The Road is quintessential McCarthy: a variant upon a picaresque adventure tale. Where in the Border Trilogy the boys’ quests began as romantic pilgrimages, however bleakly the last novel, Cities of the Plain, ends, and there is a youthful vigor to the prose suggestive of ceaseless, restless, exuberant motion—usually on horseback—The Road is a work of numbing bleakness, pessimism; the journey is on foot, very slow, haphazard, less an adventure than an unmitigated ordeal. An unnamed father and his son—Everyman, Everyboy—are embarked upon a journey with no destination other than the hope of escaping the impending Appalachian winter by taking back roads along the southern coast. Here is a return to McCarthy’s eastern Tennessee roots—though in tone very like the rough country of McCarthy’s West. Civilization has been destroyed in what seems to have been an instantaneous flash of nuclear energy—ash sifts down from overcast skies, most wildlife has become extinct, and other surviving Homo sapiens, observed with great caution and horror, have reverted to barbarism in graphic visual imagery of the kind scattered through Blood Meridian:
Shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken eyes…The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink.
As McCarthy has never shown the slightest interest in politics or history—even his most realistic novel, Suttree, takes place in a topical vacuum—so in this parable of human folly and its tragic aftermath there is no explanation of why war was waged, and by whom; if in fact the devastation is global, as we are led to assume; from this point onward, history itself is extinct. It’s as if the demons of Blood Meridian—the men who “settled” the West by imposing their barbarism upon an exquisitely beautiful nature—have triumphed. McCarthy’s vision is Manichean: there are “good” people and there are “evil” people—the former at the mercy of the latter. Horribly, in The Road, evil people are devouring good people in orgies of desperate cannibalism.
This monochromatic vision would be unbearable except for McCarthy’s beautifully rendered “poetic” prose. Here is an incantatory voice that makes of devastation—doom itself—something rich and strange, as in the late poetry of T. S. Eliot:
They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulated sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.
And in the richly evocative final passage of the novel:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and forsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
As usual McCarthy’s perspective is coolly omniscient: his narrative voice seems to hover just above individuals like the questing father and his son, without entering into them fully. We see through the father’s anxious eyes—we share his anxious thoughts—but we are simultaneously distinct from him and are aware at all times that he’s a (fictitious, allegorical) character in a tale. Admirers of McCarthy’s more varied prose may miss the flashes of his droll, deformed wit, always evident amid the excesses of Blood Meridian, the novel that most resembles The Road; McCarthy’s favored theme is male barbarism, in contrast to the brotherly sentiment of the boy-heroes of the Border Trilogy, or the tender feelings Billy Parham has for the (female) wolf in The Crossing—the (female) wolf as the boy-hero’s anima. In The Road, it’s significant that there is no maternal figure: McCarthy has disposed of the mother, as a suicide. (McCarthy’s female portraits are flat as cartoon figures set beside his men. The wife in The Road speaks as no woman in recorded history is ever likely to have spoken—“I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time.” No word more inexorably male than whorish!) Only a father remains—only the father—pushing the possessions of his depleted family in a shopping cart—an ironic, disfigured artifact of a lost consumer culture—armed with a revolver containing only two bullets. It’s significant—and alarmingly timely—that father and son are wearing masks to protect them from the befouled air. Their primary tasks are to scavenge food and to stay out of sight of other people. In the course of the journey the boy begins to perceive that the father, intent upon his and his son’s survival, is gradually changing into a savage like the others. One is reminded of Faulkner’s terse summation of the Negro housekeeper of the afflicted house of the Compsons, in The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” (As if the singular Dilsey were in fact multiple, emblematic.)
The Road is McCarthy’s most lyric novel as it is his most horrific and perhaps his most personal: there is an acknowledgment of human love here missing in McCarthy’s more characteristic work. Who could have imagined, given the lurid and zestful black humor of Child of God and Blood Meridian, and the celebration of unfettered bachelorhood of the Border Trilogy, that in later years Cormac McCarthy would write so feelingly about parental love for a child? Of course the child is a boy as the parent who has been courageous enough to survive to protect him is male. In McCarthy’s Manichean/Old Testament cosmology, the female has yet to be born.
IN ROUGH COUNTRY II: ANNIE PROULX
Fine Just the Way It Is
Wyoming Stories 3
by Annie Proulx
She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and unsecured truck doors. Her boy, too. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that cancelled their favored status. The trip along the road was a roll call of grief.
