Cormac McCarthy obituary: Stripped-down novels mirrored his dislike of trappings of success

Born July 20th, 1933

Died June 13th, 2023

The immense talent of the American novelist Cormac McCarthy (Charles Joseph McCarthy), who has died aged 89, was for three decades a secret that circulated from hand to hand between a small number of readers, including influential champions of his work.

McCarthy seemed to come from nowhere and for most of his career wrote in hermit-like obscurity. He politely declined to be interviewed, never signed copies of his own books, attended no literary conferences, did not teach. His novels, early and late, were grim, violent tales of life stripped down to the raw fundamentals of existence in a hostile world.

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Acclaim and a mass readership came late. Until the runaway success of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, McCarthy had sold fewer than 5,000 copies of the hardback edition of any of his novels. By 2006, Blood Meridian, a blood-dripping tale of scalp-hunting and massacres in northern Mexico in the 1840s, was placed at No 3 in a Time magazine list of the 25 greatest American novels. He reached an even wider audience via film adaptations of books. Not since Faulkner had an American author been so extravagantly talented and, by choice, so distant from the literary culture.

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the eldest son and third of six children of Gladys (nee McGrail) and Charles McCarthy. Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in the fiercely Protestant environment of Tennessee, McCarthy was sent to exclusively Catholic schools. Neither the family’s religion, nor their comfortable upper-middle-class life (maids, a large family house), was much to his liking.

McCarthy received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation in late December 1981 informing him that he had been awarded a “genius grant” of $500,000, which enabled him to buy a small stucco house behind a shopping mall in El Paso

He attended the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952, but dropped out. He had no career ambitions, hated “progress”. The decision legally to change his name from Charles to Cormac suggests some of the family tensions that shaped McCarthy’s relations to his family. He later re-enrolled at the University of Tennessee where, as “CJ McCarthy jnr”, he published two short stories in a campus literary magazine. They attracted some attention, and he received the university’s Ingram-Merrill award for creative writing in 1959.

He promptly left the university without taking a degree and went to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse and married Lee Holleman. They had a son, Cullen, moved back south to Asheville, North Carolina, and were divorced soon after. When asked years later about whether he paid alimony, he responded: “With what?”

He was, for the next 25 years, poor, rootless and happy. His first book, The Orchard Keeper (1965) – a Faulkneresque tale set in rural Tennessee in the interwar years – was published by Random House and attracted little attention, but received the William Faulkner Foundation award and won McCarthy a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On his sea voyage to Europe, planning to visit Ireland, he met Anne DeLisle, a young British singer and dancer, who was working as an entertainer on the ship. They married in 1966, and lived in a rented finca in Ibiza in a boozy community of expat American artists and writers. There he wrote Outer Dark, a tale of incest and violence. It was published in 1968, and sank without trace.

A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled the couple to return to the US in some style for DeLisle’s first visit to McCarthy’s parents. When they reached Tennessee, they rented a cottage adjacent to a pig farm south of Knoxville, where they lived for 10 years. McCarthy poured the memory of his life in Knoxville into a long autobiographical novel, Suttree, which appeared in 1979.

Mid-draft, he walked out on DeLisle, and moved to El Paso, Texas. Although they divorced, he continued to send drafts to DeLisle in Knoxville for typing. “I lived waiting for him to come home for years and years,” she recalled.

The Road appeared in 2006, a spare, powerful novel. For a writer never much known for his concern for intense emotional attachment, the feelings of the (unnamed) father for his son was something new in McCarthy

McCarthy received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation in late December 1981 informing him that he had been awarded a “genius grant” of $500,000, which enabled him to buy a small stucco house behind a shopping mall in El Paso. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was the director of the MacArthur Foundation, and he and McCarthy became close friends. Invited by Gell-Mann to affiliate with the Santa Fe Institute, a freewheeling think tank for scientists, McCarthy at last found an intellectual home. In 1999, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John, he settled down in Tesuque, New Mexico, and worked on his later novels in his office at the institute. “I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet.”

It was in 1985, with Blood Meridian, that McCarthy found critical acclaim. In the early 1990s, McCarthy acquired a new publisher (Knopf), a new editor (Gary Fisketjon) and, for the first time in his career, an agent (Amanda Urban). In 1992 Fisketjon and Urban persuaded the reluctant author to give an interview to the New York Times. All the Pretty Horses appeared that spring, and was a runaway success. It was the first volume in the Border trilogy, and was followed in 1994 by The Crossing, and in 1998 by Cities of the Plain. No Country for Old Men, published in 2005, was dismissed by the critic James Wood as “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller”. The Coen brothers movie of 2007 revealed the perfect geometry of this violent tale of pursuit and revenge. The Road appeared in 2006, a spare, powerful novel. For a writer never much known for his concern for intense emotional attachment, the feelings of the (unnamed) father for his son was something new in McCarthy; it gave The Road an emotional depth. McCarthy received the Pen/Saul Bellow award in 2009. Two late novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, appeared in 2022, capstones to an intense and remarkable career. His third marriage ended in divorce in 2006.

He is survived by his sons, two grandchildren, and two sisters and a brother.