush and wheatgrass that blankets his
3,700-acre ranch in Big Sky country. "It's funny," he says at
last, "but you never know where lightning will strike. You're
sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it
will befall you."

    Not that McGuane is complaining. A fit 50, he has weathered
the storms of literary celebrity, Hollywood, alcoholism, two
failed marriages and at least one critical scalping, only to
retain his stature as one of the most original American writers
on either side of the Mississippi. This fall his seventh novel,
Keep the Change, was published, ending a four-year hiatus from
long fiction. The New York Times proclaimed it the "best book
he has written to date." Almost as sweet is the news that Keep
the Change is already the best-selling book of his career. No
wonder that McGuane's Raw Deal Ranch has been rechristened
Gladstone.

    Keep the Change chronicles the cross-country escapades of
Joe Starling, a blocked painter who endeavors to "put his old
life to an end" by stealing his girlfriend's car and setting out
from Florida to reclaim the Montana ranch left to him by his
father. As the plot progresses to its ironic denouement, Joe
courts his teenage sweetheart, rekindles a love affair with the
land and comes to terms with some family ghosts -- both dead and
alive. Like most McGuane protagonists, Starling is at a gallop
between his past and future, an existential cowboy with good
intentions and bad habits, determined to take his spiritual
malaise by the horns and shake some meaning out of it. He is,
in other words, a lot like Thomas McGuane.

    Both a departure and a summing up, Keep the Change is
described by McGuane as a "happy superimposition of results on
intentions." Loyal readers will find themselves on familiar
terrain -- the bone-dry wit, terse dialogue, lyrical
descriptions of nature and hovering suggestion of violence are
pure McGuane. But the measured tone and relatively upbeat ending
of the book are a far cry from the pyrotechnical flash of his
earlier works like The Bushwacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the
Shade. Not all McGuane fans have stayed for the ride. "There are
readers who abandoned me over the feeling that my writing has
become relatively lusterless," he observes. "But your literary
style is kind of like your face -- you can't do much to change
it. I just hope that you can look at a shelf of my books and
say, `This is a 40-year struggle to understand the human race.'"

    For Thomas Francis McGuane III that struggle began at the
age of ten when a disagreement with a boyhood chum over the
description of a sunset ended in a fistfight. "It was my first
literary skirmish," he says. Born and raised in Michigan,
McGuane was introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work
ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early
on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be
from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I
saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he
recalls. At Michigan State, McGuane edited a literary journal
and shunned the budding hippie drug culture with such conviction
that his peers dubbed him the "White Knight."

    After stints at Yale drama school and Stanford, McGuane
realized he had reached a "point of no return" in his literary
vocation. "I was in my late 20s," he says. "I had prepared
myself for no other career. What was I to do? Start selling
lighting fixtures and hope to rise in the corporation?" Instead,
he wrote The Sporting Club, an apocalyptic satire of an
exclusive Michigan hunt club, which was published in 1969 to
rave reviews. Two years later came The Bushwacked Piano, a
biting social broadside about a scheme to sell towers stocked
with insect-eating bats to the gullible public. In 1973 McGuane
upped the ante with Ninety-Two in the Shade, a dazzling novel
of free-floating angst and male brinkmanship set in the Florida
Keys. Ninety-Two was nominated for a National Book Award, and
McGuane became, in the words of Saul Bellow, "a kind of language
star." Critics compared the 34-year-old author to Faulkner,
Hemingway, Chekov and Camus. The big time -- and Tinseltown --
beckoned. McGuane became a celluloid hotshot, penning scripts
for Rancho Deluxe and Tom Horn among other movies. In exchange
for writing 1976's The Missouri Breaks, which starred Marlon
Brando and Jack Nicholson, he was given the chance to direct the
screen version of Ninety-Two.

    Meanwhile, McGuane had used the proceeds from selling the
film rights to The Sporting Club to buy a ranch in Paradise
Valley, Montana, where he moved with his wife, nee Betty
Crockett (a direct descendant of Davy), and his son Thomas IV.
The breathtaking scenery and anything-goes ambiance soon
attracted a freewheeling constellation of characters that
included fellow writer Richard Brautigan, actor Peter Fonda,
painter Russell Chatham and director Sam Peckinpah. Before long,
stories started coming out of the valley, ribald tales of sex,
drugs and rock 'n' roll that have become part of the local lore.

    Chinks appeared in the White Knight's armor. McGuane and
Crockett were divorced, and a nine-month marriage to actress
Margot Kidder (Superman) came and went. In 1977 McGuane took a
third trip to the altar, with Alabama-born Laurie Buffet, who
is the sister of his friend country singer Jimmy Buffet.
McGuane's reputation bottomed out in 1978 when he received a
critical licking for Panama, a caustically humorous novel that
limned the dark side of fame. The same year, actress Elizabeth
Ashley threw fat on the media fire by sparing few details of her
romance with McGuane in her autobiography, which described him
as a "psychedelic cowboy" and "aging juvenile delinquent."
Meanwhile, the deaths of both his parents and his sister took
a heavy toll. "I come from a family that has a lot of
alcoholism," McGuane confides. "I became really kind of an
unpleasant drinker."

