. Spinning .

You know what scares me?  I don’t see the darkness in McCarthy any more.

It was warm in the room, he could feel the sweat in his armpits, but the man was swathed heavily in blankets.  Thickness of them under his hand..here shape of arm, of shoulder, chest…sleeping on his back.  Gifford snuffled.  One gluey eyelid came unstuck as the covers receded from his chin with maternal solicitude.

He even raised his head a little, wonderingly, sleep leaving him in slow grudging waves, so that he seemed to be coming up to meet it, the shut fist rocketing down out of blackness and into his face with a pulpy sound like a thrown melon bursting.  (p. 167)

There’s horror here, blood and guts McCarthy-style without holding back.  And yet what is the scenario, really:  Sylder warning Gifford to not question the kid, to leave the drowned car and whiskey to sit where they lay.  Sneaking into his house in the dead dark of night, chuckling, "Es muy malo que no tengas un perro," he says; It’s very bad that you don’t have a dog.

Somehow, this shows more honesty, less malice than so much I’ve seen lately in the guise of a smile.

Glad I’m catching up on the old, since the new is coming at us fast and furiously. 

Just a thought this morning, and one that comes up in my mind quite a bit:  How much does the author know about what he presents in a story, what is planned, and what can still surprise him?  What is offered to the reader and what does a reader pull out in deep digging that is his, and his alone?

With Faulknerian influence on this first novel of McCarthy’s, there is a difficulty in recognizing the three main characters of Uncle Ather, Sylder, and John Wesley.  Often starting action without definite character appointment, it is up to the reader to recognize both who, and in what time period this event is occurring.  The novel opens with an unnamed hitchhiker.  Sylder is then introduced.  We find the man Rattner, and then there is a boy.  We’re never quite sure who’s the "he" that McCarthy begins a new thread with until we’ve gotten more acquainted and set back into time.

Is this feeling of becoming lost at times in the reading a plot technique?  Does it gear us towards latching onto a character, learning him and his ways as he weaves his way through the countryside, in the hope that he knows his way around and will lead us on through the story?

One thing about the actors in McCarthy’s stories is that they are always on the move.  Sometimes they know what they’re seeking, sometimes they don’t, but they always seem to know their environment.  They understand it, even if they’re lost to both God and man.

…that is, if we come to understand Benjy, of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and the way stream of consciousness reveals the revealer, then we can come to understand the method enough to understand McCarthy’s characters, or anyone else’s.  Here, Uncle Ather’s thoughts on his wife, Ellen:

On the sixth day he went out and knocked a plank from the back of the barn with the poll of his axe, cut from it two boards.  On one he carefully incised her name with the point of his knife.  Then he chopped a stake-point on the other board and nasiled the two together in the form of a cross.  He took it and took her clothes and a spade down to a corner of the lot where he scooped a hold, buried the clothes, and with the shank of the spade pounded the cross into the ground. 

(…) That goddamned bibledrummer, wadn’t it?  (p. 156)

I believe that Ather is thinking about his wife, and the days after she left, and how he buried her and his memories of her out back.  With his close connection to the earth, he needs to take her out of the house and put his life with her into the ground, bury it there, under a cross.  It existed, and then it was gone.

One thing McCarthy does not do, is race the reader through his stories.  Nor does he tell us about his characters. We follow at a steady pace, and decide by what they do, who they are.  We’re following three different men in this, John Wesley Rattner, a fatherless young man who lives with his mother and is just beginning to stretch his limits of the world.  He moves his bed from the loft out to the porch, freezing at night until his mother puts it back one day while he is away. 

Marion Sylder, a bit older, whisky runner and hell-raiser.  Good hearted though, it would seem, as he gives the boy who’s helped him out of an accident, one of his favorite dog’s puppies.  But, he’s killed a man, a hitchhiker who tried to take him for a ride long ago.

And an old man who sees all that’s going on in the hills, the boys walking around hunting, visiting the pit where a skeleton lies quietly, Sylder running his Plymouth loaded down with booze through the woods.  He’s knows who’s coming and who’s going, and they all walk through his part of the world.  As we walk with the travelers, we stand with the old man, Uncle Ather.  Because we know that these three men will meet up when their paths cross.

Except the hitchhiker, who lies in his water-filled open grave.  And all three now know he is there.

One of the elements of what Longinus (or whoever) claims makes up the sublime he calls "noble diction" — "which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language.

Here is where Cormac McCarthy excels.  I must share this:

All was quiet.  The birds were stilled in their first tentative and querulous chirpings.  Low in the east and beyond the town a gray soulless dawn gnawed the horizon into shape.  (p.97)

The imagery alone is incredibly drawn, a day dawning colorless until the separation of earth and sky is seen, ragged (gnawed into shape) treeline and mountain.  But with McCarthy, you can take more from this:  gray and soulless would indicate a continuation of a life without hope, as if the heavens had given up on God and man alike.  Gnawed the horizon into shape seems to offer a power that controls, but with either the toying with life, as a dog worries a bone, or the hunger to consume it all and nearly suck out the marrow–depending upon your interpretation of the verb to gnaw.  What does that mean for the world, and the men in McCarthy’s story that live within it?

