A New York Times review of the novel, Suttree, opened with these words: “Cormac McCarthy knows how a poisoned rat died. `It was moving one rear leg in slow circles as if to music.’” Yeah, Ol’ Cormac makes you look at it.
Nobody much calls him McCarthy any more. It’s always Cormac or Ol’ Cormac, as in: “You know Cormac grew up here in Knoxville don’t you? He went to Catholic High.” And, “It wouldn’t surprise me if Ol’ Cormac was to win the Nobel Prize one day.” Or, “You know that pretty English dancer who used to run Annie’s Restaurant down in the Old City? That was Cormac’s wife.”
His friends, early fans and a coterie of literary scholars in the Cormac McCarthy Society tend to call themselves Cormackians. To them, he was a “great writer,” “literary genius” and “brilliant stylist” long before his breakthrough novel, All the Pretty Horses (Knopf) pranced on-stage in 1992. They could point to his many prizes, the rave reviews that greeted his previous books—those dark, enigmatic Appalachian novels. Still, most of those books were written in relative obscurity and were remaindered almost immediately.
With All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy achieved that marriage of popular success and critical acclaim that (you can bet the ranch, pardner) some writers would kill for. Critics compared the novel to Huckleberry Finn. They remarked on McCarthy’s handling of dialogue and character, and his edgy, florid descriptions of nature.
But a strange disquiet set in among some of McCarthy’s early devotees. Take his old friend, Leslie Garrett, who was dying of cancer when McCarthy’s most popular book appeared. Garrett, the author of two dark and sombre novels, The Beasts and In the Country of Desire, remarked, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.” It was not a compliment. For those who early on developed a taste for McCarthy’s more macabre literary fare, All the Pretty Horses was notable for what it lacked—the heart of darkness that beat all through his earlier works. The novel that won the 1993 National Book Award and spent months on the New York Times Best Sellers List demands less of the reader, emotionally and intellectually (save for translating the Spanish, hombre) than any of his other works.
The publication in 1994 of McCarthy’s play, The Stonemason (Ecco Press) and his sprawling novel, The Crossing (Knopf) seemed to crystallize a split in his body of work and in the literary establishment’s reaction to it. The Stonemason is a brief, complex drama in which McCarthy for the first time displays real human affection and character motivation. Oddly, it’s set among members of an afro-American family. The closet drama about a young man coming to terms with his largely absent father garnered little attention. (Read Entire Story Here.)
The Crossing was another matter. Some were ready to bestow the Nobel Prize on McCarthy for the sprawling, epic novel. In a splashy, front-page review in the June 12, 1994 New York Times Book Review, poet and scholar Robert Haas declared The Crossing “a miracle in prose.” He all but announced McCarthy’s arrival in the pantheon of great world writers, right up there with Shakespeare, Homer, Twain and authors of The Bible.
Others were put off by such lavish praise. Some reviewers were puzzled by the structure. The protagonist Billy Parham’s three journeys across Mexico in The Crossing seemed at least one too many considering that All the Pretty Horses contained two trips across Mexico and that McCarthy’s last novel before that, Blood Meridian (Random House, 1985), was about a journey on horseback through formerly Mexican-American territory, also by a teenaged boy.
McCarthy’s editor Gary Fisketjon reacted to the occasional bad press in a May 1995 interview.
“It’s axiomatic in publishing that the thrill of discovery is followed by backlash. But that book (The Crossing) is so great I didn’t give a shit what they said about it.”
Still, if what you know about Ol’ Cormac was gleaned from the so-called “Border Trilogy”—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain (1998)—stormy as they are—you likely have a rather more sunny view of the author than his complete body of work warrants. Those books after all, are lightened by a tone of nostalgia for the old west and Americana in general that is absent in the early books. (And if all you know of the man is what you read in the April 19, 1993 New York Times Magazine profile—McCarthy’s one interview of record—you don’t know much on that score either, my friend.)
The point is, many believe that all of McCarthy’s works worth reading arrived before his popular success.
