About 10 years ago, the critic James Wolcott suggested that Martin Amis (who died last month at 73) retire from writing novels and instead commit himself full-time to giving interviews—which were always funny, and crackling with insight and pleasure, even when the book he was selling was a bit of a stinker. I’d happily trade in Lionel Asbo for a dozen more Amis interviews. In one of these conversations, Amis explained that Vladimir Nabokov was the most hospitable of novelists, always offering you a nice drink and his finest chair. By contrast, Amis said, reading James Joyce’s work, with puns whose appreciation requires a knowledge of Old Norse and the names of minor Irish rivers, was like arriving at an entryway rigged for pratfalls, with mousetraps snapping at your feet as you struggled to find the light switch, only to discover that no one was home.
I have wondered where on this spectrum of hospitality one might find Cormac McCarthy, who died yesterday at 89. Had he taken Wolcott’s proposed form of literary early retirement, we would have been deprived of two great books—The Passenger and Stella Maris—and gotten essentially zilch in return, so arid and gnomic were his few public utterances. He was Joycean, by way of Faulkner, in his total unwillingness to spare the reader looking up an obscure word. (My copy of Blood Meridian has a slip of paper in it, with a list of words I had to look up and have never used since: weskit, anchorite, thrapple.) Like Joyce, he used such words, especially Germanic ones, without inhibition, although the effect was totally different. The McCarthy voice was timeless—not in the pedestrian sense of “will be read for generations,” but in the unsettling, cosmological sense that one could not tell whether the voice was ancient or from the distant future. The diction contributed to this effect, as the words were seemingly so unplaceably antique that it was as if he had excavated them from some prehistoric riverbed, where they were laid down like fossils from the earliest days of human speech.
He was equally unsubmissive to other human sensibilities: Harold Bloom, who thought Blood Meridian the best novel by a living American, wrote that he had needed a few false starts to get through the book, because the torture and death were so unrelenting. I first read Blood Meridian while sitting next to a cairn of stacked bones, the remains of victims of genocide in the Cambodian countryside. In such a setting, nothing in the book felt far-fetched. McCarthy’s middle romantic period, in particular the Border Trilogy, was humane, even tender at times, but it could also be overtaken by violence, unannounced and no doubt for many readers unwelcome. No one, however, could claim that the horrifying turns defied reality. And no matter how awful the turn, in any of his books, it always seemed tragically inevitable in the world McCarthy had made.
To me, reading McCarthy was like reading the work of some advanced alien intelligence. (His final novels suggest the existence of such a force.) Does an alien intelligence make you feel welcome? Does it mess with you, and set malicious little traps? McCarthy didn’t labor to comfort a reader, nor were his books elaborate pranks at the reader’s expense. The worlds depicted in Blood Meridian and The Passenger are not built for mortal humans like you and me. They are built instead as arenas of combat for godlike figures with little interest in providing temporary solace to the humans who pass through their worlds. These superhuman characters have plans and battles whose schedules are measured in millennia, and they regard the rest of us with only peripheral attention. The subject of his inhuman novels is ironically most humane: how to live and die as a mortal being, while in the crossfire of gods and demigods on a battleground that preceded human existence and will continue long after we are all gone.
On any given page of McCarthy, one is likely to find an unlucky minor character getting scalped, or tipsily holding court in the French Quarter. The Passenger will be the book for which McCarthy is remembered, I suspect, because unlike in Blood Meridian, these mortal bystanders are not inarticulate, spitting cowboys. When the Kid, the ragged mortal at the center of Blood Meridian, meets the demigod poised to kill him, he says, “You ain’t nothing”—an act of humane insolence so awesome that one wishes to build a statue to him, on behalf of our species. The characters of The Passenger talk back to the gods more eloquently. “The horseman it would seem has chalked my door,” writes one such character, the sublime John Sheddan, in a letter sent from his deathbed to the protagonist. “I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here … More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.” These are not the most comforting words I have read about death, but they seem as likely as any to be true.
