10 ms·

Early Cormac McCarthy Interviews Rediscovered

88 points by samclemens 4y ago

x-sp 4y ago
https://archive.ph/7lhHN https://archive.ph/7lhHN
kekkidy 4y ago
lqet 4y ago
One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in another league and one of the best novels of the past century. It also contains one of the greatest characters ever, Judge Holden [0] He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden
- mjrbrennan 4y ago
  Love Cormac as well he is also one of my favourite authors. That Judge passage is also one of my favourite passages in literature, alongside the ending of The Road which I have framed with a technical drawing of a brook trout: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Just finished Cities of the Plain after reading the rest of the border trilogy and not being that impressed, but this one absolutely floored me and I shed tears at the end. Will need to go back and read all three in quick succession at some point. Still really need to read Child of God.
  - bmj 4y ago
    Have you spent any time in the southwest United States? Those books hit me a particular way after many trips to west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. McCarthy has a way of capturing that landscape....
    - mjrbrennan 4y ago
      No I’ve never been to the states, I’ve always wanted to though. I want to visit so many states since America has such a huge cultural influence on me especially my fiction, but I live in Australia so it’s kind of impractical. Can’t wait to get there some day!
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    His prose is just immaculate. Do yourself a favor and read the above passage out loud. It has a driving rhythm. What’s amazing is that he maintains the beat for entire novels.
- ak39 4y ago
  Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice. I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place. (This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)
  - kamranjon 4y ago
    I highly recommend Suttree, which is much less in that post-apocalyptic vein. It’s incredibly humanistic and funny and I think it’s his best work. It still has his incredible command of the English language and sequences of just absolutely beautiful prose, and in some ways it can be quite devastating but it’s much more balanced with the endearing parts of humanity I think.
    - whiddershins 4y ago
      I second Suttree. I love the preface so much I memorized most of it.
      - everybodyknows 4y ago
- ta20211004_1 4y ago
  Ok that passage from Blood Meridian is obviously great, but posting it out of context like this makes my skin crawl! It's almost a spoiler. Without knowing the preceding events, and the general way in which the story is grounded in reality, the otherworldliness of this passage is totally out of context! That's my 2c.
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  Blood Meridian is like a poem, that is movie but in a form of a sculpture and in prose.
- mtalantikite 4y ago
  Maybe it's just because it was the order I read his work in, but I'd start with "Blood Meridian". It's just beyond so many other books out there. Same with the Border Trilogy. I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". They're good, but "Blood Meridian" and the Border Trilogy I barely took breaks from while reading. Just plowed through them front to back. When I got to the end of "Blood Meridian" I just started at the front again. No need for a warm up, just jump right in to some of the best literature you'll ever encounter.
  - Keblo 4y ago
    Child of God is an easier read than Blood Meridian, and acts as a pretty good way to get used to his minimalist punctuation
    - mtalantikite 4y ago
      Sure, though my point is that I read Blood Meridian first and didn't find it all that hard to get into. It's just so good you'll give it your full attention and effort. Had I started with Suttree or The Road I may have just given up and not gotten to Blood Meridian at all. I put both of those books down for significant periods of time. I'm trying to finish The Road right now. I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).
narrator 4y ago
Everyone loves "The Road", but more than half the book is the kid saying he's scared, hungry, or cold and dad saying it's going to be ok. The repetition gets ridiculous.
- erokar 4y ago
  I agree. While it certainly contains good writing that book is also mannered and sentimental, my least favourite of his.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Life with children is often repetitive and you find yourself reverting to the same old platitudes and patterns. So at least it's realistic?
- Eumenes 4y ago
  Agreed, fortunately its a short book. Has me on the fence about reading Blood Meridian.
  - beowulfey 4y ago
    Definitely give it a try. Blood Meridian is like no other book. Definitely not repetitive!
jansan 4y ago
Why is it coming up now? Does he finally have a chance to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
- voisin 4y ago
  He has two books coming out, one this month and one next. First books since 2006 I believe.
- random42_ 4y ago
  Probably because he’s got two new books coming out this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/cormac-mccarthy-new-novels.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/cormac-mccarthy-new...
- oxfeed65261 4y ago