I don’t subscribe to this view. There is something redemptive about All the Pretty Horses, as if, for the first time, the author acknowledges that spilt blood, far from meaningless, is the price we must pay for the privilege of living. (That spilt blood, in fact, is the price the universe pays for its very existence, Pilgrim).
This theme is stated with eloquence on page 282 of that first edition, in the following passage:
He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
Before All the Pretty Horses, Cormac offered scant testimony that existence was worth that cost. The change in attitude and tone was as clear as the change in cadence and substance. They added up to a demarcation in McCarthy’s work as pronounced as the Continental Divide. The new style owed as much to Hemingway and Malcolm Lowry as to Faulkner, the writer most often cited as McCarthy’s primary influence.
Some devotees of the early works find it maddening that those books should be overshadowed by the new, re-invented McCarthy. Their one hope is that, in his early seventies now, the still-trim, physically fit writer will yet come home to the earlier style and sensibility, because clearly there are more books to come. There is also the prospect that the early novels might become movies, in the tradition of All the Pretty Horses (2000, Billy Bob Thornton directing Matt Damon) or TV dramas, such as McCarthy’s teleplay for PBS, The Gardener’s Son (1977, Ned Beatty and Brad Dourif).
“At one point I was told the producers of Miami Vice would be filming Blood Meridian,” Fisketjon told me years back, referring to McCarthy’s first western. (But take that word western with a grain of desert sand and a stiff shot of whiskey if you plan on reading it, pardner. Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey never rode here).
Blood Meridian, stylistically and substantively, stands at the Great Divide in McCarthy’s body of work. It resembles in setting, terrain and gear, his more recent westerns. It’s tone, style and dark worldview are blood kin to McCarthy’s early black books set in Tennessee, books that a hit film could thrust from the shadows.
But then, talk of a movie has gone around for years. I remember during McCarthy’s lean days of 1990 hearing Jim Boruff, an old friend of his from college, suggest a McCarthy movie would be made comparing El Paso and Juarez with Sodom and Gomorrah—those decadent cities of the plain mentioned in the Good Book.
(Yesssssssss, then again …)
Rumors would rise like primordial ooze in a vast black sea of silence that lapped outward from McCarthy’s hideout at the time, a modest house on El Paso’s Coffin Street.
He could scarcely have chosen a street with a name better suited to his early reputation, and there are those who believe it was a calculated choice, much as his silence, they say, was an act of reverse psychology, nurtured to attract the curious. Ol’ Cormac, of course, wasn’t talking.
Time was you could depend on such silence. It was as constant a part of McCarthy’s mystique as his association with Albert Erskine, who once edited Faulkner and later plucked McCarthy’s first novel from a slush pile at Random House. He went on to edit each of McCarthy’s first five books. They all garnered wonderful reviews, gained for McCarthy the respect of such literary eminences as Saul Bellow, then quietly faded into the detritus.
McCarthy carried on in obscurity. When Erskine retired, McCarthy moved to Knopf and the afore-mentioned Fisketjon, whom Will Blythe, literary editor for Esquire at the time, referred to as “an editor with a feel for marketing.”
To outward appearances, that’s when everything changed. Esquire ran thirty pages from All the Pretty Horses, the book took off, and suddenly Ol’ Cormac was a hot topic.
If you don’t write it down it gets away forever. Most things get lost even if you do, but there’s always the chance that something will be remembered or otherwise preserved and passed along by someone who reads. When that happens, you’ve added to the grandeur and variety of the world.
For six months in 1993 I was regarded as something of an authority on McCarthy, thanks to a piece I had written for The Knoxville News-Sentinel (much of it contained in this article). I received phone calls from The London Telegraph, Atlantic Monthly and others trying to locate people I’d interviewed. Almost no one in mainstream publishing knew much about McCarthy. My News-Sentinel article was one of the most extensive pieces written about him until that time. That’s less a measure of my journalistic prowess than of McCarthy’s high regard for his privacy. None of his old friends quite believed it when he granted an interview to New York Times Magazine. But speaking practically, it was only one in a series of astute moves. For the first time in his life, Ol’ Cormac landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
At least one thing didn’t change. McCarthy continued to turn away from the acclaim. He was in Spain when he won his National Book Award. He really didn’t care for such notoriety, he wrote to Garrett, whose cancer clutched his throat in a death-grip at the time. It should have happened to you old friend, McCarthy wrote.
