cormac mccarthy, in memoriam

the novelist who proved when you stare into the abyss, it stares back at you

I was 21 when I first read Cormac McCarthy. His most recent novel, No Country for Old Men, was still in hardback. I was living in New Orleans at the time, having recently graduated, and helping with Hurricane Katrina clean-up. My best friend had swung through town on a road trip through Dixie and was listening to the book on audio. After his high commendation—and to break up the string of Russian novels I was reading at the time—I picked up McCarthy’s dark book.

I will never forget the voice of Ed Tom Bell, the beleaguered West Texas sheriff and “old man” of the title. I will never forget the chilling character of Anton Chigurh, even before Javier Bardem frightened the world with his portrayal of the dead-eyed killer. I will never forget Llewelyn Moss’s misguided attempt to John Wayne the situation, an attempt that ends with an ignominious off-page death. The book stuck with me.

Fast forward a year and some change, and my newly minted wife and I are living in El Paso, Texas, one of McCarthy’s old haunts and the scene of about 1/3 of the novel. The Coen Brothers’ film adaptation comes out and we go to see it. After we walked out, my wife took one look at the bleak landscape of our reality that matched so perfectly our escapism of the past two hours and promptly burst into tears. It was not an incorrect reaction. Indeed, McCarthy’s vision of the world naturally leads to despair.

I listened to the audio version of The Road, the first audiobook I ever listened to, while driving to work on dark, cold winter mornings. The scene, if you’ve read the book you know the one, made me feel eerie and off that entire day. While reading Blood Meridian, I often couldn’t believe what I was reading, the violence and the nihilism and the hopelessness were so overpowering. The Judge haunts my dreams.

When I read All the Pretty Horses, I could not believe that these books were all written by the same person. When I read his more Southern Gothic novels from his early career, I couldn’t believe that McCarthy could be funny when he chose (though darkly humorous, of course).

McCarthy was 89 when he died. That’s a long life. His writing career spanned from the mid-1960s up to the dual release of his novels The Passenger and Stella Maris which came out late last year. That’s a long time to be writing. His early novels read like Faulkner fan-fiction. Over time, he developed his own style. He became more clipped in his prose like Hemingway. He became Biblical in his language and allusions.

McCarthy’s darkness is often pointed out. It’s hard to miss. But I think there is more to him than showing depravity for depravity’s sake. When I talk about McCarthy with people, I always say that in the same way that Nietzsche is the one philosopher who honestly looked into the abyss of a godless world, McCarthy is the one novelist I know who has stared deeply into that abyss. For all I know, McCarthy believed in God. He certainly knew scripture, both its words and its cadences.

This world is dark. Our modern age abounds with false prescriptions and antidotes to this darkness, from naive, cheery optimism to denial to utter hopelessness and nihilism (that still insists on borrowing heavily and without attribution from Christianity). McCarthy showed the world in its darkness. Christians need to be realistic about this. We need to remember that, as the Psalmist says, if we make our bed in Sheol, God is there. If we cloak ourselves in darkness and pretend to be hidden, we need to remember that the darkness is as light to him. Nothing remains outside of his vision.

For me, McCarthy’s high-water mark as a writer is Blood Meridian. However, my favorite book by McCarthy is The Road. The Road, a post-apocalyptic travel thriller featuring a father and his young son, is, somehow, the most hopeful novel he would write. It is our duty as humans to keep the fire alive. The Father gives everything he has to his son and then Abraham-like, sends him out into the wilderness. No Country ends on a similar note of hope. Ed Tom dreams of his father cradling a flame and waiting for him ahead in the place where all old men eventually go. And John Grady Cole realizes something similar at the end of All the Pretty Horses. In perhaps my favorite passage in all of McCarthy’s vast corpus, he reflects:

He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

This is not a Christian view of reality. There is no cosmic balancing act between pain and beauty. And yet, I do think there is something to this sentiment. If this cosmos is ultimately a comedy and our lives a romance, then it is possible for single moments of beauty to overwhelm the pain we’ve experienced. Our fall, in the end, might be fortunate. The vision of grace all the grander for the darkness endured to reach its final beauty.

It is my prayer that McCarthy is standing in the presence of the Love that moves the sun and the other stars and that the darkness that he knew so well in this life is overwhelmed by the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. That he now sees that the pinpricks of light he saw breaking through the sea of darkness were the true reality, the harbinger of our eternal destiny. And that he now dwells in that light.