The Last Mesa: On the Importance of Cormac McCarthy
I recently finished reading all of Cormac McCarthy’s works, and now, sullenly, I need somewhere else to turn. I look around at my book shelves still with many, many books that I haven’t read, and I open their pages for a while, read a bit of their earnest prose, and close it again, uninterested, like a spoiled child unable to redeem the privileges of old sins. I’ve returned to a few of my old confident favorites—Gravity’s Rainbow, Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!—only for brief periods, reading a few pages, allowing them to mark their reassurances that this world is indeed a rich one, foaming over with desirious heartache, with hilarity and torment and paranoia, that the world is a complex marvel of characters, that our automation and annoyance of the world we are moving through, elbowing our way as quickly as possible through this human congestion, finding the fastest way to get to the end, that the world is in fact tantamount to our prejudices of it. It’s infinitely more rich and complex than the confidence of our egos presume it is. We may be a horrific man-eating species, just carnal beasts addicted to war disguised in tailored suits as genteelmannered professionals, but these impulses are sometimes negated by other lovelier truths.
In the bare harassment of our theater, standing naked at the dawn of this concupiscent malnourishment like a gaunt and grotesque version of our fertility—a silo of angst, our nascent hopes and dreams strewn out like carcasses—we can travel to the vividest of places and meet the craziest of characters with our mind, a book serving as a guide to that adventure, and we will be free and boundless in those moments. McCarthy’s language is an example of this, a velveteen nostrum to the noise, to the calamity of trudging through the nakedness of being alive here and now. The way he paints these worlds with words, these worlds that are unfamiliar to us but also distantly quotidian, like an embryonic memory, especially those of us who are American, who just until recently were these cruel despots of the frontier, we are guilty of believing we are the modern more civilized kin of this worship of our heritage.
A few years ago I made a promise to myself that I would read as many great works as I could, that I didn’t want to die without having read a majority of the best, and ideally what Harold Bloom considered even more important, was a second or third reading of them. This is impossible, of course, mostly because I can’t consume a thousand pages an hour like Bloom could, and because I’m a carpenter and spend the majority of my days in seething disdain of this decision. But it’s a strange desire, I realize that, to prefer to commit to the frenzy of consuming the divine conceit of stranger, wiser, quiet loners who huddled in their rooms for endless lengths of time on end, and plead for them to attach their views onto us, to clear out all the rubbage and distraction of life and real living, in all its marbled sensuality, so hopefully I can do the same and get a few worthwhile novels out into the rotting heap of history with all the others. It’s been a month since I finished Outer Dark, the last one that was waiting on my shelf, and it’s been a few months since McCarthy died.
And now he’s dead. Gone forever. Except as a memory, awake in the confines of the stories he gave to us. There was a reassurance about him, in the fact that he was still alive when he was, that one of the best in history was still working away, still etching new worlds letter by letter, hammering onto his one Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter that he wrote over five million words on. (He actually had two over the course of his career, but it doesn’t matter.) Because he created the most horrible and resplendent and redemptive worlds all in one that didn’t exist before, new characters that had never been birthed that spoke to us as some wretched innocence, so sickly urge carved deep into the human condition. I feel the same way about Thomas Pynchon, but he too is surely ready to die any day now, and then decade after decade there will be fewer writers and fewer readers, and we’ll be left alone, our brains rotting into the future of bucktoothed scoundrels, we’ll be left to roam the future like hyenas, cackling loudly and menacingly, the future as the new frontier where literature is quickly replaced by video games and VR headsets and three-dimensional pornography, fucking the brains out of a hi-tech blowup doll, the digitized malevolent gore of screens sucking us in like a blackhole, a Videodrome dictatorship, a barbarous whorish slave infinity. I know I am now just a guy complaining about the kids on their phones these days, like the sheriff towards the end of No Country For Old Men complaining about the kids and their green hair and rings through their noses, but McCarthy is a dying breed. I guess he’s a dead breed.
