The Haunted Road: a journey through Cormac MacCarthy’s lost America

In his work our most elemental responses were immortalized in luminous gravity.

Valedictions for great writers have become rare.  Generally novelists are remembered as celebrated personalities, vaguely attached to works whose power has subtly diminished over numerous decades.

MacCarthy is unique in leaving us with his mystery fully intact and his legacy as one of post war America’s greatest voices fully assured.

Born in Rhode Island in 1933 though raised in Tennessee, MacCarthy began writing in the wake of a dazzling generation who had redefined the possibilities of American literature.

Faulkner had created a universe rooted in the estrangement of the post bellum South; Steinbeck had laden the endeavours of the rural poor with a mythic significance. Troubled giants like Hemingway had refined a prose with a sharp elliptical impact, telegraphic cadence and rhythmic patterning gave taut unrelenting harmony to pictures of the fleeting and unfathomed.

Fissures in the heart of literary culture had been observed for some time. In his seminal 1939 essay ‘Paleface and Redskin’ the critic Philip Rahv identified two dominant archetypes in American letters. The Paleface exemplified by Henry James was enervated by rootless sophistication, his measured studies of genteel neuroses culpably detached from the visceral forces of his century.

In contrast the Redskin embodied by Walt Whitman showed unmediated response to the natural and instantaneous, which though fertile lacked the reflection or balance necessary for conscious art.

The dilemma continues to shift and relocate itself in fresh evolutions of the genre.

Though relatively affluent and securely middle class MacCarthy was drawn to the experiential leading him to drop out of university to join the US Airforce.

Years of struggle and travel followed leading to his debut novel, ‘The Orchard Keeper’, which was published in 1965. His lifestyle retained a frontier austerity as he decamped with his family to remote homesteads and daily contests with the natural world- a fabric of self-sufficiency connecting him strongly to the native tradition.

No idyll could escape the corrosions in national life as the Vietnam War spun ever further into a cycle of trauma and self-doubt. Younger writers like John Ehle and James Welch challenged narratives of a civilizing mission and created works of dark ambivalence rooted in a vanishing Appalachian world.

Visions of the Old West would be ruthlessly subverted in ‘Blood Meridian’, perhaps MacCarthy’s most iconic novel.

Seen through the life of a nomadic drifter known only as ‘the kid’, we witness a panorama of nineteenth century prospecting unfold in which the raw furies of men and fate terrorize the reader. 

Unremitting both in its violence and moral anarchy, the book shows no instrument of justice or order; only a flickering consciousness of transitory life.

Magnificently adorned in prose of biblical resonance, ‘Blood Meridian’ crystallised MacCarthy’s register in which Miltonic authority is pared by demotic force and blunt dialogue.

Brooding over all is the landscape, a pitiless vista of dreadful beauty in which the futile malice of the actors is ultimately dissolved. The interplay between crisis and nature would be a perennial theme in his work.

After the epic brutality of ‘Blood Meridian’ Macarthy looked to fragmented family dynamics and faced the uncertainty of the past with more wistful reflections.

The Border Trilogy explores a waning cowboy existence on the Mexican border. Though stark, its cruelty is prosaic and not wholly destructive.

At its heart lies a strained friendship of two young men coming of age in a land being tamed. There is a palpable sense of loss. A perilous freedom gives way to a suffocating security.

Exalted by many great American writers, the theme of a journey as being a trial of oneself seems to find its closing expression. In a tradition founded by Puritans wrestling with salvation in limitless wilderness, danger has been a forge of the soul. Later settlers would cross the continent to have their dreams tested in the furnace of war and famine. MacCarthy offers a kind of elegy for such powerful proofs of achievement.

Raised Catholic, MacCarthy lapsed into agnosticism in later life though the rubric of belief still haunts his characters.

‘The Road’ chronicles a dystopian nightmare in which civilization has collapsed leaving marauding bands of cannibals to fight over a blighted wasteland. A father and his son travel away from the carnage to save themselves both from the mobs and the dehumanizing pressures of the apocalypse.

Hailed by some as a portrait of environmental collapse it also has the shape of a pilgrimage in which metaphysical states find poles in our choices and salvation exists as the survival of human character.

Unsurprisingly given its graphic depth McCarthy’s work has attracted film makers, most successfully the Coen brothers.

‘No Country for Old Men’ drapes sinuous menace and humour over McCarthy’s tale of flight and retribution; forlorn expanses of scrum gather a seething malevolence unleashed in the flyblown shelters of motels and gas stations while vengeance runs its course. As a counterpoint to one of MacCarthy’s books it is unlikely to be bettered.

With the passing of MacCarthy it is hard not to sense a diminution of ambition and purity in literature. The savagery which lines our paths will find smaller shadows and our vulnerability less vital tests. In his work our most elemental responses were immortalized in luminous gravity.

We will not see his like again.