“It’s almost like superstition,” his brother Dennis once declared. “He’s afraid he’ll ruin whatever he has going. He tends to be Salinger-esque. I think there’s a lot to be said for pushing your books. But then, he’s been able to write all these years. I very much respect his sense of privacy. He just doesn’t want anything said about him.”
Doubtlessly McCarthy blushed at how Garrett described him to me then: “Cormac was a very, very handsome man. He’s a little grayer, but he’s still a good-looking man. I said once, `I don’t mind that you are a great writer and almost as intelligent as me, but God was very cruel when he made you so good looking.’ He’s a little vain.”
McCarthy’s distinguished good looks render him more recognizable than most famous people, and while he’s been known to show up unannounced, once in a blue moon, at local watering holes in Knoxville and converse with any fans who happen to be there the stir caused by such appearances serves only to dramatize his otherwise reclusive ways.
Close associates tend to say things like, “It isn’t snobbery. Cormac lets his books do the talking.”
Confront the books then. Tiptoe up to them. Poke them with a stick, for they bite. Rape, necrophilia, scalpings, beheadings, arson and incest are the enterprises lovingly portrayed in those early novels. The protagonists are mostly good old boys who love only their mothers. The settings are endless evocations of nature constantly devouring itself, and along with itself, those who lust and labor there. Each of the first three novels is bloodier and more relentlessly bleak, than its predecessor.
The Orchard Keeper (1965) recounts the violent feuding, whisky making and whoring of some East Tennessee mountain people in the early part of this century. Outer Dark (1968) chronicles the travels of a mountain woman whose brother has left a child—the product of their incest—in the wilderness to die. Child of God (1973) celebrates Lester Ballard, a man driven to kill young lovers and then copulate with the bodies in his underground lair.
Suttree (1979) recounts the comings and goings of a young man from a “good family” who has chosen to live an outcast existence among the derelicts on the waterfront in Knoxville. It too contains its share of spilt blood.
Maybe. Critics used to complain that McCarthy was derivative of Faulkner, but with each successive book the grounds for such criticisms have eroded. The truth is that in some ways McCarthy is Faulkner’s polar opposite. Faulkner was so close to his characters that at times it seemed he was speaking from their very larynxes. McCarthy, on the other hand, keeps his subjects at a distance that, with few exceptions, is galactic and cold. He observes them clinically, descriptively, almost empirically. As Blythe said of his work, “It’s almost told from the point-of-view of God, but it’s a God who absolutely doesn’t care what happens to human beings. McCarthy describes human behavior in much the same way that he talks about the animals in his stories.”
Could be. Yet McCarthy burst out of such categories with Blood Meridian, going beyond mere gothic-ism, mere naturalism, to conjure a feast of bloodletting in the American Southwest. (More than a feast, my friend, a very universe consigned to gore.) In its unrelenting bleakness, the novel surpasses anything McCarthy wrote before. Here is a more or less typical passage from Blood Meridian:
And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.
Trust me. I went easy on you. I could have quoted from the beheading scene. Blood Meridian describes a murder, on average, every five pages. There is a symbolic figure, sort of a prophet of carnage, in these pages. A big, hairless, super-intellectual albino known only as The Judge dances and declaims his way through this book, even unto… the end… but then, I won’t spoil it for you. Let’s just say the ending is so black, so utterly devoid of hope, that surely here is revealed the outer limits of McCarthy’s nihilism toward the world.
Best to think of something else, like, what kind of man…?
Frontier boys fleeing Tennessee would commonly tack notes to their cabin doors composed of three letters: “GTT.” It meant “Gone To Texas.” Cormac left more than that behind when he trucked down to El Paso by way of Colorado and Arizona in the late 1970s. He left his second wife, Annie Delisle, a pretty English dancer and singer. Delisle became a celebrity of Knoxville nightlife in 1983, after she opened Annie’s: A Very Special Restaurant in a gentrified section of town known as the Old City. Later she moved to Florida.