  FTA: ‘The find [of the early interviews] comes as McCarthy is preparing to publish two new intertwined novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” — his first since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize. ‘McCarthy will give no interviews in conjunction with their release. Instead, here is a look back at a less guarded time in his life.’
mellosouls 4y ago
Blood Meridian is worth a Nobel on it's own, I've often wondered why he's never received it, he's distinctive and mesmerising at his best.
- wellthisisgreat 4y ago
  Same, maybe BM is just too... pulp genre-wise somehow? Or too cruel while being fictional and Nobel tolerates cruelty when it's based on true events?
  - mellosouls 4y ago
    I think it has some basis in real events and characters, eg The Judge was real (though obviously somewhat reimagined here).
    - random42_ 4y ago
      The Glanton Gang was also real: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton
sn41 4y ago
I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when Harold Bloom raved about his "Blood Meridian". I am sorry to say this, I was not moved by Cormac McCarthy. I read "All the Pale Horses", and "No Country for Old Men". I started reading "Blood Meridian", but there was a gruesome scene involving infants. I never saw the point of Judge Holden, even though in my mind, I kept visualizing him being played by Daniel Day-Lewis. My plan is to read "Cities of the Plain" and "Outer Dark" - they are poetic titles, but I wonder whether I should spend the time.
- johnvaluk 4y ago
  Blood Meridian left me with the feeling that Judge Holden was originally multiple characters turned into a composite to serve as a narrative device and metaphor. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been a straightforward odyssey of the kid, involving the many people and situations he encountered along the way. Using the Judge as a thematic binder sort of ruined it for me.
  - CPLX 4y ago
    There’s a lot of interpretations and I don’t know if he’s ever endorsed one, but I see the judge as a general representation of a concept I’d describe loosely as capitalism, or the Industrial Revolution, or western technological progress in general. He’s the embodiment of a force that just overtops and envelops everything in its path. It’s doesn’t even make sense to consider him moral or immoral or amoral (as many do when considering him a stand in for the devil) but more as a force that just transcends morality completely and makes it irrelevant, a force that has no other purpose but to expand and consume resources, indifferent to death or convention or tradition. A force that never sleeps. I think the scene where he calmly ignores the Indian attack while making explosives is probably the most literal example but the theme runs through his character.
  - richardatlarge 4y ago
    This comment reminds me of a song by CT Dummies - God Shuffled His Feet
- ne8il 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Holy shit, McCarthy has a new novel coming out Oct 25! Mark the day guys.
rspeele 4y ago
I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces. Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far. Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did. When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel. With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him. Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not. That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Your "meta" criticism is fair, and it's something I would normally bridle at as well, but in McCarthy's case, it just has me hooked, though it takes a while to get into the flow. In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing. Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.
marttt 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Link to the paper mentioned in the NYT story, "Cormac McCarthy’s Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968–1980" (The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2022) 20 (2): 108–135; free access): https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cormac-mccarthy/article/20/2/108/318560/Cormac-McCarthy-s-Interviews-in-Tennessee-and https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cormac-mccart... To me, Cormac McCarthy has an incredibly good sense of how people actually speak. As a side note, same thing was also said somewhere about Quentin Tarantino -- as one of the most relevant reasons why his movies are "cult".
karaterobot 4y ago
I got a few paragraphs into the article and realized that I feel weird about reading an article that oriented around sharing inconsequential private details he probably regrets divulging decades ago. I don't need to know about his private life to appreciate his books. I think it's fine for scholars to dig this stuff up and record it, but I don't need to read about it.
- marttt 4y ago
  +1, I was thinking the same thing, even though I am definitely and eagerly going to read the research paper on McCarthy's rediscovered interviews. There was a beauty in his reluctance to give interviews; I admit having spent a lot of time years ago to track down stuff that would shed some light on his personality and the rationale behind his punctuation style. And, I felt kind of happy to realize that I have to make most of the conclusions myself. I liked the image of Cormac McCarthy the recluse, but oh well. In the age of digital archives, there's no "right to be forgotten" for geniuses, I guess.

