McMurtry begins with his first reading of Benjamin at the Dairy Queen while groups of working-class locals 'formed and reformed, like drifting clouds.' The particular essay that caught McMurtry's eye was Its quality of drift, and it leaves the reader longing for a stronger theme, greater narrative punch. This has its charms, and occasionally, as with McMurtry's riffs on the very brief, mostly mythic history of cowboys in American life, it is more than charming it is illuminating. McMurtry is a sort of flaneur through the arcades It meanders it picks up themes and then picks up other themes, but it often doesn't get to a point.īenjamin, as McMurtry well knows, was fascinated by the flaneur, the person who browsed through the Parisian shopping arcades that for Benjamin epitomized urban commercialism. Still, his memoir is not easy to get a bead on. This is an engaging idea, and McMurtry is an engaging writer. But McMurtry's meeting with Benjamin's mind in the Texas flatlands is emblematic of the mysteriousness of personal outcomes, and in that way Benjamin servesĪs an evocative point of departure for McMurtry's examination of his own literary itinerary. He never went to the Dairy Queen in ArcherĬity, Texas, where McMurtry first read him in 1980. Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish literary critic and essayist whose origins were as different from McMurtry's as they could possibly be, plays the role of cultural foil here. McMurtry's new memoir, 'Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,' makes much of distances - psychological as well as geographical - as he explains how he abandoned the cowboy life in Texas, where he grew up,Īnd became, as he puts it, a herder of words. Perhaps for that reason explanations of how writers became writers often involve stories of long distances traveled from originīut even in a land of long distances, not many have traveled quite as far as Larry McMurtry, the prolific author of two dozen novels and books of essays, including 'The Last Picture Show,' 'Lonesome Dove' Riting is not often a profession passed down from generation to generation, especially not in immigrant, raw-boned America, where it took a long timeįor the cultural accretions to build to the point where literature was a major activity.

`Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen': A Seminal Moment at a Texas Drive-InīOOKS OF THE TIMES `Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen': A Seminal Moment at a Texas Drive-In

Walter benjamin at the dairy queen