It was reported on June 28, 2016 that Cormac McCarthy had died of a stroke. The story was a deliberate hoax, a lie that spread halfway around the world before it was quashed like the bug it was.
I received the news of McCarthy’s actual death on June 13, 2023, in a terse email delivered late in the afternoon on the day he passed. The report came from a lifelong friend who I had blessed and cursed decades ago by suggesting that he read McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN, one of those rare books that takes up permanent residency in the reader’s mind.
I immediately pulled down all 12 of McCarthy’s novels from their shelf (in Casa del Hartlaub, he gets one all to himself) and opened various books at random or with deliberate intent, reading pages here and there deep into the night and the next morning. I am still doing it --- everything from the last paragraph of THE ROAD to the terrible events so beautifully told in THE ORCHARD KEEPER, his first published novel. There are other matters that I should be taking care of that may be more important, but none of them seem to be as urgent.
McCarthy eschewed the company of other writers in favor of mathematicians. As with those who toil in that field of study, his work peels back the surface of the here and now to expose the stratum at levels that most of us rarely, if ever, discern or acknowledge --- revealing the beauty, wretchedness, horror and sadness from which one who beholds it cannot ever really walk away.
I’m guessing that McCarthy’s books have launched and crashed the vessels of the careers of hundreds, if not thousands, of authors on the same forlorn beach. The arc would be something like “I want to write like that.” “I can write like that.” “I can’t write like that.” “No one can write like that.” His books do not lend themselves to teaching oneself the art of writing, though much can be learned from them. McCarthy himself had no self-evident instructors, but he had dedication and focus, which you need to accomplish anything. Relationships were sacrificed on the altar of his art for over 60 years, and the results --- a dozen novels, three short stories, an essay, five screenplays and two plays --- may be relatively few in number for a lifetime dedicated to a craft. But they run long and deep and true, and are worth the effort to appreciate that they require and demand.
It was reported a little over a week ago that McCarthy was working on a screenplay for BLOOD MERIDIAN, which many think would be impossible to translate to film. There are also boxes --- more than 100, at last count --- of essays and correspondence that he left behind, and possibly a few novels in various stages of completion. Perhaps we will see some of these writings in the future. In any event, we are blessed if what he wrote while he was on this side of the veil is all that is ever revealed.
McCarthy was reported to have passed on at his home due to “natural causes,” a formal term for “one too many birthdays.” I have been imagining him to be writing, writing, writing in the here and now and all the days to come, blissfully unaware of his new circumstances. Who’s to say that’s wrong?