88 points by samclemens 4y ago

x-sp 4y ago

https://archive.ph/7lhHN https://archive.ph/7lhHN

kekkidy 4y ago

lqet 4y ago

One of my favorite authors. If you haven't read anything of him, start with "The Road" and "Child of God", they are quite accessible and highly thrilling (I also strongly suspect that Patrick Süskind read "Child of God" before he wrote "Perfume: Story of a Murderer"). "No Country For Old Men" is also a great book. A bit more challenging, but a beautiful read: "All the Pretty Horses". "Blood Meridian" is simply in another league and one of the best novels of the past century. It also contains one of the greatest characters ever, Judge Holden [0] He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden

mjrbrennan 4y ago
Love Cormac as well he is also one of my favourite authors. That Judge passage is also one of my favourite passages in literature, alongside the ending of The Road which I have framed with a technical drawing of a brook trout: Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Just finished Cities of the Plain after reading the rest of the border trilogy and not being that impressed, but this one absolutely floored me and I shed tears at the end. Will need to go back and read all three in quick succession at some point. Still really need to read Child of God.
- bmj 4y ago
  Have you spent any time in the southwest United States? Those books hit me a particular way after many trips to west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. McCarthy has a way of capturing that landscape....
  - mjrbrennan 4y ago
    No I’ve never been to the states, I’ve always wanted to though. I want to visit so many states since America has such a huge cultural influence on me especially my fiction, but I live in Australia so it’s kind of impractical. Can’t wait to get there some day!
- williamcotton 4y ago
  His prose is just immaculate. Do yourself a favor and read the above passage out loud. It has a driving rhythm. What’s amazing is that he maintains the beat for entire novels.
ak39 4y ago
Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say. My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice. I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place. (This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)
- kamranjon 4y ago
  I highly recommend Suttree, which is much less in that post-apocalyptic vein. It’s incredibly humanistic and funny and I think it’s his best work. It still has his incredible command of the English language and sequences of just absolutely beautiful prose, and in some ways it can be quite devastating but it’s much more balanced with the endearing parts of humanity I think.
  - whiddershins 4y ago
    I second Suttree. I love the preface so much I memorized most of it.
    - everybodyknows 4y ago
ta20211004_1 4y ago
Ok that passage from Blood Meridian is obviously great, but posting it out of context like this makes my skin crawl! It's almost a spoiler. Without knowing the preceding events, and the general way in which the story is grounded in reality, the otherworldliness of this passage is totally out of context! That's my 2c.
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Blood Meridian is like a poem, that is movie but in a form of a sculpture and in prose.
mtalantikite 4y ago
Maybe it's just because it was the order I read his work in, but I'd start with "Blood Meridian". It's just beyond so many other books out there. Same with the Border Trilogy. I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". They're good, but "Blood Meridian" and the Border Trilogy I barely took breaks from while reading. Just plowed through them front to back. When I got to the end of "Blood Meridian" I just started at the front again. No need for a warm up, just jump right in to some of the best literature you'll ever encounter.
- Keblo 4y ago
  Child of God is an easier read than Blood Meridian, and acts as a pretty good way to get used to his minimalist punctuation
  - mtalantikite 4y ago
    Sure, though my point is that I read Blood Meridian first and didn't find it all that hard to get into. It's just so good you'll give it your full attention and effort. Had I started with Suttree or The Road I may have just given up and not gotten to Blood Meridian at all. I put both of those books down for significant periods of time. I'm trying to finish The Road right now. I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).

narrator 4y ago

Everyone loves "The Road", but more than half the book is the kid saying he's scared, hungry, or cold and dad saying it's going to be ok. The repetition gets ridiculous.

erokar 4y ago
I agree. While it certainly contains good writing that book is also mannered and sentimental, my least favourite of his.
pavlov 4y ago
Life with children is often repetitive and you find yourself reverting to the same old platitudes and patterns. So at least it's realistic?
Eumenes 4y ago
Agreed, fortunately its a short book. Has me on the fence about reading Blood Meridian.
- beowulfey 4y ago
  Definitely give it a try. Blood Meridian is like no other book. Definitely not repetitive!

jansan 4y ago

Why is it coming up now? Does he finally have a chance to win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

voisin 4y ago
He has two books coming out, one this month and one next. First books since 2006 I believe.
random42_ 4y ago
Probably because he’s got two new books coming out this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/cormac-mccarthy-new-novels.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/cormac-mccarthy-new...
oxfeed65261 4y ago
FTA: ‘The find [of the early interviews] comes as McCarthy is preparing to publish two new intertwined novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” — his first since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a best seller that won the Pulitzer Prize. ‘McCarthy will give no interviews in conjunction with their release. Instead, here is a look back at a less guarded time in his life.’

mellosouls 4y ago

Blood Meridian is worth a Nobel on it's own, I've often wondered why he's never received it, he's distinctive and mesmerising at his best.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago
Same, maybe BM is just too... pulp genre-wise somehow? Or too cruel while being fictional and Nobel tolerates cruelty when it's based on true events?
- mellosouls 4y ago
  I think it has some basis in real events and characters, eg The Judge was real (though obviously somewhat reimagined here).
  - random42_ 4y ago
    The Glanton Gang was also real: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Joel_Glanton

sn41 4y ago

I first heard of Cormac McCarthy when Harold Bloom raved about his "Blood Meridian". I am sorry to say this, I was not moved by Cormac McCarthy. I read "All the Pale Horses", and "No Country for Old Men". I started reading "Blood Meridian", but there was a gruesome scene involving infants. I never saw the point of Judge Holden, even though in my mind, I kept visualizing him being played by Daniel Day-Lewis. My plan is to read "Cities of the Plain" and "Outer Dark" - they are poetic titles, but I wonder whether I should spend the time.

