Cormac McCarthy: A Rare Literary Life (2011)

Cormac McCarthy:A Rare Literary Life George Brosi Cormac McCarthy is one of America's most accomplished fiction writers and also one of our country's most fascinating individuals. Now seventy-seven years old, he lives near Tesuque, New Mexico. Although he does not attend literary events or book signings and jealously guards his privacy, he is active in the nearby Santa Fe Institute, which describes itself as an "independent research and education center...for multidisciplinary collaborations in the physical, biological, computational, and social sciences...in attempts to uncover the mechanisms that underlie the deep simplicity present in our complex world." His last published novel, The Road, won the Pulitzer Prize in literature. It is a post-apocalyptical narrative that returns for much of its setting to the East Tennessee countryside of McCarthy's first novels. The sheer devastation depicted in this novel exceeds the bleak and brutal scenes that are a trademark of his previous works. Yet the book, according to its author, is about human goodness. Fundamentally, The Road is a story about the love between a father and son. In fact, McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal in a rare 2009 interview that he considers his son, John, something of a coauthor because so many of the conversations in the book actually transpired between himself and his son. Cormac McCarthy's life and literary career can be divided into three distinct periods. He was four years old when he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and lived there and in neighboring Sevier and Blount counties for most of the first forty-three years of his life. Three of the four novels he wrote during this period were clearly set in East Tennessee. The next five novels were all set in the American Southwest, especially in the border country around El Paso, where McCarthy lived for the next two decades. He told the Wall Street Journal, "I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia, and they'll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here's a good subject. And it was." For the third period of his career, he has lived in New Mexico. [End Page 11] Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, the eldest son in a family of three girls and three boys. In 1937, his father, a lawyer, went to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, and the family moved there, living in a succession of rental houses until June of 1941 when the family bought a place on Martin Mill Pike at the outskirts of the city. Cormac roamed the nearby woods and later learned to fish and hunt. As a child, McCarthy's passion was visual art. His work was exhibited in shows beginning at the tender age of eight. Asked about his subject matter, he recalled a mixed media painting he did of a rhinoceros charging. McCarthy's only public artwork that has survived is inauspiciously located on the grounds of the Blount County Public Library in Maryville, Tennessee. It is a mosaic on a horizontal circular slab of concrete signed by both him and fellow artist, Bill Kidwell. McCarthy attended Knoxville Catholic High School and then enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951. He dropped out of UT the next year and traveled around the country, finally joining the Air Force in 1953. He served four years, including two in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. He returned to UT in 1957 and published two stories in the school magazine, The Phoenix, first under the name "C. J. McCarthy, Jr." and then "C. J. McCarthy." He won the university award in creative writing in both 1959 and 1960. There is no known evidence of when Cormac changed his name, but he was christened Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., and the change was inspired by King Cormac McCarthy who lived in Blarney Castle in Ireland. After McCarthy's girlfriend, Lee Holleman, graduated from UT in 1960, he...