—ANNIE PROULX, FROM “TITS-UP IN A DITCH”
Like a flash flood rushing along a normally meandering stream, Annie Proulx’s most characteristic short stories move with a deceptive sort of sinister casualness, before the point of impact, and of disaster—but “disaster” for Proulx, as for her kinsman-contemporary Cormac McCarthy whose quasi-mystical western territory is to the south (New Mexico, Texas, Mexico) of Proulx’s photo-realist Wyoming territory, is likely to be tersely and ironically noted, as the fall of a sparrow might be noted, one more event in the hard implacable heart of Nature. In Proulx’s words:
For me, the story falls out of a place, its geology and climate, the flora, fauna, prevailing winds, the weather. I am not people-centric, and I’m appalled at what human beings have done to the planet.*
And:
I took rurality as my ground…The landscapes [of Wyoming and Newfoundland] are different, but the economic situations and the beliefs of the people…are quite similar, because they are all commanded by powers in urban centers. But because [the people] can’t see who’s making the rules and the economic strategies that govern them, they continue to believe in the independent rural life, which is deliciously ironic and very sad. [Guardian interview, December 11, 2004]
Through a sequence of vividly imagined and boldly idiosyncratic works of fiction—Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), Accordion Crimes (1996), Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), That Old Ace in the Hole (2002), Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004)—Proulx has explored rural America in extremis with an admirable passion and patience for research of all kinds, both scholarly and reportorial. As she acknowledges in the front matter of Close Range,
she is “an aficionado of local histories [who has] for years collected memoirs and accounts of regional lives and events in many parts of North America” for her Texas/Oklahoma panhandle epic Ace in the Hole, Proulx allegedly spent three years of travel gathering information, of which in the end she could use but a relatively small portion; researching The Shipping News, by her account she fell asleep for two years reading The Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Lacking the Old Testament-prophet vehemence that permeates Cormac McCarthy’s similarly elegiac work, but suffused with a similar aesthetic wonderment for the physical terrain of the West and the big skies above—both Proulx and McCarthy are tireless, if not relentless in their exacting depiction of Ansel Adams–like scenery—Proulx often laces her grimly naturalistic tales with flashes of bawdy humor, even an appealing goofiness, as if to suggest that, from the Olympian perspective of the Rockies, the mishaps, follies, and even the tragedies of humankind are of minuscule significance in a world in which “demons [are] sprinkled throughout…like croutons in a salad.”
With the publication of this new collection of Wyoming stories, Proulx has now three volumes of Western tales of which the most famous—and the masterwork—remains the long, lyric, tenderly erotic “Brokeback Mountain” (originally published in The New Yorker in 1997) from the first volume Close Range. This initial collection of Wyoming tales is perhaps the most substantial of the three volumes as well as containing, in its hardcover edition, poetically evocative watercolors of Western scenes by the artist William Matthews. Having moved to rural Wyoming in her early sixties, in 1994, after having lived for most of her life in small towns in New England, Proulx assimilated her vast new territory in much the same way that Cormac McCarthy, moving west from his longtime home in Tennessee, in 1976, assimilated his new Southwestern territory, as a landscape both historical and symbolic: a terrain of great physical beauty dwarfing the merely “human” in ways to evoke the allegorical Yukon tales of Jack London and the North African desert tales of Paul Bowles. Already in her fifties when she first began publishing short stories in magazines like Gray’s Sporting Journal, Harrowsmith, and Ploughshares, and fifty-eight when she came to literary prominence with The Shipping News, Proulx is far less oracular than Cormac McCarthy, predisposed to vernacular speech and characters sketched in the broad, blunt strokes of such old-fashioned comics as “Dick Tracy,” “Little Orphan Annie,” and “Krazy Kat” in which caricature is the norm and the grotesque is signaled by “funny” names in abundance; we know that we are not in the rarefied literary territory of post-Jamesian, post-Chekhovian, post-Joycean fiction when we encounter such rural specimens as Pake Bitts, Diamond Felts and his rodeo sidekick Leecil Bewd, Dirt Sheets, Sutton Muddyman, Roany Hamp (female), Creel Zmundzinski, Reverend Jefford J. Pecker, Orion Horncrackle, Plato Bucklew, Gay G. Brawls, Georgina Crawshaw, Deb Sipple (male), Fiesta Punch, Budgel Wolfscale, Condor Figg, Hard Winter Ulph, Chad Grills, Chay Sump, Queeda Dorgan, Sink Gartrell, Mizpah Fur, Hi Alcorn, Antip Bewley, Fenk Fipps and his friend Wacky Lipe, Fong Saucer, Bracelet Quean (male), Pastor Alf Crashbee, and numerous others whose hard-luck fates seem predestined in their names as in Proulx’s thumbnail sketches that leap from the page like crude comical Weegee portraits:
The terrain of [Car] Scrope himself consisted of a big, close-cropped head, platinum-blond mustache, a ruined back from a pneumatic drill ride on the back of a…tatter-eared pinto…feet wrecked from a lifetime in tight cowboy boots, and simian arms…His features, a chiseled small mouth, watercolored eyes, had a pinched look, but the muscled shoulders and deep chest advertised a masculine strength that had, over the years, attracted not a few women…[He] ate, in addition to large quantities of beef and pork, junk food from plastic sacks which set off itchy rashes and produced bowel movements containing long orange strands as though he had swallowed and digested a fox. [“Pair a Spurs”]
As Proulx observes in the tongue-in-cheek endings of two tall tales included in Close Range, “When you live a long way out you make your own fun” (“55 Miles to the Gas Pump”) and “If you believe that you’ll believe anything” (“People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water”).
