It’s the very smallest things in a work of art that draw us in and seize us, that stick in the memory, call us back, make us feel that this is a masterpiece, which is only a way of saying it’s a thing that we love beyond measure.
Most of my books are in the office where I teach, but I have a small bookcase at home where the books that mean the most to me live. On that little shelf, you’ll find Christina Stead’s “The Man Who Loved Children,” Bohumil Hrabal’s “All My Cats,” William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” The only time I struggled was when it came to Cormac McCarthy. There were too many choices. Eventually, I settled on his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965). Midway through, there’s a moment that couldn’t be more common — a young man walks toward a house — but the way McCarthy sees it is utterly uncommon:
The car pulled away trailing ropy plumes of smoke, the one red taillight bobbing. He turned toward the house, lightless and archaic among the crumbling oaks, crossed the frosted yard. His shadow swept upward to the lean-to roof, dangled from a limb, upward again, laced with branches, stood suddenly upon the roof. He slid downward over the eaves and disappeared in the black square of the gable window.
McCarthy makes so many simple, thrilling choices here: smoke, “ropy” in its twisting; a red taillight, “bobbing” like a head. But most thrilling is the shadow that acts with a will of its own. This way of making the world visible was McCarthy’s entirely. His language drew from the whole history of writing in English. There were echoes, but there were new sounds too. I was far from alone in this assessment. His early novels never sold more than 5,000 copies, but he had fans right out of the gate, including Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison.
McCarthy’s 60-year career divides neatly into 30-year halves: obscurity and fame. During the 30 years beginning in 1962, when he sent the manuscript of “The Orchard Keeper” to Random House, unsolicited, he published five novels. Little was known about him beyond what the author bios on his book jackets reported. For the most part, they hew to the same set of facts: born in Rhode Island in 1933; moved to Knoxville, Tenn., soon after; spent a desultory year at the University of Tennessee; served four years in the Air Force. At the end of his first novel’s bio, though, we find this inscrutable sentence: “Mr. McCarthy began work on ‘The Orchard Keeper’ in 1959, but the necessities of life delayed its completion.”
The necessities remained unnamed.
What would take their place is lore.
In 1992, “All the Pretty Horses” appeared and made McCarthy a household name. The book was an international best seller, won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, became a movie starring Matt Damon. But the importance of another event that year for McCarthy’s career cannot be overstated: the appearance of a proto-biography of him that forged a sort of creation myth.
It ran in this magazine: a profile by the art critic Richard B. Woodward. McCarthy was drawn as a man who shunned the world of publishing and writers, who chose poverty so that he could commit entirely to a monastic life of writing and, because of that commitment, endured “neglect and hardship.” Not merely long-suffering, McCarthy was rough-hewn in the American grain. Here was a man who talked rattlesnakes and grizzly bears, drove a 14-year-old pickup and lived in a tiny cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. Although Woodward acknowledged that “McCarthy’s silence about himself has spawned a host of legends about his background and whereabouts” — including that he had lived under an oil derrick — the article read more as a reinforcement of those legends than as a refutation.
The idea of McCarthy that it promoted would predominate over the next three decades, perhaps because it resonated so fully with the solitary, self-sufficient men who populate his fiction. That is, until 17 months after his death in 2023, when Vanity Fair published an article about Augusta Britt, then in her 60s, whom McCarthy met when she was 16 and with whom he began a sexual relationship a year later. The conversation became about whether he groomed an underage girl. McCarthy the Great American Novelist became a man to be canceled. The life was said to void the art — however little we still knew about it.
That little is about to become quite a lot. The first major biography of the author, Tracy Daugherty’s “Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited,” appears this month. It complicates the story of McCarthy’s life in ways that will both trouble us further and ground us in a more nuanced reckoning.
The story of the inner life of a person, told by another, is always and inevitably a fiction, if a necessary one. Literary biography, as a form, brings an additional burden to that telling; it must find the hidden harmonies between work and life, without suggesting that the work is merely derivative of it. By the end, you should feel that the work in its immensity exceeds the little life that made it.
