Cormac McCarthy Was American Lit’s Lyrical Lone Wolf

Cormac McCarthy was American literature’s most famous lone wolf. While neither hermit nor recluse, he was a private man who avoided publicity–the number of interviews he granted reporters over the course of a six-decade career could be counted on one hand, and in none of those interviews could he be described as loquacious. He kept to himself, and he wrote accordingly: The brutish landscapes and the people therein that he surveyed in his fiction, first in the American South and then in the American West, bear slight resemblance to the realities that engaged his contemporaries. “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them,” he once wrote about one of his more benighted characters, and at least as far as his fiction was concerned, he might have been writing about himself.

But perhaps the most confounding fact about McCarthy is there seemed to be two of him. There was the McCarthy who grew up in the South and wrote four well-regarded novels about the region in language as rich and fulgent as any prose since Faulkner. Indeed, it is a measure of McCarthy’s talent that he risked the comparison and didn’t suffer by it. (Flannery O’Connor once said, when asked how she compared herself to Faulkner, “You don’t want to be on the railroad track with your little pony cart when the Dixie Special comes through.” McCarthy seemed like a man who would’ve simply hijacked the train.)

Then, in mid-career, he lit out for the territory, though with none of Huck’s good spirits. McCarthy went out West like a man hot on the trail of Original Sin, and along the way he took no prisoners. The first fruit of this migration was Blood Meridian, a novel about desperadoes in the 19th century West that’s as dark as they come and as good as they come, buoyed—made bearable, really—by prose as beautifully baroque as any written in the last century. And sometimes not so bearable. This is a novel with baby scalping in it, after all.

Read more at The Daily Beast.