Cormac McCarthy

Here is my comment on Gary Fiskejohn's memoir in The Washington Post.

"This is an excellent essay and particularly virtuous in its refusal to constrict McCarthy's genius--as many others have done--to the dark side of things. It is also refreshing in its appreciation of great writing at the level of the sentence. I would like to see someone note, however, that McCarthy had the ear of a poet and that his writing, like Faulkner's, was often more richly sonorous and rhythmical than most of today's poetry.

He was a traveller to places unknown, otherwise undiscovered, illuminated by the tremendous brilliance of his imagination and brought back to us like booty rapt from another world. It is true that these imaginative cargoes include some very dark things. McCarthy could evoke a quality of terror that makes Edgar Allen Poe look like Ann Radcliffe by comparison. The cause of screaming in the basement of a house in THE ROAD is the most terrifying thing I have ever read, let alone imagined. Then there is the death of the deputy in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, the knife fights in THE BORDER TRILOGY, the myriad horrors in BLOOD MERIDIAN.

He is no nihilist. Many of his characters are insignian of a complicated morality. In a context where King Lear is proved wrong about “the worst,” the nature of the boy in THE ROAD is the face of love and generosity. Another boy, John Grady, shows great courage and resilience as he is hunted down and as he loses his first love. Then there is perseverance in the face of an agonizingly unattainable love and sinister institutional designs Robert Western shows in THE PASSENGER and the brilliance of Alicia Western, in STELLA MARIS, who in a life her intellect seems to show as without hope can still allude to the remedial passage of “Dover Beach” and, in the end, seek companionship and ask her doctor to hold her hand."