| Intl. Notebook | Jun 14 2023 |
Cormac McCarthy goes to the place that was his lifelong literary obsession.
Because we have actual jobs we're always a little late with tribute posts, which is why we generally don't do them. The last time we wrote about an author's death it was Elmore Leonard, who transcended the bounds of genre fiction to develop one of the most unique and entertaining literary voices of the last fifty years. And then there's Cormac McCarthy, dead as of yesterday, who was one of the greatest stylists to ever work in the English language. From the first page of his first book you knew you were dealing with a different vision, a different way of seeing the world and processing the events that occurred within it. In All the Pretty Horses, which was McCarthy's sixth book but the first we ever read, he did the following in the third paragraph, writing about a train:
It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.
It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone.
That's a classic McCarthy sentence, overwhelmingly visual, scoffing at structure and punctuation, seeming to run forever but mirroring the minute focus on objects and landscapes people often feel during emotional distress. In this case it reflects the inner turmoil of a character—the iconic John Grady Cole—who doesn't express emotion extravagantly, if at all. McCarthy often used long sentences in this way, but his powers of description could also be concise, as in this example, from Suttree:
He made a fire beneath a shelf of rock and watched a storm close over the valley down there, ragged hot wires of lightning quaking in the dusk like voltage in some mad chemist’s chambers.
And he would also do this, from Cities of the Plain:
The desolation of that place was a thing exquisite.
The sentence is more bleakness observed through the eyes of young man/ancient soul John Grady Cole, who was perhaps a version of McCarthy himself. We gather that there's a debate between those who prefer his early work and those who prefer his later work. For us, All the Pretty Horses represents the dividing line. We prefer that book and everything before, but we very much love everything after too. When someone asks which of his novels we like best, we're usually baffled. Often we select Blood Meridian, in which he rewrote the Old West as a gore-drenched Boschian hellscape. Babies are massacred. Horses are diseased. Men wear necklaces of ears. And death comes swiftly from nowhere.About a third of the way through the book McCarthy unflinchingly shows readers the lethal mutation within the American DNA by using the example of two cowboys who hate each other. They're both named Jackson, but one is white and the other is black, and they're called by their company of companions White Jackson and Black Jackson. McCarthy does this to suggest the basic sameness between these men, like cousins from a family, but in their minds they're completely opposite. White Jackson expresses this through racism and high-handedness, and inevitably he finally pushes Black Jackson too far, with horrifying results. It's nighttime, and all the men are sitting around a campfire:
The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled. He was sat as before save headless, drenched in blood, the cigarillo still between his fingers, leaning toward the dark and smoking grotto in the flames where his life had gone.
Other authors have used far more words to get across what McCarthy imparts in that highly metaphorical passage—that hoping to reach a covenant is futile when people exist in a Hobbesian maelstrom of violence, or a zero sum trap of daily existence. The rule that says we must vie with one another merely to survive, that one person's victory must come at another's loss, issues from the minds and media
of those who never really have to vie for anything, and the idea needs somehow to be erased and rewritten before lasting peace and prosperity are possible. McCarthy's characters almost always fail on that front because he personally didn't think humans collectively have the capability to throw off the shackles of ignorance, indolence, hate, and greed. He believed all of those are inalterable human qualities—or human nature, full stop. If he ever thought differently, even for a second, it certainly didn't color his almost unbearably hopeless prose.
of those who never really have to vie for anything, and the idea needs somehow to be erased and rewritten before lasting peace and prosperity are possible. McCarthy's characters almost always fail on that front because he personally didn't think humans collectively have the capability to throw off the shackles of ignorance, indolence, hate, and greed. He believed all of those are inalterable human qualities—or human nature, full stop. If he ever thought differently, even for a second, it certainly didn't color his almost unbearably hopeless prose.McCarthy possesses the hallmarks of someone who, because of his unique literary vision and the lavish praise it generated, will bring the iconoclasts flocking soon, and they'll claim he's overrated and not really a good writer at all. Good luck with that. Like Hemingway and other giants, though, he was indisputably a writer with a narrow focus. But we don't believe that an author must be everything to everyone. McCarthy didn't bother trying to flesh out female characters in a realistic way; there are plenty of writers who do. His ethnic portryals were limited to the people you'd encounter near the U.S.'s southern border; writers abound who are more inclusive. McCarthy was a singular creator who explored every nook and niche of a tightly bounded realm circumscribed by the duality of the U.S. and Mexico's violent historical dance, the banality of seeing the world in good/evil terms, the salvational potential of love, the struggle of those in meager circumstances, and ultimately, the inevitability of oblivion. Yesterday was his turn to fall, and be borne away into the unknown.
