Cormac McCarthy,
the writer who never surfed the Net
Paulo Faria
Translated by Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta
Revised by Peter Josyph
Cormac McCarthy has died, and an immense sadness descends upon us.
With his death, a certain era, a certain literature have died.
McCarthy grew up in a time and a place where children, regardless of their social class (Cormac McCarthy was born into a wealthy family), learned from childhood to hunt and fish, they climbed trees, they had a close relationship with the natural world. This communion, this attention to natural cycles, was always at the heart of his writing. The age of writers who, as children, were Tom Sawyers or Huck Finns, has ended. Cormac McCarthy never touched a computer, he never surfed the net, he never did a Google search. To the very end he wrote on typewriters to which he remained loyal, pounding on the keys and pulling the carriage back at the end of each line. He spent many of his days in the Santa Fe Institute, talking to some of the most renowned scientists in the world, debating the nature of time, of space, of human language, the way that our brains work, but he never touched a computer. His knowledge was gathered from the printed word, from the spoken words of friends and colleagues, and from his own firsthand experience. That age has also died with him.
Long before the advent of the internet and social networks that have made people speak a lot and very quickly, McCarthy measured his public statements. Perhaps that was one of his most admirable traits: journalistic silence. In 1981 he said in an interview, “If your ego is so inverted that you really think the world wants to hear about what you did and thought, then there’s something very wrong with you.” Throughout his life, Cormac McCarthy never yielded an inch, he never deviated from this path.
Someone said that boring people tell the whole story. Cormac McCarthy never told us the whole story. Even in his longer novels—Suttree, The Crossing, The Passenger—what remains to be told is always more than what we are told. We will never know what Cornelius Suttree looks like. When he goes to the barber, we learn that he has dark curly hair. Nothing more. We will never know what global catastrophe devastated the world in The Road. Not that it matters. Only boring people tell the whole story. Only annoying people are convinced that the world is interested in finding out what we—or our characters—are doing and thinking at every moment.
Texas State University-San Marcos houses numerous typescripts of Blood Meridian, the greatest American novel about the conquest of the West and the violence inherent in the genesis of America. On one of those pages, beside a paragraph in which he describes a sunset seen from the top of a mountain range, McCarthy handwrote the following:: “You can use this but you must rewrite and have another day in the mountain.” Because his writing was just like that, it was born of the earth and the rocky hills. And there is an immense sadness in seeing a journey like this come to an end.
There’s a wonderful story they tell. Cormac McCarthy had already left the family home, on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. His younger brother, Dennis, his lifelong best friend, having just emerged from adolescence, moved into his older brother’s bedroom and began to rummage among his papers. He found the issue of the university magazine in which, without his family knowing, Cormac had published (still under his baptismal name, Charles) a shockingly mature short story, “A Drowning Incident,” in which some of the great themes of his work already appear.
"A Drowning Incident" can be summed up as follows:
A boy leaves the house, goes through the field and the forests.
A dog has given birth, the father weans the puppies and gives away the litter.
The boy lies down on a bridge, contemplates the water and, to his astonishment, he sees the bodies of the drowned puppies dragged past him by the current. Using a wire, he manages to fish up the sack containing the drowned puppies.
The story ends with the boy sitting in his room, waiting for his father to arrive. Beside his brother, still a baby, sleeping in his crib, carefully covered by the soft blanket, lies the soaking wet body of a puppy, which the lobsters have gutted.
Thrilled with this discovery, McCarthy's brother Dennis ran downstairs shouting “Mother, mother, look what Charles has written!” And he sat down at the kitchen table in front of his mother, who picked up the magazine and began to read the story. Her face gradually grew angrier and angrier. Until, to the amazement of Dennis, who expected her to be as delighted as he was, his mother, enraged, threw the magazine on to the table and shouted: “That’s not what happened at all!” Without knowing it, Cormac McCarthy’s mother expressed the essence of her son’s genius: in fact, nothing like that happened. The stories he told were born of the earth and the rocky hills, but they only occurred in one place: in Cormac McCarthy’s own mind.
“I guess his writing took him there.”
That’s what I was told by Jim Long, a Knoxville friend from Cormac McCarthy’s childhood and youth—and one of the featured characters in Suttree. I had asked Jim why Cormac had left Tennessee and moved to the Southwest to write about Comanches, cowboys and scalphunters. The truth is that Jim Long understood it all, because for Cormac McCarthy everything happened because of the writing: it was the writing that took him everywhere.
The writing and the silence—always the silence.
McCarthy published The Road in 2006, then we waited sixteen years for The Passenger and Stella Maris, an incredible duology, unique, into which Cormac McCarthy seemed determined to put everything he had left to say before he died. The Passenger ends with Bobby Western living alone in a windmill in Ibiza, absorbed in his thoughts, waiting for death. It is a kind of homecoming, because Cormac McCarthy lived in Ibiza as a young man. It is also the culmination of a long line of protagonists in Cormac McCarthy’s novels who end up on their own, having turned their back on the world. As if McCarthy, who sacrificed a great deal throughout his creative drive, had always felt a weighty premonition of the final loneliness.
In San Marcos there are also typescripts of other masterworks. There is a page of The Road that he didn’t use in the final version. The father and son, hidden behind a cliff, see a horse being cornered by a horde of hunters who stab it to death, butcher it, and begin to roast the meat. Father and son keep watch until the following morning, but the hunters don’t budge for a long time.
“They rose and went on through the bare woods. He watched the boy. It sure did smell good, didnt it?
The boy nodded.
There’ll be other horses.
But there werent.”
And now that we won’t find any more horses, we have to learn to live without Cormac McCarthy. To learn a new way to breathe, as a friend of mine said to me just now. To learn a new way to walk, to be, to read. To learn to live without Cormac McCarthy’s silence.
13 June 2023
This text was originally published in the Portuguese daily newspaper Público.
Accessible at: https://www.publico.pt/2023/06/14/culturaipsilon/cronica/cormac-mccarthy-escritor-navegou-internet-2053259