Daugherty’s biography spans the full course of McCarthy’s life, from his early years as the son of a prominent Tennessee lawyer to his time in the Air Force in Alaska, his travels through Europe and itinerate years of researching novels throughout the Southwest and Mexico and his eventual move to Santa Fe, N.M., for his final two decades. Though it does not include Daugherty’s own interviews with McCarthy — they never met — the biography draws on previously published interviews and some new ones with friends, family and colleagues from different eras of his life, as well as the troves of McCarthy papers that now reside in various archives.
In plumbing these sources, Daugherty takes nothing for granted. Consider how Woodward began his profile, with McCarthy telling a story of coming upon a rattlesnake on a road, a creature with a bite that can kill you:
“You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?” Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage.
Daugherty’s endnotes — which are fascinating reading on their own — reveal that he tracked down Woodward’s original tapes in the McCarthy archive at Texas State University. Daugherty found that, far from seeking camouflage, McCarthy was making an analogy between the risks of love and a snake bite.
“If you’re in love, you’re . . . you know. . . . [I]t can be very trying. Or at least [that’s] my experience.”
Woodward asked him when he was last in love.
“Well, what’s today?” he answered. “Right now, I don’t know what to do. I have a real weakness for beautiful, intelligent women. And I don’t know how to handle …”
No. Sorry. He’d say no more.
Why not?
“[The story] involves another person.”
And it was there that McCarthy transitioned to rattlesnakes, relating a trip by truck that had him nudging one off the road with a stick, followed by a manly talk with park rangers.
By seeking the fuller context that Woodward cut, Daugherty reveals why McCarthy told the snake story in the first place. It was an analogy — “exactly like falling in love,” Daugherty explains. “Exposing yourself. And not resisting, even courting, the danger.” The camouflage that Woodward was attributing to McCarthy was, in fact, his own. From a complicated McCarthy he was creating a simplistic one. From a specific McCarthy he was creating a general one. From a real McCarthy he was creating a mythic one.
“It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life,” Woodward wrote. “He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview.” McCarthy, in fact, did 10 interviews from 1968 to 1980, published mostly in regional newspapers, timed to coincide with two novels and a movie for which he and the director were seeking financing. The interviews are candid and chatty, about writing and reading, matters of craft, with photos of him and his wife taken in their home. In the photos, McCarthy is shown in conversation, smiling as he talks; sitting soberly at his writing desk; beaming at his wife as she serves him tea. He agreed to two major profiles — in The New Yorker and Esquire — to be timed to the appearance of his fourth novel, “Suttree.” Neither made it into print. All show McCarthy’s willingness to do press when it might serve him.
It has been central to our idea of McCarthy to believe that he was a literary outsider, but reading Daugherty, I think it is fairer to say that McCarthy was a consummate product of the publishing business. Albert Erskine, his editor at Random House, sent McCarthy’s first novel to Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow and Malcolm Cowley and got blurbs from three of them. No, McCarthy didn’t give readings, and no, he didn’t teach, but the writers who advocated for him helped him get grants and prizes totaling $300,000 across 15 years, making him more of a literary insider than most writers would dare dream.
A lot of that money went to books. He had 7,000 by the early 1990s, most in storage. The final tally was 20,000, books that were cataloged by archivists at his home in New Mexico. Thousands are annotated, on subjects including whale biology, violins, French medieval history and advanced mathematics. There are at least 142 books on Wittgenstein, at least 190 books on quantum physics, at least 114 on Einstein. His brother Dennis said that throughout his life McCarthy read several hours a day, every day. He taught himself everything, anything. If he wanted to learn it, he read a book. Learn to sew? Had the book. Fix engines? Had the book. Build a gun barrel? He read a book, as his elegantly drafted plan, folded inside, reveals.
