What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
With this statement the novelist would seem to bare his own ardent heart, making vulnerable what in practitioners of literary irony is kept well hidden.
In a telling scene in Cities of the Plain, John Grady Cole on his way to town with “hair all slicked back like a muskrat” pauses for a conversation with an old ranch hand to whom he speaks with a touchingly filial courtesy. The old man tells John Grady a tale of barroom violence in Juarez, Mexico, in 1929.
…Tales of the old west, he said.
Yessir.
Lots of people shot and killed.
Why were they?
Mr. Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasn’t just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That’s all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west.
Nothing to do, in other words, with the “degeneracy of mankind” but only with the brainless predilection for violence in a specific historic/sociological context.
Through the more than one thousand pages of the Border Trilogy the essential conflict is between two distinct ways of life: the way of the wanderer-on-horseback and the way of settled, circumscribed life. The yearning to leave home and “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (in Huckleberry Finn’s memorable final words) is perhaps the most powerful of yearnings in McCarthy’s novels, far more convincing, for instance, than John Grady Cole’s romantic infatuations with Mexican girls. Though for most Americans the vast, empty spaces of rural Texas and New Mexico would seem roomy enough, for the boy-heroes of McCarthy’s fiction Mexico is the region of exotic adventure and mystery: “where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of man.” The slickly villainous Mexican pimp Eduardo of Cities of the Plain gives the yearning a cruder interpretation:
[Americans] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name. Being farmboys of course the first place they think to look of course is a whorehouse.
In fact there is nothing salacious nor even sexual in the interlocked tales of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Even as John Grady becomes a lover he remains in essence chastely stoic as the hero of a traditional boy’s adventure story.
Initially, both John Grady and Billy, of Texas and New Mexico respectively, are drawn to crossing the Mexican border on horseback as a means of escaping the increasingly somber facts of their lives (with the death of John Grady’s grandfather, the family ranch will be sold and he must leave; both Billy Parham’s parents are murdered) and of proving themselves as men. Though minutely grounded in the verisimilitude of ranch life and the gravitas of the physical world, which no one has more powerfully evoked than Cormac McCarthy, each novel attempts to link its boy-heroes with ballad or fairy-tale elements that some readers may find implausible, if not preposterous. The best way of appreciating McCarthy’s achievement in the Border Trilogy is simply to suspend disbelief when the novels swerve into their mythic mode. For example, the first part of The Crossing, a tenderly observed love story of a kind between the teenaged Billy Parham and a pregnant female wolf he has trapped, and leads across the Mexican border with the intention of releasing her in the mountains, is an extraordinary piece of imaginative prose, like the novel’s final pages in which Billy encounters a terribly crippled stray dog. Here is Billy’s homage to the mysterious and beautiful predator he has had to kill, to end her suffering:
He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight…Deer and hare and dove and ground-vole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from…He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.
John Grady’s “ardent heart” for horses is equally convincing, but far less convincing is the boy’s predilection for falling disastrously in love with Mexican girls (highborn in All the Pretty Horses, an abused prostitute in Cities of the Plain) whom he naively wishes to marry. Not much of this is credible and virtually none of it is original, but the doomed boy-girl romance of All the Pretty Horses helped to make the novel McCarthy’s breakthrough best seller. In the more skillfully composed Cities of the Plain, in essence a reprise of All the Pretty Horses in a darker tone, John Grady’s second love affair, with a teenaged prostitute both abused and saintly in the way of a Dostoyevskian girl of the streets, leads to their death in a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence with Eduardo, stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play. Before he is killed by the American boy he hasn’t taken altogether seriously, Eduardo pronounces this cultural judgment:
In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death. For that is what has brought you here. That is what you were seeking…
Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world—he passed the knife back and forth like a shuttle through a loom—your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions.
In McCarthy’s later fiction such seemingly allegorical figures begin to intrude, as if the author had become impatient with the conventions of realism, like the later, pointedly didactic Tolstoy in his “moral fables” telling us what he wants us to think in an elevated vatic language. Dialogue gives way to rambling monologues, sermons, and homilies in the second half of The Crossing, as Billy Parham encounters strangers on his pilgrimage, each with a story to tell him. After the dramatic conclusion of Cities of the Plain, the author adds an anticlimactic epilogue in which a garrulous stranger appears to tell the now seventy-eight-year-old Billy Parham what life is all about.
This story like all stories has its beginning in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.
