Today the New Statesman published an essay I wrote on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I haven’t previously used this newsletter to disseminate pieces I’ve written elsewhere—preferring to keep it as an occasional clearinghouse for harmless but unpublishable ideas—but in view of the degradation of f.k.a. Twitter, where I have mostly shared my work, and because I have a few short thoughts on the composition of the piece, I’m sharing it by this means.
This piece was the most difficult thing for me to write that I can remember: because of other obligations, because it is hard to focus when it’s summertime on the East Coast, because of how forbidding Blood Meridian is, because of the difficulty of saying something new about the late McCarthy after news of his death occasioned a flood of reflections—and because of the bruising impact that the book made on me when I read it for the first time, more than a decade ago, on a family vacation in rural northern New Mexico, as a teenager in love with the landscape and literature of the American West. The wide parched valley on the road to Taos, split impossibly by the deep gorge of the Rio Grande: this was the ideal landscape in which to be reading Cormac McCarthy. Less ideal, to be taking in scalpings and cantina brawls in one-hour installments on the Q train.
Having previously read, and been enraptured by, McCarthy’s more commercially successful (and tonally more optimistic) All the Pretty Horses, reading Blood Meridian was a brutal experience. I especially remember being shaken by the book’s terrifying final pages. But in the years since I have developed a distaste for the sentimentality—yes—that emerges in places in All the Pretty Horses and which badly mars The Road, a book whose popularity I cannot understand; it reads like a parody of McCarthy’s own style. Sentimentality is a Western disease: Blood Meridian, reducing this to a minimum by preserving Southern pessimism in treating Western themes, has seemed ever more to me like McCarthy’s finest work.
In the West the landscape is a constant presence, a reservoir of moral strength in the manner described in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”—but after several years of living in New York City I have, like a man doubting his faith, at times questioned its use, along lines in keeping with local habits of thinking. The archetypal New Yorker’s reaction to appeals to the healing power of nature would be one of skepticism: What, in human terms, can it do? It turns out that Blood Meridian is interested in this question, too, as I tried to acknowledge in the essay:
Though it is an historical novel, in its tenebrous invocations of cosmic finality and in its demand that the violence it depicts be considered timeless, Blood Meridian often resists historicisation. So too in McCarthy’s unmatched depictions of the inhuman Western landscape and his juxtaposition of primordial natural perfection with the wretched temporariness of man. In one, after suffering through parched wastes Glanton’s men are rained on for days as they pass through a land of stunning beauty. “Wild vines of blue morninglory” pass by the men “slouched under slickers hacked from greasy halfcured hides”.
The beautiful landscape takes on a tragic aspect in its remoteness: in the end its beauty is mute and distant, unable to intervene in the wreck of human affairs.
But it is a little more complicated than that. You can read the full piece on the New Statesman’s website here.
One of my most unpopular literary opinions is my dislike of this book. I wrote somewhere that it was overwrought and felt like being trapped on a bad carnival haunted house ride, going round and round. Or like a Marlboro ad written by Dean Koontz.
Of course there's some great imagery, and the themes are dark and based on real events. But I thought it might have worked better as a poem.
I was booed out of the room. I just didn't get it. The pain and boredom of reading it reflected the pain and boredom of the subject, etc, but I remained steadfast.
You, however, make an excellent case for it, and that means something coming from me.