To the last Readers of Books, wherever you may be.

Mourning the passing of author, Cormac McCarthy.
Sync… I spoke about him on Monday in my James Joyce Riverrun Talk via Zoom-link in
Montreal.

Absorbing his recent books, The Passenger and Stella Maris—I would have footnoted them for my Joyce talk, if there had been a place to put such notes.

I’ve been reading him and reviewing his books for decades. A long sometimes darkening conversation with one I never met. In my imagination another friend, another mentor. Deeply brave in confronting the dark. Unparalleled use of language sometimes countering, or counterpointing, the gravity of his vision. Oral rich phrasings elevated tales of frontiers. His stories and images pressed darkness and madness to reveal themselves. In his later books, rare but moving moments of compassion—hands reaching out to other hands in the light-dark, people holding hands with an enigmatic other—scenes that astonished.

Much more to say… And if we truly lived in a literary alphabetic culture there would be
conversations about him everywhere. Homages, honourings, for Suttree and Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy and The Stonemason. Sadly, people may know him only from the largely failed movie versions of his books; No Country for Old Men and The Counsellor being notable exceptions. No movie-maker has truly been able to catch in cinema-pictures what McCarthy relays in words.

On a personal note, I was moved by the depiction of the valiant but at times reckless John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses, and I named my son after him. So that my son could, someday, find the story of a boy who came out of the desert after excruciating lessons of revenging violence.

Be at peace, Cormac McCarthy; and thank you, for your words and stories, for the unrelenting integrity of vision, for your spasms of stark humour, for the devotions that we find in your sentences and images.
We mourn much these days and nights, given the losses to the Pandemic and to wars of every kind, given the sagging and scorched moods we carry. Still, I’ll do my best today, tonight, and later, and on, to remember and eulogize you.

PS
Was McCarthy one of the last Modernists? With Alice Munro, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Elena Ferrante.

I’d say so. McCarthy… Like one on an island, somewhere, fighting a twilight battle in a war that ended long ago (unknown to the fighter). Into the depths with an abiding seriousness about language and form. What comes surging through words when they’re impressed into evoking lucidities and ambiguities, infinite fluidities. I suppose I’d have to include myself in this errant process. (In my dreams, to be in such august company). But … surely contemporary subject matter—the advent of A.I. and the global all—with faint glimmerings of the Modernist sensibility…

PPS
Once I met Alice Munro at Albert Britnell’s Bookstore in Toronto. Briefly. I’d been asking about McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which had just been published. I wanted to know how it was selling at the store. I knew his books had long languished in overlooked or forgotten margins. The bookseller said, this one’s doing well. Then I turned around and saw Munro. Very affable. She said she knew McCarthy’s work, admiring his strange eloquence and harrowing honesty. Sometimes I think she said ‘stranger’, not strange. And then she was gone.

B.W. Powe, Cordoba Spain