Cormac McCarthy
A Giant of Literature is Gone
Biggest News in Books: Cormac McCarthy Dies at 89
Cormac McCarthy died at 89 on Tuesday. McCarthy was, in many ways, everything we idealize in a writer. Famously reclusive, he gave only about a half-dozen interviews in his entire career, a career which spanned more than six decades. He lived to write (in one of his few interviews he said “writing is way down the list” of topics he’s interested in, I don’t buy it—later, in the same interview, he says he just needs to figure out how to eat so that he can write). He also insisted, through action, that the work speak for itself, which, with him being so utterly talented, it gloriously could and did. He became a legendary literary figure, a must-read writer, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, and an adaption of his novel became an Oscar-winning film, all without any self-promotion or uttering any public comments. He wrote the words and they inspired his agent, editors, publisher, and readers to do the rest.
Online, many writers and readers are sharing their favorite lines and paragraphs from his work. On the sentence level he is the rarest of birds, a writer that is able to dazzle even when his sentences are taken completely out of context. He wrote often violent, but wondrously image- and idea-rich poetry. His ability to use the English language is up there with a handful of novelists who have ever lived—even a large ego’d and genius line-level writer in his own right, David Foster Wallace was, for once, speechless when he recommended McCarthy’s fifth book Blood Meridian.
Often, as I imagine most do, I read McCarthy’s books with a pen in hand, ready to write down the profound sentences that I want to ingrain forever in my memory—I can see in my own notes from reading Blood Meridian that I gave up writing out quotes and simply listed whole pages to return to. Here’s one such page in that list describing “the judge”, which is just one example of McCarthy’s sense of the epic and his felicity with devilishly complex structures:
“In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there a system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history though what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions no accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged in the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions exciting only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.”
But it is McCarthy’s profound ability with words coupled with his sense of intellectual and emotional clarity that puts him in a class of transcendent writers. His words are pretty, they sound nice, and make you feel smarter for reading them, but you also get the sense that he is always relentlessly driving toward some purpose. For as showy as these types of passages are, in your gut as a reader you read them and know that none of it is done for show. This is another way in which he’ll always be the epitome of a writer as pure artist. He was enacting the cliché we often evoke: he was writing because he had something to say.
No Country for Old Men is maybe the greatest crime thriller ever written—and as with any truly great genre novel it elevates above category until the question of literary or genre hardly matters (you won’t find it on any best-of crime lists). Usually writers in this upper-echelon of intellect and lyricism stick to that mode; they almost can’t help but bask in complexity and like the aforementioned David Foster Wallace, and others, they often eschew story—also known as plot—in the service of sentences that please them. But with some of his later masterpieces McCarthy showed that he could strip it all down if he wanted to, marry his prose with pure storytelling, and do it without losing any of his gravity. Of any book I’ve read, No Country still has the greatest sense of forward momentum—it’s a gem of tactile writing and how to put the physical world into language mixed with high level philosophy and storytelling that clicks into place with every word and page.
Whether he is speaking in a high register of biblically-infused prose or the low resister of tidy, declarative sentences, his writing always has the effect of enveloping and absorbing the reader in what he is trying to express. It's adjacent to feeling entertained, but much more active. The way he writes forces you to be an active participate in his writing, decoding, probing, and searching just like the characters and their author seem to be.
The Passenger, published late last year, was his final gift. A novel that may not be his quote-unquote best, but that contains a little piece of every talent he sometimes showed in more extreme or selective ways—those philosophical ambitious, biblical sentences, action and human survival broken into matter-of-fact brilliant simplicity, and, his perhaps underrated dialogue, every bit as powerful as his haunting descriptions of landscapes and violence. That he wrote this book in his 80s with every bit as much verve as his earliest novels is an astounding fact. Although we are saddened that no more of his transcendent books will suddenly appear like an oasis in a desert, we can respect his legacy by following the entire ethos he embodied with his public silence: we can still read his words on the page; they are what he had to say to us. He’s too good not to quote again, so I’ll leave you with one last passage from his final novel:
“Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night…
He washed his clothes in the dishpan and hung them to dry over the porch railing. Sometimes they’d blow away down the dunes. On sunny days he’d walk the beach naked. Solitary, silent. Lost. Nights he built fires on the beach and sat there wrapped in his blanket. The moon rose over the gulf and the moon’s path dished and tilted on the water. Birds flew down the beach in the dark. He didnt know what kind they were. He thought about the passenger but he never went back out to the islands. The fire leaned in the wind and seawater hissed in the burning wood. He watched it burn to coals. The embers glowed and faded and glowed and bits of fire hobbled away down the beach into the darkness. He knew that he should wonder what was to become of him.”
Back Matter: A Moby-Dick Update and Book Club Reminder
Editorial Assistant Book Club: A quick reminder that for the first Dear Head of Mine book club June pick—in which we read and think about an “Indie” contemporary piece of literature that isn’t on the bestseller list or picked by other big book club picks—we’re reading the novel The Guest by Emma Cline. I won’t say anything more than that it is a quick read if nothing else—it only took me two days. So at least I can guarantee a relatively low time commitment if you’d like to read along.
Editing Moby-Dick: I’m finally free of reading Moby-Dick every day but somehow, I’ve fittingly come up with a project to drag out my involvement with this classic even longer. I’m about halfway through “editing” and I can’t believe how long this book is all over again. But there are some fascinating results emerging from the reevaluation of Moby-Dick by getting in the weeds. If I’ve learned anything from this novel, it’s that whales take time.