There’s a handful of authors for which I have read every novel they’ve ever written. Cormac McCarthy is one of them. He died today.
I’ve always thought it strange that someone that wrote the words that Cormac McCarthy wrote the way that Cormac McCarthy wrote them was still alive. They came from a place that ought to have been inaccessible; not living out twilight negotiating film rights to his work in Santa Fe. Today things have been settled. If that seems a bit raw, well, then it’s not likely you understand the relationship one ought to have with his work.
There were three McCarthy books that met me in the place that I was in my life when I read them. I read All The Pretty Horses when I was a 23 year old Naval Officer deploying for the first time. McCarthy’s John Grady Cole was unapologetic in his stubbornness as his hero’s journey began. He knew what he was and what the world around him was. Even if the world wasn’t going to agree with him, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t wrong. He should have been an old stubborn man. But he was sixteen. And in that I felt some hope.
I read Blood Meridian for the first time when I was in Iraq. I could feel Judge Holden’s grip on me. To know how easily I could fall into the darkness of killing and the messy embrace of violence and war is something that never really goes away. To understand the reality of blood lust and the joy of violence. But to know that it’s the devil himself that’s put it in you and not your nature. To be The Kid rebelling through the bars of the San Diego jail cell back to evil incarnate and know you may have been in it but not of it.
I read The Road shortly after my son was diagnosed with severe cognitive impairment and autism. Like The Man I was going to give my helpless son over one day to the murderers and cannibals after I die. To see the cruel dying world around us through the lens of his innocence. And to know that he would be my purpose until the day I died; to carry the fire.
There are McCarthy scholars that have written useful and important work on the symbolism of McCarthy. That his works touch on nihilism and morality and Catholicism and naturalism or the absurdity of manifest destiny. I don’t know much about any of that. I’m not a McCarthy scholar. I’ve just read his books and seen a bit of the world that’s made me feel a certain way about them.
They say he’ll never die…