Cormac McCarthy famously hated the novels of Marcel Proust—too many opera gloves, too many perfumed drapes, not enough elemental struggle with the forces of life and death—which makes it thorny to write McCarthy’s obituary. How do you compose a mournful remembrance for someone who scorned the whole notion of mournful remembrance? McCarthy died on Tuesday, at the age of 89, of natural causes at his home in New Mexico, and ever since I heard the news I’ve been trying to think of a way to frame his life without seeming to ignore everything he valued in it. Should we call him, as so many others have, one of the finest American writers of his generation? Sure, but McCarthy himself didn’t think of writing as some kind of deep personal vocation. Ranking his interests for The New York Times Magazine in 1992, he said writing was “way, way down at the bottom of the list.” Should we lament that he never won the Nobel Prize? Well, we could, but McCarthy himself was by all appearances utterly indifferent to literary culture and its marketplace of prestige. He avoided New York. He avoided other writers. He preferred thinking about math. He preferred hanging out with scientists.
Which leaves us with the Proustian option—recounting his life story, recovering his memory from time. But McCarthy’s 12 novels largely depict time as an obliterating force, human life as a momentary spark in an anonymous abyss. The vivid sense impressions that order our inner lives in Proust’s writing are, in McCarthy’s, often the violent incursions of an external reality that is always about to destroy us. Everything exists in a perpetual present; every moment is charged with the possibility of death. The blank sky looms over the rocks. The rocks loom over the plains. The bones of a horse lie in the dried-out riverbed, where a cautious trickle of water noses forward like a line of ants. The men on horseback come out of the pines and shoot us dead. Now we are dead, and the riverbed, the pines, the rocks, and the eagle turning in slow circles matter precisely as much, and in precisely the same way, as our lifeless bodies.
“The total immanence of the created world.” That’s what a friend of mine called the object of McCarthy’s vision. It was 2005 or 2006. We were sitting in a Friendly’s in North Haven, Connecticut, talking about Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, the 1985 novel that’s sometimes considered McCarthy’s masterwork. My friend, who was serious and religious, was trying to explain the Christian theology he could detect in McCarthy’s novel. I, a light-minded person, temperamentally casual about the problem of total immanence, was trying unsuccessfully to drink an Oreo milkshake through a straw. My friend said, “He’ll write 10 pages describing the landscape and then some act of horrific violence will come out of nowhere and he’ll cover it in one short paragraph. And then he’ll go back to describing the landscape, and the whole time the tone will stay exactly the same, the tone won’t change at all, because if God created the world, then everything in the world is equally suffused with God’s presence. A headless corpse is as much an aspect of God as a cloudburst or a sleeping child.”
I realized at this moment that I was going to have to switch to a spoon. I fumbled with the plastic wrapper. My friend said, “It brings the paradox of faith to this unbelievably intense crisis point. The absolute indifference of the universe is a sign of the absolute fullness of God’s presence.”
McCarthy was born in 1933—not a mournful remembrance, just a fact, a data point, unsentimental—to an Irish Catholic family in Providence, Rhode Island. He grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he went to Catholic school and served as an altar boy. He was a poor student, bored by books but obsessively interested in everything else. He studied physics and engineering at the University of Tennessee. He dropped out to join the Air Force, which sent him to Alaska, where he discovered he was interested in books after all. He started writing. He came home and published stories. He got married. He got divorced, reportedly because his wife declined to support him financially while he wrote his books. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, came out in 1965 while he was working in an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago. His second, Outer Dark, written in Ibiza on a Rockefeller grant, followed in 1968.
Critics liked his work. No one bought it. For decades, he didn’t have an agent. What would have been the point? The sums were too small. He lived on grant money (he won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1981) in tiny houses, in out-of-the-way southern and western towns. He was nearly 60 before he wrote a book that sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies. In the ’90s he wrote his Border Trilogy—All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)—about two young cowboys on the U.S.-Mexico border, which gave him his first popular success. From then on, his career climbed steadily, though success and failure are equally meaningless under the uncaring glare of the sky. The Coen brothers turned No Country for Old Men, his 2005 novel about an aging sheriff tracking a sadistic killer, into an Oscar-winning movie. In 2008 he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road, about a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. He didn’t turn up to accept the award in person. He did not particularly appear to give a shit when the cognoscenti started including him in the Nobel conversation. He stayed out west, in New Mexico, where he worked on philosophical and linguistic problems at the Santa Fe Institute. Occasionally he published a slim novel that arrived as if from nowhere, a stern visitation from a separate literary dimension. The last two, the twin volumes of The Passenger and Stella Maris, arrived late last year.
If I’ve given you the impression that McCarthy’s novels are arid, they’re not. They’re full of human feeling; they’re often very moving. I’m thinking of the sheriff confronting his fear of a changing world in No Country for Old Men (possibly the closest McCarthy ever gets to mournful remembrance) and of the father’s love for his son in The Road (possibly the closest he ever gets to sentimentality). But none of the novels are built, as most novels are—even grim, violent, challenging novels—to serve human feeling. Emotions are fragile byproducts in McCarthy’s world. They influence events only weakly. They may be wholly meaningless. In his life, McCarthy seemed to wear his own biography lightly, rarely giving interviews, rarely seeming interested in the task of shaping his story into a narrative. His novels, inevitably, are more interested in shaping narratives, but they can seem similarly uninterested in the aspects of narrative that we normally associate with the pleasures of fiction. We come to books to be moved, to make sense of the world, and to see ourselves in other people, but in McCarthy’s stories, these things seem to happen only incidentally and unpredictably. It’s of no real consequence whether they happen or not. The real aim is always to put us in contact with the rock on the horizon, something colder, clearer, truer, more absolute, more remote, and more unforgiving than the consolations of the Victorians (the secret will turn up in the last chapter; the orphans become millionaires) or the modernists’ existential quests (drinking and suffering let me forge my own individual soul). I sometimes read McCarthy and think, “What does it matter if I am put into contact with the hard, cold, true, absolute, remote, and unforgiving core of things, if its only value to me is personal and all personal value is insignificant and doomed?” But then, I am at best a semi-serious reader, as well as a person who tries to drink milkshakes through a straw.
Here, though, we encounter a characteristic McCarthy paradox. Because while his eye always seemed fixed on something higher and farther off than mere readerly satisfaction, he was also deeply drawn to genres that conventionally prize readerly satisfaction above all else. Most of his work sticks closely to the forms of masculine adventure novels: Westerns (the Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian), crime stories (No Country for Old Men), survival fiction (The Road). He professed disdain for writers who didn’t deal directly with life and death, but his determination to explore the extremes of human experience also had something curiously boyish about it, something maybe a little immature. He saw the extremes of human experience in Hollywood terms. He loved cowboys and gunfights and chases. The Road, which is full of horror tropes, exhibits a fascination with apocalyptic death cults that wouldn’t be out of place in a George Miller movie. It sounds very stark and serious to say that only life-and-death stories are worth telling, but doesn’t it also risk being a little superficial? After all, there are many human beings who are not currently on the run after stealing a suitcase full of money from a failed drug deal. Those people may also feel that their problems are worth the attention of storytellers, even if no one is shooting at them.
I’ve somehow made it this far without talking about McCarthy’s legendary prose style. But it’s the style that ultimately fuses his contradictions into something singular and majestic. He was simply a masterful prose stylist, arguably the last surviving heir of what you could call the Old Testament-Melville-Faulkner strain of American writing. (His great contemporary Toni Morrison also worked in that strain, to a degree; other contemporaries, like Joan Didion, exemplified the New Testament-Twain-Hemingway strain that now seems most at home in journalism.) The early novels are written in long, fevered, brilliantly arcane sentences that drive many people, including me at times, batty. The New Yorker critic James Wood has called Blood Meridian “overheated,” which is actually a mild way of describing Blood Meridian. I have a setting on my stove called Turbo Boil; Blood Meridian is what would happen if you cooked Absalom, Absalom! on it.
I can’t find a more exemplary early McCarthy phrase than the one Wood quotes: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” I kind of love this image, but mostly because I recently read a book about the history of alchemy and thus know what an “alcahest” is. And this is kind of the point: Reading early McCarthy, you are never safe; you are always likely to need some fabulously obscure piece of knowledge or abstruse vocabulary just to survive to the next comma. The sentences are full of trap doors, always threatening to dump you screaming into the void, never grieving when they do.
The style got leaner as McCarthy got older. By the time of No Country for Old Men, it’s sanded down to bare wood. No quotation marks (McCarthy was years ahead of the Sally Rooney curve on this score). Barely any punctuation. Sentences either short and plain or polysyndetic, strung along a chain of “ands”: “He turned and put his wrist to the door lock and shot out the lock cylinder with the cobalt steel plunger of the cattle gun and opened the door and went in and shut the door behind him.” This spare and unsparing later mode, poised midway between the Biblical and the quotidian, seemed to suit the image of McCarthy that sprang up, with no encouragement from him, in his last years—an image that turned him into a kind of Old Man of the Mountain, a far-seeing outsider charged with a forbidding and perhaps alien wisdom.
The late style was the voice of a writer who’d been to the far end of language, who’d gazed upon all the words there are (alcahest, sidereal, pauldron, vestiture, anchorite) and came back changed. In 1985, McCarthy’s depictions of violence sounded like this, a description of a Comanche attack in Blood Meridian:
all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Twenty years later, the vaguely mystical, Blakean, incantatory tone has been reduced to an essence of pure action:
Moss felt something tug at the bag over his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didn’t feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot.
Both these moments (the second is from No Country for Old Men) could easily have been taken from conventional scenes in the kinds of movies a boy of McCarthy’s age might have gone to see as a child. But no one could mistake prose like this for conventional genre writing. The degree of difficulty required to take this Boys’ Own adventure milieu and turn it into a profound investigation of humanity’s place in the universe is frankly absurd; McCarthy did it again and again and again.
It’s hard for me to believe he won’t write any more books, though my saying so might only serve to prove that I didn’t read him closely enough. The other question I wanted to ask was what will become of American fiction now that he and Toni Morrison are dead. Where will we find another novelist capable of rendering the violence and beauty and strangeness of this country from the cosmic bedrock up? But this, too, is a question that I suspect would have left McCarthy indifferent.