It’s as if the novelist were providing a gloss on his novel, or his notes to himself during its composition.
So long as McCarthy trusts to John Grady Cole and Billy Parham to embody truths they cannot perhaps articulate, the Border novels are works of surpassing emotional power and beauty; elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world, in the decades following World War II. “The world will never be the same,” the adolescent Billy is told by an older horseman in The Crossing, to which Billy replies, “I know it. It ain’t now.” By the end of the trilogy Billy has become an elderly homeless man, long since horseless and friendless, taken in by a family out of pity and given “a shed room off the kitchen that was much like the room he’d slept in as a boy.”
As if we were forced to see Huckleberry Finn in his later years, a homeless drifter broken in body and spirit, for whom the romance of “setting off for the Territory” is long past.
A partial inventory of the macho artillery employ
ed in McCarthy’s ninth novel No Country for Old Men includes: a short-barreled Uzi with a twenty-five round clip; an AK-47 automatic; a short-barreled H & K machine pistol with a black nylon shoulderstrap; a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol stock and a twenty-round drum magazine; a Tec-9 with two extra magazines; a nickel-plated government .45 automatic pistol; a heavy-barreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut and a Unert1 telescopic sight; a stainless steel .357 revolver; a nine-millimeter Glock; a twelve-gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish fitted with a shop-made silencer “fully a foot long and big around as a beercan.” Too many to count are undesignated pistols and shotguns, some of them short-barreled. There is a cattle gun acquired by a psychopath killer and put to cruel use:
[Chigurh] placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see.
Llewelyn Moss, a former Vietnam War sniper, a Texan on the run from the psychopath, employs some of the weaponry in this arsenal but is “a strong believer in the shotgun.” The sheriff of Comanche County, an older man named Bell, prefers old-fashioned police-issue Colts—“If that don’t stop him you’d better throw the thing down and take off runnin’”—and the old Winchester model 97—“I like it that it’s got a hammer.” Men are judged by their prowess with firearms but also by the boots they choose to wear: “Nocona” for Moss; “expensive Lucchese crocodile” for a self-described hit man named Wells in the hire of a wealthy Houston businessman/drug smuggler; ostrich-skin boots for the psychopath Chigurh.
Not the Texas frontier of legend but contemporary rural Texas in the vicinity of Sanderson, near the Mexican border, is the setting for this fast-plotted action novel about heroin smugglers and the considerable collateral damage among the innocent and not-so-innocent in their wake. The novel takes its title from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/—Those dying generations—at their song…” Yeats’s country is Ireland, seemingly suffused with erotic energy; McCarthy’s country is suffused with the malevolent Eros of male violence. Not horses or wolves but firearms and their effect upon human flesh is the object of desire in No Country for Old Men, which reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarrantino. With the exception of Sheriff Bell, the moral conscience of the novel, characters are sketchily and perfunctorily drawn as if on the run. At the center of the action is a psychopath who shoots his way through scenes invincible as a Terminator-like instrument of destruction and given to vatic utterances: “When I came into your life your life was over.”
Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy’s signature style, No Country for Old Men is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure, unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities ending with his death. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “MacGuffin” to signify the arbitrary object of pursuit: someone has something (an icon, a secret formula, any variety of treasure) that others want, generating chase scenes, killings, suspense in Hitchcock’s ingeniously contrived films. In No Country for Old Men the MacGuffin is drug money—“Two point four million. All used bills”—discovered by Moss in the aftermath of an apparent shoot-out by rival drug smugglers in the wilds north of the Mexican border, where Moss is hunting antelope. In addition to the money, Moss also takes some Mexican brown heroin and several firearms which in the course of his doomed adventure will be put to frequent use.
Thirty-six, married to a much younger woman, a naive risk taker who puts both himself and his wife in jeopardy, Moss doesn’t exist as much more than a function of the plot, a kind of puppet jerked about by the author. Since the predominant mode of narration in No Country for Old Men is detached, as in a screenplay, a documentation of physical actions, we follow Moss and his nemesis Chigurh, cutting from one to the other as in an action film, without being privy to their motives. (After several readings, I still can’t understand why, having stolen the drug money and escaped safely, Moss decides to revisit the scene of the carnage to help the only surviving, badly wounded Mexican, rather than anonymously summon professional help for the man. Except to get himself sighted and pursued by drug dealers, and precipitate the plot, this isn’t a very sensible decision.)
