If another Cormac McCarthy comes along, the world may never learn of his (or her) greatness
Given that censors at publishing houses are already undoing the threads of "troublesome" literature and its creators, consider how intent they are on preventing new additions to the elite canon
Cormac McCarthy, who died on June 13 a little over a month shy of his ninetieth birthday, was the best pure writer I have ever sampled. He might even now be displeased to hear that assessment, as it’s a familiar if somewhat demographically balkanized refrain (most of McCarthy’s readers are older, white, and male, and probably growing more so all three respects as I type). This is because McCarthy, a purposefully reclusive figure who didn’t grant his first interview until he was nearing sixty, was also a master at crafting intricate plots and remarkably memorable characters; his verbal pyrotechnics make it tempting to forget this.
Devoting too much attention the packaging of McCarthy’s stories at the expense of the package is like focusing on how well Lady Gaga sings and otherwise performs while forgetting she’s…not so bad at other aspects of music, too.
(Most people have never touched a piano and may not appreciate how rare it is even for a popular performer to be this skilled on keys—I don’t think Elton John, Kid Rock, or Billy Joel, all quite good, were ever at Lady Gaga’s level, although Rick Wakeman is a freak with an invisible third arm and, Yes, zero historical peers. Also, at least one of the pianos Gaga uses here probably costs more than twice as much as the best Tesla Model 3. Maybe that’s why she is so intent on using every available patch of surface when playing.)
It’s possible you’re someone destined to be described accurately enough in your obituary as an Avid Reader and yet have never even heard of McCarthy. If this is the unfortunate case, but you’ve seen or heard of the film No Country for Old Men (the winner of four 2007 Academy Awards, including Best Picture), then you’re at least culturally adjacent to his presence, as the film was an adaptation of a 2005 McCarthy novel of the same name.
McCarthy is not the most fun author to read. Not in the moment. But after it’s over, you want a cigarette even if you’ve never smoked one in your life.
Most people stuck in airports would probably be better off perusing what the Moonies are handing out rather than try to immerse themselves in something as thick as McCarthy’s writing, which is ill-suited for ambient clamor. And any humor in his narratives is bleak to a degree that even Larry David or the Coen Brothers, who directed No Country For Old Men, could never portray with the unaided wit. But no matter how bleak the mood he set, it was never nihilistic. There was a moral point to every passage McCarthy allowed into the bright glare of publication, even if none of his novels—despite many winning (sometimes multiple) coveted literary awards—were New York Times bestsellers.
Also, although he advocated in interviews for writers to aim for parsimony and as few extraneous marks as possible, with periods the only helpful form of punctuation1, McCarthy was capable of writing a run-on sentence spanning more than one page that makes perfect sense, and feels like a story on its own—just an accelerating crescendo of heres and no, over theres and oh fuck watch outs.
The first McCarthy novel I read, on the recommendation of a friend circa 2001, was Suttree (1979). This is a tale of a genial vagabond in Knoxville, Tennessee who has traded family privilege for a fisherman’s life spent either working or sleeping on a boat or tippling with low men in tattered coats in bars, and is loosely based on parts of McCarthy’s own life.
After I waded through that, the same friend sent me a copy of Child of God. Anyone can read this in an afternoon. I recommend it as a McCarthy starting point, not only for its brevity but because it is McCarthy at his most soiled and unapologetic. The story follows the life of a man named Lester Ballard (a great choice for a social-media handle, along with Lane Meyer) who, early in the story, is shot in the ass by a farmer who has caught wise to Lester’s habit of copulating with the especially ripe fruits in the farmer’s watermelon patch. Fruit-fucking is perhaps the most socially acceptable act described in the story, and Ballard emerges as neither its most hapless nor, arguably, its least sympathetic character.
This passage is unreal (and, since it’s a direct excerpt from the novel, may contain spoilers):
Now, it’s fair to recognize that “niggerized” may strike some readers as a somewhat racially charged term these days. But if you read the passage, you immediately see that McCarthy is writing from not the semi-detached perspective of an omniscient narrator but from the perspective of someone in the middle of the action, near enough to either rescue someone from the situation or make it even worse but sadistically or placidly doing neither. He describes the car as he does because this is how the characters in the story would describe it, as is perhaps more evident when reading the whole story. And as you can see, whatever connotations “niggerized” may signal, McCarthy is using the word as a vehicle for describing a degree of white trash so profound and brutish that the scene almost—almost—cries for a drone to enter it and eradicate all involved.
