N.B. I’ll start this article by briefly
summarizing McCarthy’s bio, before continuing on a slightly more personal level
and providing a brief description of his style as a writer.
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (originally named Charles
after his father) is an award winning American writer, known for a number of
novels including Blood Meridian, All The Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men,
and The Road. Many of his works have been critically praised and he has won
both the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award.
Born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933,
McCarthy was raised in a Roman Catholic setting, moving a number of times as his family followed his father's employment. Initially, he read liberal arts
at the University of Tennessee before joining the U.S. Air Force for a number
of years. While he was based in Alaska, he performed his own radio show. His
first literary success came upon his return to the university where he won a
number of awards for his writing.
He wrote his first novel, The Orchard
Keeper, while working as a mechanic before travelling to Ireland and across
parts of Europe. He sent the novel to Random House for publication, as it was
“the only publisher that he had heard of”. Interestingly, the editor at Random
House, Albert Erskine, was also William Faulkner’s editor. Faulkner is one of McCarthy’s
primary influences. Following this, he returned to America where the remainder
of his novels and screenplays have been written. Up until the publication of All The Pretty Horses, McCarthy did not have a particularly wide audience, and
the majority of the money he needed to support his writing came in the form of
grants. In an interview with Oprah, he recalls that during hard times money
would always show when he really needed it. He recalls a story when he couldn’t
afford to purchase toothpaste and he received a free sample with a magazine in
the post. I have noticed on a number of websites that review works of
literature an air of surprise that McCarthy would choose to give an interview
with Oprah. Many people saw it as an ironic move for someone who is naturally
reticent about giving interviews, although the benefits of the resulting increased publicity are clear and
understandable.
Following the success of the Border
Trilogy, in 2005 the Coen brothers adapted No Country For Old Men into a film which won four
Academy Awards. The Road was adapted for film in 2009.
McCarthy’s most recent work, announced in
early 2012, is a screenplay directed by Ridley Scott titled ‘The Counselor’,
with Brad Pitt having allegedly been sighted on set.
McCarthy’s Writing Style
Before I comment too much on his style,
Blood Meridian is, in my opinion, the epitome of McCarthy’s work to date. If
sections appear biased towards it, then try your best to forgive me. ;)
I think that in recent years many people
have become aware of McCarthy as a result of The Road, a post-apocalyptic tale following a father and his son in their efforts to survive. While it is
certainly an incredible piece of literature, often touching, terrifying and
completely fascinating, I personally feel that his previous works are a little
less, hmm, perhaps sentimental. While
one could certainly argue that sentimentality is exactly what is missing from
some of his other works, maybe sentimentality isn’t the correct word that I’m
looking for, it’s not quite right, but anyway, what I’m trying to say is if you
haven’t done so already, investigate his other works as many of them have a far
richer, grittier and more plangent form of expression than The Road…in my
opinion. But how could I possibly dislike such mellifluous prose as this:
“He walked out in the gray light and stood
and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold
relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs
of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And
somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” –
The Road
McCarthy has a very idiosyncratic literary
style, with perhaps the closest influences coming from William Faulkner. A
number of his novels have endings with events that are left open to various
interpretations, with specific examples including Blood Meridian and The Road.
McCarthy often uses long sentences with a minimalist approach towards using
punctuation, refraining from using speech marks or semi-colons, resulting in an
effect that often matches many of the landscapes that provide the backdrop for
his novels. Maybe it takes some getting used to, maybe it doesn’t. Here is a
typical example:
"It was a lone tree burning on the
desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary
pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot
sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended
companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small
owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and
solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards
with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert
basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly
gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes
that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch
whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets." – Blood
Meridian
While writing and researching Blood Meridian,
McCarthy learned Spanish and has since utilized it heavily in a number of his
novels, in particular the Border Trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing,
and Cities of the Plain). In my experience, the novels often work well if you
have access to a translator on Google or similar, although he only really
decorates the novels with Spanish and no significant context is lost if one
doesn’t translate.
McCarthy has previously stated that he does
not really “understand” writers who don’t “deal with issues of life and death”.
“To me,” he says, “that’s not literature.”
Perhaps one of the best examples of McCarthy’s handling of the subject
of life and death, although it runs clearly through each novel, is expressed by
his character, Judge Holden, from Blood Meridian. The critic Harold Bloom has
described the Judge as the personification of death; an all wise, all knowing
character who is “violence incarnate,” and “the most frightening figure in all
of American literature.” It appears as if the extensive research conducted for
writing Blood Meridian resulted in a binding of America’s historic violence
with the cliché of the old romantic west, creating the anti-western.
"This is the nature of war, whose
stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war
is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will
of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore
forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of
the unity of existence. War is god." – Judge Holden, Blood Meridian.
An overall feeling of McCarthy’s style, if
possible to describe tersely at all, is probably, if you’ll forgive the
juxtaposition, beautifully lugubrious. He is both lyrical and has also been
accused by Professor Hungerford of Yale University as sometimes being quite boring.
Personally, his work has an intoxicatingly salubrious affect on me. An example
of such a moment:
“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.” – All The
Pretty Horses
Bibliography
This list includes all of McCarthy’s novels
in chronological order of publication. It does not include any planned or rumored works.
Sources and Information
·
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com
·
His novels
·
http://www.goodreads.com
·
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/screen-talk-more-doors-open-for-dormer-8026715.html
·
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/news/a396959/michael-fassbender-films-the-counselor-in-london-first-pictures.html
·
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuccco2umo
·
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgyZ4ia25gg