Robert Macfarlane: ‘He listened harder to prose than anyone since Melville’
British writer and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Among the thousand things I could praise in McCarthy’s astonishing body of work – written over 60 years – I want to speak of his prose rhythms. His books proclaimed themselves in the mind’s ear, setting it thrumming and rumbling, piercing it with cries. He listened harder to prose, and thought more about its prosody, than anyone since Melville. He first outgrew, then radically exceeded, the dying falls of Faulkner’s cadences. His phrasing could be great page-long peals of thunder (the attack of the Comanches in the fourth chapter of Blood Meridian, say), wire-bright flashes of lightning (“The stars burned with a lidless fixity”), anaphoras that came to act as refrains across whole books (“They rode on”; “They walked on”), right down to the tender “OK” which is passed back and forth between father and son in The Road. The most important word in McCarthy’s lexicon was perhaps the least conspicuous: “and”. That little conjunction paratactically strung together the atrocious and the mundane, the ultra-violent and the kind. Morally, it had a similar power to the desert light that McCarthy describes as falling with “strange equality” upon “all phenomena”. Historiographically, it enacted McCarthy’s bleak view of human history: repetition, recursion, the illusion of progress, the endless beats of a death-drum sounded in the dark backward and abysm of time.
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Stephen King: ‘There is no way to convey the loss I feel’
American author of horror and fantasy novels
Early this year, while Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I had an idea for a story called The Dreamers. I wrote it while reading Cormac McCarthy’s penultimate book, The Passenger. The story that emerged was very much under the influence of McCarthy’s prose. I was, in fact, almost hypnotised by The Passenger, as I was when reading such McCarthy novels as All the Pretty Horses and his masterpiece, Blood Meridian. Because my story was very much in McCarthy’s style, I dedicated it to him.
Every story is a locked door. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – style is the key that opens it. That was the case with The Dreamers. At one point in it I wrote this:
He looked like a bird colonel I knew over there in that other world watching through his binoculars as the F-100Ds and Super Sabres of the 352nd came in low over Bien Hoa, pregnant with the firejelly they would drop in an orange curtain, burning a miscarriage in the green, turning part of the overstory to ash and skeleton palms. The men and women too, them calling nahn tu, nahn tu to no one who could hear or care if they did.
This is not McCarthy, I simply do not have his talent, but it would have been an impossible passage to write, or even think of, without him. It shows not just his influence but the spell he cast over both his readers and those writers of lesser abilities who admired his work. He was, simply put, the last great white male American novelist.
Although his prose undoubtedly owes something to William Faulkner, he eventually became Faulkner’s equal, if not his superior. From Blood Meridian (1985) on, his prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power. If you have read him, you understand. If you have not, there is no way to convey the loss I feel even though he died at a good age, a patriarch’s age, and did his work with a patriarch’s unflinching strength. He is a loss to the American imagination, but as McCarthy himself might have said, “I gave you the books and the books remain, undimmed and undaunted.”
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Annie Proulx: ‘He taught readers to face up to existence’
American novelist and short story writer
More than sorrow I feel gratitude for the works of this extraordinary writer who, in presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence.
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Benjamin Myers: ‘I was so moved by The Road that I unexpectedly proposed to my partner’
British author of novels including Cuddy and The Perfect Golden Circle. An adaptation of his novel The Gallows Pole is now showing on BBC Two
I was something of a latecomer to Cormac McCarthy. For reasons unknown, I didn’t read him until I immersed myself in The Road over Christmas 2008 while snowbound in a cottage in a particularly remote corner of the Yorkshire Dales. Sometimes subject, writing style and environment all conspire to provide the perfect reading experience, something that changes your understanding of what literature can do and sends the imagination off in a whole new direction. This was it.
I was so moved by the novel that I unexpectedly proposed to my partner upon its completion; no one was more surprised than I was to hear the words coming out of my mouth.
But such is the power of this writer who only ever dealt in the two grand themes: life and death.
From the gothic grotesque of his early novels such as Outer Dark and Child of God, in which Appalachian Tennessee is seen as a living hell far worse than any biblical depiction, through the sprawling, uncharacteristically funny and arguably underrated Suttree and on to the recent purple patch that produced The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy wrote with an unprecedented power. His understanding of language suggested he knew full well that literature is a process of dark magic, each new novel necessitating a unique vocabulary from which to cast a spell: poetry as a dangerous weapon and a form of seduction.
