Adventure classics--McCarthy’s long, deadly road trip

All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

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There’s this strange thing about Texas: the people the state reveres most--Sam Houston, say, or David Crockett, or since this is a literary blog, maybe William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry)--are from someplace else. All too often, those actually from the state get little recognition. Luckily for Cormac McCarthy’s reputation as a Texas writer, he’s not from Texas.

Born in Rhode Island, in his forties, after decades of travel he left his then wife and ended up in El Paso, Texas, the westernmost point of the state. Maybe the mountainous desert landscape of West Texas inspired him. Maybe it’s just where his car just broke down.

But whether it was the beneficent effect of Texas on outsiders, or just that he quit drinking about that time (at least so he said in a later interview), but things started to click for him. He got a grant of money from a foundation, one of the so-called “genius” awards. And he started writing novels people would actually read. Novels like All the Pretty Horses, a deceptively innocuous title for a book about a young man’s horseback journey through the borderlands of Texas and Mexico as he learns about life, death and love.

Published in 1992, All the Pretty Horses is the story of sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole. When the ranch his grandfather settled is sold following the grandfather’s death, and with John Grady’s parents estranged, he starts on a horseback road trip south. Soon after leaving the ranch, his friend Lacey Rawlins joins him. Along the way, they meet a runaway who calls himself Jimmy Blevins, riding a big bay horse too fine for somebody like Jimmy to have acquired by legal means, and eager to get to Mexico where “there wont be nobody huntin me.”

(McCarthy is notoriously chary of punctuation, especially of quotation marks--the ones in the example above are mine. And although he’s famously given to weird pronouncements, I wonder whether his aversion is due solely to philosophic considerations or simply to nonfunctional keys on his also famously ancient Olivetti
typewriter.)

His three partners in misfortune cross the Rio Grande together, and their troubles begin--the theft of the fine bay horse, John Grady’s doomed love affair with the daughter of a Mexican rancher, imprisonment supposedly for their illegal entry into the country but actually an attempt by the girl’s father to separate her from John Grady.

And one by one, everyone John Grady cares for is lost, leaving him at the end of the story to return to Texas with only the lost and found bay horse. Everyone and everything else is gone--sold, estranged, disowned or dead, lost to the train of fatality that dogs McCarthy's tales.

If you’re a friend of John Grady Cole’s, you’d better get away fast, before the terrible fate that follows him traps you also. All the Pretty Horses is my favorite among the several McCarthy novels I’ve read, but his lugubriousness is so extreme it sometimes makes me wonder if he’s completely serious.

Especially when he does things such as telling media star Oprah Winfrey that he prefers “simple declarative sentences,” knowing he’s written sentences such as this one from the opening pages of Pretty Horses: “At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost (Comanche) nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.”

And that’s far from the only example. No wonder a writer in a workshop at last month’s DFW Writers Conference cited McCarthy as an example of a poetic writer. But “simple and declarative sentences”? I suspect that old rogue McCarthy was trying to pull Winfrey’s stylishly-clad leg.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at another novel by a Texas writer, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools.)

Wordcraft --Resolutions for writers, in brief

The thing that makes New Year’s resolutions so hard to keep is their too frequent vagueness. Or maybe it’s their habit of being just too open ended. Or too painful. It doesn’t have to be so. One year I resolved to kiss my loved ones and tell them every day that I loved them. I recommend it. And for this last post of 2013, I’ll list a very few resolutions for writers that are short, sweet and joys to keep.

Number One -- Get a library card! To write, we need to read. And we need to nurture other readers. So don’t just get a card for yourself, but for every member of your household.

If you’re an adult living in my town--Dallas, Texas--all you need to get a library card is a current government-issued photo identification and proof of Dallas residency, which can be as simple as a utility bill. If you’re applying for a card for a child, you as guardian, will need your photo ID and proof of Dallas residency, or the child’s school registration (within the city of Dallas) and/or ID. Teens may apply for their own library card with a current Dallas school or government ID. In some cases, you may even get a Dallas library card for limited use if you’re not a city resident (although you should check with your local library about its requirements). For specifics, see http://dallaslibrary2.org/about/libraryCards.php/.

