It’s late, & the last few weeks have been long, my family driving back & forth between Florida & Tennessee & Indiana. Along the way we’ve encountered unusually heavy thunderstorms in Florida, an infernal heatwave in Tennessee, & lingering smoke from the Canadian wildfires in northern Indiana. Apocalyptic.
One of my family’s patriarchs has passed on over to the next kingdom. Lung cancer. He had smoked heavily all his life & had severe COPD. We all found out he had cancer at the beginning of the year, & he degraded fast. But he was a tough man. A hard man, too. The reason my family is not beset with poverty & addictions. At the end, he quit chemo & sat at home with his wife, quietly, waiting for death to come for him, facing it head-on.
I’ve been thinking with gratitude, maybe even awe, about this good man, & I’ve been reading The Divine Comedy again. &, of course, I’ve been thinking about the passing, a couple weeks ago, of another manly man of the same generation: Cormac McCarthy. Then, all these things from the last few weeks come swirling together. The apocalyptic environment, the travel back & forth, my family’s brave patriarch, & Dante. & I think about how McCarthy put together these sorts of facts into a vision of what America was until the mid-century.
I think McCarthy wrote for my sake. I see two manly men from a different generation. Now, we call them Stoic, or better yet, sober. America will not see their likes again & those of us who know it cannot but judge & fear. These men stand out in the generation that made the world we have today, the good & the bad are both their work, our inheritance. But since my thoughts come after a funeral, it’s proper to say the beautiful things. My family’s patriarch brought us a prosperity & security, & shaped our characters. McCarthy was the last important American novelist, one of the last poets—the storytellers, the makers of the images in which we see ourselves & our America. Both faced the troubles they saw with their shoulders set & their faces stern.
Reading McCarthy this week, I’m struck by something I rarely see people discussing: He read Dante. Some writers compared McCarthy’s most popular novel, The Road, to Dante’s most famous canticle, Inferno. But this week I’m thinking about McCarthy alongside Purgatorio instead, & I think I see more clearly McCarthy’s major themes & I understand his characters more intimately. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell offers his final monologue:
I had two dreams about [my father] after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewhere & he give me some money & I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times & I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold & there was snow on the ground & he rode past me & kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past & he had this blanket wrapped around him & he had his head down & when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do & I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. & in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead & that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark & all that cold & I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. & then I woke up.
Now, I’m immediately thinking of one of my favorite parts in all of The Divine Comedy, when Dante & Virgil meet the Roman poet Statius, in Purgatorio cantos 21 & 22. Dante is led through hell by the most famous Roman poet, Virgil, who lived in the 1st c. B.C., & then through Purgatory until, at the end of Purgatorio, Dante meets Beatrice, partially an allegory for Christ, among other sacred things. On the journey through Purgatory, they meet Statius, a poet of the 1st c. A.D. Dante claims Statius converted to Christianity before he died. When he realizes it is Virgil with Dante, he thanks him & waxes eloquent about how, though Virgil was not a Christian, he laid the way for Christianity in Statius’s heart. Statius says Virgil walked through the dark night carrying the fire for a light which Virgil would light ahead but never benefit from himself, rather he was going ahead of the others, lighting a fire to teach those who would follow him & have the knowledge of Christ.
From Purgatorio canto 22, Longfellow’s translation:
Thus Virgilius began… “Now when thou sangest the relentless weapons Of the twofold affliction of Jocasta,” The singer of the Songs Bucolic said, “From that which Clio there with thee preludes, It does not seem that yet had made thee faithful That faith without which no good works suffice. If this be so, what candles or what sun Scattered thy darkness so that thou didst trim Thy sails behind the Fisherman thereafter?” And [Statius] to him: “Thou first directedst me Towards Parnassus, in its grots to drink, And first concerning God didst me enlighten. Thou didst as he who walketh in the night, Who bears his light behind, which helps him not, But wary makes the persons after him, When thou didst say: ‘The age renews itself, Justice returns, and man’s primeval time, And a new progeny descends from heaven.’ Through thee I Poet was, through thee a Christian; But that thou better see what I design, To colour it will I extend my hand. Already was the world in every part Pregnant with the true creed, disseminated By messengers of the eternal kingdom; And thy assertion, spoken of above, With the new preachers was in unison; Whence I to visit them the custom took. Then they became so holy in my sight, That, when Domitian persecuted them, Not without tears of mine were their laments; And all the while that I on earth remained, Them I befriended, and their upright customs Made me disparage all the other sects. And ere I led the Greeks unto the rivers Of Thebes, in poetry, I was baptized, But out of fear was covertly a Christian, For a long time professing paganism; And this lukewarmness caused me the fourth circle To circuit round more than four centuries. Thou, therefore ... raised the covering That hid from me whatever good I speak of.”
This is how I think of McCarthy’s Sheriff Bell—this is how Tommy Lee Jones delivered that final monologue in the Coen Bros. film. I think the sheriff is leaving behind the suffering of his old age—I fear there is apathy & cynicism growing in him, to judge by his monologues, which open every chapter of the novel—I think he sees something selfish in apathy & instead regains some hope. I think he means to go forward toward the fire his father went ahead to make & leave light for those behind him too. If they will follow it.
Cormac McCarthy’s novels are very harsh, but they are not nihilistic, as some people have supposed, confusing ugliness & suffering for hell. They are, however, realistic about the situation we are in. Why would he end No Country for Old Men with such an image if he did not hold onto some hope?
Writers like McCarthy & men like my family’s patriarch were harsh, not like the nice people today, but they faced their situations like men should & we do not. So we should look to their examples, to the fires they have gone on ahead of us to light. We should say to them, in our memories, “You went ahead by night, carrying a lamp behind you, maybe of no help to yourself but lighting the way for those of us who would follow you.” We should go out into the dark, seek the fire they have fixed for us out there.
Thank you for your beautiful tribute to my grandfather. ❤️
This was worth reading - thank you.