There's a stretch of I5, southern Oregon, where you go up and down, a series of crests, then down into the wooded valley. Each and ever time I crest, and start down into the next valley, I'm scanning for the smoke from small fires, and I get a chill. My wife get's tired of me re-telling the story every time. She doesn't know it, but I'm thinking about it every single ridge cresting. Powerful. Another great post Ted, Thanks.
I had read everything by McCarthy and just finished the last two a couple of months ago. A serious writer for serious readers. I am in awe of the magnificent, massive intelligence behind the writing. He may have been a recluse but he shared so much more humanity through his writing than through the "culture machine." He gave humanity to repugnant characters and asked us to look at them unflinchingly. As we should to ourselves.
Getting real “honest broker” vibes from this post. I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy yet (though I’ve seen the movie of No Country for Old Men) and it seems that has been a serious omission.
"If you immerse yourself in the darker things they stain you. You cannot go to the underworld and come back untainted. If you descend into violence, if you descend into all these forbidden things, I think a metaphor for the ID, the darker elements of human nature, you cannot control them in the world of daylight. The darkness knows truths that the daylight cannot afford to acknowledge. . . . There are a certain set of taboos you cannot break." 1:22:24
A lot of my writer friends love McCarthy's work. So I tried reading No Country for Old Men and watched some of the movie. But, at the risk of seeming unsophisticated, I see no "urgent need" to read books or watch movies about horrible people doing horrible things. I can't voluntarily submit myself to being brutalized by a novel or a movie.
As one commenter wrote about what it is like to read, Blood Meridian, it was like "being punched in the gut or slack-jawed with horror every other page." All I have to do to experience those feelings is look at what society is doing.
Someone I read recently who reviewed McCarthy's last two books did another thing that other literary theorizers about why good people who deplore degradation do when they promote the reading of dark, horrifying fiction, and that reviewer went looking in the two books about siblings tormented by an unconsummated passion for each other, seeking glimpses of a sense of the transcendent. I don't think the effort is worth the time and it risks permanent harm.
Yes. Most who’ve written are humbled by CM. Each paragraph should be slowly sipped, like the best poetry. Staggering talent. We’re not connected to the word as we once were. Expediency is the enemy of brilliant prose. He’ll be missed but will live forever in the words.
I highly recommend checking out the review of McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper that John Pistelli posted on his substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, the day that McCarthy died. He really nails how a publisher holding onto a loss leader like McCarthy for so long until he was finally noticed represents a different era in publishing. Now that publishing houses have been absorbed into ever larger media conglomerates, there is very little pretense of upholding artistry left, only profit motive.
It feels like Ted is driving at the same thing here when he’s examining the reception to McCarthy’s final books. It’s not just the media but a deficient literate culture (and its subsequent effect on the media) that ignores his genius.
"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the Eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.
As he turned to go heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the East like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite breaks and creating out of the night the endless fence line down the dead straight right away and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came legging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground shutter watching it till it was gone."
McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, I read "Blood Meridian " twice through on a 2-day Greyhound bus ride home to Cleveland from Albuquerque, NM 20 years ago; it was a perfect companion to the sleepless, hallucinogenic feel of the trip.
I think the NPR/NYRB culture doesn't like covering his books for another reason: they have a bias against authors whose work they find too "masculine" in style and content; unless the authors are folks of "other" cultures that can be easily exoticized. They disdain the readership they imagine for books like McCarthy's, you could say.
Anyhow, if folks are nervous about reading CM due to gruesomeness, violence, etc.; give them "Suttree". It's my favorite and the least thorny book of his that I know of.
I am an old and timid reader but have found that reading The Honest Broker is one of the few best things I have ever done in broadening my exploration of literature. Cormac is now on my list of book authors yet to come into my home library. Reading this current review has been exciting and emotional to a significant degree. I appreciate everyone here who is offering meaningful comment.
“ Just a few days ago, a novelist withdrew her book from publication—because it was set in Russia in the 1930s. This might hurt feelings (of Ukrainians, etc.). So the book got axed. For better or worse, that’s the literary culture in the year 2023. At this rate, we’ll soon have a new ending for War and Peace, with Napoleon returning from Moscow in triumph. Anything else would be indelicate.”
This was one of the dumbest developments in recent weeks, although there’s a lot of competition. In a world of physical books, what’s on paper is on paper forever, unless burned, but digital media brings with it the opportunity for the absurd, including even modifications to Tolstoy, at some future date.
I read The Road during a particularly bleak passage in my own life—probably not the best timing—but still I will never forget simply putting my head down on the dining room table and weeping as the final pages of the story unfolded. And now, 15 years and several McCarthy books later, my frequent response to what I see around me, either uttered or imagined, is, "This ain't 'no country for old men'."
