Some years ago in New Orleans, I learned a word in an antiquarian bookshop, one of those places organized according to the idiosyncratic style that was no doubt an outward physical manifestation of the proprietor’s own mind and memory. On a small shelf just inside the door was the label “Crime, Murder, & Rascality.” The term “rascality,” its definition balanced so perfectly on the fulcrum between the evil and the merely mischievous, may be the perfect descriptor for the way Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), who grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, lived his life.
A serial raconteur, married thrice, constantly searching and moving, often spending nights in jail as a young man, whose powerful mind and good looks allowed him to chase women until his dying years, McCarthy is a product of his epoch: He simply could not have been permitted if he had come of age today.
After an awful childhood characterized by roaming the fading old hillbilly South filled with mythos and moonshine, rebelling against a violently abusive but outwardly upstanding lawyer father by doing poorly in school and befriending every delinquent he could spend time with in seedy bars or pool halls, in his 20s, McCarthy abandoned his first son, putting his first wife and a 6-month-old baby on a train bound far away. In his 40s, he took a 17-year-old girlfriend and formed a lifelong relationship that would become public after his death. The old rascal hit on his friends’ wives, and described himself as sober when he was drinking less than normal, but still drinking.
Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited;
By Tracy Daugherty;
St. Martin’s Press;
528 pp.; $35.00
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Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited; By Tracy Daugherty; St. Martin’s Press; 528 pp.; $35.00
For long stretches of his life, which only saw him achieve literary celebrity well into the period when hair goes gray, he lived almost as a bum, penniless, often operating out of motels, or lighting out on long journeys to places like a pre-jet set Ibiza, or Texas and Mexico. The trips served him in collecting fodder for his seemingly superhuman care with language and dialect, as well as his fearsomely accurate descriptions of the physical world, so full of knickknacks and weapons and desert bluffs and human pain. They also seem, to judge from Tracy Daugherty’s new biography, Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, to simply be the restless wanderings of a gluttonously curious mind, at once scandalized and enthralled by the world.
Given his litany of sins, that nearly any reader of this biography is likely to come away liking McCarthy and imagining him to be someone it would have been nice to know counts as a real achievement. Biographies should give readers a vivid and whole enough picture for readers to feel justified in making such a judgment, one way or the other, and Daugherty does just this. He seems to have spoken to a large number of McCarthy acquaintances and family members, as well as to have mastered the massive corpus of letters and papers that McCarthy, an inveterate redrafter and notetaker, left behind. The book also shines when it traces McCarthy’s money troubles — for a long time he had much too little, and then he had much too much.
But Daugherty’s great virtue as a biographer of writers (he has also written on Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry, among others) is as a close reader. In attending to each of McCarthy’s books, he offers analyses and descriptions that are, impressively, both short and keen. Any more you’d want to know would send you to the book itself. (Those of us who think Blood Meridian [1985] is at least as good as Moby-Dick would tell you to take the time to do so before even considering reading a biography of the author.)
Still, it’s not all good. Daugherty, also a novelist, often gives in to the (unconscious?) temptation to attempt to emulate the stylized writing of his subject. Daugherty is a fine writer, but the comparison is not kind to him. For every successful literary flourish (“McCarthy slouched as though he’d like to be folded into his own back pocket. He leaned his head against his left hand and ran his other hand across his face as if to erase it”), there are perhaps 50 unsuccessful ones (“the jittery starlight like fireflies bobbing through black clouds”).
Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of The Road in 2009 in New York. (Evan Agostiniap)
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Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of ‘The Road’ in 2009 in New York. (Evan Agostiniap)
Daugherty is also clearly uncomfortable in recording that McCarthy was a Republican who consumed conservative media, and also a car guy, making sideswipes and moving briskly along. He is more comfortable evincing McCarthy’s environmentalism, partly rooted, Daugherty explains, in his childhood opposition to his father’s work with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Much is made of the great evils of the dams erected in this endeavor, and of the clearing out of the land necessary to establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park — modernization and conservation efforts which Daugherty describes McCarthy as deeply opposed to, along with all technological modernizing, and modernity itself. If he thinks the model reader sees these projects as net negatives, he is probably mistaken. The book also contains a strained attempt at a thematic linking of McCarthy with the making of the atomic bomb, tracing McCarthy’s life from the environs around the Oak Ridge facility for producing nuclear fuel to his death near the site of the Trinity test.
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What makes the book engrossing is not the mainly good but uneven work the biographer put into crafting it, but the good work Cormac McCarthy put into living his life. He never had a real job, as such, instead dedicating himself with great intensity to writing, first in the Faulknerian style he loved and then as the muse took him. His travels from a home base in Tennessee to the American Southwest changed the trajectory of his interests and literary career, resulting in Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses (1992), and No Country for Old Men (2005). For those masterpieces, we also have to thank the work of brilliant editors, as Daugherty rightly acknowledges. A McCarthy Substack (Cormacstack?) would likely not have been any good, so preciously and slowly did he write, and so adamantly did he resist notes (despite often eventually taking them in).
In McCarthy’s late middle and old age, after finally achieving the literary recognition he’d so long craved, he turned his interests primarily to science, or at least to socializing with star scientists, mainly through the Santa Fe Institute, where he was a sort of pet writer. He seems to have tried in all phases of his life to be gruff and obscure, and to show himself as infinitely disappointed with the world and hostile to his fellow man. It’s delightful to watch him fail, as he can’t help but charm everyone both in person and through his books, outwardly bleak but so obviously coming from a place of love.
Nicholas Clairmont is a freelance writer. He is the former Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
