Cormac McCarthy, 1933-2023

In Memoriam

Photograph from The New Yorker.

Yesterday, Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road and other novels died at age 89. His bibliography includes a dozen novels and two plays; he published his final two novels just last year.

I am no Cormac McCarthy expert and will leave an assessment of his career and legacy in much more qualified hands. Instead, I will devote the rest of this short post to a few personal reflections.

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Like most readers my age, I discovered McCarthy via The Road, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and received a feature film adaptation two years later. The tale of a father and son struggling to survive in post-apocalyptic America both hit me emotionally and opened up new possibilities in writing for me. In one scene, the unnamed protagonist pauses for a moment to look back at his son, imagining him as

some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

As I read this quote, I am again the twenty year-old college student reading it for the first time and marveling at how a few nouns can evoke not just a world but also a sense of it being dreamed or dimly remembered.

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The Road and the Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men led to me to that novel, of course, and to Blood Meridian and The Orchard Keeper in my college library. Throughout these books, I kept running into incredible unpunctuated run-on sentences, where clauses connected by ‘and’ after ‘and’ took on a breathless freight train momentum.

These sentences, as much as anything else I’ve ever read, pushed me to consider the rhythm of prose, the different ways in which sentences can flow, the way the three letters a-n-d, if repeated at the right interval, can create both a sense of overall forward progression - and at times even a sense of acceleration — and interesting juxtapositions between the various linked clauses. In other words, the aesthetic impact of sheer accumulation.

Consider the following sentence from Blood Meridian and how its bare catalogue of detail captures utter sensory overload:

And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again.

(In terms of violence and gore, this is a comparatively mild excerpt from the novel.)

If you ever read my own fiction, I’m sure that you’ll come across more than a few comma-less sentences attempting to emulate him. For both fiction and nonfiction, McCarthy’s example has made me more sensitive to the expressive power of sequences of events and of lists. That’s something I’ve kept with me.

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Dickensian, Kafkaesque, Wodehousian, Borgesian — sometimes an author creates a world so vivid that their name becomes shorthand for a constellation of settings, themes, stylistic choices with a pervasive atmosphere. If you compare a film or a novel to Cormac McCarthy, you’ve said (or suggested) quite a bit about it with just those two words: that it probably takes place in some version of the American west; that this wild west is probably a place of both slow, gothic decay and brutal, immediate violence; that this violence may be at times grimly, absurdly funny; that this world, if not explicitly post-apocalyptic, will at times feel post-apocalyptic; that the characters will travel through a bleak, sparse landscape on an ultimately futile question; that the overall flavor will be of despair in the face of inevitable violence.

That world and some of its inhabitants, especially Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh, will stay around for a long time.

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McCarthy was a novelist, a follower of Melville and Faulkner, whose long, dense, challenging books found readers — and inspired passionate praise, critique, parody and argument — in a culture that continues to sideline the novel in favor of more immediate electronic alternatives. I’m sure I’m not the only one who followed his roots back to Melville and Flannery O’Connor.

Probably the most quoted passage from McCarthy’s writing comes from near the end of The Road, where the father tells his son that “you have to carry the fire.” The son protests, claiming that he does not know how to, that the fire might not be real and, finally, that he does not know where it is. “Yes you do,” the father replies. “It's inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Here’s to an author who, as much as anyone else, carried the fire of the American novel through an increasingly inhospitable landscape.