In Praise of Cormac McCarthy

                                                                      UPDATE

     Recently Vanity Fair published an article detailing a decades long infatuation and frequently romantic relationship Cormac McCarthy had with a girl who was sixteen at the time of their first meeting and seventeen when they became intimately involved. McCarthy himself was forty two. I have only read this article and a handful of reactions to it, but there currently seems to be no reason to doubt the veracity of its account. Responses seem to have been generally negative, seeing as how the article itself was bizarrely favorable towards this relationship and the relationship itself was illegal and ethically dubious. This is the article, which I encourage everyone to read and thereby conclude for themselves their feelings on the matter. Here are mine: 
     McCarthy had a relationship with a minor a few decades his junior. This is inappropriate and unacceptable. The woman herself does not believe she was groomed or abused and apparently remains fond of McCarthy, which is an important bit of context, but I don't find that particularly compelling when it is employed as a reason for dismissing concerns about McCarthy's behavior. Let's pretend, for a moment, that our actions contain no inherent moral weight and that their consequences alone determine whether or not they are good, bad, or neutral. Viewed with that lens, it may seem like McCarthy is off the hook because the consequences were not disastrous for anyone as they can be and often are when an older authority figure enters a relationship with a vulnerable minor. But just because it may not have ended in trauma and heartbreak now doesn't mean that it was never a bad idea, because these kinds of relationships most often are harmful and McCarthy should have known that.
     Think of it like this: many people drive while impaired by alcohol or drugs and manage to make it home without killing anyone, but we still condemn such behavior because we know that it frequently does lead to disaster and just because it works out sometimes doesn't mean it was okay in the first place. The risk was not worth it. Recklessness with the well being of others is dangerous and unacceptable, and it seems to me that even under the most generous, permissive moral frameworks McCarthy remains guilty of intolerable negligence of another person's health because everyone knows that sexual relationships between adults and minors, even if we take the view that they are not inherently immoral (I believe they are inherently immoral regardless of consequence, by the way), are still unacceptable for the reason that they run an overwhelming risk of inflicting significant mental and emotional damage on the younger party. McCarthy is culpable for extreme carelessness at best, and predatory behavior at worst.
     It is inexpressibly unmoving to me that McCarthy had intense feelings for this person; my response is, "Tough &%#$." Rightness and wrongness exist regardless of the potency of our desire to do wrong or the fervor of our belief that indulging in sin will improve our lives. 
     I say all this because I felt uncomfortable leaving this highly laudatory post up in light of these revelations. I decided in consultation with Nathan that taking it down and pretending it never existed would be a mistake, so the post will remain with this very important coda attached to it. My experience of his work is unchanged, as is my assessment of his literary talent, but I felt personally moved by my conscience to give those who may read the words below the full context of the man about whom they are reading. 

                                                                ORIGIANL POST

    This being my first post here on Magellans at the Movies: the Blog, the awkwardly named visual companion to Nathan and I's audio program that has only ever dealt with movies (and the occasional nod towards books and video games), I was intending to make the inaugural dispatch about, you guessed it, a movie.

    My plans were changed, however, when Cormac McCarthy, peerless scribe of the American South, died just as I was finalizing plans to actually make a blog, something that, as a product of my natural aversion to attention, I've never really wanted to do.
    Still, if one wishes, as I do, to pierce the broad walls and skeptical gatekeepers that keep the writing world secluded from the rest of us, one has to overcome at least a little bit of their inborn shyness.

   With that in mind, then, let us begin the hopefully long and prosperous journey of Magellans at the Movies: the Blog by combining the seemingly disparate threads of happenstance and emotions that have attended its inception. A missive concerning something that combines themes of writing, films, and, above all, reclusiveness: Cormac McCarthy.

    I first encountered McCarthy vicariously through Joel and Ethan Coen's superb adaptation of No Country for Old Men. As is often the case when I watch a movie based on a book, I felt moved to explore the source material and by the next week I had the book in my hands.

    So much of what made McCarthy's voice unique was made clear from the first page. Quite famously, McCarthy eschewed most punctuation. He indicated pauses with commas and ended sentences with periods and that was about it. If that sounds strange, it was, but combined with McCarthy's imperious command of the English language it made his books go down like a cold glass of water on a hot summer day. McCarthy's run-on sentences felt less like grammatical errors and more like thoughts directly transcribed onto the page from a brilliant mind. Each idea flowed into the next like ponds feeding into streams feeding into mighty rivers of complex themes and ideas that were grand yet grounded in believable, ground-level stakes. 

    The stories that McCarthy chose to tell with these lengthy stretches of text were often simple in concept: a hunter on the run with stolen drug money, a father guiding his son through an apocalyptic landscape, a band of scalpers hunt Native Americans on the Texas-Mexican border. None of them had mind-blowing twists or shocking revelations, yet each one was memorable for the utterly Cormac McCarthy manner in which they were delivered.

    McCarthy's stories were always infused with a certain world-weary wisdom. Sherriff Bell, the narrator and framing device for No Country for Old Men, often broke up the main narrative with interludes chronicling his growing disillusionment with modern life. We heard about his observations of the alienation fracturing interpersonal relationships, the intensifying violence and hedonism of a culture whose bedrocks were being eroded with each passing day, and yet the book refused to slip into the easy conclusion of nostalgia for a mythical golden age. A defeated and overwhelmed Bell visits his uncle, who tells him the story of the death of a family member in the early 1900s: shot down on his own front porch by bandits who watched him die as his desperate wife tried to save him. A reminder of the constancy of violence in the human story.

    Needless to say, McCarthy's books took a dim view of human nature. They were bleak, violent tales that often flirted with all out nihilism. The characters of his fiction raged and fought and engaged with their own folly, whether for good or ill, but heroism was never assured of reward, nor was evil certain to be punished. 

    The net impact of all this unpleasantness, in my opinion, isn't to depress the reader with sermons of doom and gloom, instead it is to remind them of the preciousness of hope. Happy endings usually come pretty cheaply in entertainment. Messages about courage, endurance, and peace are delivered at no greater a cost than some cuts and bruises and maybe the death of a minor character. In the world of Cormac McCarthy, however, hope isn't something that's delivered, it's something you have to earn. The characters of McCarthy books are engaged in a pitched battle with despair in the form of psychopathic hitmen, trios of otherworldly anarchists, and even the blasted landscape of a ruined Earth. Often times they come up short and, if they survive at all, return to their old lives jaded and broken, but sometimes, just sometimes, hope is achieved.

    At the end of The Road (SPOILERS), the father dies, having spent the preceding pages fighting tooth and nail to keep his son safe. The son, devastated, leaves his father's corpse after a few days of mourning, certain of his impending doom, but instead of meeting a grisly fate he finds a new caretaker and a new family. Together they continue the journey of the road, prepared to face the horrors of life against which they can never truly succeed, and yet, this conclusion is tinged unmistakably with hope. The long, painful, terrifying fight of the father ends in victory, his faith is rewarded, at least in some small measure, and his son lives to fight another day. 

    This is the great achievement of Cormac McCarthy's books for me, one that I think can get lost in all the blood and violence. These books are entertaining and thought provoking, but their most important reminder is how hard it is to be hopeful no matter what time period you're inhabiting. You have to fight, and fight hard, to hang on to hope, and the hard truth of it is that sometimes your hope will fail.
But sometimes it won't. 
And for that reminder, now, in the past, and in the future, I am grateful to Cormac McCarthy. The writing world has lost a true master, but the good news is that while we wait for his replacement, we still have his books to look back on, share with others, and enjoy ourselves.