“It may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves.”
– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.
He never teaches and he never gives readings and he is rarely interviewed. He is a writer.
When his sixth book, All The Pretty Horses, won the 1993 National Book Award, Cormac McCarthy didn’t even bother to pick up the award.
He has a lifelong habit of avoiding questions. The answers are in his books, bet your poke.
“He solicits publicity,” a Texas lawyer amigo observed, “like a man evading process.”
Fifty-eight years old when Horses was published, an impoverished artist most of his life, his books had never sold over 2500 copies in hard cover and not all that many more in paperback. After five books and three decades of writing, unknown save to a small coterie of critics, professors and other writers who thought he was God, McCarthy finally found his first agent. He changed editors.
Being God don’t pay spit. And He don’t make house payments.
Horses sold 180,000 hardbound copies and 300,000 paperbacks. When Mike Nichols purchased the movie option, McCarthy bought a new pickup truck.
His father was a lawyer with the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville and Cormac was the eldest of six children. Cormac felt he didn’t fit in with his family or at his schools. He tried twice the University of Tennessee, where he found his first wife. Tried the U.S. Air Force.
His first book, The Orchard Keeper, is a commemorative about a past way of life in Southeast hill country. Apparently heavily influenced by Faulkner. McCarthy received some grant money as a result of Keeper, and there’s no evidence he’s done a lick of real work since. The man is a writer.
His second wife recalls living with Cormac in a barn outside Knoxville for eight years, bathing outdoors, eating beans. Her husband rejected $2,000 offers to speak at universities because everything he had to say was available in those books no one was buying. No tengo dinero.
Those early works were a hard trailride for readers who couldn’t hack their way through McCarthy’s syntactical underbrush of thorns. The Outer Dark (’68), Child of God (’74) and Suttree (’79) are Southern gothic novels distinguished by creepy plots full of necrophilia and incest and God, told in prose so rich it could rot your teeth.
The Stonemason, McCarthy’s only play, centers on the domestic troubles of a middle-class black family in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Seventies.
In the early Seventies McCarthy roved west looking for a spot that hadn’t been written out. The second Mrs. McCarthy was not invited along.
“I just decide to go to a place and write,” McCarthy explains. A lot of his characters have the gypsy habit, wanderers all.
In 1981 McCarthy was awarded one of those MacArthur genius awards.
“I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him,” said Shelby Foote. Saul Bellow mentioned McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death dealing sentences.”
We’re talking, say, $260,000 here. Dinero mucho grande. Mucho gusto. Some of the money went to free the author from tumbledown motels. He bought a dog-eared little stone and stucco affair the color of mayonnaise left out too long with a dirt yard and no space in the back to speak of. On Coffin Avenue, El Paso, Texas.
McCarthy golfs, shoots pool, eats modest portions of simple food at Luby’s, a nearby cafeteria and calls a couple of lawyers, an artist, an academic and a Nobel-prizewinning physicist his friends. Perhaps a cerveza.
In 1985, McCarthy published his Moby Dick, an apocalyptic epic about a scalp hunter in the 1840’s Blue Meridian or The Evening Redness In The West. About which Time magazine said, “To read it is to say goodbye to peace.”
All The Pretty Horses, a story set in 1950 of the making of a man in the Southwest of North America, is McCarthy’s sunniest, gentlest work. By his standards, a pastoral tale. Horses’ prose, said one critic, echoes Early Hemingway, not that that should dissuade you.
In many ways, Cole, the hero of Horses is that old familiar thing in American literature, the natural man.
“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”
One might accuse McCarthy of a predilection for opaque philosophizing. He does have a great vocabulary.
The world of All The Pretty Horses is a place where evil is as common as dirt and as likely to soil you, while goodness is only an ideal, something to be searching after. Like a gold claim that won’t play out.
“Here beyond men’s judgements all covenants were brittle,” it says in Blood Meridian.
His prose and plots roots, sunk deep in the blood drenched bottomland of classic tragedy, reveal an unremitting contempt for modern sensibilities. We have it too easy today and are not even aware of our great fortune.
McCarthy’s prose is simply too dark for most people. His characters are sociopaths, often murderous, more often half mad. They exist in a world almost bereft of kindness, happiness or any other civilizing aspect.
Perhaps McCarthy has mellowed with age or maybe it just occurred to him that nasty dispositions and big green stinking conglomerations of stuperous snot slimeing o’er his pustulant imagination might be unattractive in a book.
Can’t tell you, don’t know what he’s thinking.
“One of the great hurdles in life,” offers McCarthy, “is when you can forget about what other people are doing.”
There’s a saying among the Japanese, a great man does not let himself be known and McCarthy seems to know that is true. But he’s a writer.
A dios.
Winter ’94-’95