There is a wisdom and a gentleness about his writing that comforts us, dark but redemptive, romantic but in spiritual awe of whatever scintillating fury powers a landscape. Because a writer as good as McCarthy provides us a connection to this strange metaphysical Beyond that we are lacking everywhere else we turn. We don’t get this anywhere else. Even in life itself we grow cold to the actual experience, we become immune to the power of the senses, taking everything in like automatons, the illustrious scions of gods disregarded merely as distractions. Books are meditations to actually stop and remember the miracle of all the living minutiae that swirls around us. In Illuminations, Walter Benjamin said “Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation.” Seagulls screaming at the entrance of a mountainous landfill of information, an orgiastic jittering explosion of noise that rarely benefits us, and we are left to resolve some meaning from all this, some advice, some contrivance derived in the maelstrom of desire. Benjamin continues that “it is left up to [us] to interpret things the way [we] understand them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” Books have that rarity of calm and mindfulness that no other form of ingestion beholds. More often than not, the best movies made come from the books written first. Stanley Kubrick believed this truth was absolute, and a requirement to make a good movie.1 McCarthy has had a share of his novels already hastily transcribed onto the screen.
The problem with adapting not just McCarthy’s novels into movies, but turning any book of any literary value is that the film stock permanently brands itself into your brain. The images from the movie then become the novel, and you can’t think of the characters and their dilemmas without thinking of the movie that is usually just a huge waste of everyone’s time. The images from the screen move in, further crowd the already cloistered and claustrophobic alleys packed haphazardly inside your skull, like rodents wanting a free place to nest. The Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country For Old Men is one of the best films around, I’ve seen it probably dozens of times, I’ll just put it on in the background on mute to keep me company while I write sometimes. But it still unavoidably robs the book from it existing independently as a book. Sure, it probably got more people to read the book because they were exposed to it, or maybe it did the opposite because potential readers felt they already experienced that experience. Nevertheless, we are visual heathens, consuming the world through flashes of color and drama, chasing the bad guys through a forlorn frontier, trying to live adventure vicariously through these other splendorous realms because our lives have already become loveless heaps of nonconfrontation, the lassitudes of defeat accepting that there is no drama here within your paddock of existence, no heroes, no bad guys, no conclusion except for the same dull day fading into night. I refuse to watch Billy Bob Thorton’s All the Pretty Horses because it looks like a calamitous failure, and already I regret watching the trailer and allowing Matt Damon’s full-grown-man-with-a-Disney-character-cottonball-nose posturing as a teenager with pubescent dreams for first love. James Franco made an adaptation of Child of God, a pretty short, incredibly rich and dark and twisted and gorgeous book. I will not see that either. James Franco is one of the outlying spartan villains to culture in general. He has taken a few of William Faulkner books and tried his best to ruin them forever for everyone. Fortunately nobody saw his Faulkner adaptations, or his Child of God adaptation, fortunately only a few people were permanently scarred from experiencing his vision of art. But Franco tried to make the definitive Blood Meridian film adaptation. He did test shoots for it. He should be hung and quartered for this, for thinking he is qualified to take one of the greatest novels ever written and infecting us with his oozing violence of pretension, engraving our unmolested minds with his curried ejaculate. But then there are books like Suttree—I think his best—that would be difficult to adapt to the screen. Its rambling narrative, its lack of an obvious goal or conflict to resolve, its sometimes repellent romantic encounters with prostitutes and homeless teenagers—there is no obvious movie here. And there is something noble in that, in existing only as a work of literature, because if it’s good enough then there is no cinematography that can replace prose.
In Suttree, during a bar fight, Suttree gets hit over the head with a floorbuffer:
He was standing with his knees locks and his hands dangling and the blood pouring down into his eyes. He could not see. He said: Do not go down.
He swayed. He took a small step, stiffly fending. What waited was not the black of nothing but a foul hag with naked gums smiling and there was no madonna of desire or mother of eternal attendance beyond the dark rain with lamps against the night, the softly cloven powdered breasts and the fragile claviclebones alabastrine above the rich velvet of her gown. The old crone swayed as if to mock him. What man is such a coward he would not rather fall once than remain forever tottering.?
Prose is close to a living being, as it sits there bounded up in a book, imprisoned like a genie, sleeping for eternities on end at its sits closed on your bookshelf, and then comes to life for the most fleeting of moments as you read across the lines and then turn the page, and then it goes dormant again forever, but then also kind of lives distantly in you too.