McCarthy seems to have looked at everything, less a polymath than a man entranced by the world’s variety. “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in a journal, and I find this experience the root of what distinguishes McCarthy’s fiction. There’s a standout example in “Blood Meridian,” his 1985 masterpiece, which the critic Harold Bloom called “a canonical imaginative achievement.” The novel charts the course of a band of men in the mid-19th century as they travel the Southwest and Mexico on an expedition to scalp Apaches. The book is brutal, repetitive and remarkable, a document of male violence, on every page, whose horrors accumulate, horrors based in history. Nested in it is one of my favorite sentences in a work of fiction. Here, men on horseback do as McCarthy so often says: They ride on. “They descended by rocky switchbacks and across the beds of streams where small trout stood on their pale fins and studied the noses of the drinking horses.” Beneath the surface of the world, McCarthy imagines another world, one in which small things apprehend, actively, larger things, where creatures we credit with no fundamental intelligence or consciousness can be studious, too, no less capable of wonder.
Two decades before he died, he moved to Santa Fe to be near the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to scientific research, directed by his friend, the evolutionary theorist David Krakauer. McCarthy had an office there. He went every day. He spoke knowledgeably and deferentially with colleagues about zoology and biology and physics. He edited manuscripts of their books, vigorously, filling the margins with comments, frank (“NOPE.”) and supportive (“Roger: I read this in tears”).
The rough-hewn rattlesnake-wrangling cowboy cleared his dishes after lunch.
If Daugherty isn’t susceptible to the mythmaking that has often obscured McCarthy’s work, he also proceeds with cleareyed care in considering the controversy surrounding his relationships with women. He shows particular awareness of the scandal that arose after the revelations of his relationship with Britt. Though the Vanity Fair article ran to 11,000 words, the more interesting, and worrisome, story of McCarthy’s personal behavior went largely unexamined.
Daugherty fills important gaps in the record. Without hyperbole, he documents McCarthy’s three troubled marriages. “The necessities of life” that delayed the completion of McCarthy’s first novel, as that first Random House bio cryptically had it, were, we learn in Daugherty, McCarthy’s covering his tracks. What was being elided: that he had a wife and son. He had met his wife, Lee Holleman, at the University of Tennessee. They married in 1961, moved to Chicago, lived there in near poverty for a year and moved back to Tennessee in May of 1962. That same month, McCarthy sent his book to Random House. By June, Random House had written back to say that it was “extremely interested in publishing” it. By then, Lee was five months pregnant.
In November, she gave birth to a boy, Cullen. As she nursed and paced, McCarthy told her she should get a job, to support them while he wrote. Later in the winter, he told Lee he would rather be single. By July, Lee “was living in a motel room in East Tennessee,” Daugherty tells us. “Cullen was just beginning to teethe and crawl.”
No one would expect any of that information to have appeared in the bio on McCarthy’s first book, but it’s remarkable to compare it with the bio that landed on his second novel, “Outer Dark” (1968). Whereas no wife, or son, is mentioned in his first bio (those are the “necessities”), we hear now that he has “married an English girl” and has won a string of grants and awards. In Daugherty, we learn what else McCarthy did: lived in Ibiza with Anne DeLisle, the English girl in question; drove around Europe in a Jaguar convertible he bought and restored; drank and took LSD.
What he didn’t do was send a penny to Lee and their son. In his profile, Woodward wrote: “Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. ‘With what?’ He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent.”
We learn that his relationship with Britt began while he and DeLisle were married. He left her to be with Britt. They were together for five years and remained close friends for the next 42, until McCarthy’s death. We get the procession of young girlfriends, and we get the third marriage, to a woman named Jennifer Winkley, whom he first met in El Paso in the early 1990s. By any reasonable measure, McCarthy comes across as delinquent and double-dealing and selfish. The facts, as Daugherty narrates them, speak for themselves.
Which is to say, Daugherty lets them speak.
If we are disappointed in what we now see of McCarthy, it’s important for us to remember why. It’s because we have been so invested in how he saw. Britt’s story forces us to ask the question: How is it that someone could be that and yet, on the other hand, do this? Daugherty does not directly raise the question, but his detailed account of McCarthy’s life may do something better — give us the means to consider whether the art was able to transform, even transcend, the life.
