Discussed in this essay:

Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, by Tracy Daugherty. St. Martin’s Press. 528 pages. $35.

The novels of Cormac McCarthy stand out in American literature like a mountain range, not only for their eminence but their solitariness and inhospitality. What contemporaries staked out adjacent terrain? And what younger writers could follow McCarthy to such majestic, desolate ground? During the late Sixties and the Seventies, when metafictional and postmodern colleagues produced collagelike stories or simulacra of historical novels that cast doubt on the very possibility that language could adequately represent the world, McCarthy seemed possessed instead by a sort of holy naïveté, never doubting that words could be a fit for things. During the Eighties, notable in American letters for plainspoken “dirty realism” about present-day life, McCarthy put out Blood Meridian, a novel of the mid-nineteenth century U.S.-Mexico borderlands and one of the more baroque creations in the language. Come the Nineties, DeLillo and Pynchon continued to deliver paranoid and playful social anatomies like those that had influenced a younger generation of writers then coming into their prime. McCarthy, for his part, hardly tips the brim of his hat in the direction of postwar capitalism as it parts the saloon doors.

The jagged sierra of McCarthy’s work created its own weather, that’s to say. Pessimistic, somber, and unironic in attitude, not to mention largely devoid of sex, TV, and even—except in No Country for Old Men (2005)—pickup trucks, his fiction scarcely seems to belong to the American culture, literary or otherwise, of the half century and more during which the books were first published. Or so you might say until you set about inventorying a gun show’s worth of firearms on display across twelve novels, and calculating the average murder rate for the same dirty dozen. The bloodshed is chiefly the doing of hard-bitten, taciturn characters averse to domestication—usually these are men without women, and usually they’re on the move—who don’t go in much for book learning either. In the early novels of this extraordinarily fluent and resourceful stylist, equipped to the outer limits of English by his own wide reading, the main characters are often as not illiterate miscreants who might burglarize any building before a library. The overall image of masculinity in McCarthy—some sanguinary, itinerant isolato too unlettered to know any such words—comes off as a weirdly earnest cartoon drawn on the basis of western and noir films as well as those nineteenth-century novels D. H. Lawrence had in mind when he declared: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” In this other sense, then, McCarthy’s highly idiosyncratic novels turn out also to be as all-American as spree killings and Coca-Cola, an unopened can of which survives the end of the world in The Road (2006) to supply the sole taste of joy that the novel’s nameless protagonist can offer his unnamed son while they hide out from cannibalistic gangs.

There had been cannibals, too, in Outer Dark (1968), McCarthy’s second book. Both that novel and The Road, like the many novels in between, string together more or less unconnected episodes of peril and escape in the manner of the picaresque, to use a lit-crit term for that view of human events best summed up as “one damned thing after another.” Whether on the run through the backwoods Tennessee of McCarthy’s boyhood or pushing a shopping cart past the jackknifed tractor trailers and abandoned gas stations of the postapocalypse (regions that may be one and the same: at one point the father in The Road points out “the house where I grew up”), or traveling on horseback along the U.S.-Mexico border, as in the novels of McCarthy’s middle period, his heroes—not often the right word for them—travel alike through a physically derelict and socially disorganized world of much violence and cruelty, “the world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities,” as The Road has it.

McCarthy’s prose will run increasingly clear over his career, even as the stream flows along the same bed. In Outer Dark, the male lead abandons a newborn, the product of incest with his sister, in a clearing, where it “howl[s] execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity.” Camarine refers here to the color of a certain berry and also gives some idea of what might be called, without scorn, the dark purple of McCarthy’s early prose, which requires a good dictionary to hand. By the time of the Border Trilogy (1992–98) and after, the sentences are more often bare notations of physical action, in concatenated sequence or paratactic blocks. In No Country for Old Men, a hit man is about to be dispatched by a rival in the same line of work: “He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face.” This is the cosmic crime scene that McCarthy has worked all along, but the style in which he files his reports has changed. And his protagonists will also undergo a modification, even a reversal, in their moral nature. If Culla Holme in Outer Dark readily orphans his son, this is the last thing the father in The Road would do: “My job is to take care of you,” he reminds his boy. “I was appointed to do that by God.”

