Written in Stone

Cormac McCarthy was a complicated fellow.

He was a son of privilege who was more at home among the poor, a poor student who sought knowledge and soaked it up. He was fiercely independent, yet let himself be saved time and again by the patronage of others. He lived for quiet time with his typewriter but loved carousing with friends.

As a writer, he was a Southern heir to Faulkner, but also a singular sage of the West. He was suspicious of language as a way to explain the world but wrote in prose so ornate it seemed more carved from stone than pecked on a portable Olivetti Lettera 32. He could be uncompromising in matters of subject, style, and punctuation, all in apparent disregard for the reading public — yet he craved sales.

It’s a lot for even a 500-page, forensically reported biography to wrangle, yet Tracy Daugherty’s Cormac McCarthy has moments when we just might witness the essence of McCarthy. Here’s a favorite:

“[H]e knew every gambler, hustler, pool shark, and bad check artist in the county, maybe in all of East Tennessee. And they were all friends of his. He was always taking their information, but he wasn’t the type of guy to tell you much. Didn’t leave a lot of fingerprints.”

That’s a quote from a friend, talking about the early 1970s McCarthy. He’d published three novels that were praised, often rapturously, though sales were modest to poor. His second marriage was in trouble. Suttree, his Southern masterpiece and most autobiographical novel, was years in the making and still a few years away. He was still living in Knoxville, where he grew up, but the West beckoned. In the West, of course, he would achieve literary fame, legend status, with the likes of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain — the Border Trilogy.

But let’s linger on the quote, for what it says about McCarthy the man, and the man of letters.

He rejected his family, particularly his lawyer father, for the company of rounders. But it wasn’t mere slumming. He wasn’t scraping the bottom of the social barrel just for some of that prime Southern gothic material.

Daugherty makes clear: McCarthy identified with outcasts and rejects. They were more interesting. They lived more boldly. We can’t choose our family, but we can choose our friends. And these were McCarthy’s.

Yes, they were his material. He took their stories and put them on the page — J-Bone was a character in Suttree and a real-life friend of McCarthy’s. Yet you wouldn’t call it soul stealing. He gave the so-called dregs of society a literary immortality and something more — their humanity.

And yet he was a man apart. He could be selfish, stubborn. Apt to disappear for long stretches. And Daugherty writes that “no amount of desperation could force him to work full time.” When the money was low and he deigned to work, the work was good — when he deigned to show up.

One brush with labor in the late 1970s is telling. McCarthy was working for a friend, designing a house addition. The owner of the home, a sociology professor living in Nashville, praised McCarthy’s skills and ingenuity, calling him a “genius,” adding, “He could have done anything he wanted … maybe if he’d been a nicer guy.” Meaning, McCarthy could be difficult, unreliable. He’d alienate co-workers. Steal tools.

At one point, when more material was needed to finish the job, the professor said McCarthy pulled a stack of credit cards from his pocket and asked if he wanted one. The professor said he couldn’t use a credit card that wasn’t his. McCarthy’s response: “I do it all the time.”

In the end, the professor fired McCarthy. No worries. Only the writing mattered, and doing it well was “the point around which everything else revolves.”

McCarthy was adhering to the Faulkner axiom, as stated in the famous interview with The Paris Review: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

Or ex-wives, in McCarthy’s case. He had three. Even before he’d published a novel, Daugherty writes, “he had already chosen his gift above the world, giving up marriage and fatherhood to pursue his vision.” The marketing material says the book shows “what McCarthy’s single-minded focus on literature cost him in family relationships, marriages, and friendships.” Cost him?

That’s one way to put it. Another is: McCarthy chose to put literature first. He also choose to marry, again and again. And, in middle age, to start a relationship with a teenager named Augusta Britt. You may have read the Vanity Fair piece about the so-called “craziest love story in literary history.”

It’s all here. So Cormac McCarthy can occasionally be a tough read, if you want to revere the man as you do the writer. Or if you find it difficult to separate the two.

But in this regard, McCarthy was not really such a complicated fellow. Read a biography of Faulkner, who put writing ahead of everything, including his marriage — but still found time for affairs with younger women. No wonder Faulkner, a likewise private author who abhorred prying eyes, suggested for his epitaph: “He made the books and he died.”

But you can separate the art from the artist. You’d better. Or else you’ll be left with lonely evenings and precious little art. And McCarthy’s was sublime. There are readers for whom Suttree is the best American novel ever written, with such passages as, “Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.” And others who swear it’s not even McCarthy’s best — an honor they bestow on Blood Meridian, the first of his Western works, which The New York Times said “comes at the reader like a slap in the face,” hard to get through but “harder to ignore.” Sales, again, were poor. But going west was a good career move. Success came, and of course McCarthy bristled at its cloying nature.

Daugherty’s biography gives us everything, a life in full. A strayed son. An otherwise-engaged husband and father. A carouser. A charmer, too, when he wanted to be. A good friend, but one who tended to set the terms. A deep and curious soul. And, yes, a writer of staggering creativity — Southern novels that can sit on a shelf with Faulkner, Western works that stand alone.

The verdict here?

Read Cormac McCarthy.

Then read Cormac McCarthy.