“If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.” ― Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction
Date:
April 19, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline:
By Richard B. Woodward;
Lead:
For many years he had no walls to hang anything on.
When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in
Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely
that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb
in a lens case to assure better illumination for
reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage
behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn't take me inside.
Renovation, which began a few years
ago, has stopped for lack of funds. "It's barely
habitable," he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot
plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.
McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books,
nearly all of them in storage lockers. "He has more intellectual
interests than anyone I've ever met," says the director Richard Pearce,
who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one
of his few "artistic" friends. Pearce asked him to
write the screenplay for "The Gardener's Son," a television drama about
the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870's by a disturbed
boy with
a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the
amputation of the boy's leg and his slow execution by hanging are the
moments from the show that linger in the mind.
McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a
trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. "We lived in total
poverty," says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida.
For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy
barn outside Knoxville. "We were bathing in the
lake," she says with some nostalgia. "Someone would call up and offer
him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would
tell them that everything he
had to say was there on the page. So we would eat
beans for another week."
McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes,
molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein -- anything -- than
himself or his books. "Of all the subjects I'm interested in, it would
be extremely difficult to find one I wasn't,"
he growls. "Writing is way,
way
down at the bottom of the list."
His hostility to the literary world seems both
genuine ("teaching writing is a hustle") and a tactic to screen out
distractions. At the MacArthur reunions he spends his time with
scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale
biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers.
One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and
ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey's death in 1989,
they discussed a covert operation
to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona.
McCarthy's silence about himself has spawned a host
of legends about his background and whereabouts. Esquire magazine
recently printed a list of rumors, including one that had him living
under an oil derrick. For many years the sum of hard-core information
about his early life could be found in an author's
note to his first novel, "The Orchard Keeper," published in 1965. It
stated that he was born in Rhode Island in 1933; grew up outside
Knoxville; attended parochial schools;
entered the University of Tennessee, which he
dropped out of; joined the Air Force in 1953 for four years; returned to
the university, which he dropped out of again, and began to write
novels in 1959. Add the publication dates of his
books and awards, the marriages and divorces, a son
born in 1962 and the move to the Southwest in 1974, and the relevant
facts of his biography are complete.
The oldest son of an eminent lawyer, formerly with
the Tennessee Valley Authority, McCarthy is Charles Jr., with five
brothers and sisters. Cormac, the Gaelic equivalent of Charles, was an
old family nickname bestowed on his father by Irish aunts.
It seems to have been a comfortable upbringing that
bears no resemblance to the wretched lives of his characters. The large
white house of his youth had acreage and woods nearby, and was staffed
with maids. "We were considered rich because all the
people around us were living in one- or two-room
shacks," he says. What went on in these shacks, and in Knoxville's
nether world, seems to have fueled his imagination more than anything
that happened inside his own family.
Only his novel "Suttree," which has a paralyzing
father-son conflict, seems strongly autobiographical.
"I was not what they had in mind," McCarthy says of
childhood discord with his parents. "I felt early on I wasn't going to
be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it."
Pressed to explain his sense of
alienation, he has an odd moment of heated
reflection. "I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone
had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every
hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn't
have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had
found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and
still had 40 or 50 to take home." WRITING AND READING seem to be the
only interests that the teen-age McCarthy
never considered. Not until he was about 23, during
his second quarrel with schooling, did he discover literature. To kill
the tedium of the Air Force, which sent him to Alaska, he began reading
in the barracks. "I read a lot
of books very quickly," he says, vague about his
self-administered syllabus.
McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its
recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect
and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The
ugly fact is books are made out of books,"
he says. "The novel depends for its life on the
novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the
"good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone
who doesn't "deal
with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry
James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me,
that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I
consider strange."
"The Orchard Keeper," however Faulknerian in its
themes, characters, language and structure, is no pastiche. The story of
a boy and two old men who weave in and out of his young life, it has a
gnarliness and a gloom all its own. Set in the hill
country of Tennessee, the allusive narrative
memorializes, without a trace of sentimentality, a vanishing way of life
in the woods. An affection for coon hounds binds the fate of the
characters, who wander unaware of any kinship. The
boy never learns that a decomposing body he sees in a
leafy pit may be his father.
