Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy died today. I’m tore up about it.
I read The Road in middle or high school. I fell in love with the story as a child often does: with no regard for style or diction or vocabulary or narration styles. I loved it for the way it made me feel. I loved it for the sum of its parts. I revisited the novel many times over the years before finding my primary literary obsession (Harry Crews).
As I came into my thirties and began approaching writing as a serious endeavor, I read Blood Meridian as much a student as a casual reader. My copy is filled with blue ink underlinings:
“…a thousand unpieced suns…”
“they waded a ford where women lay dead at their wash.”
“…these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced.”
“…to which a man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny…”
“This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing.”
“A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings.”
I have spent weeks worth of afternoon daydreams thinking about his writing. Why it feels important and unique and so damn alive. And my opinion eventually formed: that McCarthy understood the truth of things, and being able to fully describe them, doesn’t look like a Shakespearean sonnet or Melville’s prose, but somewhere very particularly in between them, and that language itself is just an approximation for the way things are, as well as the way we see and feel about them. It shouldn’t come as a large to surprise to anyone who’s closely read his work that McCarthy was interested in the formation and use of language.
For better or worse, Cormac has found his way into some of my own writing:
A friend told me that every serious writer compares themselves, often disastrously, to a famed writer. McCarthy has become that for me, and, ostensibly, many others. It’s a good bar, even if we never meet it.
The nicest thing I can think to say about McCarthy is that I hope his writing influenced many serious writers to squint at the world and sometimes wryly smile.