Cormac McCarthy: Remembering unique individualism of ‘uncompromising’ American novelist

With the publication last fall of “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” there was a common — though largely unspoken — sentiment among the literary set: these would probably be the last novels we would see from Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy had never been a prolific writer (he published only a dozen novels in a career spanning almost 60 years), he had never been a fast writer (the interlocking “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” were published 16 years after his previous novel, “The Road”) and the author was nearly 90 years old.

Despite this presentiment, however, the news that McCarthy had died Tuesday, at age 89, was devastating. McCarthy had always seemed, to his readers, to be much like the western landscape of many of his books: endless and eternal.

Twitter, our primary vehicle for community mourning, was filled with tributes, including many which referred to McCarthy as some variation on “the last great American writer” (Stephen King referred to McCarthy as “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time”). While that point is somewhat ridiculous on the face of it (off the top of my head, I can think of dozens of “great American writers,” including the likes of Colson Whitehead and Donna Tartt) the sentiment, and the roots of it, are definitely understandable.

McCarthy was a masterful writer, who leaves behind a body of work that defies easy categorization or summary, a writer who seemed, even in his earliest work, to be writing of the ages and for the ages, rather than following any trends or literary fashions.

It is better, perhaps, and definitely more accurate to consider McCarthy one of the most uncompromising of American writers. For both good and ill.

We see McCarthy’s uncompromising nature most vividly on the page, in terms of his prose style and conventions. Many of the online tributes to the author featured blocks of text taken from his fiction; this is a striking departure from how writers are usually memorialized on social media. Typically, posters will write about the effect the late writer or a particular work had on them. While there were a lot of these posts (how could there not be), it was striking how many people went back to the texts themselves, elevating the work rather than the effect of the work.

McCarthy’s prose, particularly in the first half of his career, exhibited influences ranging from the Bible to James Joyce to William Faulkner. The prose of novels such as “Child of God” and “Outer Dark” presented a significant barrier to entry to some readers, their rhythms and density making for at-times difficult reading (and that’s not even touching on the frequently horrific content, including necrophilia, child-killing and, well, melon fornication).

His style shifted somewhat later in his career, with “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992, and the following books exhibited a more spare prose, rooted in dialogue and simpler, more straightforward sentences, stylistically akin to the openness of the western vistas in which they were set.

He eschewed the use of quotation marks and semicolons in his work, often substituting “and” in place of a comma, creating a roiling effect. As he told Oprah Winfrey in a 2007 interview, “There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

That interview with Oprah is itself an example of McCarthy’s uncompromising nature. While not as reclusive as, say, J.D. Salinger (who basically hid away in his New Hampshire compound for the last five decades of his life) or Thomas Pynchon (of whom only a handful of photographs are known to exist), McCarthy largely avoided the media.

The Oprah interview — which the author was forced to do when the talk show host selected “The Road” for her book club — is one of only two major interviews he gave. The other, for the New York Times a month before the publication of “All the Pretty Horses,” only came about “after long negotiations with his agent in New York, Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who promised he wouldn’t have to do another for many years.” As that article points out, “it would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview.”

To clarify just how uncompromising an approach this was, at that point in his career, none of McCarthy’s five novels had sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. This includes 1985’s “Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West,” now widely regarded as McCarthy’s masterpiece (critic Harold Bloom referred to it as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and compared it to “Moby-Dick,” while acknowledging it took him several tries to finish the book, owing to its graphic and disturbing content).

This uncompromising nature resulted in McCarthy living in poverty for the first half of his career, prior to receiving a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1981. The $236,000 prize allowed him to travel in, and move to, the American southwest to research and write “Blood Meridian.” He lived in cheap motels and a crumbling stone cottage, travelling with a high wattage light bulb to enable him to read and write.

He and his second wife, Anne DeLisle, lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville, Tenn., for eight years. “We were bathing in the lake,” she told the New York Times in 1992. “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.” It should be noted that his marriage to DeLisle ended in 1981, the same year he received the MacArthur grant. His first marriage, to Lee Holleman, ended after he asked her — already charged with taking care of their young son and keeping house — to get a job so he could focus on his writing.

That focus seems to have taken on a compulsive and ritualistic quality, an attitude that extended to his tools. Beginning in the early 1960s, McCarthy wrote all of his fiction and correspondence on an Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter, which he purchased for $50 at a Knoxville pawnshop. In 2009, the typewriter — which, it was estimated, had about five million words to its credit — was auctioned at Christie’s. The $245,000 price was donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific think tank for which he was a trustee (and basically served as an unofficial writer-in-residence). Rather than upgrading, or, heaven forfend, shifting to a word processor, he replaced his treasured Olivetti with exactly the same model and continued to work.

While his refusal to compromise is admirable at some levels, it is important to remember that there is little honour in poverty for its own sake, and that those celebrating the perceived purity of McCarthy’s unrelenting focus overlook just how much he benefited from the systems and structures that were in place to allow him to be uncompromising.

In publishing, it is not a given that the cream will rise to the top, and one can safely say that few major publishers today would give a writer 25 years and six novels to begin selling. It shouldn’t be overlooked just how significant the 1992 New York Times interview was in setting up “All the Pretty Horses” for its astonishing, and atypical, success (while “Blood Meridian” sold fewer than 5,000 copies in hardcover, “All the Pretty Horses” sold more than 190,000 hardcover copies in the first six months and became a New York Times bestseller, as well as winning the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). And let’s not forget about the unpaid and largely unrecognized support and labour he received from his wives.

McCarthy leaves behind an unparalleled body of work, books that read of obsession and passion, of fierce and dedicated labour. Somewhat strangely, perhaps, that work is unlikely to serve as an influence for newer writers: his fiction is too individual, too uncompromising, to serve as a road map or touchstone. It will remain a monument in and of itself. He may not be the last great American writer, but McCarthy was, truly, the last of his kind.

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