McCarthy began the book in college and finished it
in Chicago, where he worked part time in an auto-parts warehouse. "I
never had any doubts about my abilities," he says. "I knew I could
write. I just had to figure out how to eat while
doing this." In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, whom
he had met at college; they had a son, Cullen (now an architecture
student at Princeton), and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer
taking off for Asheville, N.C., and
New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony,
McCarthy snorts. "With what?" He recalls his expulsion from a
$40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.
After three years of writing, he packed off the
manuscript to Random House -- "it was the only publisher I had heard
of." Eventually it reached the desk of the legendary Albert Erskine, who
had been Faulkner's last editor as well as the
sponsor for "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry and
"The Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. Erskine recognized McCarthy as a
writer of the same caliber and, in the sort of relationship that
scarcely exists anymore
in American publishing, edited him for the next 20
years. "There is a father-son feeling," says Erskine, despite the fact,
as he sheepishly admits, that "we never sold any of his books."
For years McCarthy seems to have subsisted on awards
money he earned for "The Orchard Keeper" -- including grants from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation
and the Rockefeller Foundation. Some of these funds
went toward a trip to Europe in 1967, where he met
DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife. They settled
for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he
wrote "Outer Dark," published
in 1968, a twisted Nativity story about a girl's
search for her baby, the product of incest with her brother. At the end
of their independent wanderings through the rural South the brother
witnesses, in one of McCarthy's
most appalling scenes, the death of his child at the
hands of three mysterious killers around a campfire: "Holme saw the
blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a
dark smile erupted on the child's
throat and went all broken down the front of it. The
child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a
wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly."
"Child of God," published in 1973 after he and
DeLisle returned to Tennessee, tested new extremes. The main character,
Lester Ballard -- a mass murderer and necrophiliac -- lives with his
victims in a series of underground caves. He is based
on newspaper reports of such a figure in Sevier
County, Tenn. Somehow, McCarthy finds compassion for and humor in
Ballard, while never asking the reader to forgive his crimes. No social
or psychological theory is offered that might
explain him away.
In a long review of the book in The New Yorker,
Robert Coles called McCarthy a "novelist of religious feeling,"
comparing him with the Greek dramatists and medieval moralists. And in a
prescient observation he noted the novelist's "stubborn
refusal to bend his writing to the literary and
intellectual demands of our era," calling him a writer "whose fate is to
be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted."
"MOST OF MY FRIENDS FROM those days are dead,"
McCarthy says. We are sitting in a bar in Juarez, discussing "Suttree,"
his longest, funniest book, a celebration of the crazies and
ne'er-do-wells he knew in Knoxville's dirty
bars and poolrooms. McCarthy doesn't drink anymore
-- he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends --
and "Suttree" reads like a farewell to that life. "The friends I do
have are simply those
who quit drinking," he says. "If there is an
occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking."
Written over about 20 years and published in 1979,
"Suttree" has a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in
McCarthy's work, who ekes out a living on a houseboat, fishing in the
polluted city river, in defiance of his stern,
successful father. A literary conceit -- part
Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal -- he is also McCarthy, the willful
outcast. Many of the brawlers and drunkards in the book are his former
real-life companions. "I was always attracted
to people who enjoyed a perilous life style," he
says. Residents of the city are said to compete to find themselves in
the text, which has displaced "A Death in the Family" by James Agee as
Knoxville's novel.
McCarthy began "Blood Meridian" after he had moved
to the Southwest, without DeLisle. "He always thought he would write the
great American western," says a still-smarting DeLisle, who typed
"Suttree" for him -- "twice,
all 800 pages." Against all odds, they remain
friends. If "Suttree" strives to be "Ulysses," "Blood Meridian" has
distinct echoes of "Moby-Dick," McCarthy's favorite book. A mad hairless
giant named Judge Holden makes florid speeches not
unlike Captain Ahab's. Based on historical events in the Southwest in
1849-50 (McCarthy learned Spanish to research it), the book follows the
life of a mythic character called
"the kid" as he rides around with John Glanton, who
was the leader of a ferocious gang of scalp hunters. The collision
between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality
gives "Blood Meridian"
its strange, hellish character. It may be the
bloodiest book since "The Iliad."
