Cormac McCarthy

Why his novel Blood Meridian is a miracle that will haunt me to my grave

According to news reports, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy passed away last week. And the bone-headed takes like the below clunker just keep on coming (sneaky how they show McCarthy in a car since his author photos always have a timeless vibe and seeing McCarthy behind the wheel looking all cosmo smoothie like that is jarring.)

The problem with this thesis that Cormac McCarthy's career couldn’t happen today is that the same thing could be said about any author. Because every literary "career" is an idiosyncratic combo of talent + a bunch of once-in-lifetime individuals in publishing + bizarre serendipity. Deep down any writer who isn't full of it knows how fortunate they are and understands the weird odds they had to overcome. Writing a book is a radical act of faith that requires you to be delusional in the extreme.

So one of the greatest writers of all time is always going to be one of the luckiest writers of all time. Sure talent has to be there but there are so many other personal stories and variables that have to align perfectly in order to write and publish books.

McCarthy said he knew early on that he wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen. In his early twenties, I gather he was seen as a kind of derelict who dropped out of the University of Tennessee and joined the Air Force. So for four years he was just some rando enlisted guy in the Air Force (stationed in Alaska), devouring works of literature. But during that time he came to feel and know in his bones his writing gift and what must have felt like destiny (he was a nothing special veteran with a dream).

McCarthy had no writing workshops or instructors to give him affirmation. No internet. Didn't know any writers. So he sent his first manuscript to William Faulkner's editor at Random House in a shoebox.

My dad gave me McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for my 17th birthday. I’ve read that book at least 50 times. It remains one of the most transformative gifts I’ve received. And over the years, Blood Meridian has served as a kind of “truth compass” for me to navigate my life by. I’ve memorized so much of that book that I haven’t actually picked it up in years. But I still think about it all the time, like this iconic crazy ass jewel:

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Ironically, Blood Meridian was a big reason I dropped out of the University of Texas after my first year and enlisted in the Marine Corps. I know this sounds kind of insane, but the below passage haunted me and I wanted to find out if it was true:

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

That’s why when the Marine recruiter said that he could put me behind a computer because I had some college under my belt I told him no I wanted to go infantry, and when the recruiter tried to talk me out of it I told him wanted to be a grunt, a ground-pounder, and if he couldn’t do that for me then I wouldn’t sign. So on the contract my MOS (military occupational specialty) was listed as 0311 rifleman.

Later, when I became a savvier reader, I realized in the above passage that McCarthy had jacked Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and repurposed them for his book. And that’s where I learned how to jack other writers’ moves and repurpose them for my own writing. After spending a year in the Marines on active duty at Camp Pendleton, I reported to the 4th Recon Battalion in San Antonio (I was a reservist and could now use the GI Bill to help pay for school.)

As it happened, Blood Meridian helped me find my first writing mentor when I returned to the University of Texas. There was this visiting creative writing professor in the English department who was supposed to be some sort of young hotshot. Fortunately, my mind was in a very good place, and even though I didn’t understand it at the time, I was perfectly prepared to receive what that professor had to teach me. Because in the Marine Corps I had undergone this life-changing transformation.

Yes, the Marines had promised to turn me into a “killing machine.” But while I was training with my fellow Marines (who were all different races and ethnicities and from cities and towns that I’d never heard of) I didn’t end up becoming a “killing machine.” Nor did I come to accept McCarthy’s assertion that “the horror of the round” spoke to my innermost heart. Instead what happened during all that training is my humanity grew by leaps and bounds as did my capacity to love people from all different walks of life. Which is a lesson I am forever grateful to the Marine Corps for. How to live with a big heart.

Anyway, so during the first week of classes at UT-Austin, I asked this young visiting professor if I could take his writing workshop (enrollment was already full). He asked me why I wanted to take his course to which I replied, “Blood Meridian is on your syllabus.” He looked at me and said, “I love that book.”

“McCarthy lives in El Paso,” I said. “I want to go meet him. Can I take your class?”

Ben Marcus. The young prof I met that day and whose class I took that semester was the author Ben Marcus. And this was a month before the publication of his first book The Age of Wire and String (Knopf). And because of Ben’s guidance and the work I put into my own writing, and because my mind was in a very good place on account of my recent transformation, well the very next semester I won the big undergraduate fiction writing prize from UT-Austin’s English Department. And I published a short story in the Berkeley Fiction Review. And then I got accepted into Brown’s MFA program with a full fellowship so that all my living and education expenses were covered. (Which was even better than the GI Bill tbh). I still remember when I went to see my Liberal Arts advisor, Mrs. Gonzales, to show her my acceptance letter from Brown (and to thank her for all her support over the years) she cried.

And then after doing my MFA, I moved to NYC and got a book deal. And in the opening pages of my first book Dear Mr. President (Knopf), my narrator, who is a veteran of the first Gulf War, explains to the reader why he joined the military and does a fairly explicit call out to Blood Meridian:

What can I say? I went over to Saudi crazy and thirsty for blood, and I thought I could justify my life by taking someone else’s, that I would be entering The Great Dialogue of War that man has been having ever since the beginning of time, that war was, in a sense, the ultimate form of divinity.

Speaking of McCarthy and the subject of war, too bad back in 2005 most of us didn’t realize that No Country for Old Men was one of McCarthy’s major works (myself included). For him to drop that book in the early part of the Iraq invasion was major literary feat and profound warning:

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn't have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we'd sent em without rifles I dont know as they'd of been all that much worse off. You can't go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.

One thing I love about Cormac McCarthy is through sheer rhetorical force he conjured these fever dreams that read as sacred and deranged historical record. Countless passages from his books are instantly recognizable as some of the truest things you will ever know. And so the matter of his death seems weirdly irrelevant. Because all his books feel like they were written by someone who died a long time ago. It feels like he died with each book he wrote so that the books could live on.

Cormac McCarthy isn’t dead because he is immortal and people will read him for as long as people read. This passage from Blood Meridian is one of my favorites in all of literature and will haunt me to my grave (in a good way):

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

Thank you for the life-changing books, Cormac. We will never see another like you.