The rather neat opposition of these Oedipal situations—a father abandons his son; a father devoutly protects his son—is something I noticed only while reading Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, by the veteran literary biographer Tracy Daugherty, the first life of the writer and a story, among other things, of a man with a vexed relationship to being a son and father. Biographies of course do nothing to explain or “solve” a writer’s work, to say where the cannibals come from. But biographical research can suggest the ways in which the work is a kind of solution to the problem of the life, or a series of solutions (none of them quite satisfactory, or the next one, proposed in the next book, wouldn’t be necessary). In the case of McCarthy, Daugherty’s biography is especially useful as a guide to the abiding life problem beneath the temporary artistic remedies, given that McCarthy’s fiction itself offers so few clues about his human career and the novelist produced no memoirs or personal essays and granted few interviews. According to Daugherty, McCarthy liked to tease people by calling his third novel, Child of God (1973), about a necrophiliac serial killer, “semi-autobiographical.”

Charles McCarthy Jr.—not yet Cormac—was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933; obviously he was not yet a Southerner either (as in the first half of his itinerary as a novelist), much less a Westerner (as in the second) who would die in an adobe house north of Santa Fe. The Catholic family was a large one—he was the third of six—and well-to-do, professional, civic-minded. The year after McCarthy was born, his father, a Yale Law grad, took a job with Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville. Charles McCarthy Sr. had risen to assistant general counsel to the TVA by the time the family moved into a ten-room affair with extensive grounds, complete with rock gardens and ponds stocked with fish. Not far away were shantytowns along the river as well as forests and caves.

The TVA encompassed land reclamation, malaria eradication, and the construction of hydropower dams in service of regional electrification. Later on, electricity from the TVA helped produce swords as well as plowshares: aluminum for Air Force planes, and eventually enriched uranium to be shipped from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Los Alamos, New Mexico. The journey of this fissile material has its analogue in McCarthy’s fiction. The Crossing (1994) ends, appalled, with the New Mexico cowboy Billy Parham woken early one morning by “the white light of the desert noon,” witnessing the Trinity test unawares. And in McCarthy’s fiction, Daugherty plausibly discerns a sort of delayed but permanent rebellion against the technological modernity and improving intentions embodied by McCarthy’s father and his TVA. The novelist’s early characters often come from hard-luck families of the kind displaced in their thousands to make room for the TVA’s dams and reservoirs, and Daugherty quotes McCarthy’s words from an unpublished transcript with a journalist:

The whole notion that somehow or another the world can be improved . . . and that everybody will live in harmony and peace happily ever after is a really dangerous and lunatic notion.

More immediately, McCarthy and his father, who was not above beating his son, were at odds on other grounds. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” McCarthy told the same journalist. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.” He inclined more toward acting—a passion of his mother’s—and also liked hunting, fishing, taxidermy, drawing. After high school, he was inexplicably wearing sandals year-round—one of Knoxville’s earliest hippies, according to the later testimony of a friend—and roistering with drinking buddies who sometimes ended up in jail. In 1951, he enrolled at the University of Tennessee, but he rarely attended classes and after his first year was asked not to return. Afraid of being drafted to fight in Korea, he enlisted in the Air Force. At a base outside Fairbanks, Alaska, he worked as a broadcaster for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.

Daugherty writes that “the raw edges of the Alaskan interior’s ice-bound wilderness” impressed themselves on McCarthy’s sensibility: “Their beauty, their indifference.” Not apparently attached to any citation, the claim is one of many that come off as poetic license on Daugherty’s part. The allure of such expediencies is understandable: McCarthy doesn’t seem to have left behind extensive diaries or journals, nor to have had many of the long-running epistolary relationships common to writers of earlier times. (The invention of the telephone has no doubt been a disaster for the biographer’s art, only partly reversed by email.) There is no sign either that McCarthy granted interviews to Daugherty, who is forced to rely heavily on his conversations with the writer’s surviving family and friends, often conducted decades after the events they concern. The resulting paucity of contemporaneous documentation or words from the horse’s mouth surely explains Daugherty’s resort to speculative passages—but these are substitutes for genuine discoveries that, wherever they patch a gap, only underscore the want of the real thing.

