Cormac McCarthy knew how to live. He went to a state school and dropped out. School is boring. He went to Alaska in the military. He only really started reading there. He went around on ships in his youth. He wrote books, and they didn’t sell, and he didn’t care. He got a wife and they lived in a shithouse he built himself and bathed in a lake and when someone would call offering money to lecture them he’d say no. And his wife said they’d eat beans. Years later when he’d had a little success an underage girl in a bikini came up to him at a motel pool. She said let’s hang out, he said yes. Years after that he impregnated a woman in his sixties who was thirty years younger. Not much is known about her except she came out of the kitchen to confront some other guy after she broke up with Cormac, with a Smith and Wesson in her pussy, due to an argument about space aliens. You can imagine how she fucked. McCarthy knew how to live.
People got mad when Vincenzo Barney’s article came out. The Wikipedia entry to this day takes pains to highlight “but she was still 17, on a shared trip to Mexico,” when they “progressed to a physical relationship.” Even in its uptightness it cedes that fucking her was progress. You and I know he nailed her day one in that motel. You’d do it too if you had the nuts. Which you don’t. I don’t either.
After this he wrote Blood Meridian which I’m rereading now. The part where the army captain takes his squad into Mexico across the landscapes is the high water mark of the English language. Better than anything before it. Better than anything will be again. Continue reading
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