johnvaluk 4y ago
Blood Meridian left me with the feeling that Judge Holden was originally multiple characters turned into a composite to serve as a narrative device and metaphor. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had been a straightforward odyssey of the kid, involving the many people and situations he encountered along the way. Using the Judge as a thematic binder sort of ruined it for me.
- CPLX 4y ago
  There’s a lot of interpretations and I don’t know if he’s ever endorsed one, but I see the judge as a general representation of a concept I’d describe loosely as capitalism, or the Industrial Revolution, or western technological progress in general. He’s the embodiment of a force that just overtops and envelops everything in its path. It’s doesn’t even make sense to consider him moral or immoral or amoral (as many do when considering him a stand in for the devil) but more as a force that just transcends morality completely and makes it irrelevant, a force that has no other purpose but to expand and consume resources, indifferent to death or convention or tradition. A force that never sleeps. I think the scene where he calmly ignores the Indian attack while making explosives is probably the most literal example but the theme runs through his character.
- richardatlarge 4y ago
  This comment reminds me of a song by CT Dummies - God Shuffled His Feet
ne8il 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

Holy shit, McCarthy has a new novel coming out Oct 25! Mark the day guys.

rspeele 4y ago

I read post after post of gushing praise for Cormac McCarthy, so I bought The Road on Kindle a few years ago. A few pages in I wished I had bought a hardcopy -- the e-book seemed to have been badly OCRed, and was missing most of the punctuation and a few of the spaces. Another few pages later, I looked up whether other people had the same problem. I was surprised to find that there was no issue with the Kindle copy. That's just how McCarthy writes. Although it's no secret, most people don't mention it -- somehow it had never come up in any of the glowing reviews I'd read. It's not been mentioned in any of the 30-ish comments in this thread so far. Now, it's a little thing, so it shouldn't bug me so much. But it did. When I read a work of fiction, I do not want to be thinking about the writer or his stylistic choices. My brain's little imagination engine should be cranking away, running the projector, imagining the characters speaking, moving, thinking, and feeling. Words from the page flow into it like fuel. With McCarthy, the engine would snarl and grind every time I hit some ugly looking naked contraction like "werent" or "didnt", or a bit of unquoted dialog that I didn't realize was a character speaking until the end of the sentence. The projector skipped a frame, and for that moment I was no longer thinking of "The Man" or "The Boy", but involuntarily thinking of "The Author" and his smug need to be special, to remind me of his presence, to prove that the rules of language are beneath him. Ironically, the justifications I have read for this style are that it's supposed to flow more naturally. Apparently punctuation is unnecessary, baroque, and only slows the reader down. Perhaps many readers agree with that, but I don't. I've spent most of my life reading English that was written according to standard rules of grammar, so it parses readily. McCarthy's "house rules" grammar does not. That all leaves a question. I finished The Road and found it to be OK. Would I have loved it, had it been written in conventional style? Still probably not. But at least I wouldn't be annoyed at the author.

mellosouls 4y ago
Your "meta" criticism is fair, and it's something I would normally bridle at as well, but in McCarthy's case, it just has me hooked, though it takes a while to get into the flow. In a less artificial way you could say the same about any writing that reads as non-standard, for instance it took me a long time to appreciate Shakespeare coming from a familiarity with modern English, but eventually I got it and it was life-changing. Obviously in McCarthy's case there is a "problem" of intent, but I think if you can replace your suspicion with an assumption of artistic good faith, you may be able to relax into the flow more easily.

marttt 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this. Link to the paper mentioned in the NYT story, "Cormac McCarthy’s Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968–1980" (The Cormac McCarthy Journal (2022) 20 (2): 108–135; free access): https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cormac-mccarthy/article/20/2/108/318560/Cormac-McCarthy-s-Interviews-in-Tennessee-and https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/cormac-mccart... To me, Cormac McCarthy has an incredibly good sense of how people actually speak. As a side note, same thing was also said somewhere about Quentin Tarantino -- as one of the most relevant reasons why his movies are "cult".

karaterobot 4y ago

I got a few paragraphs into the article and realized that I feel weird about reading an article that oriented around sharing inconsequential private details he probably regrets divulging decades ago. I don't need to know about his private life to appreciate his books. I think it's fine for scholars to dig this stuff up and record it, but I don't need to read about it.

marttt 4y ago
+1, I was thinking the same thing, even though I am definitely and eagerly going to read the research paper on McCarthy's rediscovered interviews. There was a beauty in his reluctance to give interviews; I admit having spent a lot of time years ago to track down stuff that would shed some light on his personality and the rationale behind his punctuation style. And, I felt kind of happy to realize that I have to make most of the conclusions myself. I liked the image of Cormac McCarthy the recluse, but oh well. In the age of digital archives, there's no "right to be forgotten" for geniuses, I guess.