In Alaska, McCarthy had a lot of time on his hands, and the main event of his military career, it appears, was reading certain novelists. The rapt extravagance of Faulkner’s third-person prose and his expert ear for dialogue; the comma-shy and detail-laden sentences of the early chapters in Joyce’s Ulysses; Melville’s fearless handling of dark, philosophical themes in the ruinous quest plot of Moby-Dick (“probably the best novel I ever read”)—all of these would later exercise a legible influence on McCarthy. At the time, these writers simply set the course of his life. After his honorable discharge, he enrolled again at the University of Tennessee, with the aid of the G.I. Bill, where he took writing classes and read modern poetry. He published stories in the student lit mag and even won a prize of $125.

McCarthy dropped out before receiving his degree, but did meet on campus Lee Holleman, a fellow writer whom he married in 1961. The pair moved to Chicago, Lee taking work at an ad agency and McCarthy in an auto-parts store. Never a skillful typist, McCarthy asked his wife to type sections of the novel he was working on. (Later in life, he will rely on other women and then his younger son for the same service.) In 1962, Random House expressed interest in publishing The Orchard Keeper, his first novel; McCarthy and his wife moved to a farmhouse in Tennessee; their son was born; and they decided to break up—all in swift succession. Before long, McCarthy was living by himself in the farmhouse, at work on two other novels. This youthful period more or less establishes the pattern of McCarthy’s adult life: There is the frustration and failure in love, including three short-lived marriages. There is the geographical restlessness, a movement from outside Knoxville, where he spent much of his time until the mid-Seventies, with stops in Ibiza, New Orleans, and elsewhere; to El Paso, Texas, until the early Aughts; and to Santa Fe thereafter. (McCarthy said about moving house that three times is as good as a fire.) And there are the novels, produced perhaps slowly but fervently, at least one new effort begun before the last has been completed.

All these departures and relocations, amatory or residential, are ordinary events of contemporary life, however momentous to the people undergoing them. Daugherty’s biography lacks the documentary resources to furnish these staples with special insights from McCarthy and his intimates. As a consequence, what is most thrilling in this biography, even more than is usually the case with literary lives, is also what is least dramatic about it, namely McCarthy’s stubborn and sometimes selfish dedication to his work. Perhaps the most important relationship of his adulthood is that with Albert Erskine at Random House, once Faulkner’s editor, too, who tolerates McCarthy’s eccentricities of usage and sticks with him through thin sales. As for big events, the receipt of a MacArthur Fellowship, allowing McCarthy to maintain his modest lifestyle in El Paso, stands out more than any vicissitudes of his emotional life. He hardly saw his son from his first marriage until he attended the young man’s wedding in Spain in 1992.

The most important word in The Orchard Keeper, which came out in 1965, is probably one on the cover: the name Cormac, which McCarthy bestowed on himself when he began to publish as an author and which became the name that friends knew him by. As a kid and as a young man, McCarthy was Charles or Charlie or Chuck. Charles was obviously his father’s name; Charlie McCarthy, still worse, referred to the wooden and plastic dummy of the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, a monocled and top-hatted wiseacre on radio and TV and, humiliatingly, a universal reference during the novelist’s youth; while Chuck was a guy among his buddies, as in the recollection of a Chicago friend: “I knew Chuck was working on a novel.” The name Cormac, on the other hand, is an item of Old Gaelic with a dignity foreign to the midcentury United States, and it’s not quite too fanciful to see McCarthy’s fiction, which employs all sorts of old-fashioned words and syntax and, in the matter of subject matter, all but expunges postwar America from the record, as a sort of Cormacification of a Chuckified world.

Unlike many of the novels to follow it, The Orchard Keeper isn’t a great book, maybe because its setting lies too close to Depression-era social reality for the novel’s highfalutin style not to seem an affectation. Still, this style sprang from McCarthy’s head impressively full-grown. When in The Orchard Keeper the burning of an inn reveals onlookers with “their faces lacquered orange as jackolanterns in the ring of heat,” we can more than glimpse the language of the books ahead, with their powers of lurid simile in league with an almost cinematic visual precision. So does the dialogue of both white people and black in this first novel—in its confident, creative wrongness with respect to standard English—sound dead-on, at least to someone who grew up a sociolinguistic world away from prewar Tennessee.