Number Two -- About that reading thing. . . . The more I wrote, the less time I thought there would be to read. But in Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he notes that he reads sixty or seventy books yearly. If King, who releases a new book practically every hour, can find that time to read, can’t we? Consider shoehorning in reading time with audio books, which King likes as much as I do.

And (although this is anticipating resolution number three) consider keeping a record of books read. Since I sometimes feel uncomfortable about not having read whatever the book of the hour is, I fall back on the wisdom of my newly favorite author, Pierre Bayard and his How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Bayard marvelously organizes reading in cultural contexts. And speaking of cultural contexts, I’ll be searching for new reads from around the globe, via
http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/.

Number Three -- Keep a record of progress. Writing is hard lonely work. If we don’t keep track of our milestones, who will? So, let’s keep logs of stories, poems and articles we’ve written. And of stories, poems and articles published. If we write blogs, notice how many posts we write and how our writing improves along the way.

Number Four -- Make a collection that doesn’t cost anything, which in some ways is also a record of progress. I have a tiny notebook of first sentences from books I love. Or we can collect last sentences, such as the lyrical passages Cormac McCarthy typically ends with to compensate for his blood-soaked prose. Or worst sentences, to make us laugh. Whatever we collect, it should be something that gives us joy, such as this short and lovely first sentence from my recent reading, “It began to snow.” (The Samurai, by Shusaku Endo). (RIP, Leonard Elmore. Sometimes it’s okay to write about weather.)

Wordcraft -- McCarthy’s six-gun gothic, part II

(Guest blogger Jim Dolan concludes his discussion of Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

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I first discovered Cormac McCarthy in the early ’90s. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian, and the experience began a two decade engagement with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

Last week, I discussed the Gothic fiction elements of “an ancient house” and “the implication of the supernatural” in McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the Gothic criteria of horror, menace, dread; the grotesque front and center; and an absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Is there a mood of horror, menace, dread? Readers of McCarthy will know there is no writer more capable of establishing this tone than he. Is the grotesque present? In No Country for Old Men, the grotesque is present in climactic peaks; in Blood Meridian it is on every page. Check.

McCarthy gives us death on every page, either actual, impending or long since. We are forced to confront the Dark Angel.

He asks us to look at what we should not see. And we are never able to not look at it. We are forced to see ourselves and every human creature as both angel and devil

His novels take place in the created, Biblical world of the Western God, but it is a world from which that God has fled, and as when children are left alone too long, a deadly mayhem is the result. The world is off the chain, and when the Sheriff in No Country for Old Men wonders if now he is seeing 'a new kind', he points a finger to that time in the near future when the moral center has collapsed and we all plunge into the abyss.

And it is into this abyss that the world has plunged in his last novel, The Road. There, a boy and his father wander the wasted world, their only goal survival. McCarthy is so successful at depicting a world where not only God seems to be gone, but the natural world appears to have died as well that I may never be able to bring myself to read it again, so devastating is that atmosphere. But in the end we are given the faintest ray of hope.

I take it that in posing this world, McCarthy is asking me, you, himself, What in the name of God are we going to do about it?

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Writing workshop note: Today, June 18, is the last day to register for the writing workshop at the Austin, Texas, ArmadilloCon. If you write science fiction, fantasy or horror, and want writing advice from the likes of Elizabeth Bear, Julie Kenner, Scott Lynch, Cat Rambo, Jeremy Lassen and more, see http://armadillocon.org/workshop.shtml/ ASAP.

