Cormac McCarthy's Abendrot

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• Cormac McCarthy's Abendrot
• David Cowart (bio)

For this reader, convinced that he beheld in Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo the apex literati of our time (yes, yes, white males all), apocalypse took the form foretold when, on June 13, a third of that splendid asterism was swept from the firmament. One step ahead of death ("this fell sergeant," as Hamlet says, so "strict in his arrest"), McCarthy had seen the last of his twelve novels into print only last December. He died scant weeks before his ninetieth birthday, which he would have observed on July 20. As William Butler Yeats supplied one of McCarthy's best-known titles, one may well, on this occasion, invoke again the opening of Auden's elegy for the great Irish poet: "Earth, receive an honored guest."

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In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer recalls being at Oxford and encountering "an old gentleman" who told him: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." I am haunted by this anecdote because it seems to characterize reading itself as "no country for old men"—to augur an end to a lifetime's joy in that pastime. And alas, though I read much of the night and go north in summer, I am less routinely transported by the books I dive into. Nor dare one indulge too frequently in the touchstones of yore (the last paragraphs of "The Dead," the first of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the fifth chapter of Urne-Buriall), lest they become filmed over with a blighting [End Page 178] familiarity. I could always take comfort, however, in the knowledge that new writing by a Cormac McCarthy (and, as intimated above, one or two of his contemporaries) could restore the wonted, primal delight.

Like most of his eventual readerdom, I came late to McCarthy. Friends had thrust copies of Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985) into my hands, but for me, as for so many others, it was All the Pretty Horses (1992) that blew my hair back and made me, more or less immediately, an acolyte. It met the criterion famously articulated by Kafka: a book should be the ax to the frozen sea within us. Mythic yet countermythic, the novel ends with its hero, John Grady Cole, displaying the thigh wound that links him to Odysseus, Jesus, and the Fisher King. As this roll call of archetypes implies, here was a flawless composite of quest narrative and, in all its permutations, romance: chivalric Western, love story, splendid adventure tale, the very essence of escape from the everyday. But all of it anchored, in the end, by that iron law of the McCarthy imagination: the reality principle.

McCarthy came gradually to bestride contemporary letters like the colossus that greeted ancient mariners sailing into the harbor at Rhodes. He was as replete with authority as the Old Testament, as idiosyncratic as Melville, as unsparingly lucid in his vision of human character and history as Dante or Milton. He was that once common but now rare phenomenon, the great writer unspoiled by the creative-writing hustle of higher education. Indeed, he managed not to take (or need) a university degree and so joined the great sodality of literary autodidacts, the fellow of Dickens and Twain, not to mention Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Vonnegut, and Capote.

He had a great sense of humor, withal.

Called "the bard of American masculinity" by Slate's skeptical reviewer, Laura Miller, McCarthy did in fact favor male characters, some loathsome, some heroic, but he also evinced great empathy for the racial other, the hapless, and the homosexual—I'm thinking of Ab Jones, Gene Harrogate, Trippin' Through the Dew, and the "buckled tribades" of Suttree. Memorable women (passionate Wanda, meretricious Joyce) also figure in that novel. From Rinthy Holme in Outer Dark (1968) to the epileptic prostitute Magdalena in Cities of the Plain (1998) to transgendered Debussy in The Passenger (2022), McCarthy's female characters are realized with panache. Three of...