The raw vexation the literally trashy father experiences over being unable to corral his cock-hungry feral daughters—”sluggards” with “black hair hanging from their armpits”—is not just palpable but crystalline. Somehow, amid the obvious hopelessness and poverty and random shotgun blasts, you imagine these people to be living the best lives they can and ever will, so why not. They all come to life, and because of the universal realities McCarthy’s writing tickles, it’s impossible to dehumanize any of his slyly multifaceted characters unless a reader is willing to do the same while taking an honest look in a steam-free mirror.
McCarthy wrote in very close. I can’t characterize it in any other way that feels correct. There is a scene in No Country for Old Men that involves a man barely escaping the headlights of pursuers in a pickup truck on some open Western United States ground at night, with gobs of money at stake and a double-cross at issue. This is one of many scenes in which you feel not as if you’re watching a movie version of the action, but as if you’re buried up to your neck in the middle of all of the gunplay and screams of pain and frustration and primal conquest, unable to move except for twisting your head around and hoping not to wind up killed. It’s all right there in your face, and well, technically you asked for it.
This—writing in close, with most or all of the standard human senses necessarily invoked—is a very hard thing to do. And in Blood Meridian (1985), probably the best novel McCarthy wrote and therefore possibly the best English-language novel in history, it creates a ride that doesn’t end. Reading this book is work.
McCarthy has a flair for using rare or archaic words, but Blood Meridian is so full of them that I had to stop at least every few pages to assure myself McCarthy hadn’t pulled a William Shakespeare and simply invented new words on demand. He hadn’t, although he easily could have gotten away with it. All of his words are real, my favorite among the obscure ones being “thrapple,” in large part because a deserving mass-murderer gets what he deserves in the scene in which the word appears.
Blood Meridian (or The Evening Redness in the West) has been the subject of countless scholarly dissertations and deconstructions, with everyone striving to pinpoint exactly what the grand lesson of the story was. I have read it twice and at the end of the second reading I was both more enlightened and more asea. For those who have read it: Who the fuck is The Judge? Who is The Judge? Not a Soros-appointed magistrate, but beyond that facile conclusion, it’s hard to tell if the character is physical or metaphysical. But while it is tempting to read about Blood Meridian before diving in, don’t. Just wade into it.
McCarthy and his themes might have a difficult time achieving mass publication, let alone real prominence, were these entering the fray today. Even existing novels are being targeted for revision, although in some cases it’s really more the author, with his words a gateway to diminishing the author’s standing—even after the targeted author is dead.
In 1983, Roald Dahl supposedly told a reporter for The New Statesman that Even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on [Jews] for no reason." He wasn’t caught saying this on a hot mike; he fully expected to see his words in print. As far as antisemitism goes, Dahl is not an edge case; referring to the Holocaust as an episode of taunting is outright evil—and was maybe worse in 1983 than such a thing would be today.
Yet going down the road of altering existing works because of the author being an objectionable figure means starting a journey with endless avenues spiking out in all directions, most notably the prevention of similar literature, however undeniably rich in creativity and the power to enchant no matter a reader’s prevailing attitudes upon beginning the word-consuming bonanza. Some of us don’t want to go back and re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald or Philip Roth forever.
Most well-known novelists are or at one point were substance-addled degenerates and philanderers whose antisocial personas make it easier for them to work long hours undisturbed—think Martin Udall in the film As Good As It Gets—and slowly lose all their teeth as they and their livers somehow survive into their late eighties and beyond, usually writing all the while because they can’t help themselves. Right now, I am reading the first of a pair of companion novels McCarthy published last year—The Passenger and Stella Maris. My God, the man just got better until the not-so-bitter-in-reality end.
McCarthy’s writing brings out the proper kind of elitism in everyone. As with Lady Gaga’s piano playing, some artistic (and to a lesser degree, athletic) feats are so sublime that beholding them compels a complete dissolution of the observer’s own ego. Sometimes it’s okay to just say “Holy shit; maybe one in a hundred million people could ever do what this person does merely with language/a guitar/a paint brush”; sometimes, in fact, you don’t have any choice but to experience naked, sighing awe at what someone as human as you are has created.
That is life at is finest. It costs nothing to experience; it just happens, and nothing should ever get in the way of anyone enjoying these ephemeral yet everlasting moments of appreciation.
They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I'll hug his neck.
—Suttree
May the best who ever lived carry on forever just as he was, and is, loved.
I noticed after finishing this post that I littered it with six semicolons. I can now see easy ways to dispense of all of them, but that would deeply undermine the point. Next time.