On the opening page of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s first western, he borrows Wordsworth’s great line “the child is father of the man”: an early-nineteenth-century prophecy of psychoanalysis and undoubtedly one of the laws of literary biography, which can locate the origins of the writer nowhere but in his or her youth. But in Blood Meridian, Wordsworth’s famous words seem to come from the mouth of a former schoolmaster who “lies in drink” and “quotes from poets whose names are now lost,” about whom we hear no more once his son runs away, on the next page, at fourteen. The blank figure of the Kid, as the boy is called, comes closest to being the main character of what follows, in a novel that mocks the ordinary novelist’s (or biographer’s) romantic notion of the individual—with his meaningful past, his special psychology, his important moral agency—in favor of a vision of mindless collective violence. The great critic Fredric Jameson, in Marxism and Form (1971), laid out a perspective on literary creation that might be summarized by a different rule: the style is father of the man. Jameson argued that the prior stylistic choices of a writer determine in advance his or her subject matter, since to be a writer is from the outset to want to write in a certain way—with a certain tone, syntax, and lexicon—and not in any other. The style thereby adopted can only suit certain stories and settings and not others.

“Thus it is a mistake,” Jameson wrote,

to think, for instance, that the books of Hemingway deal essentially with such things as courage, love, and death; in reality, their deepest subject is simply the writing of a certain type of sentence, the practice of a determinate style.

So it is that the author’s subject matter—courage and so on—derives from his style, not the other way around, and Hemingway’s novels, as Jameson says, must take place in the simplified social world of Americans abroad because this is the occasion felicitous to the characteristic simplifications of his prose. Regardless of the overall applicability of Jameson’s argument, perhaps nowhere in postwar American fiction does a strong individual style seem to insist on a certain kind of subject matter, to the exclusion of others, more than in the work of Cormac McCarthy. Even in Suttree (1979), McCarthy’s most ostensibly autobiographical novel, about the estranged son of a prosperous Knoxville family dwelling on a ramshackle houseboat and catching fish to support himself, the description of Market Street on a Monday morning in 1951 might well be that of a medieval marketplace, in its ornate poverty and religiose madness:

Suttree with his parcel of fish going past the rows of derelict trucks piled with produce and flowers, an atmosphere rank with country commerce, a reek of farmgoods in the air tending off into a light surmise of putrefaction and decay. Pariahs adorned the walk and blind singers and organists and psalmists with mouth harps wandered up and down. . . . Mute and roosting pedlars watching from their wagonbeds and flower ladies in their bonnets like cowled gnomes. . . . He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with a vigor unknown to the sane.

In his novels, McCarthy apprehends the world as a scene of material dilapidation and social disorder, few if any governments or corporations in sight. Somehow this vision is that of one of the central writers of postwar consumer society, a place of mass higher education, of industrial plastics, consumer electronics, and personal automobiles, of cheap and attractive clothing. For all that this society furnished the historical ground of McCarthy’s career, it barely registers in his fictional accounts of ragged and desperate illiterates making their way on foot or on horseback through an almost immemorial scene of stone, wood, metal, fire. To restrict his style only to the objects that suit it, McCarthy must flee contemporary society to set his novels in the remotest parts of Appalachia, untouched by the TVA, as in the earlier novels; along the bloody frontier of westward expansion in the American Southwest of the mid-nineteenth century (Blood Meridian); and in the lonesome backcountry of the desert Southwest during the Forties and early Fifties (the Border Trilogy). The Road leapfrogs the period between the end of the Second World War and the outbreak of some future world war—“A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions”—altogether.
The rare McCarthy novels that do take place in the center of his own times seem ill at ease with the historical moment. In No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, the crusty West Texas sheriff who narrates much of the book complains of youngsters with “green hair and bones in their noses” and rhapsodizes about his long and happy marriage. You’d never guess from Sheriff Bell’s apocalyptic musings on a world “goin to hell in a handbasket,” in which educators can no longer “tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum,” that in 2005, when the novel was published, the murder rate in the United States had fallen almost in half from its 1980 peak. But McCarthy’s then editor, Gary Fisketjon, reported that the sheriff’s crusty opinions correspond to McCarthy’s own. So does the simplistic moralism of The Road, with its unembarrassed language of good guys (father and son) versus bad guys (cannibal gangs), belong to the era of Bush’s war on terror. But its virtually biblical story of a Josephlike figure shielding a Christlike boy from a massacre of the innocents is probably more deeply a reflection of McCarthy’s wish for a better relationship with his second son, John Francis, born in 1998, during his third marriage, than those he’d had with his own father and first son. At one point in Daugherty’s biography, McCarthy and John Francis goof around playing music and singing songs together, an unthinkable occurrence between Charleses Sr. and Jr. back in Knoxville.

Last spring saw the reissue of the critic Leslie Fiedler’s great study Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Surveying classic work from Charles Brockden Brown through Melville and Hawthorne down to Faulkner, Hemingway, and Chandler, Fiedler summed up American fiction as a set of gothic tales and boys’ adventure stories, in which spasms of masculine violence and flights from society win out over the more grown-up themes of mature sexual love. Whatever the validity of Fiedler’s thesis with respect to the general run of postwar American fiction, it fits McCarthy like a glove. One can imagine Fiedler hooting with recognition on learning that the few love relationships in McCarthy include doomed incestuous bonds, like those in Outer Dark and his last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (both 2022). The same goes for the unsuccessful effort on the part of a pure-hearted white cowboy, in Cities of the Plain (1998), to rescue from her dark-skinned Mexican captors a teenage prostitute with a heart of gold. (The episode also calls to mind the posthumously revealed scandal of McCarthy’s own involvement with a sixteen-year- old named Augusta Britt when he was in his forties, one mitigated or not, according to your lights, by the decades-long friendship that resulted—the apparent rationale for Daugherty’s portentous subtitle, A Legacy Revisited.) The destructive quests and bootless journeys in McCarthy can likewise seem inspired more by the pursuit of the white whale in Moby-Dick or the transportation of Addie Bundren’s corpse in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying than by anything closer to his own experience or observation. Above all, it’s in McCarthy’s prose that the tradition of what Lawrence called classic American literature often seems to have reached its final fruition in something like a lurid pastiche.

It might, in fact, be fair enough to judge McCarthy’s work as a somewhat ridiculous effort to extend a tradition that looked exhausted by the Fifties, if not earlier, by refashioning it as a mode of apocalyptic prophecy. In Blood Meridian, the Glanton Gang at the heart of the novel, a murderous company after bounties for Apache scalps, are described as virtual cannibals, “the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth,” altogether “like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.” McCarthy’s Glanton Gang derives in part from historical records (he relied heavily on the memoirs of Samuel Chamberlain, who rode with the actual Glanton Gang in 1849–50), and another writer might see such scalp hunters as figures of a particular time and place, where the declining indigenous empire of Comancheria met entrepreneurial Americans in an administrative vacuum—Mexico in retreat from territory north of the Rio Grande, the United States not yet in control—that was especially propitious to freelance violence. But the novel appears to present human history otherwise, as a sort of anthropophagic uniformity in which human beings devour one another in much the same way no matter the era. Judge Holden, the satanic prophet presiding over Blood Meridian, declares of war: “As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here.” This corny diabolism, the weakest element of the novel, overlooks the fact that even rock and stone have a history of great and dramatic change, or the science of geology wouldn’t exist. Warfare and violence are, naturally, subject to history to a far greater degree; in this, they are more like literature.

Why insist, then, that McCarthy remains a great writer, philosophical dubiousness and stylistic pastiche notwithstanding? The case is indeed harder to make than the contrary one, since, at least for me, it relies so heavily on the evidence of one’s ear. It’s just that the sound of Cormac McCarthy’s prose, even or especially in its excesses, seems to me to realize something inherent in the language. You catch something similar, but not so sustained, in the excess and strangeness of Shakespearean monologues or Yeatsian rants, in the scandalized feeling of Faulkner’s repetitions or, to mention a writer closer in time to McCarthy, in the bitter fineness of James Baldwin’s periods, as if the large miracle of what English words can do could emerge in full only from some cause for indignation of like dimensions. This is a furious eloquence of pure opposition, as when Caliban says to Prospero in The Tempest, as a son might to a father, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse.” In McCarthy, because of the gulf between the untutored speech of his characters and his own elaborate diction, the distance between ordinary daily expression and the utmost capacities of English is at its maximum, and his prose seems to me outraged in good part by its own near impossibility and nonexistence from the standpoint of society. So does literary power certify its worldly impotence, and this then becomes the real nature of the writer’s quarrel with his middle-class family and a postwar America he hardly acknowledges: an impression impossible for me to prove, and harder to dispel.