I discovered Cormac McCarthy when I saw No Country for Old Men in the theater because I’ve always trusted the quality of Coen Brothers films. I was so blown away by a sense that movie gave me I looked into the writer. A line from the Wikipedia article jumped out at me immediately.
He is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature.”
I have nothing against James and Proust, but it’s rare to hear a writer imply he wants to “deal with issues of life and death”. Sounds like my kind of guy.
His story as a writer is the stuff of writer romanticism. He wrote for decades in total poverty, caring for nothing but writing or for catering to popular tastes. Universities would offer him thousands of dollars to speak and he’d deny them saying he had nothing else to say than what was in the books. His books barely sold, even Blood Meridian, now considered a masterpiece of American literature. Nobody except those deep in the literary world even knew of him. As Madison Smartt Bell famously put it, “he shunned publicity so effectively that he wasn't even famous for it.”
Then through some combination of luck and chance and maybe marketing he got famous for All the Pretty Horses and by the time The Road came out he was doing an interview with Oprah. I think everybody’s watching to see how fame will change his books and some might say it is already apparent.
I don’t remember why I chose it, but I got All the Pretty Horses out of the library. Probably because it had won the National Book Award. It is the first of a trilogy often called his Border trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain. All highly recommended, but the first is the best. Before those was Blood Meridian, cited consistently in those lists I like to read as one of the best books of recent decades and beyond. It’s our age’s Moby Dick. Depending on the degree of my McCarthy fanaticism I would say it has to be one of the best books I have ever read hands-down. Maybe the best. I’m certainly not the only person to think so. Let me just say the vision and unmitigated tragic scale of his books is like a sobering smack in the face. No doubt reading these has changed my life (see below) and work. I have not read books so powerful.
His books are certainly “literary books” breaking all the rules and making new ones about how we’re supposed to write. Drawing on the biblical, the cinematic, the mythic, the tragic, the Modernist, the post-Modernist, the Grotesque, McCarthy clashes the old world with the modern world, where would-be heroes have their illusions yanked out from under their feet and are left either dead or staggering about, punch-drunk with his particular brand of apocalyptic Nihilism. McCarthy’s vision of humanity is cynical and misanthropic for the most part: fundamentally we are selfish animals driven by base and egotistic needs and violence is our preferable way of relating to the world.
If McCarthy has a cinematic counterpart it is Sam Peckinpah. From Wikipedia:
Peckinpah's films generally deal with the conflict between values and ideals, and thecorruption of violence in human society. He was given the nickname "Bloody Sam" due to the violence in his films. His characters are often loners or losers who desire to be honorable, but are forced to compromise in order to survive in a world of nihilism and brutality.
After the westerns—and fame—he wrote No Country for Old Men which in its genesis is more a screenplay than a novel. I don’t count it as representative of McCarthy. I tried reading it but I can’t since the film spoiled it for me. It screams to me screenplay. From what I gather the book varies little from the movie. The killer in No Country represented to me a few things: the fact of inevitable death or indiscriminate malevolence in the world, and related, an undermining of the traditional ethics where the righteous win out and the evil pays the price for its deeds. There’s also the anti-modern world theme of a future (or present?) where much of humanity has lost a moral spark that makes it human and the killer is its harbinger.
In this way The Road feels like its sequel: a world devoid of not only of what sane social cohesion civilization can offer, but of anything to live for—most of the decent people just kill themselves rather than live like animals. Most the people that remain on that earth are sub-human—or at least they represent the darker side of people. The boy and his father carry what they call The Fire as the last representatives of humanity. I can’t think of a better way to make a reader question everything and confront what matters than this scenario he put a father and son in. It’s been called the most depressing book ever and I’m sure lots of people can’t bear it. It’s not the kind of weight you can carry for long. It has indeed left its scorch mark on me.
McCarthy’s books which I would recommend:
- All the Pretty Horses, [The Crossing, Cities of the Plain]
- The Road
I should note that I tried reading Suttree and didn’t like it. I think it’s this thing I have about novels otherwise serious trying to also be funny. It’s a real turn-off for me and probably the reason I can’t read Thomas Pynchon despite his status as one of the Greats. I haven’t been able to return to those books (including Suttree) he wrote before the westerns often called his Southern Gothic.
McCarthy and Drinking
One thing I can credit McCarthy for—or at least associate strongly with—was quitting drinking—almost exactly two years ago if I use that humiliating new year’s eve as a turning point. No doubt: McCarthy’s work is extremely sobering. My attitude had been why not drink and I still wouldn’t disagree with somebody who had this philosophy, but I found in McCarthy a place I wanted to be and that translated into getting (more) serious about my writing. Look, he said, books can be written like this! That meant directing all available energies, energies that had been wasted in the semi or total oblivion of gin or whiskey or the hangovers. It meant spending more time reading and, buoyed by finding McCarthy, perhaps there were other greats I should seek out and read. The product of this latest phase is these Contemporary Writer jottings.
I don’t know when or if or under what other circumstances I would have quit if I didn’t call it McCarthy, but I remember those acutely sober winter evenings reading his western trilogy. I had already been half way to quitting after reaching the point where my tolerance and subsequent quantities had just gotten ridiculous. I essentially have stopped drinking the hard stuff which was going down with only a little ice. It wasn’t especially hard to quit and I still have a couple of beers now and again, but it took something to be that much more serious about to make me decide to stop. It was not long after reading him that I found he had stopped drinking as well years ago and there was this line of his that meant so much to me. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking." It’s true. Just think of all the drinking writers. There are so many it becomes easier to think of the ones that don’t drink—and they usually had quit at some point. The only writer I can think of that is a known teetotaler is Coetzee. At one point I would have pointed to one of those great red-nosed drunks and said, “See, he did it!” Probably not the best way of looking at it.
