Celestial Timepiece

“he is a titan of literature fierce & indomitable as a tornado” — Joyce Carol Oates

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now here is a purely literary, visionary, word-besotted artist. McCarthy may be quoted out of context beautifully & his imagination reduced to a few bleak passages, but over all he is a titan of literature fierce & indomitable as a tornado. that is art–accumulative, intransigent
—Joyce Carol Oates, June 14, 2023

(most interesting that “The Stonemason” is about a Black family whom McCarthy treats with enormous respect & obvious affection. like nothing else he’d written. of course the vatic oracular voice is seductive but can become pretentious: “Stonemason” is not at all pretentious)
—Joyce Carol Oates, June 19, 2023

not sure if it’s my favorite Cormac McCarthy –(that would be jubilantly joycean “Suttree”)–but surely “The Stonemason” is the most warmly human, psychologically “realistic” work he’d ever done; & so odd, McCarthy never again wrote anything like it, a literary/poetic play).
—Joyce Carol Oates, June 19, 2023

In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy

Pascal’s enigmatic remark in the Pensées “Life is a dream a little less inconstant” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, which unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian; from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to the tightly plotted crime novel, No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy’s worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor. Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the US Air Force for four years, of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy’s first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mockepic Blood Meridian, set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849 to 1878, marks the author’s dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest.

Full text of “In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy”

Image: New Mexico backroad, Michael Dunn, blurred and mixed with author portrait.

Image: Cormac McCarthy book jacket portrait, Joe Blackwell, 1965