Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89. In 2012, we detailed what we learned from the Cormac McCarthy Papers. The archives gave us a unique look inside the working method of an artist who spoke little about his own work.
Bloodless dawn. The old cowboy sets out across the sharp-footed malpías toward the volcanic cone. On his pack, below the antique swivel-bore rifle, swing two small pouches of crystal saltpeter and ground alder charcoal like the cheap curio of a traveling tinker. He reaches the slope of the cone and scrambles up the glassy flint of now eroded sedimentary rock.
At least this is what I pictured after I came across a recipe for homemade gunpowder in McCarthy’s notes. The laminated recipe, scrawled in small cursive letters on a bail bondsman’s notepad, is part of the Cormac McCarthy Papers—98 boxes of notes, letters, drafts, and correspondences on all of the reclusive author’s works—archived at Texas State University-San Marco’s Wittliff Collections.
. The archives give us a unique look inside the working method of an artist who speaks little about his own work—and gives us clues as to how his reticence, when brought intoAdvertisement As avid McCarthy readers may have noticed, the scene I’ve imagined above is more or less lifted right out of, a loosely historical novel that trails a gang of desperadoes through the haunted badlands of 19century Mexico as they maraud for Indian scalps. Judge Holden, the “sooty-souled rascal” at the heart of the bloody epic, bakes up the gunpowder in a last-ditch effort to save his gang from a grisly death at the hands of trailing Apaches.
Early drafts read more like a parroting of Charles Portis or Louis L’Amour than the “universal tragedy of blood” Harold Bloom called the published version. The prose is cramped, the voice toneless and noticeably devoid of that deep, brassy register we’ve come to expect from McCarthy.Courtesy The Cormac McCarthy Papers, Wittliff Collections, Texas State University.
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