There is little doubt that McCarthy places well within this element of the sublime, in language alone.  And for me, he reaches as well into the "first and most important (is) the power of forming great conceptions."  (The Sublime)  For what greater conception is there than the natural world, and this is one of McCarthy’s constants, his focus on the land as a setting for his characters.

Whenever I read McCarthy I come across a few pages that beg to be read aloud.  Usually, a description of a place, and McCarthy colors it well:

He went up the far side of the square under the shadow of the market house past brown country faces peering from among their carts and trucks, perched on crates, old women with faces like dried fruit set deep in their hooded bonnets, shaggy, striated and hooktoothed as coconut carvings, shabby backlanders trafficking in the wares of the earth, higgling their goods from a long row of ancient vehicles backed obliquely aainst the curb and freighted with fruits and vegetables, eggs and berries, honey in jars and boxes of nuts, bundles of roots and herbs from sassafras to boneset, a bordello of potted plants and flowers.  (p. 82)

What’s that you say?  These are people and things, not places?  I disagree.  This is the square, alive with color, sounds, and smells.  And I read this in a drone that I can’t help falling into, as if, amid all this busyness, there is still a sense of despair.

McCarthy is a master at keeping the reader on a level with his characters in time.  If someone’s trudging down a road, we know how he’s walking, how long it’ll take him to get into town.  And this, a fight that turns deadly between Marion Sylder and an obnoxious hitchhiker who tries to likely steal the car:

Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it.  The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether.  When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips.  He relaxed his hand, the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider.  He tried to open it again but could not.  He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right.  (p. 40)

Yeah, we held our breath, watching, reading the image and thinking, that guy’s gotta be dead.  And we wait for McCarthy to tell us.  McCarthy waits for us to find out.  Time stopped, then caught up again, and we’re all on that road looking down.

I suspect, after reading several of McCarthy’s books now, that his readers are weeded out or strengthened into firm believers by his opening chapters.

In this novel, we follow one man walking towards a place he wants to be going.  This man is Kenneth Rattner.  He is alone, seems harmless and friendly enough, yet he lies and steals.  Then there is another man, Marion Sylder; a dandy with fancy boots and a fine car, who buys drinks for one and all as he enters a hometown bar after many years’ absence.

It is McCarthy’s method to draw lines leading to and away; but they’re never straight and easy to follow.  We know who’s important to watch though, and that their individual journeys are bringing them together.   But we have to get involved with them a bit first, even while knowing that a meeting is just up ahead.  And we try to figure out where, how, and why.  Maybe we’re already picking sides; the winner, the loser.  And we look for clues from what McCarthy’s bound to give us in the setting, in the movements of his characters, and in how they interact with all who they run into prior to that kismetic moment of facing off. 

And we tense up for that meeting now, as we should have for the pairing up of the Judge and the Kid.  Had we only known.

I can’t find it easily enough to excerpt here, but something I found in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian awed me when I first read it since it was the first time I’d come across it.  It was a repetition of words in a phrase, and it was just awesome.

I’ve run across it elsewhere since, but have run into two examples in Stories for Late at Night:

Faster and more fast was the beat of music, and Lolita circled faster and yet faster, stamping her right foot sharply…etc.  (Pieces of Silver, Brett Halliday, p. 151)

The boy, in his tweed jacket, thick flannel trousers, and over-tight collar, at whose front blazed a tie which hoped to look like that of some famous school or college, was hot, and very hot.  (Our Feathered Friends, Philip MacDonald, p. 216)

In the first case above, it suits perfectly, fulfilling its purpose of emphasizing the increasing speed of both the music and Lolita’s dancing.  Even the repetition of the repeated adjective doesn’t deflate its impact.

In the second, it seems out of place within both the language and the context of the story. The drama called up by the repeated "hot" doesn’t seem appropriate to being overdressed.  While the author included the word "blazed" to describe and place the boy’s tie, I would have assumed that it was colorful, rather than merely  looking like a school tie, which to me, would place at either navy or maroon.

So the use of language, the playing with it, is something that can work, or not.

For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky.  He walked along slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and bobbling on one foot like some squat ungainly bird while he examined the wad of tape coming through his shoesole.  He turned again.  Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him.  It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came.  (p. 1)

Ah, my man, McCarthy.  Once again I fall totally into his story.  McCarthy has a knack of drawing the setting, then coloring it in just enough to let you look into a three-dimensional world.

Our minds are directed to the road, then the sky, then back down to the the infinitesimal dust of the road, as if to say, this may be small compared to the universe of the sky and beyond, but this, this is where it’s all going to happen.

