The end of the age of the novel is a somewhat sobering time for those of us who grew up with novels, not quite realizing as young men that the novel was over, nor prepared to see the last important novelists disappear. Last week, Cormac McCarthy died. I wrote some of my thoughts on his life & times, starting with an obit for the Washington Free Beacon:
Cormac McCarthy was almost 60 when he became famous for All The Pretty Horses. It won him the National Book Award in 1992 after some 30 years of publishing novels. He died almost an ancient man, at 89, this week, having recently published a pair of novels, The Passenger & Stella Maris, his first in 16 years. Everyone thinks he spent all those silent years being Cormac, somewhere in the Southwestern desert, but none of us know what that means because he was a private man. He knew that people may like to read his prose, enjoy the heartbreak, even terror, & the beautiful sentences, but that no one would want to live like him or consider things the way he did. The age of the novelist is long past. There are no great public funerals or occasions of state. It's an important quality in a writer, an absence of sentimentality.
McCarthy was born in 1933, grew up during the Depression, in Tennessee, spent his 20s more or less hoboing around America, with stints in college, the Air Force, any number of jobs, always poor, but apparently never in jail. Eventually, he became a writer whose novels received good reviews, but only a few thousand people bought them, & he made do with the occasional grant or scholarship. Misery, the South, & the secretly Southern heart that beats in the Western American man became his themes.
Fame may have been good for McCarthy: He wrote 7 of his 12 novels in the last third of his life, as well as some screenplays & plays. Eventually, he achieved everything a novelist now can achieve: His post-apocalyptic father & son horror-picaresque The Road (2006) won him the Pulitzer Prize & some others—Oprah selected it for her book club & sold about 1.5 million paperbacks; it was already a bestseller before that, having sold about a tenth of those numbers in hardcover, & then it was adapted to the screen in 2009. On the other hand, No Country for Old Men (2005), less of a success, was filmed by the Coen Bros. in 2007 & won Best Picture, becoming part of the pop culture.
But it is not enough to send off a writer, it’s also important to think back, so I reviewed McCarthy’s No country for old men for Law & Liberty:
Of course, the nation does not mourn novelists & only a very small number of our notable artists are celebrities. But McCarthy has more claim to be remembered, because his 2005 novel, No Country For Old Men, was adapted in 2007 by the Coen Brothers, & won the Best Picture Award, along with three other Oscars, & grossed more than $160 million worldwide, as well as more than $50 million in discs alone. It’s a remarkable movie people are likely to watch & remember, because it forces them to think about evil. We turn to the movies to adjudicate popularity, & in this case, a prestigious artist became part of the pop culture with a Western, of all things.
McCarthy wanted his readers, perhaps Americans in general, to face up to their curiosity about those rare moments when middle-class life is suspended, or perhaps transcended; we sometimes call them do-or-die moments, but I guess most of the men we admire are those who do something noble & thereby come to their deaths. We don’t know that we’re worthy of sacrifice, & McCarthy does not push his artistic talent in that direction, but he forces us to face up to our noble aspirations by showing us the fascination & repugnance of evil men & evil deeds, & therefore what it would take for us to face them down. Reading & thinking about his novels is a fitting way to remember a man who wanted to investigate seriously the origin of our beliefs.
Finally, I reviewed his latest novel, The Passenger, for a RealClearBooks symposium:
American novelists in the 20th century used to be celebrities &, perhaps, men: Hemingway, certainly Faulkner. Now, they might as well not exist, in a situation that might be worse than the 19th c. one that led Melville to die drunk & forgotten or Henry James to escape to England. We suffer from a kind of feminism, driven by the pantheistic spirituality of our times, & a very ignorant moralism about ethnic minorities, pushed by women who can’t handle these decadent times.
It’s against this background that Cormac McCarthy’s work makes sense. He’s not just a novelist, or a chronicler of American decline, but an alternative to the times. He brings back rugged individualism, once the American dream, &, since this is a second look at that former strength, he tests the connection between American freedom & nihilism, as well as the deeper question that comes out of our love of stories, of drama, of conflict, our longing for beauty seen in staring at the ugliness he conjures up in his stories of America’s past and future, Western & sci-fi, the all-American concerns—do the upright people twisted by the times long for God? Did we have to end up this way? Are we fated?
If you’d like to read some more about McCarthy, Luke Sheehan at the University Bookman has published a symposium! Also, over at IM, Lafayette Lee calls McCarthy America’s prophet. Here are a few quotes from his essay, starting with this important insight — cultural patronage used to work better & worked to amazing results in this case:
He was bouncing between motel rooms in 1981, when he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship—a crucial lifeline, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Saul Bellow & Shelby Foote. The “genius grant” gave McCarthy a reprieve from shacks, barns, & motel rooms & provided him with a small stone house in El Paso. In this “barely habitable” dwelling, surrounded by dust & clutter, McCarthy commenced to write his magnum opus, Blood Meridian.
After passing through a ghostly Southern underworld, where Faulkner was his Virgil, McCarthy settles into his own voice. Everything after his first four novels is clean & crisp, like a canyon wind that sears your throat. The language is elegant & the prose often Biblical. The dialogue is taut like a bowstring but sometimes unravels into sinuous monologues that probe life’s deepest questions. The descriptions of the landscape, its flora & fauna, & the heavenly bodies that spin far above are magnificent & invoke the divine. & the scenery provides comfort & relief from the nauseating violence that erupts on almost every page.
Blood Meridian rejects the nostalgia that torments Southern literature. Once again, the protagonist is unburdened by the past. He is “the Kid,” a nameless nobody, displaced but not really dispossessed—for he has no inheritance nor memory to speak of. In his exile from nothing he joins a band of scalpers, & together they sweep across a vast expanse like a thundering storm. The mysterious land & its exquisite features pretend to hold answers to great questions, & we are tempted to believe they might just reveal the Kid’s destiny. But the deeper the wretched band penetrates this almost infinite space, the more alien the world becomes, so boundless & incomprehensible. & even as the heavens appear ready to offer up a revelation or a drop of transcendence, we are always left wanting. The promise of violence is all that remains—that & death. In this state we are all rendered fools, our utopian aspirations collapse, & the religion of progress becomes nothing more than devilish joke.
Thanks so much for this. I have only read The Road. I saw the movie No Country for Old M’en and absolutely hated it, but I was much younger then. No idea if I would receive it better now and I probably won’t find out. The Road crushed my soul. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, but I literally couldn’t stop once I started. It hurt me more than any other book I’ve read. I know why, but I’m not sharing that -- at least not here. I read it a few years ago and just writing this comment about it has got my nose burning and my eyes welling up. Enough of that nonsense.
I like this -> “We suffer from a kind of feminism, driven by the pantheistic spirituality of our times, & a very ignorant moralism about ethnic minorities, pushed by women who can’t handle these decadent times.” -- because it’s true.