Wordcraft -- McCarthy's six-gun gothic

(Today’s guest blogger, Dallas-area writer Jim Dolan, discusses the Gothic elements in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, among other works. Jim Dolan is a prize winning poet, a fiction writer, moderator of Writer's Garrett Stone Soup All Genres group in Dallas, occasional film actor, a psychotherapist in private practice and passionate bicycle racer. He is a lifelong resident of Oak Cliff Texas, where he lives with his wife, Karen. He regularly blogs at www.coach4pros.blogspot.com/. )

When I first discovered McCarthy in the early 90s it was by reading All the Pretty Horses. I had not had a prose reading experience like that since discovering Vladimir Nabokov when I was much younger- a sense of envelopment in prose that was sensual, almost tactile, like eating chocolate or the best focaccia bread with red wine. I discovered that my pleasure in the text was multi-leveled through an engagement with character, setting and story but also through the encounter with the palpable qualities of the language itself. I completely believe that McCarthy's abilities with English are Shakespearian. But I mention this as a way of saying that All the Pretty Horses began a two decade engagement for me with everything McCarthy has written, some titles two or even three times through.

I recently led a panel discussion for the Writer's Garrett where we discussed his Western novels. The point of the discussion was to see if we could establish why it is that these texts are frequently referred to as Gothic. Of course, I had to go and find out what elements are present in the classic European Gothic texts, and discovered the following:

-- An ancient castle, an old manor, a family home is occupied by the protagonist's generation and is in disrepair; there are unexplained events that happen in the environs

-- The supernatural is presented or implied

-- The supernatural occurrences are related to an ancient curse upon the family, stemming from some massive wrong-doing long ago

-- There is a mood of horror, menace, dread

-- The grotesque is front and center

-- An absolute concern with good vs. evil, with evil the likely winner.

Looking at the McCarthy Western novels through the Gothic lens, we can see that the Border Trilogy is really just good old fashioned Western Romance told in divine prose. We can take those out of the discussion. This leaves us with Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men. Today, I’ll apply the first three Gothic criteria -- an ancient home, the supernatural, and a curse stemming from massive wrong-doing.

In Blood Meridian we are presented with a novel unlike any before or since, an unending bloodbath with no detectable moral center, something No Country for Old Men does possess in the character of the Sheriff. Do these two qualify as Gothics? I think so. We can begin by substituting the Old West for the ancient house in which the spirits of the dead shriek for revenge in the persons of the Comanche Hordes come to slaughter Captain White's platoon beginning on page 51 of Blood Meridian. In No Country for Old Men, Moss has penetrated the mystery house of Mexico and stolen $2 million from the scene of a drug deal gone wrong. Again, cause for an exacting revenge, in the person of Chigurh, the vastly more powerful counterpoint to the waning Sheriff.

(Next week: Guest blogger Jim Dolan continues his discussion of the Gothic in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, with the criteria of horror, menace and dread. Leave a light on!)

Knowing your world

Toward the end of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole answered three questions that tested the truth of his story about acquiring the bay horse.  The judge hearing his case asked him the number of hectares in the Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion hacienda and the name of the husband of the hacienda’s cook.  Finally, he asked to see the scars of John Grady's wound.  And when John Grady had given his answers and shown his scars, the judge accepted that he told the truth.  The judge had no way to determine whether the answers were factual or whether the young protagonist was wounded under the circumstances he described.  But, as he told John Grady, “the trouble with a liar is he cant remember what he said.”  And John Grady remembered even the obscure facts of his experience.  How much do you know about your characters and their world?  Whether you put these in writing in your story or not, we the readers want to believe you know them well enough to answer all our questions.  We want to believe you could show us the scars.

Here’s a chance to test your ability to build a world.  I had so much fun with my own writing prompt, I’m holding a contest to let you choose some.  List three items in the comments section within the next two weeks that you’d like to include in a short story of any genre.  I’ll pick three – adding my own, if needed – and post them on the January 26 blog, adding the rules for a short story contest using the prompts.  Winning prompt entries will be credited.  They’re your choice, but keep the sex and violence to about what you’d see in a PG-13 movie.