Love it.

Need a Cormac fix.  But since I’ve so many books in the pile, I’m pulling one out of there (have a total of five left in there!): The Orchard Keeper.

Am still enjoying Stories for Late at Night, and will post on any wowsers that come up, but Halliday’s Pieces of Silver was the high point of the anthology so far–it was a story that, like Tillie Olsen’s I Stand Here Ironing, will be with me forever.

No, not that McCarthy, but my man, Cormac of the guts and the blood and the rats.

Crof of Writing Fiction just had to know this would stir me up some: 

The New York Times has a piece asking: What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?

The article is very much worth reading, but I see I’ve read almost none of the books listed. Cormac McCarthy looms large; I think he’s among the very worst writers of the past quarter-century…like an undertaker who puts a mound of Dream Whip, topped with a cherry, on the face of every corpse.

Well McCarthy may not have reached Willie status with me yet, so I’m not ready to take out the gloves, but it is interesting to note the diversity of opinion that certain writers evoke.  Just as with Faulkner and Joyce, there is mob mentality, there is educated discourse, there is marketing hype and there is the product itself that all figure into the acceptance or rejection of an artist.

When in truth, all it comes down to is the story and the single reader.  I admire certain authors, and I admire even more the reader, like Crof, who decides for himself what he likes.

Just finished McCarthy’s Child of God and honestly don’t know what to say.  I truly wish some day to continue my formal study of literature so that I can offer a more insightful review than Whew!  I seem to base my very unprofessional reviews on gut feeling and reaction to both story and writing rather than follow any acknowledged critical theory.  Maybe someday I’ll get the time and money to take  this all to a higher level.  Meanwhile…

I loved this book.  As gross and as horrifying as Lester Ballard is, and as vague about what makes him tick as McCarthy could be, I was fascinated by him.  He is so very much the darker side of us and yet in his way, he is almost innocent though he does know what he’s doing all the time.  I think the disturbing factor that McCarthy brings to Ballard–and this may well be why he does not give him a detailed history–is that he is so close, just on the other side of the line we draw for ourselves of decent behavior.

I’m thinking that what sets (for me) a book apart from being just another novel, even a good novel with story and fine writing, is when it carries the reader through it into the world of the narrative and the characters.  When it makes you stop only to need to think about or share some fine idea or bit of exceptional prose.  No doubt I definitely look for the writing style, the voice and the imagery as much as story.  McCarthy feeds my needs.  There is one other clue that tells me a book is good; I don’t want to start reading another one by a different author immediately.  It’s like brushing your teeth after a good meal and ruining the memory of it with mint instead of savoring the glory of the meal.

The end of Lester Ballard is just as jaw-dropping as his life.  On the lam he glimpses a vision of himself before what he’s become, but cannot think about it.  We just know that it bothers him a little before he goes back to the business of surviving. Child of God may describe an opinion that we are all born alike in innocence; or that we are all born alike in baseness.  What happens in our lives and our reactions steadily steer our course towards an ending.  That’s why I felt it was so imperative to discover what led Lester to choose the paths he’d taken.  Because we all begin at the same starting point.  McCarthy has pointed that out to us, and has left us to wonder if ever we, like Lester, come close to crossing that line.

Yep, McCarthy’s my man.

Lester’s first murder of a woman is born of the egg of rejection with the sperm he’s left inside a woman he found dead in a car (boy, that’s a whole psychological story right there that I won’t go into because it got worse).  After his home, such as it is, burns down, he lives in a cave.  What we see is him shooting a woman who’s spurned him, and while we know what he’s done with the first woman he found dead, it is only when he returns to the cave after his trip downtown to sell watches (we know where he probably has gotten them), and kicks at the ashes of his campfire in the cave that we learn a bit more:

Ballard kicked at the fire and turned a few dull cherry coals up out of the ash and bones.  (p. 133)

Then as we follow him down deeper into the earth through the natural caverns and passageways, we’re once again hit with horror:

Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on the ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.  (p. 135)

So the turning of Lester into a serial murderer has been foreshadowed by his first murder, while we become suspicious of his actions we discover them to be true and yet they still hit us like a ton of bricks with the audacity of what he’s doing to the bodies.  McCarthy’s foreshadowing is a strange twist of letting us know the crime, and then subtly weaving it into the most mundane of actions where it lies like a rock in the middle of your stomach.

We still aren’t sure what drives Lester Ballard, but we see suggestions of his own lack of insight:

Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed.  Given charge, Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.  (p. 136)

With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave.  Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascent through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ask and smoke like souls rising from hades.  When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.  (p. 141)

Ballard moves through life on instinct, but we see only the worst of man in his resolutions of his problems.  He seems to be unaware of the nature of what he is doing, and yet he is a man who lives by natural laws of the animalistic tendencies of man.  Born clean, ruined by life?  Or born with simply a need for survival and untouched by civilization?  Which came first…?