Cormac McCarthy has died. He was eighty-nine years old. It would not be exactly true to call him a mainstream novelist, but he was more nearly mainstream than an author of genre fiction or of one of the pulp genres. However, like Walker Percy (1916-1990), he wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, his called The Road, from 2006.
Like Percy and so many well-known and well-admired American authors of the twentieth century, the late Mr. McCarthy was a Southerner. However, he was not so by birth, for Cormac McCarthy, whose real name was the same as a ventriloquist's dummy, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. Imagine: for a time, he shared a city with H.P. Lovecraft.
Like Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy, as a writer, lived in poverty. He did not come from poverty, though. His father was a successful and well-off attorney. Named Charles Joseph McCarthy (1907-1995), he was born in Providence, too. In 1934, the elder McCarthy began work for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The McCarthy family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. I imagine they lived somewhere else in the South before that. If so, maybe Cormac McCarthy was a Yankee only for a year.
In 1962, when the childhood home of Knoxville author James Agee (1909-1955) was being demolished, Cormac McCarthy salvaged some of the bricks to build fireplaces in his writer's shack. Like Mr. McCarthy, James Agee was not an especially prolific author. Unlike him, Agee died young. Agee is known for his work from the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with another Walker, Walker Evans.* Agee also wrote the screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (1955), an unforgettable film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. Agee's screenplay was based on the novel of the same name by West Virginia author Davis Grubb (1919-1980). Writing as Dave Grubb, he had one story in Weird Tales, "One Foot in the Grave," from May 1948. His story "The Horsehair Trunk" (Collier's, May 25, 1946) was adapted to an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971.
I said that Cormac McCarthy was not exactly a mainstream author. That's probably not exactly true, either, for he wrote about violence, death, menace, and terror. He also wrote mostly of men. And if there is a setting for the American novel, it might be the road. Cormac McCarthy wrote, of course, the aforementioned novel, The Road. I think that he and his works would have fit easily into Leslie Fiedler's thesis concerning American literature, which Dr. Fiedler explicated in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966). Not love and hate, as printed on Robert Mitchum's knuckles, but love and death.**
Cormac McCarthy did a lot of wandering in his life. He lived in a lot of places and must surely have spent a lot of time on the road. The wonder is that he lived so long, was married three times, and had two children, one of whom, a then-young son, is one of the subjects of The Road. Mr. McCarthy came from an Irish-Catholic family. We have our ways. I see echoes in my own family of him and his.
He was interested in science and hung out with physicists, biologists, and other scientists. One of these was whale biologist Roger Payne (1935-2023), who died three days before Cormac McCarthy, on June 10, 2023. Dr. Payne's recordings of whale-song are on their way to the stars aboard the Voyager spacecraft. They are also in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), one of the better entries, I think, in that series. We begin our voyages by setting off on the road.
Another way in which Cormac McCarthy is in the mainstream of American literature is that he is essentially an enigma and a kind of solitary voice emanating from his place on the fringes, in the wilderness, from foreign shores, from beyond frontiers. In that way, he is like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, his fellow Southerners William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor, and countless others.*** I wish we had more of him. But at least we have what we have. At least we shared with him this life and this earth, at least for a while.
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*Like The Road, The Walking Dead is post-apocalyptic. In the former, the cannibals are living. In the latter, they are the walking dead, and they are called walkers.
**Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, probably too late for consideration in Leslie Fiedler's book. I once had a copy of The Orchid Keeper. I regret having given it up. I started it but never finished it. Like trying to read Loren Eiseley's book The Invisible Pyramid while I was still a high-schooler, I knew that this was something important and a book that would hold something for me, but I knew also that it was something above me at the time. Instead, since then, I have read Mr. McCarthy's Border Trilogy and The Road, plus No Country for Old Men (2005). I have Suttree and Blood Meridian on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time to read those, too. And, yes, I did go back and read The Invisible Pyramid. Loren Eiseley, a friend of Ray Bradbury, is one of my favorite authors.
***Another on that list might be Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., known as Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Brockden Brown shared a first name. Unfortunately, Mr. McCarthy also shared his first and last names with a ventriloquist's dummy, thus the powerful and evocative assumed name, Cormac. Brown's last novel is entitled Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803-1805). A biloquist is a ventriloquist.
Finally, Cormac MacCarthy and Cormac Mac Art were both men in Irish history. Robert E. Howard wrote stories about Cormac Mac Art. Finally, finally, my friend Sarah had a short-tailed cat that she called Cormy, short for Cormac McCarthy. Hello to Sarah wherever you are on this great road and I miss you.
Copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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