Cormac also left Suttree, a novel set squarely in Knoxville. It did for McCarthy what A Death in the Family did for Knoxville’s other famous writer of Irish descent, James Agee. It made him a local legend. Unlike Agee, who actually spent very little time in Knoxville, McCarthy knew the city intimately. Also unlike Agee, who shrouded the city in misty impressions, McCarthy cataloged it relentlessly, chronicling its back-alley decadence, its fecal decay, its malodorous mania. The terrain of Suttree is replete with rotted fish, used comdoms, raw sewage and blood bucket taverns.
Yet, the story, set in 1951, is compelling, the characters sympathetic if not exactly appealing. More than any other denizen of McCarthy’s world, the title character is his alter ego. Like many another figure you find in Southern literature, Suttree is a young man who has lost faith in family, tradition, formal education and old time religion. Aimlessly, he wanders a decaying terrain. He lives on a houseboat in the filthy Tennessee River near First Creek and survives by fishing for carp and catfish. Yet the characters surrounding him breathe life into the book.
There is the country sheriff who sees Suttree’s life as an indictment of modern, atheistic education. As he tells Suttree: “I will say one thing; you’ve opened my eyes. I’ve got two daughters, oldest fourteen, and I’d see them both in hell fore I’d send them up to that university.”
Then there is the mountain boy arrested early on for his… um, amorous attentions to watermelons. When Suttree asks him about the charge, the following exchange takes place:
“Harrogate grinned uneasily. They tried to get me for beast, beast….”
“Yeah, but my lawyer told ‘em a watermelon wasn’t no beast. He was a smart son of a bitch.”
Still, it’s Suttree himself, wandering lost among fallen people in a fallen world that is most compelling. Reading Suttree, you sense that, for once, you glimpse the author.
For McCarthy also walked the streets of Knoxville, “this city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad.” The details are too rich, the language too true for McCarthy not to have known intimately the people and places of which he sings.
The houses in which he grew up, along with five siblings, still stand. The McCarthys lived in an unassuming home, but in an affluent section of Knoxville known as Sequoyah Hills, where Cormac was brought from Providence, R.I., by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. McCarthy, in 1937, when he was four.
Later they moved about 10 miles away to Martin Mill Pike, a sinuous drive into the leafy countryside of South Knox County. When I saw it, the white, gabled structure was choked with weeds and debris, but once it was structurally sound and dignified.
“Cormac ran all these forests and hills,” Annie Delisle said in her singing English accent as she drove past the house on a summer’s day years ago. “He used to put his traps out here; he trapped muskrats and things.”
McCarthy left home in the late 1950s. He attended the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. Evidently he had some sort of falling out with his father, top legal counsel for TVA. The elder McCarthy was in the air so much that he was one of only four Knoxvillians in Trans World Airline’s Million Mile Club at the time. A symptom of the rift may have been McCarthy’s name-change. Christened Charles McCarthy, like his father, McCarthy changed it to Cormac because, according to Garrett, he didn’t like associations with one Charlie McCarthy, the famous wooden dummy that played comedian to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s straight man. While the motivation to change his name appears obvious enough now, one can see how an already estranged father might have taken the act as a personal affront.
Perhaps the name he chose hints at his own sense of destiny. Cormac is taken from the name of the ancient Irish hero who built the Blarney Castle.
At any rate, the record shows that McCarthy joined the Air Force in 1953 for four years, two of them in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. After mustering out, he visited San Francisco, checking out the haunts of famous Beat writers of the day, according to friends, then returned to UT, 1957-59, where he published two stories, “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan,” in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix .
McCarthy left the university again, this time for good, to finish The Orchard Keeper, while working as an auto mechanic in Chicago, according a short biographical sketch on the Cormac McCarthy Society website, www.cormacmccarthy.com, by Marty Priola. At some point he married Lee Holleman, a former UT student. The couple lived for a time in Sevier County, Tennessee. They had one son, Lee McCarthy, now the author of several books of poetry.
