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Journalism of Courage
Celebrated American author Cormac McCarthy passed away on June 13, at the age of 89. During his lifetime, he wrote 12 novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, mostly set in the American south and dealing with violent, often apocalyptic themes. He was compared to authors like William Faulkner and Herman Melville, and considered one of the greatest American writers.
Some of his most famous novels include All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). No Country for Old Men was later adapted into a 2007 film of the same name by the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, which won several Academy awards, including Best Picture — the novel had itself arisen out of a screenplay McCarthy had written.
McCarthy’s last books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published in 2022. Reacting to his death, Stephen King, another iconic figure of American literature, wrote: “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”
The works
McCarthy was praised for his distinct prose, which was described as “dense”, “austere” and even “weird” on occasions. It was characterised by minimal punctuation, and generally depicted deeply disturbed characters and the violence in their lives, in an explicit manner. There is also a pervasive sense of nihilism in his novels; however, some critics read his later works as ‘moralistic’.
In a rare interview with American media mogul Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy said that he preferred “simple declarative sentences” and described semicolons as “idiocy”. Other defining features of his prose are the absence of quotation marks for dialogues, as well as lack of attribution for dialogues.
Some other recurring themes in his books are individuals in conflict with society, and the ineptitude of authority figures, especially those in law enforcement. In a 2009 profile in The Guardian, McCarthy was described as “the great pessimist of American literature”, and as a “reclusive soothsayer who makes even Hemingway look touchy-feely”.
The Pulitzer Prize winner The Road could be argued as the pièce de résistance of McCarthy’s bibliography: it details the journey of an unnamed father and son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, seeking food and resources to survive the coming winter. Critics noted the ‘ray of hope’ at the end of the novel, and it was adapted for the screen in 2007, with the film also winning critical acclaim.
American critic and literature professor Erik J Wielenberg, in his essay ‘God, Morality, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, writes that the novel is “a meditation on morality, what makes human life meaningful, and the relationship between these things and God. While the novel is rife with religious imagery and ideas, it suggests a conception of morality and meaning that is secular in nature.”
McCarthy also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Suttree (1979), which was remarkable for its departure from his usual writing style. The book depicts fringe communities in the American state Tennessee, where he had grown up, and has a more humorous tone than his other bleaker novels.
His 1985 historical novel, Blood Meridian, was the first to catapult him into the wider public eye. Also set in Tennessee, the novel belongs to the Western genre, and describes the violent exploits of a gang in the American Southwest. Critics, including William Dalrymple, have called it the ‘Great American Novel’ (a Great American Novel is an academic and literary term that refers to a canonical text that exemplifies the essence of being American; some other examples include Melville’s Moby Dick, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn).
Harold Bloom, one of the foremost literary critics of all time, wrote about the book: “…no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian.”
The person
McCarthy generally stayed away from the public eye, except on rare occasions, and seldom came out to promote his work, even as the culture of ‘celebrity author’ was growing across the US. He also never did other jobs for sustenance, choosing to devote himself entirely to his writing since 1959 (he had previously served in the Air Force for four years, and dropped out at least twice from the University of Tennessee), which often brought him and his family to conditions of poverty.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1992, he said that writing was “way, way down at the bottom of the list” of his many interests. He famously preferred the company of scientists over fellow authors, and also voiced his opinions on other authors. In the same interview cited above, he said that he respected only authors who “deal with issues of life and death”, citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not.
In a conversation with the Coen brothers, he also said that he did not understand the appeal of magical realism genre: “You know, it’s hard enough to get people to believe what you’re telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.”