I’ve never read Cormac McCarthy. There are too many books in the world and our paths have never crossed. I think I might now.
I agree with what you say about the need for brutal writing to shake us out of the torpor we appear to be in in when it comes to letting more and more catastrophic events seemingly wash over us every day but I do understand the need of those who seek to use literature as a refuge too. I suppose the issue is that that choice should be made BY the individual consumer and not for them.
Blood Meridian is our Moby Dick of the 20th Century. I've read it seven time and taught it to AP English students. I also agree w/ your assessment of his final books whichI read out of order but thought were consistently brilliant. I am taking on Suttree next, which Sebastian Junger says is a must read.
not sure about broad brushes like the 'culture industry' but you failed to notice the review by James Wood, easily the best writer on literature currently working in English. He did a deep dive that covered the essence of the two different styles of McCarthy and, especially compared with early works, it may be a bit of an overstatement to call either work a masterpiece. Regardless, Wood did his serious noticing and recognized what is to be appreciated and what rang false in both works.
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" "The Shadow knows!"
As did Cormac McCarthy.
To read McCarthy is to risk unique pain, that of encountering the Devil and the mystery of one's own evil, other worldy and supranatural in origin, pehaps, but of fallen man's nature in its expression. In attempting to describe his experience of reading McCarthy, the lowly worm reader is confronted with imaginative constraints and the reader's poor power to communicate horror expressively. I can't say adequately what I see when I read McCarthy (my poor powers to add or detract are too poor) but I know it when I see it, and I see it also in the Book of Revelations, Augustine when he confesses, Conrad's Horror, Faulkner when he's most cynical, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn in everything they wrote about the psychology of depraved and saved man, and Hannah Arendt in grappling with totalitarianism and Eichmann. To read McCarthy is to channel the Gulag Archipelago, One day in The Life..., Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Augustine's Confessions, The Brothers Karamazov, Prince Andrey's nihilism as he lay dying in War and Peace, and the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
So, that's all I've got-to describe my experience of McCarthy as best I can merely by saying that to me it's like reading a very select few other writers. Reasoning by analogy is insufficient, but it's the best I can do.
I'm still haunted by 'The Road'
There's a stretch of I5, southern Oregon, where you go up and down, a series of crests, then down into the wooded valley. Each and ever time I crest, and start down into the next valley, I'm scanning for the smoke from small fires, and I get a chill. My wife get's tired of me re-telling the story every time. She doesn't know it, but I'm thinking about it every single ridge cresting. Powerful. Another great post Ted, Thanks.
I had read everything by McCarthy and just finished the last two a couple of months ago. A serious writer for serious readers. I am in awe of the magnificent, massive intelligence behind the writing. He may have been a recluse but he shared so much more humanity through his writing than through the "culture machine." He gave humanity to repugnant characters and asked us to look at them unflinchingly. As we should to ourselves.
Getting real “honest broker” vibes from this post. I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy yet (though I’ve seen the movie of No Country for Old Men) and it seems that has been a serious omission.
This discussion makes me think of a quote from your brother Dana that I wrote down while watching the First Things podcast, Why Translate Seneca? May 30, 2023 Hercules Furens The Madness of Hercules https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2023/05/seneca-poetry-and-suffering
"If you immerse yourself in the darker things they stain you. You cannot go to the underworld and come back untainted. If you descend into violence, if you descend into all these forbidden things, I think a metaphor for the ID, the darker elements of human nature, you cannot control them in the world of daylight. The darkness knows truths that the daylight cannot afford to acknowledge. . . . There are a certain set of taboos you cannot break." 1:22:24
A lot of my writer friends love McCarthy's work. So I tried reading No Country for Old Men and watched some of the movie. But, at the risk of seeming unsophisticated, I see no "urgent need" to read books or watch movies about horrible people doing horrible things. I can't voluntarily submit myself to being brutalized by a novel or a movie.
As one commenter wrote about what it is like to read, Blood Meridian, it was like "being punched in the gut or slack-jawed with horror every other page." All I have to do to experience those feelings is look at what society is doing.
Someone I read recently who reviewed McCarthy's last two books did another thing that other literary theorizers about why good people who deplore degradation do when they promote the reading of dark, horrifying fiction, and that reviewer went looking in the two books about siblings tormented by an unconsummated passion for each other, seeking glimpses of a sense of the transcendent. I don't think the effort is worth the time and it risks permanent harm.
Yes. Most who’ve written are humbled by CM. Each paragraph should be slowly sipped, like the best poetry. Staggering talent. We’re not connected to the word as we once were. Expediency is the enemy of brilliant prose. He’ll be missed but will live forever in the words.
I highly recommend checking out the review of McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper that John Pistelli posted on his substack, Grand Hotel Abyss, the day that McCarthy died. He really nails how a publisher holding onto a loss leader like McCarthy for so long until he was finally noticed represents a different era in publishing. Now that publishing houses have been absorbed into ever larger media conglomerates, there is very little pretense of upholding artistry left, only profit motive.