That marriage soon ended, however, and McCarthy lived the single life again, running with a fast crowd according to old friends, who, well, made up that fast crowd. Drug use, drunken binges and sexual escapades were common among the bohemian youth of the time. Often, to escape distraction, McCarthy would take road trips or put up in a local motel or stay in the cabin of friends in the nearby Smoky Mountains. There he would write, bolstered by the William Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.
Gary Goodman, a former classmate, used to visit the hideaway where McCarthy lived for a time while working on his second book, Outer Dark.
“We’re climbing around, up this beautiful mountain,” remembered Goodman. “We get up on top, the two of us, looking around. We found these big old boulders, massive, 500 to 1,000 pounds. We got to rolling them down the side of the mountain, out there crazy, laughing, knocking down trees five and six inches in diameter. I remember we rolled over a stone once and there was a scorpion.”
Cormac might have milked the episode for five pages of abstruse and violent prose.
Yet McCarthy is a gentle man, from all accounts.
“Everybody I know admires him,” said Delisle. “The man is very disciplined and dedicated to his work, and that’s admirable in anybody, isn’t it?”
Delisle swathed her memories in tenderness, when she recalled her times with Cormac. “It was a romance, it was a wonderful romance,” she said in a throaty, lilting English accent. She was 24 and performing on a luxury passenger ship, the Sylvania, when she met McCarthy. He was in his mid-30’s, flush with money from his Faulkner Prize and bound for Ireland.
“We met the first night out to sea. He was dancing with a beautiful blonde. We saw each other across the ballroom and fell madly in love. We spent the whole trip together. We used to stay up all night watching the moon on the sea. He was going to Ireland, where his ancestors were from.
“I had been traveling. A friend and I had a `sister act,’ and we sang and danced and traveled all over the world. Cormac sort of followed us around. We were married in England in an old Norman church built in 1100 in Hamble, Hampshire.
“The quality that Cormac loved in me at that time was that I was childlike, naive in many things, just so happy to share. He was kind of a teacher. We bought an old XK-120 Jaguar with no roof on it, and he fixed it all up in Paris and we drove it through Geneva and all the way around through Italy and down the south coast of France to Barcelona.” Eventually the pair were lured to Ibiza, the bohemian island enclave off the coast of Spain.
“Ibiza was all writers and musicians, and I think it was like people were trying to recapture a feeling of 1920s Paris with Hemingway and all that stuff. It never quite made it, but still it was an exciting time.”
Garrett was there, fresh from his own literary success, having won the Maxwell Perkins Award for his first novel, The Beasts.
“We were both young literary lions, circling each other, claws extended. Within five minutes I knew that I had met a future friend. He and Annie and I were The Three Musketeers. We did a lot of carousing, a lot of champagne. Cormac doesn’t drink now.”
Garrett continued to drink and smoke and take pills for years, and while he was swirling down into a pit of depression, drug dependency, and writer’s block, McCarthy returned to Tennessee with his bride. There he finished Child of God.
He also returned to an unwieldy manuscript that would become Suttree. Already he had spent many years on it. In their modest homes, Cormac would compose all day, sometimes while lying in bed. DeLisle would type up the pages.
Suttree was distilled from a manuscript that numbered nearly 2,000 pages, said DeLisle. It was a curious introduction to the new land she had chosen to live in.
“I was still young and this was the other side of the world to me,” she recalled. “He had five brothers and sisters and lots of nieces and nephews who were especially kind to me. We lived in Rockford in a little house for $50 a month, a little pig farm, just out-rage-ous.
“He didn’t carry insurance. He was such a rebel that he didn’t live the same kind of life anybody else on earth lived. He knew everything that was going on. We did everything there was to do in life,” she said mysteriously.
Later they made a home from an upgraded barn on thirty acres near Knoxville, where they lived for most of the 70s. A photo album tells some of the story. There is a picture of DeLisle, pretty, petite, dancing in the studio she operated for local dancers. There is a photo of McCarthy holding a copperhead snake in one hand and the pistol he shot it with in the other.
