Cormac McCarthy was a bad writer and an interesting phenomenon. Why did so many people say that he was a great writer, a genius, a giant of American letters? The puzzle isn’t as big as it appears. As with most over-rated artists, some of the people who said they liked him could see or glimpse the truth. They knew that he was pretentious and posturing, that he chose words clumsily and carelessly, had no sense of rhythm or the ridiculous, and wrote with all the natural grace and beauty of a chimpanzee riding a tricycle.

But most of those who saw the truth about Mccarthy didn’t dare to speak it. They stood beside the procession of praise and prizes and stayed shtum, when they should have shouted: “The emperor has no clothes!” A critic called B.R. Myers did dare to speak the truth. He shouted “The emperor has no clothes!” at the Atlantic in 2001:

McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words. […] No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history. […] It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But “wild animals” isn’t epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. […] All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. “Not until now,” the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, “has the unhuman world been given its own holy canon.” What a difference a pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow’s soul.) – “A Reader’s Manifesto”, The Atlantic (July 2001)

Myers is also right on the money when he says that McCarthy “thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense.” He lets the gas out of McCarthy’s bloated reputation like a bad simile firing a bazooka into a dead whale. If you can’t see the cruddiness of Cormac, I recommend that you read Myers’ essay. It covers more bad writers than McCarthy, though, so if you’re pressed for time, just search for “Cormac” and have your eyes opened. Or not, as the case may be.

As for me, I’d like to re-quote a passage from McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Road (2006). I’ve already looked at it in “King Cormac”, but I have more to say:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.

Is that good writing? No, it’s cruddy writing. Please consider these two sentences:

Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath.

You’ve got the pretentious and portentous “some cold glaucoma” followed by the hackneyed, Oprah-esque “precious breath”. The noun didn’t need any adjective. This is far stronger:

His hand rose and fell softly with each breath.

With “precious breath”, McCarthy was telling his readers what to think about the feelings of a father for his son. With just “breath”, he would have let his readers think it for themselves. Now look at this sentence:

He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.

Is that good writing? No, again it’s cruddy writing. The sentence has no grace or rhythm and ends as McCarthy’s sentences so often do: with a bathetic thud. As Myers says of another of Cormac’s cruds: it can’t be “read aloud in a natural fashion.” This re-write of the sentence is stronger:

He pushed away the tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking blankets and looked toward the east for light. But there was none.

And the re-write can be “read aloud in a natural fashion”. The Road is full of sentences that cry out in vain for a re-write. So are McCarthy’s other books. Not that I’ve read those other books, but I can see it from Myers’ essay and from quotes like this:

You can appreciate the language in McCarthy’s fiction for its lexical richness, gothic rhythms, and descriptive precision. In Suttree, you positively live on the grimy shore of the Tennessee River, where the “water was warm to the touch and had a granular lubricity like graphite.” Same for Blood Meridian. The Southwest desert is your home, or prison. You look up at the night sky. “All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” – “a href=”https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/06/16/on-cormac-mccarthy/”>On Cormac McCarthy”, The Paris Review (June 2023)

No, McCarthy’s language did not have “descriptive precision”. As B.R. Myers repeatedly demonstrates, it had the opposite: descriptive imprecision. That bit about the “true geology” being “fear” is, like so much of McCarthy’s writing, unintentionally funny. It suffers from the same fault as A.E. Housman identified in some of Swinburne’s more careless moments:

[M]uch worse can be said of another kind of simile, which grows common in his later writings. When a poet says that hatred is hot as fire or chastity white as snow, we can only object that we have often heard this before and that, considered as ornament, it is rather trite and cheap. But when he inverts his comparison and says that fire is hot as hatred and snow white as chastity, he is a fool for his pains. The heat of fire and the whiteness of snow are so much more sharply perceived than those qualities of hatred and chastity which have heat and whiteness for courtesy titles, that these similes actually blur the image and dilute the force of what is said. – “Swinburne” by A.E. Housman (1910)

A geology of stone is “much more sharply perceived” than a geology of fear. Whatever that is anyway. The cruddiness of Cormac also inspired cruddy writing by others. And still does:

McCarthy wrote figures, like Judge Holden, who were the genocidal tycoons of that brutal machine [of American history] and greased its wheels. Others, like Billy Parham, became its more indirect, melancholic grist. – “On Cormac McCarthy”, The Paris Review (June 2023)

Tycoons don’t grease wheels. That’s a job for underlings, not tycoons. And grist is what’s ground in a mill, not what fuels a brutal machine with wheels. “Indirect grist” doesn’t make sense. What do you do with indirect grist? Pretend to put it in a mill? As for “melancholic grist”: that’s both clumsy and funny. Cormac’s cruddiness continues. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

Previously Pre-Posted (please peruse)

• King Cormac — a look at the malign influence of McCarthy on the far better writer Stephen King