We can only guess that this is what he thought, as the other admirable trait beyond his creative abilities was McCarthy’s complete disregard for the notion of “being a writer”. This meant no press interviews, no festival appearances, no humiliatingly attended in-store signings. To the outside world he was a hermit but to many of us he was living the dream.
In an industry where the writer is expected to be a raconteur and entertainer, as readily available to please as a performing seal, his is an output that presents a strong argument against all that soul-draining distraction. Only a man who hid himself away from the world could have written Blood Meridian.
A writer does not create immortal work by being doing what they are told. Cormac McCarthy did what he wanted. Such creative freedom and linguistic daring ensures that his contribution to the world is a body of work that will sing down the centuries.
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Ridley Scott: ‘He reminded me of Joyce with his Ulysses’
British film director and producer
Cormac is sadly gone. One of the great American authors of the past century who wrote such visceral encounters with unforgettable imagery. A poet on every level, with even the most mundane “universes” reminding me of Joyce with his Ulysses.
I worked with him twice. On a very good adaptation of Blood Meridian, but no one had the balls to go for it. The Counselor was also not for the fainthearted, but he wrote the best dialogue I have ever encountered. One of my proudest creations: how else would one attach such a formidable cast?
He leaves great memories with all his work.
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Anne Enright: ‘He worked close to some religious impulse’
Irish author of The Gathering and Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood
Cormac McCarthy was such a virtuoso, his language was so rich and new, it made his books almost bearable. To read his work was to suffer a slow accumulation of hurt and horror: it was, for me, an uncomfortable, almost masochistic experience, heightened by the scope and fury of his vision. McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute. His sentences were astonishing.
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Sebastian Junger: ‘Not only does he have the language, he’s got the soul’
American journalist, author and film-maker
I think he’s completely by himself among contemporary authors, it’s as if they put Mount Everest down in the Appalachians. Not only does he have the vision, he has the language. And not only does he have the language, he’s got the soul.
I’m guessing he wrote The Passenger and Stella Maris knowing they would be his final communication; they’re about these sorts of thresholds, experiences between life and death. They got a totally mixed reception, and I have the feeling he didn’t really give a shit: he wrote what he felt he had to write, to complete the circle of his life and his work.
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Erica Wagner: ‘He carried the fire of imagination’
Author and critic
Cormac McCarthy’s poetic, menacing vision may not have completely defined the contemporary American literary landscape but it came close; and its sense of roiling anarchy, conveyed in prose that combined plain speaking with the biblically ornate, seems prescient now. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told the New York Times magazine in a (very rare) interview. His crowning achievements - the violent, gorgeous Border Trilogy, The Road and No Country for Old Men - will endure. He carried the fire of imagination through his books, and as he would have wished, it will remain alight.
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Thomas Keneally: ‘He was a very arresting writer’
Australian novelist, playwright, essayist and actor
McCarthy was a great apocalyptic writer but there was a sense of the old Celtic sagas in the way men, in particular, clashed in his books. He had a very fragile trust in the angelic nature of humanity and he was obsessed, like all good ruined Celts, with the tension between the angelic and brutal nature of humankind. No one wrote about this dichotomy better than him.
He was a very arresting writer; very violent, perhaps too much so. He had this darkness to him but a sense of the human comedy as well, which comes through in No Country for Old Men, where the old sheriff, who doesn’t get much of a run in the movie, says: “You know the good thing about old age? It doesn’t last long.”
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Travis Elborough: ‘He wrote humanely about misfits and twisted outsiders’
British writer and cultural historian
McCarthy was an author who always wrestled with the big issues. His novels raised serious questions about life and death, the nature of evil, moral choice, the allure of violence, the passing of traditions and the future of the planet. He wrote humanely about misfits and twisted outsiders. His books were peopled by bootleggers, drug-runners, swindlers, incestuous siblings, child-killers, scalp-hunters, mass murderers and necrophiliacs, and examined some of the very darkest deeds of which human beings are capable. But he refused to paint the world in simple binaries. His novels were often blood-soaked with bad things happening to seemingly good people, and the bad, mad and dangerous to know appearing to come good in the end.
He was always something of a literary outlaw, eschewing the trappings of fame and the book world. His exchange with Oprah Winfrey about The Road, the dystopian novel that earned him the Pulitzer prize, makes for rather painful viewing.
For years he toiled in virtual obscurity, sustained by the faith in his abilities and the belief in the power of his stories to reach an audience. That faith and his continued commitment to his craft, even through periods of genuine financial hardship, paid off handsomely.