It feels like Ted is driving at the same thing here when he’s examining the reception to McCarthy’s final books. It’s not just the media but a deficient literate culture (and its subsequent effect on the media) that ignores his genius.
All the pretty horses
"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the Eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.
As he turned to go heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the East like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite breaks and creating out of the night the endless fence line down the dead straight right away and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came legging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground shutter watching it till it was gone."
McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, I read "Blood Meridian " twice through on a 2-day Greyhound bus ride home to Cleveland from Albuquerque, NM 20 years ago; it was a perfect companion to the sleepless, hallucinogenic feel of the trip.
I think the NPR/NYRB culture doesn't like covering his books for another reason: they have a bias against authors whose work they find too "masculine" in style and content; unless the authors are folks of "other" cultures that can be easily exoticized. They disdain the readership they imagine for books like McCarthy's, you could say.
Anyhow, if folks are nervous about reading CM due to gruesomeness, violence, etc.; give them "Suttree". It's my favorite and the least thorny book of his that I know of.
I am an old and timid reader but have found that reading The Honest Broker is one of the few best things I have ever done in broadening my exploration of literature. Cormac is now on my list of book authors yet to come into my home library. Reading this current review has been exciting and emotional to a significant degree. I appreciate everyone here who is offering meaningful comment.
“ Just a few days ago, a novelist withdrew her book from publication—because it was set in Russia in the 1930s. This might hurt feelings (of Ukrainians, etc.). So the book got axed. For better or worse, that’s the literary culture in the year 2023. At this rate, we’ll soon have a new ending for War and Peace, with Napoleon returning from Moscow in triumph. Anything else would be indelicate.”
This was one of the dumbest developments in recent weeks, although there’s a lot of competition. In a world of physical books, what’s on paper is on paper forever, unless burned, but digital media brings with it the opportunity for the absurd, including even modifications to Tolstoy, at some future date.
I read The Road during a particularly bleak passage in my own life—probably not the best timing—but still I will never forget simply putting my head down on the dining room table and weeping as the final pages of the story unfolded. And now, 15 years and several McCarthy books later, my frequent response to what I see around me, either uttered or imagined, is, "This ain't 'no country for old men'."
Thank you for this.
I’ve never read Cormac McCarthy. There are too many books in the world and our paths have never crossed. I think I might now.
I agree with what you say about the need for brutal writing to shake us out of the torpor we appear to be in in when it comes to letting more and more catastrophic events seemingly wash over us every day but I do understand the need of those who seek to use literature as a refuge too. I suppose the issue is that that choice should be made BY the individual consumer and not for them.
Ted,
Blood Meridian is our Moby Dick of the 20th Century. I've read it seven time and taught it to AP English students. I also agree w/ your assessment of his final books whichI read out of order but thought were consistently brilliant. I am taking on Suttree next, which Sebastian Junger says is a must read.
Orin Domenico
not sure about broad brushes like the 'culture industry' but you failed to notice the review by James Wood, easily the best writer on literature currently working in English. He did a deep dive that covered the essence of the two different styles of McCarthy and, especially compared with early works, it may be a bit of an overstatement to call either work a masterpiece. Regardless, Wood did his serious noticing and recognized what is to be appreciated and what rang false in both works.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/19/cormac-mccarthy-peers-into-the-abyss-the-passenger-stella-maris
I love writers for the way they use language, and McCarthy’s prose in Blood Meridian is for me very nearly unparalleled.
The only other modern American writer I’d put in the same class is Thomas Pynchon.
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" "The Shadow knows!"
As did Cormac McCarthy.
To read McCarthy is to risk unique pain, that of encountering the Devil and the mystery of one's own evil, other worldy and supranatural in origin, pehaps, but of fallen man's nature in its expression. In attempting to describe his experience of reading McCarthy, the lowly worm reader is confronted with imaginative constraints and the reader's poor power to communicate horror expressively. I can't say adequately what I see when I read McCarthy (my poor powers to add or detract are too poor) but I know it when I see it, and I see it also in the Book of Revelations, Augustine when he confesses, Conrad's Horror, Faulkner when he's most cynical, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn in everything they wrote about the psychology of depraved and saved man, and Hannah Arendt in grappling with totalitarianism and Eichmann. To read McCarthy is to channel the Gulag Archipelago, One day in The Life..., Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Augustine's Confessions, The Brothers Karamazov, Prince Andrey's nihilism as he lay dying in War and Peace, and the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
So, that's all I've got-to describe my experience of McCarthy as best I can merely by saying that to me it's like reading a very select few other writers. Reasoning by analogy is insufficient, but it's the best I can do.