In essence, No Country for Old Men is a showcase for McCarthy’s psychopath killer Anton Chigurh and the mayhem he perpetrates upon mostly unarmed and helpless individuals. There is no sexuality in McCarthy’s fiction but only a minutely described, ecstatically evoked Eros of physical violence, repeatedly evoked in prose. As his almost exact contemporary John Updike has written with ecstatic tenderness of physical heterosexual love, so McCarthy writes of physical violence with an attentiveness found in no other serious writer except Sade:
Chigurh shot [Wells] in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing.
And, in the aftermath of a bloody street shoot-out:
The man [he’d shot in the back] was lying in a spreading pool of blood. Help me, he said. Chigurh took the pistol from his waist. He looked into the man’s eyes. The man looked away.
Look at me, Chigurh said…
He looked at Chigurh. He looked at the new day paling all about. Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching him. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world.
No match for Chigurh is the former Vietnam War sniper Moss, who takes “a couple of rounds in the face”:
There was no chock under Moss’s neck and his head was turned to the side. One eye partly opened. He looked like a badman on a slab. They’d sponged the blood off of him but there were holes in his face and his teeth were shot out.
Like an invincible figure in a video game of murder and mayhem, Chigurh is flatly portrayed and not very convincing: “I have no enemies. I don’t permit it.” When he delivers most of the drug money to the unnamed Houston businessman/drug smuggler, instead of keeping it for himself, he explains that his rampage has been “simply to establish my bonafides. As someone who is an expert in a difficult field.”
All that keeps No Country for Old Men from being a skillfully executed but essentially meretricious thriller is the presence, increasingly rambling and hesitant as the novel proceeds, of the sheriff of Comanche County, one of the “old men” alluded to in the title. Dismissed as a “redneck sheriff in a hick town. In a hick state,” Bell is intended as a moral compass amid the whirligig of amorality. He is courageous and well intentioned but ineffectual as a lawman, unable to stop Chigurh’s rampage and hardly capable of identifying him. Where he hadn’t had a single unsolved homicide in his jurisdiction in forty-one years, now he has nine unsolved homicides in a single week. The new breed of psychopath drug dealer/assassin is beyond Bell’s power to control as the new Uzis and machine pistols are beyond the old-style Colts and Winchesters. It’s possible that Cormac McCarthy, described in a recent interview as a “southern conservative,”2 intends Bell’s social-conservative predilections to speak for his own, explaining the high crime rate in Comanche County in this way: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…It reaches into ever strata.” More pointedly,
I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you woul
d probably come up with is narcotics…[Satan] explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation.
Bell is evidently unfamiliar with the blood-drenched history of his state and its protracted border wars, so vigorously documented elsewhere in Cormac McCarthy. He’s a man left behind by his era confronted with a moral void beyond even Satan: “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”
Nowhere has Cormac McCarthy addressed this question more powerfully, and more succinctly, than in his post-Apocalyptic novel The Road (2006), the most widely acclaimed of his numerous works of fiction. Throughout this bleakly prophetic short novel with its affinities to such twentieth-century visionaries as Samuel Beckett and José Saramago, we are in the presence of a stripped-down humanity, in extremis; utterly vanished is the crude, jocular, tall-tale black humor of McCarthy’s earlier novels, and McCarthy’s sense of a community of individuals bonded by common loss, or threat of loss, as in the elegiac Border Trilogy and the besieged Comanche County of No Country for Old Men. Throughout the novel McCarthy evokes an air of antiquity: though we are presumably in a future time, we are more truly in the past, before history: this is the Hades of Homer, the Inferno of Dante. In the way of Bosch, Dürer, and Goya, and in the mode of the most malevolently inventive contemporary doomsday filmmaker—like George Miller, creator of the Mad Max series—McCarthy exults in the depiction of human corpses amid his desiccated landscape, and in the suggestion of violent, grotesque deaths: mummified bodies are sighted in doorways and in vehicles, garishly displayed on pikes, or posed like waxworks dummies in a vast and unspeakable allegory. In a little clearing is a “black thing skewered over coals”—a “charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” In this hell, McCarthy’s protagonist is shrewd enough to know that he must always be able to see behind him—he has affixed a rearview motorcycle mirror to the shopping cart in which he pushes his belongings, in the kind of small but painstakingly defining detail that makes Cormac McCarthy so vivid a writer. What would be an abstract and perhaps over-familiar doomsday polemic in the imagination of another writer is an emotionally gripping tale in McCarthy’s.