Proulx’s more sympathetically and realistically imagined stories, however, transcend caricature and are frequently moving, and memorable: characters may be foolish, hardly more than puppets or ants seen from the ironist’s distance, but the prose in which they are rendered is likely to be sinewy, supple, tensely impacted and “poetic” in the best sense of the word. In a grimly powerful tale aptly titled “The Mud Below” from Close Range, a doomed young bull rider lives for “the turbulent ride [that gives him] the indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation”:
Rodeo night in a hot little Okie town and Diamond Felts was inside a metal chute a long way from the scratch on Wyoming dirt he named as home, sitting on the back of bull 82N, a loose-skinned brindle Brahma-cross described in the program as Little Kisses…He kept his butt cocked to one side, his feet up on the chute rails so the bull couldn’t grind his leg, brad him up, so that if he got thrashed he could get over the top in a hurry.
When the end comes for the bull rider, it comes quickly:
In the sixth second the bull stopped dead, then shifted everything the other way and immediately back again and he was lost, flying to the left into his hand and over the animal’s shoulder, his eye catching the wet glare of the bull, but his hand stayed upside down and jammed. He was hung up and good…The bull was crazy to get rid of him and the clanging bell. Diamond was jerked high off the ground with every lunge, snapped like a towel…The animal spun so rapidly its shape seemed to the watchers like mottled streaks of paint, the rider a paint rag…His arm was being pulled from its socket. It went on and on. This time he was going to die before shouting strangers.
In fact, Diamond Felts doesn’t die just then: he survives, if barely, to consider how “it was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud.”
Close Range is bracketed by “The Mud Below” and the equally poignant and powerful “Brokeback Mountain,” whose cowboy-lover protagonists
were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.
Herding and watching over sheep in a remote mountainside setting, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, seemingly “straight” boys, begin to have sexual relations as if by chance, and opportunity; no word tender as “love” will ever pass between them, but their lives are forever altered, their subsequent marriages blighted. The reader’s intimacy with the young lovers on their mountainside tending sheep is rudely interrupted by Proulx’s sudden switch of perspective:
They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a god-damn word except once Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with, “Me neither…” There were only two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk’s back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below…They believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre [their supervisor at Farm and Ranch Employment] had watched them through his 10x42 binoculars for ten minutes one day.
In Wyoming, as in most of America in the 1960s and 1970s, it would not have been likely that two male lovers could be tolerated, nor even feel that living together outright might be an option for them; Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar part, and come together in secret, and part again through the years until the mysterious death of Jack Twist that might have been an accident, or an act of savage homophobia, and the brooding Ennis del Mar is left to consider the significance of discovering, in the closet of his dead lover’s boyhood room, his own shirt hanging inside a bloodied shirt
of Jack’s:
the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.
Bad Dirt, more explicitly concerned with socio-economic changes wrought in rural Wyoming during the postwar fifties—“the Eisenhower era of interstate highway construction that changed Wyoming forever by letting in the outside” is characterized by saga-like narrations broken up among numerous protagonists, most of them seen at a bemused distance, as through a rifle scope (“By the weary age of thirty, [Deb Sipple] had been married twice, and it hadn’t taken permanently either time despite the fact that he had small feet and a big pecker”) and by breezily jocular tall tales like “The Hellhole” (in which Wyoming Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski discovers a sulfurous sinkhole into which poachers in the state forest can be manipulated into falling—“a fiery red tube about three feet across that resembled an enormous blowtorch-heated pipe. With a shriek the preacher disappeared. The whole thing had happened in less than five seconds”—and “Florida Rental” in which a woman besieged by her rancher-neighbor’s voracious grazing cattle arranges to rent Florida alligators from a relative to scare them off. It’s as if Proulx is determined not to draw too close to her characters, nearly all of whom are luckless and doomed, yet there is a quick sympathetic portrait of a woman named Suzzy New who has made a bad marriage to a rancher in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”: