Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered
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"No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in another league and one of the best novels of the past century. It also contains one of the greatest characters ever, Judge Holden [0]
He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Still really need to read Child of God.
My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place.
(This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)
I'd suggest there's a similar identification between the author and the Kid of Blood Meridian.
What McCarthy thinks of Melville's Moby Dick I have not heard, but for the reader anyway, there's a rich cross-fertilization. Both of ideas -- being a pawn within a monstrous, doomed enterprise -- and of technique, as with the cryptic oracles of catastrophe who say their piece and then vanish from the narrative.
If you were to show me that phrase and ask which book matches it most closely, I would have to say "Blood Meridian". It's a singular work. Texas-Mexico border area, 1850s. It's definitely post-apocalyptic, the aftermath of an invasion of technologically sophisticated but genocidally savage aliens ... for the native Americans.
Blood meridian is a book I often recommend as an approachable introduction to what people experiencing the period might have thought, but framing the context is somewhat important.
I've literally only read the Cliff's Notes version of The Road, but the scenario it describes seems far bleaker, prolonged, and hopeless than any historical event you might look for as precedent. It seems quite plausible that what the book describes is after some people tried to pull together in some feel-good way, and then failed and fell apart again because it wasn't going to work.
The potential for savagery, how easy it is for some to take a human life or completely disregard it is a theme that runs in many of his novels. In a post-apocalyptic scenario like in The Road, where everyone is literally scavenging for their lives you can bet your ass life will become a horror show. Not for everyone, not anywhere, but for enough people to determine that it is part of human nature just a much as extending help to one another.
To me CM's work explores the duality of beauty (in the most expansive sense of the word) and tragedy that exists in the world.
I recommend All the Pretty Horses if you want something less intense than The Road or Blood Meridian but no less powerful. One my favorite quotes:
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that 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.”
I find it hard to agree with this after COVID showed that a substantial portion of the US and global population weren't willing to wear masks to protect their fellow man and life saving vaccines were purposefully politicized. I also think that post apocalyptic novels typically live in a world where traditional power structures have been abandoned/destroyed and individualism is necessary for survival so I'm not sure one can draw a parallel between typical catastrophes and apocalyptic events.
It is an allegory of fathers and sons.
This is very tangential, but this is one of the reasons I could never get into The Walking Dead and similar shows. It was really hard for me to suspend my disbelief there.
When working together is clearly beneficial, not cooperating is simply illogical. But what happens when cooperation is not only not clearly beneficial, but may even be actively detrimental? What happens if you're starving to death, and you see a weaker man who has enough, barely enough, to feed himself approaching? And that is all there is?
Adding a notion of a child, of the future itself, into the picture makes it all the more difficult.
That's my 2c.
I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". They're good, but "Blood Meridian" and the Border Trilogy I barely took breaks from while reading. Just plowed through them front to back. When I got to the end of "Blood Meridian" I just started at the front again. No need for a warm up, just jump right in to some of the best literature you'll ever encounter.
I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).
Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far.
Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did.
When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel.
With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him.
Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not.
That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.
In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing.
Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.
It does lead to a fun hypothetical. If Cormac McCarthy was a dead author from the nth century, and his writing style was the way everybody wrote in the nth century, I wouldn't hold it against him. I would probably be able to get used to it, and quit muttering "this son of a bitch" aloud every two pages. Although I still doubt I would be a huge fan, I likely would be more appreciative of his work than I am now. But it would be exactly the same work, the same letters on the page. Why should the context change make any difference at all?
So maybe that just makes me petty. But even if so, I can't argue myself into enjoying something I don't enjoy.
That's the difference between "reading fiction" and literature: text as a work of art. Great authors are present through their style. How they tell their story is an important as what the story is about. Attributing it to the author being smug is as ridiculous as saying that Picasso should paint his objects in a way that conforms more to how they look in real life.
Rmoving parts of th languag that you find unncssary just fls lik bing cutsy for its own sak. I don't gt what it adds to th rading xprinc. Similar to how my rmoval of th most common lttr from this post dosn't simplify it, it maks it annoying to rad.
But I admit I am a lowbrow typ and I don't work vry hard to lik things that I don't lik at first tast.
To me, Cormac McCarthy has an incredibly good sense of how people actually speak. As a side note, same thing was also said somewhere about Quentin Tarantino -- as one of the most relevant reasons why his movies are "cult".
I liked the image of Cormac McCarthy the recluse, but oh well.
In the age of digital archives, there's no "right to be forgotten" for geniuses, I guess.
‘The find [of the early interviews] comes as McCarthy is preparing to publish two new intertwined novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” — his first since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize.
‘McCarthy will give no interviews in conjunction with their release. Instead, here is a look back at a less guarded time in his life.’
He’s the embodiment of a force that just overtops and envelops everything in its path. It’s doesn’t even make sense to consider him moral or immoral or amoral (as many do when considering him a stand in for the devil) but more as a force that just transcends morality completely and makes it irrelevant, a force that has no other purpose but to expand and consume resources, indifferent to death or convention or tradition. A force that never sleeps.
I think the scene where he calmly ignores the Indian attack while making explosives is probably the most literal example but the theme runs through his character.
"Suttree" doesn't come up as often as his other work but is my personal favorite. There are some darker moments but it's a very funny book - a lot of "Charles Portis"-esque conversations and encounters.