Cormac McCarthy: the passing of a literary giant

His stories traversed Appalachia and the American Southwest; his characters, outsiders, co-existing in a world of savage violence and incomprehensible meaning. More than any other twentieth century writer, Cormac McCarthy defined the darker side of America and the human condition. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1992, in one of the very few interviews he ever gave. Indeed, you would never encounter the apple pie, manicured lawns type of Americana in Mr McCarthy’s works; his novels were filled with beatings, scalpings, rape, incest, necrophilia, cannibalism and an inescapable fatalism. Yet, despite all the macabre trappings of his stories, Mr McCarthy captivated his readers with his biblical prose and challenged them to face up to their own mortality. The author Stephen King recently described McCarthy’s writing as “hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power.” Amen to that. 

For many years, Mr McCarthy – fulfilling the mould of the reclusive writer – lived quietly outside the literary mainstream. His first four novels – “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) – all barren fables written in the disjointed prose of William Faulkner, were not commercially successful. 

His next novel, the unremittingly brutal and blood-soaked anti-western, “Blood Meridian” (1985), initially received little recognition, but is now widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of American literature. The esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom counted “Blood Meridian” as one of the twentieth century’s towering achievements; Time magazine placed it in its “Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”.

McCarthy’s singular talents would eventually propel him to the mainstream. His elegiac 1992 western, “All the Pretty Horses,” won McCarthy a National Book Award; his gruelling, post-apocalyptic “The Road” landed him the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The nihilistic neo-western “No Country for Old Men” (2005) was quickly adapted into a film, written and directed by the Coen Brothers (Ethan and Joel). It was a resounding success, winning 4 Academy Awards, including for Best Picture. 

“No Country for Old Men” features one of Mr McCarthy’s most memorable characters, the clinically psychopathic hitman Anton Chirgurh (no one is quite sure how to pronounce that surname), decimating his victims with a cattle bolt gun. In the film, he was portrayed by an unforgettable Javier Bardem – in Oscar-winning form – donning a foul haircut and a petrifying mechanical smile. In his amoral, matter-of-fact lethality, Chirgurh may be one of the great unsung American zeitgeists: a baffling incantation of the scourge of violence that has always plagued the vast expanses of the United States of America. This was one of the great things about Mr McCarthy; he may not have been America’s saccharine cheerleader, but he was one of its greatest psychoanalysts. 

Cormac McCarthy’s prose can seem off-putting, especially to the uninitiated. It is certainly austere, bereft of most punctuation: there are no quotation marks, no semicolons and very few commas. Notwithstanding, the reader is advised to push through; they will unlock a mesmerising portal into the vast and desolate American landscape, and a jarring insight into the darkest recesses of the human mind. There is also the occasional comic relief through wicked humour as well; in the picaresque “Suttree”, when a dimwitted young man “violates” a farmer’s watermelon field, the farmer sues, alleging bestiality; the young man retorts, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”