“He caught that under the lawn mower one day and he shot it and skinned it for me and I kept it, so you can imagine it was quite an eye-opener.”
There is a picture of a stone chimney, another of a little stone room.
“He did every bit of that work himself. All the rocks that you see, we used to pick them up on the side of the road and from the fields. He got wood that he had cut, kiln-dried at a lumber mill in Townsend.”
McCarthy was working on Suttree for most of those years, and living off grants. There was never enough money and no children, something DeLisle regrets.
There were hints that McCarthy was prepared to break out of his obscurity. He had been working on The Gardener’s Son, a drama similar to The Stone Mason, in that chronicles fraternal and paternal conflicts steeped in oedipal overtones.
During the shooting, McCarthy enjoyed the company of another woman, and a permanent split with DeLisle seemed inevitable. Still, when it came, DeLisle was crushed.
“We were together eight or nine years, completely together, then not together. I’ve sat and thought and thought for hours. Some strange things had happened, then just—one New Year’s Eve, it must have been ‘76—he said `Well, I’m going.’
“For a month he was packing the truck, and it was standing outside the door and he was packing things into it, and for a month I was crazy. I could not believe that was happening. He took me out for my birthday. We went to The Orangery (an upscale restaurant) and we had a wonderful dinner. The next day he got up and got into his little `U-Haul-It’ and took off and I took off after him, then turned off and went to Lexington, Kentucky, for a few weeks.
“I guess I just never believed it would happen. It’s like when somebody dies, the only time you realize it has happened is when you’re throwing the earth over the coffin.”
That word again.
On some level, McCarthy is death-obsessed. Yet Garrett defended McCarthy’s fascination with the morbid.
“Lester Ballard (the necrophiliac in Child of’God) is one of the most contemptible human beings in all of American literature. What a remarkable thing. This man is detestable and yet he is a child of God and therefore the more to be pitied. When it comes to the truth about our place on earth and who we are and what we are, I would look to Cormac before I would, say, Rod McKuen. The fact that his vision is dark, so what? Life isn’t a picnic.”
At times, however, it was, even for a writer with McCarthy’s dark visions.
“After he would write, he would say, Well, it’s cocktail time,” recalled DeLisle. “Then he’d take a shower as if washing all that stuff out of his hair. We’d light a candle, have a nice dinner, we’d talk and laugh. Those were the best of times, the most exquisite times, the times when everything was right with the world.”
Both Garrett and DeLisle label McCarthy a chameleon. “On the one hand he was sophisticated,” she said. “He loved the niceties of life, but he would live on the levels that people would understand. He would sit by the old pot-bellied stove, spit and chew tobacco. That’s how he lived.”
Doubtlessly it was around such stoves that he garnered much of the grist for his literary mill.
Lately the chameleon has displayed softer hues. The question is, which colors will be showing when McCarthy’s long-awaited ninth novel is complete? Some look for a darker, more gritty read, as if Ol’ Cormac were baiting a trap. In McCarthy’s world, a bloody maw awaits the unwary. (Welcome to the sunny Southwest… Dear Friend…)
But that’s not the way I see it.
For McCarthy lives and works near the end of a trail that can be followed by the attentive scout. The spoor starts in Tennessee, embraces and rejects the world at once, heads west into hell, crosses the Great Divide, to emerge in a landscape of solace if not hope. Friends say he can often be seen at social gatherings in El Paso, Santa Fe, Knoxville and abroad.
McCarthy married his third wife, Jennifer, about the time Cities of the Plain saw print. They have one child. The McCarthys moved from El Paso to Santa Fe, where he’s at work on his next novel, due within the next year from Knopf.
If name is more than metaphor, and something lies buried on El Paso’s Coffin Street, it could be the corpse of the author’s most nihilistic visions. Washed in the mystic blood of his own complex mythos, McCarthy writes his way toward redemption. He rides the pretty words of resounding language into the blood-stained skies of a setting sun.
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