“I find so much pleasure in the authority of his voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.” edcaesar remembers Cormac McCarthy.
In 2008, my wife and I asked a friend to read a passage from Cormac McCarthy at our wedding, in England. We may be the only fools in the world ever to have done so. McCarthy’s work—depicting a cold and violent America in prose that is by turns austere, gaudy, religiose, archaic—does not easily lend itself to such a joyful occasion. But I was and remain a McCarthy nut, and “” was a book we both adored.
She took his hand and held it in hers and touched the veins. They went out in the dawn in the city and walked in the streets. They spoke to the streetsweepers and to women opening the small shops, washing the steps.
The man who read this in the church, Chris Craig, flew helicopters with my father in the Fleet Air Arm. He took special care to stay in touch with our family after, in 1982. With me, that care often took the form of letters, at the end of which he would sometimes recommend books or films. I loved getting those letters.
What a gift that recommendation was. Later that year, in 1998, I read “All the Pretty Horses” on a daylong train journey that passed through rural Croatia. Looking out the window at the reddish scrubland, I imagined myself in the world of the novel: a bildungsroman in which two boys ride out from Texas into Mexico and learn about horses, love, violence, and the nastiness of the adult world. I had never experienced anything like “All the Pretty Horses.
Soon afterward, I swallowed the œuvre: McCarthy’s profoundly bleak early Southern novels, and his violent Gnostic masterpiece “
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