In McCarthy’s very first story, “A Wake for Susan,” published when he was still in college, a boy is in the woods with a rifle trying to shoot squirrels. No luck. He knows, though, that there’s a cemetery somewhere in those woods, ancient and overgrown. He finds it. There, a headstone of a girl named Susan. She died in 1834, at the age of 17. In the woods, in a flash, he imagines the course of her life, her thoughts and feelings, her wishes and wants, as she falls in love with a boy — the boy imagining her life, their lives together. Here is McCarthy, not much more than a boy himself, imagining a boy imagining the inner life of a girl who lived too briefly.
How does one imagine the inner life of a 17-year-old? How would McCarthy, nearly 20 years later, imagine the inner life of 17-year-old Augusta Britt? We cannot see — cannot know — how he managed it, if he managed it, in life. In art, we see it on the page.
Reading the “Susan” story and then McCarthy’s final novel, “Stella Maris” — star of the sea, an early epithet for Mary, mother of Jesus — I noticed something remarkable, a direct echo of McCarthy’s first story in the final novel. In “Stella Maris,” McCarthy again inhabits a female character, a prodigy, a mathematician focusing on the most difficult theories in the discipline. But she is losing her mind. She has checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, Stella Maris. The entire novel is a Q&A, a series of transcriptions of recordings that a psychiatrist made with her consent with an eye to writing about her. “Stella Maris,” too, starts with a tombstone, of a kind. When we meet her in “Stella Maris,” we already know, from a companion novel, “The Passenger,” which was published at the same time, that she has died by suicide, has hanged herself from the bough of a tree.
As the psychiatrist tries to get to the bottom of her, you might say that he is a boy who is trying to imagine the inner life of a girl. Their dialogue contains some of McCarthy’s most straightforward and moving writing. In forensic detail, she describes how she thought through suicide by drowning, its unknowns. What happens beneath the surface, is what she wonders. What is happening beneath her surface, the psychiatrist is wondering. What pain anchors there, out of sight, alone in the dark?
I can’t get over how clear this frame is in McCarthy’s work. In the interim between the first story and the last book, there’s really nothing like it, except in his life, the many marriages and relationships that show him, quite clearly, failing to fully imagine a woman’s inner life.
By what animal instinct did McCarthy know that “Stella Maris” was the book that would close his creative circle begun in 1959? The book is, in its utter difference from all his other books, in its way, perfect, a capstone. After novels in which women play a scant role or are scarcely imagined at all, the final novel imagines what a woman would say about herself to a man who is trying to listen to her, understand her, acknowledge her suffering, if at a clinical distance. This is narratively comprehensible — the doctor is a clinician — but it’s also philosophically significant. Rather than trying to imagine her thoughts, McCarthy is dramatizing a man’s listening to what a woman is saying about her life, her pain. McCarthy, at last, has changed, in his art, in his approach to how he treats — in both senses — women.
“Women are tough,” McCarthy told Oprah in 2007. “I don’t pretend to understand women. I think most men don’t know much about women. They find them very mysterious.” “Still you do?” Oprah replied. “Three wives later?” “Stella Maris” is McCarthy’s most honest and imaginatively committed attempt to confront that mystery. It is both an admission of his failure and a clear signal that he had been trying to confront it since the very beginning.
And yet this final remarkable novel should not, we learn from Daugherty, exist. McCarthy had trouble thinking after radiation treatments for prostate cancer. He once drove away in his truck and was lost for days. As the publication deadline for the novels approached, “he just couldn’t get [the work] done,” Laurence Gonzales, whose own McCarthy biography appears next May, told Daugherty. “I think in desperation Amanda Urban” — McCarthy’s agent — “finally said, ‘Well, OK, let’s just put all this together and see what he thinks.’”
Urban was serving as McCarthy’s premortem literary executor. She had worked with him for 30 years, and it was she who, Daugherty tells us, salvaged, from what was said to be a mess of a book, a perfect little novel — one that Daugherty reveals he’d been working on for 60 years. Daugherty says there’s doubt that McCarthy had a finishing hand in what came out or even read it. Through this telling of McCarthy’s life, Daugherty has begun the work that one hopes literary biography can do: unearth the story of how the art escaped the confines of the flawed life that yielded it.
Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for the magazine who often writes about artists and authors. He is a writer in residence at Bard College and a senior fellow of its Hannah Arendt Center.
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