"I've always been interested in the Southwest,"
McCarthy says blandly. "There isn't a place in the world you can go
where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the
West."
More profoundly, the book explores the nature of
evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the
regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white,
Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the
American frontier.
"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed,"
McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can
be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a
really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted
with this notion are the first ones to give up their
souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you
and make your life vacuous."
This tooth-and-claw view of reality would seem not
to accept the largesse of philanthropies. Then again, McCarthy is no
typical reactionary. Like Flannery O'Conner, he sides with the misfits
and anachronisms of modern life against "progress."
His play, "The Stonemason," written a few years ago
and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in
Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many
months. The breakdown of the family
in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of
stoneworking as a craft.
"Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is," he
says, sipping a Coke. "Not even prostitution can come close to its
antiquity. It's older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50
years, with hydraulic cement, it's
vanishing. I find that rather interesting."
BY COMPARISON WITH the sonority and carnage of
"Blood Meridian," the world of "All the Pretty Horses" is less risky --
repressed but sane. The main character, a teen-ager named John Grady
Cole, leaves his home in West Texas in 1949
after the death of his grandfather and during his
parents' divorce, convincing his friend Lacey Rawlins they should ride
off to Mexico.
Dialogue rather than description predominates, and
the comical exchanges between the young men have a bleak music, as
though their words had been whittled down by the wind off the desert:
They rode.
You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins.
About what?
I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease.
Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be
ill at ease. Should be anyways.
Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean
that you might be someplace you wasn't supposed to be and didnt know it?
What the hell's wrong with you?
I dont know. Nothin. I believe I'll sing.
He did.
A linear tale of boyish episodes -- they meet
vaqueros, are joined by a hapless companion, break horses on a hacienda
and are thrown in jail -- the book has a sustained innocence and a
lucidity new in McCarthy's work. There is even a budding love
story.
"You haven't come to the end yet," says McCarthy,
when asked about the low body count. "This may be nothing but a snare
and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well."
The book is, in fact, the first volume of a trilogy;
the third part has existed for more than 10 years as a screenplay. He
and Richard Pearce have come close to making the film -- Sean Penn was
interested -- but producers always became skittish about
the plot, which has as its central relationship John
Grady Cole's love for a teen-age Mexican prostitute.
Knopf is revving up the publicity engines for a
campaign that they hope will bring McCarthy his overdue recognition.
Vintage will reissue "Suttree" and "Blood Meridian" next month, and the
rest of his work shortly thereafter. McCarthy,
however, won't be making the book-signing circuit.
During my visit he was at work in the mornings on Volume 2 of the
trilogy, which will require another extended trip through Mexico.
"The great thing about Cormac is that he's in no
rush," Pearce says. "He is absolutely at peace with his own rhythms and
has complete confidence in his own powers."
In a pool hall one afternoon, a loud and youthful
establishment in one of El Paso's ubiquitous malls, McCarthy ignores the
video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A
skillful player, he was a member of a team at this place,
an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative
demeanor. But more than one of his friends describes McCarthy as a
"chameleon, able to adjust easily to any surroundings and company
because he seems so secure in what he will
and will not do."
"Everything's interesting," McCarthy says. "I don't
think I've been bored in 50 years. I've forgotten what it was like."
He bangs away in his stone house or in motels on an
Olivetti manual. "It's a messy business," he says about his
novel-building. "You wind up with shoe boxes of scrap paper." He likes
computers. "But not to write on."
That's about all he will discuss about his process
of writing. Who types his final drafts now he doesn't say.
Having saved enough money to leave El Paso, McCarthy
may take off again soon, probably for several years in Spain. His son,
with whom he has lately re-established a strong bond, is to be married
there this year. "Three moves is as good as a fire,"
he says in praise of homelessness.
The psychic cost of such an independent life, to
himself and others, is tough to gauge. Aware that gifted American
writers don't have to endure the kind of neglect and hardship that have
been his, McCarthy has chosen to be hardheaded about the terms
of his success. As he commemorates what is passing
from memory -- the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age -- he
seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to
exist.
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