Cormac McCarthy, Imagination, and Pirates
These last weeks I’ve written and perseverated about the strange and disturbing visions of Cormac McCarthy, and the evanescent character of my own imagination. McCarthy’s novels contain much that is twisted and tortured and above all, bleak. After reading about Mexican prisons in All the Pretty Horses or the hopeless apocalyptic world of The Road or the senseless Glanton gang violence in Blood Meridian, I can’t help but wonder about McCarthy’s nightmares. Among writers—a notoriously introverted and strange group—he has a reputation for taking the role of writer/recluse and curmudgeon to new levels. As a writer, I marvel at his inventive stories. As a physician, I read his work and ponder the rare and truthful descriptions of raw human fear and realize again how indistinct the borders can be between imagination and madness.
I suspect all writers who regularly bleed their words on to paper go through stretches when their imagination seems a figment of, well, the imagination. During graduate school I too often wasted sleeping time sinking in a pool of self-pitying angst due to my mentor’s copious grammar “corrections.” I now realize that the far more devastating critique was contained in those red-penciled words like “stereotypical” or “cliche” or “melodramatic;” all literary code words indicating a dearth of imagination. I now spend considerable time, particularly time when I should be sleeping, exploring the dreams and secrets of my characters, bushwhacking through my memory and experience to find those hidden but well traveled trails between desire and action.
It was after two unproductive writing days and an intervening restless night that my despair at finding a creative way to tell these stories caused me to close my laptop and play with my grandson. It was President’s day and as a public school kindergartner he was sprung for the day. This was one of those golden grandparent days complete with bike rides, trampoline jumping, the 3-D movie Journey, burgers and shakes for lunch, a trip to Barnes and Noble, and book reading—lots of book reading.
My grandson, as it turns out, is crazy about pirates. During our day he was read many books about pirates, most more than once. A very active six year old, he sat absolutely still, listening intently for 65 minutes as his grandmother read his carefully considered B & N purchase: Piratetologoy: a Pirate Hunter’s Companion Guide.
After one book reading he was playing outside unmindful of his grandfather’s voyeur gaze. Even without so much as a stick, I could tell he was battling a fierce opponent. Jumping up onto the tampalene in order to obtain an advantage, he was soon bouncing up and down while thrusting and parrying. How fluid were his connections to a world that only he could know. I wanted to run out, have him describe the world he inhabited while physically bouncing up and down in an Austin suburb–but I did not. I remembered the bitter disappointment when my parents called me back from my life as the fifth Musketeer or the Hardy boys other investigator.
I don’t doubt my grandson’s interest in Pirates has something to do with his being confined to a school desk in the same way I transported myself out of grade school through books. Watching the immediate imaginative alchemy between our reading a story and his expanded living into of that world while on the trampoline and then to his memory’s distillation as he later described the afternoon to his mother, made me wonder what residual would be evident in his adult imagination. Robert Olen Butler once said [of writing] “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”
But despite his grandparents and parents best efforts, I know my grandson’s childhood memories won’t be all good. As we all do, he will have bitter disappointments, moments opaque to family and friends, moments silent but not forgotten. Yet these memories, like yesterday’s successful battle with the pirates, will also provide the “compost” for his growing imagination.
Which again brings me to wonder about Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Is the writer’s creation of such difficult characters and stories actually revealing a personal psychopathology or the results of a depraved or deprived childhood? Critic Lionel Trilling once said of fiction writing, “Disguise is not concealment. . . The more a writer takes pains with his work to remove it from the personal and subjective, the more—and not the less—he will express his true unconscious.” While this statement carries some truth, I do not think it is the whole story. Writer Grace Paley—quoted by David Jauss in his excellent book, Alone With All That Could Happen—said it more completely, “You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.” McCarthy writes of an evil he knows something about but his stories explore and explicate what he doesn’t know and can only imagine: the implications, borders, and mysteries of human desire, human fantasy, and a human heart taken up with evil.
McCarthy’s stories have characters that are grotesque in part because we have gotten so adept at ignoring evil and compartmentalizing suffering that only the “terrible” or “bigger than life” will get our attention. If we fertilize our garden with only the minerals that produce green leaves we may be left with beautiful but impotent plants. Flannery O’Connor once said, “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
My son the lawyer informs me legal writing speaks only of what is known, an argument that must have precedent for assertion. Fiction writers pursue a different tack. McCarthy’s fiction explores, using the act of writing, what he doesn’t know. What is painful for many of his readers including me is McCarthy does not allow us to start with a sentimentalized version of the human heart. He starts by wondering what does an individual and world look like if love were gone? O’Connor again observed, “children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”
It was not the Mexican prison or killing a man that broke John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses. Rather, it was when Alejandra told Cole, “I didn’t know that he [her father] would stop loving me. I didn’t know he could. Now I know.” Cole could not, “make things right” because what was wrong wasn’t fixable.” Finally, the young cowboy got it. When she repeated that she loved him but would not go away with him, would physically withdraw from their love, he suddenly had a new imaginative capacity. “He felt something co
ld and soulless enter him like another being and imagined that it smiled malignly and he no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”
McCarthy could not imagine love’s absence without having an imagination seasoned by memories of love or explicate a world without hope unless he had, however scant or provisional, some knowledge of hope’s character.
I suppose like McCarthy’s dark fiction, the imagining that my writing is without visible evidence of an imagination is proof of its existence–or at least, the scant basis for hope.