    It was only a matter of time before McGuane looked through
the bottom of a shot glass and glimpsed his own mortality.
Observes longtime friend and fellow novelist Jim Harrison
(Legends of the Fall): "Like a lot of writers, we started out
reading Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky, and you think that in order to
write you also have to be partly crazy. And later on it occurs
to us that we're going to die unless we behave." Realizing that
"my streak of self-destructiveness had to end," McGuane quit
drinking and poured himself into writing. Two novels -- Nobody's
Angel (1982) and Something to Be Desired (1985) -- were followed
by To Skin a Cat (1986), a well-received collection of short
stories that helped put McGuane back on the literary track.

    McGuane, who has not had a drink in nine years, also
credits his healthier frame of mind to the life-affirming
influence of his wife Laurie, who is the mother of their
daughter Annie, 9. An expert horsewoman in her own right, Laurie
helps McGuane deal with his correspondence and critiques his
first drafts. If she admits to noticing a change in her husband
over the past few years, it is simply that he has become "less
cynical."

    Yet his Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation from
well-mannered writer to party animal and back again has led some
to wonder which is the real McGuane. Both and neither, answers
McGuane, who is irked by the fact that his wild and crazy days
have taken on "a kind of monster reality" in the press. "During
that period I was supposed to be living in the street, I also
wrote ten movies, a novel and about 25 pieces of journalism,"
he says with annoyance. "Even in the flamboyant period of the
'70s, I would say 85% of my waking time was spent on work. The
day-to-day boring reality is that I was going to the typewriter
and working."

    Three years ago, the McGuanes moved out of Paradise Valley
to their current spread near McLeod (pop. 5). In the cozy living
room of his log-cabin house, McGuane throws another chunk of
cottonwood on the fire as Laurie whips up a pot of hearty
chicken soup in the kitchen. His lean, 6-ft. 3-in. frame draped
across a wing chair, McGuane exudes the tempered confidence of
hard-won experience. While many of his erstwhile drinking
partners have fallen by the wayside, he has managed not only to
survive but to thrive in his role of gentleman rancher and
Marlboro Man of letters. "I guess I'm kind of like lip cancer,"
he says with a wry smile. "I just won't go away."

    During dinner, McGuane sips nonalcoholic beer and talks
about an upcoming cutting-horse competition in Billings.
Cutting, a highly stylized ritual in which a horse and rider
"work" a cow in much the same way a defensive guard tries to
block a basketball, is a dear topic for the McGuanes. They also
happen to be formidably good at it. Laurie is Montana's
defending cutting-horse champion, Tom was No. 1 the year before,
and the two are the leading contenders for the 1989 trophy. "We
take turns," Laurie laughs.

    McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of
cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot
work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates
a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic
countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down
and say, `Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and
send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of
literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called
Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he
admits that "there is a residual frontier feeling of open
possibilities that seems to be a part of the voice of living
here."

    At the same time, McGuane rejects the charge that he has
turned his back on reality by retreating to "a kind of Early
American theme park." To McGuane, both urban blight and rural
isolation are symptoms of a deeper problem. "I do think that
there's a kind of national illness, and I think that every
American is touched by it," he says. "It's a by-product of this
20-year wave of narcissism and self-help movements and stuff
where people have lost the ability to refer to things larger
than themselves, and their reward is solitude. It penetrates
Montana as thoroughly as it penetrates Manhattan."

    Which perhaps explains his current fascination with the
harmony found in the pedestrian rhythms of ordinary life. "The
kind of place that really gives me a thrill now is a place like
Chicago or Toledo or Buffalo, where you notice people rolling
out and going to work in the morning," says McGuane. "After 50
years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing
that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on
their novel or the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth."

    The advent of a Rocky Mountain frost provides the perfect
impetus for McGuane's own literary labors. In fact, McGuane is
already itching to start a new novel, which he says will cover
a "larger piece of territory, a larger slice of humanity and
include some topics I've never written about before, like
politics."

    When he's ready to hit the word processor, McGuane heads
out to his office, a freestanding shed with a porch overlooking
the banks of the Boulder River. By the door is a fishing rod he
keeps just in case the trout start to jump. Fishing, McGuane
explains, is just another way for him to stay in touch with the
"spirit and poetry of the natural world." Maintaining a primal
connection to the environment is essential to McGuane, for both
his peace of mind and his work. "I feel strongly that writers
need to be some place," he says. "The real thing, the real job
of artists of any kind is to somehow seize the life you're
having in an unrelinquishing grip." McGuane is sure to continue
doing exactly that. But, just in case, he keeps his epitaph
handy. His eyes gleam with mischief as he repeats it: "No stone
unturned -- except this one."