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.
At that point in his career, McCarthy was a man more admired than read. All of his fiction had been respectfully reviewed, and none of his books had made it passed a first edition. That changed in 1992, when the author got a new editor, a new agent, and a new style. The editor put some publishing muscle behind McCarthy’s output, the agent arranged a timely—and luckily very beautiful—profile in The New York Times, and McCarthy wrote All the Pretty Horses.
Like Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses was set in the West and in Mexico but moved forward in time to the 20th Century. And where the earlier book was crafted in prose so rich it could rot your teeth, the new book’s language was as clear as water: “They rode up out of the river among the willows and rode singlefile upstream through the shallows onto a long gravel beach where they took off their hats and turned and looked back at the country they’d left. No one spoke. Then suddenly they put their horses to a gallop up the beach and turned and came back, fanning with their hats and laughing and pulling up and patting the horses on the shoulder.”
Blood Meridian’s language, like the language of all McCarthy’s fiction to that point, was something to chew over, to mull, to wonder at. With All the Pretty Horses and all the fiction that came after, McCarthy’s aim seemed to be to get you to ignore the prose and concentrate on the story. It was as though Faulkner and Hemingway got together and decided to swap styles. However you describe it, it was one of the more astonishing transformations in American letters. Perhaps even more remarkable, the two halves of the career do not cancel each other out. You can appreciate one or the other or both without any trouble at all.
You certainly can’t characterize the second, later style as selling out, because the writing, while more easily read, was still in the service of an uncompromisingly dark and complicated genius. But there were notable differences: the new novel had a love story that, while not exactly the happy-ending kind, at least did not cross paths, as had earlier McCarthy romancing, with necrophilia or watermelons. And there was more humor. Or more unforced humor anyway—Suttree had its funny moments, but it always seemed too self-consciously Rabelasian. In All the Pretty Horses, the funny parts just seem to flow from the characters. Jimmy Blevins, the brassy little teenager the protagonists meet early in the novel, is a character Twain would have been happy to create.
Those protagonists, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlings, are barely older than Blevins when All the Pretty Horses commences, but by the end of the trilogy of novels that charts their fates is finished, callowness and innocence are in short supply. Still, in its unabashed love of the Western landscape and its celebration of friendship, however fugitive or fleeting, All the Pretty Horses made McCarthy’s bleak outlook a lot more palatable—palatable enough, anyway, to make him a bestseller for the first time in his life.
After that he became a Major American Novelist who needed little or no introduction. His books became hit movies. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He appeared on Oprah.
Notably, though, the quality of the fiction remained high. Shelby Foote said of All the Pretty Horses, “The novel’s hero, as in the five that came before, is the English language—or perhaps I should say the American language.” That was true in 1992, and it never changed. There were hiccups—the Border trilogy falters in the stretch, and The Road is, at least compared to Blood Meridian, post-apocalypse lite—but right to the end, his uncompromising vision of a world where civilization and violence are joined at the hip and his almost magical knack for making words do as he pleased never wavered. He bears comparison to Hawthorne and Faulkner, Melville and O’Connor, and even in that company, he holds his own.
