Cormac McCarthy at 70
Many would argue that he's the most challenging of contemporary American novelists. To say that his hyper-realism is unique borders on the banal. What Cormac McCarthy has achieved goes beyond, far beyond, style, although it's an important part of the entire picture. No, McCarthy's finest achievement is how his protagonists deal with the modern in settings where tradition governs men's lives. The violence of change is central in McCarthy's world and his men and women accept this fact with honesty and bravery. Today, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, we wish him well.
Five years ago, I read two magnificent books and wrote a combined impression of them for the site that foreshadowed Rainy Day. Looking for common ground between The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Lampedusa and The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy might sound far-fetched but, as I argued at the time, there are commonalties. Well, that's what I thought then. Here's what I wrote in the summer of 1998:
THE LEOPARD in Lampedusa's novel prances only on the family crest and in the daydreams of a Sicilian aristocrat, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. When we first meet him, the year is 1860 and the Risorgimento — the movement for Italian unification — is rumbling in the background. Don Fabrizio knows this means the end of the aristocracy he represents, but noblesse oblige and a deep sense of tradition prevent him from swimming with the popular tide.
By the time the book closes in 1910, the old order is gone, Italy is "united", and Don Fabrizio is dead.
Lampedusa used the fifty-year span of the novel to ponder the transitory nature of power, health, wealth, and happiness. He draws us into his world with exquisite sentences filled with humour and passion, social and historical detail. Take, for example, the scene where Don Fabrizio has to meet Don Calegaro de Sedara, a calculating archetype of the new order, whose daughter Angelica will make a strategic marriage with the prince's favourite nephew, Tancredi:
"As he crossed the two rooms preceding the study he tried to imagine himself as an imposing leopard with smooth scented skin preparing to tear a timid jackal to pieces; but by one of those involuntary associations of ideas which are the scourge of natures like his, he found flicking into his memory one of those French historical pictures in which Austrian marshals and generals, covered with plumes and decorations, are filing in surrender past an ironical Napoleon; they are more elegant, undoubtedly, but it is the squat little man in the grey topcoat who is the victor; and so, put out by these inopportune memories of Mantua and Ulm, it was an irritated leopard who entered the study."
LAMPEDUSA'S classic ends in the years just before Europe plunges into the First World War; Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece begins in the years just before the United States enters the Second World War. The figurative leopard of Don Fabrizio's Sicily is replaced by the real wolf 16-year-old Billy Parham rescues from a trap, tames, and leads across the border to Mexico. This is the first of three border crossings the young man will make in the course of the novel. Each one will sear him with life's hazards and hardships.
McCarthy's aristocrats are animals: wolves and horses. They are nature's nobility, superior in every way to the venal humans who use and abuse them. In Billy's first encounter with the wolves, we experience the writer's prose in all its stark beauty:
"They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such as if they seemed of another world entire. They moved down the valley and turned and moved far out on the plain until they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and disappeared."
THE GREATNESS of McCarthy's achievement lies in his ability to convey the immensity of the terrain and the harshness of the world his characters inhabit. His poetic writing rolls the reader across dusty ranges, down mountains and along dry riverbeds. His command of language allows the protagonists to meander from English into Spanish with the same nonchalance that they traverse the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
The genius of Lampedusa was his ability to take the microcosm of decaying Sicilian aristocracy and turn it into a moving account of life's beauty and death's inevitability. His accomplishment has been to make the Salina family as memorable as the Rostovs of War and Peace and the Buend́¡³ ofA Hundred Years of Solitude.
SEPARATED by continents and cultures, Billy Parham and the Prince of Salina are united by their creators in a search for life's meaning. By accompanying them on their journeys, we get a glimpse of where we are all going.
Impressions there from the summer of 1998. If you'd like to learn more about Cormac McCarthy, one of the most influential of contemporary American novelists, visit the Cormac McCarthy Society.
Diarist of the day: Joan Wyndham, 20 July 1944"An attack on Hitler's life, but unfortunately, the bastard wasn't killed."