McCarthy is of course haunted by his own reputation. The famous passage in Blood Meridian—“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”— this whole sentiment that McCarthy is known for is only a very narrow part of his aesthetic. And the aesthetic is only a very narrow part of the work itself. He’s known for his dark view of man, for the pervasive violence that is as resplendent and orgiastic and impartial as a very unfriendly cynic’s view of the world, one that has no hope left for us. In a eulogy to his death, The New York Times say that his books “explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.” Another says McCarthy “applied a stark, merciless vision to his stories of misfits and the apocalypse.” I think this reading of him is wrong. The ending of The Road is hopeful. The love story in All The Pretty Horses is a redemptive force to the violence that surrounds them. The love between Bobby Western and his sister in The Passenger, and Stella Maris is true love, and while it’s incestuous and intended to make us squeamish in a very traditionally McCarthy way, the heartache and madness is one of the most palpable I’ve read.2 And these sometimes stand out as Hollywood elements that can make a work more popular. But the truth is that every page is redemptive, that the writing itself is like a sunrise, a reassurance that there is a goodness in something rarely found. The way he describes a landscape unavoidably makes you look at your own landscapes as if for the first time, like being on psychedelics and realizing that the world around you that you have tragically taken for granted is brimming with impossible jawdropping beauty.
The other day I began a rereading of The Crossing, and noticed something I hadn’t before. There’s an exactness, a hyperrealism in his prose, that couldn’t just be imagined and whipped up. In an old interview or article on him from a while back, one of his ex-wives said he would go for long road trips to the places he wrote about, study them deeply and personally, get deep into the towns and countrysides and the people that created them. And there’s an undeniable intimacy and authenticity to the places and people he writes about. He claimed that he didn’t write much down before starting a new novel, that he instead let it bounce around inside his head for a while until it decided to take form. That seems outrageous, but people are wired differently, and maybe he was able to channel the spiritual truth of what Whitman said in Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” There’s a level of quality—dare we capitalize it to make it Quality—that can elevate us just by being close to it.
In Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he studies his famous query of what Quality is, what makes a piece of writing good or bad. He would take polls in the classes he taught, comparing a good paper from a student with a not-so-good one, and noticed something maybe expected, that the students consistently agreed on what the better of the two papers were, that there must be some underlying fabric of quality that made something of exceptional worth. He concludes to define Quality as a fundamental force in the universe that churns into manifestation all the ideas and material existence that we know of to continuously evolve and grow in greater proportions of quality. So a piece of “good” writing, according to Pirsig, is just a matter of channeling that fundamental force, the amount of reading and writing and observation, and living, rich complex years of living all this must take, to achieve the highest standard, is to connect to something deeper than just yourself and the skill that you alone have, but rather it is to barely tap into the much larger and grander wealth that came before you.
A lot of writers like to assume roles of being almost like divine mediums, that the work flows through them from the eternal outside. McCarthy famously never gave interviews, and while he was not a hermit in the way Salinger was or Pynchon is, he refused to talk about his writing process. My friend sat with him once, at his house, and spoke to him for an hour or so, and told me of how incredibly nice and personable he was, how small and soft he was, that he seemed like a loving man who was deeply interested in whatever my friend had to say. That was less than a year before he died, and I envy that sort of innocence and youthfulness one must have at that age, that earnestness for new ideas, new engagement, even when the end of your life is so closely in sight. I think I’m now at the point in my life where the older I am becoming, the more sympathetic I am to the world around. Maybe empathetic. At least I think I’m trying.
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon last night, for example, and while it was playing I thought about what it might take to have come up with this story on your own, simply as a screenwriter, trying to get another picture out into the frenzy of new content coming into the ether all the time. It’s too complicated and involved of a story for it just to be made up. I thought a lot about There Will Be Blood while watching it, and while that too is at least partly based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, you can tell that it comes from the mind of an individual, one of our best auteurs of course, and one of my favorite films of all time, but it’s still more a traditional narrative of the rise and fall of our main character, and overcoming the obstacle of his religious nemesis. Killers is too realistic and rich to be straight fiction, nobody is good enough to come up with that on their own. Our imaginations are much more simple. It reminds me of that quote from John Cassavettes: “I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter, I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them. What we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.” Cassavettes told real stories, and while they weren’t really true stories in the traditional sense, they were very much real. McCarthy’s books are similar, in that they’re works of fiction, but they are written from a life of deep observation, pulling utterly countless details from real people, that achieves in making it almost more real than real life. Of course, Blood Meridian is practically historical fiction—it’s based on the real Glanton gang, and Judge Holden is probably the whale from Moby-Dick, giant and pale white and immortal, but the characters within all his books, their actions, and desires, and little ways of doing things are more real to us than are are to ourselves.
Stella Maris is an impressively difficult achievement, to write an entire book consisting only of dialogue between a schizophrenic mathematical genius and her doctor, and discuss some of the most scientifically advanced topics. I’m not very scientifically literate, but I was not expecting to be turned on by this book, and look forward to future readings.