Cormac McCarthy, Imagination, and Pirates
These last weeks I’ve written and perseverated about the strange and disturbing visions of Cormac McCarthy, and the evanescent character of my own imagination. McCarthy’s novels contain much that is twisted and tortured and above all, bleak. After reading about Mexican prisons in All the Pretty Horses or the hopeless apocalyptic world of The Road or the senseless Glanton gang violence in Blood Meridian, I can’t help but wonder about McCarthy’s nightmares. Among writers—a notoriously introverted and strange group—he has a reputation for taking the role of writer/recluse and curmudgeon to new levels. As a writer, I marvel at his inventive stories. As a physician, I read his work and ponder the rare and truthful descriptions of raw human fear and realize again how indistinct the borders can be between imagination and madness.
I suspect all writers who regularly bleed their words on to paper go through stretches when their imagination seems a figment of, well, the imagination. During graduate school I too often wasted sleeping time sinking in a pool of self-pitying angst due to my mentor’s copious grammar “corrections.” I now realize that the far more devastating critique was contained in those red-penciled words like “stereotypical” or “cliche” or “melodramatic;” all literary code words indicating a dearth of imagination. I now spend considerable time, particularly time when I should be sleeping, exploring the dreams and secrets of my characters, bushwhacking through my memory and experience to find those hidden but well traveled trails between desire and action.
It was after two unproductive writing days and an intervening restless night that my despair at finding a creative way to tell these stories caused me to close my laptop and play with my grandson. It was President’s day and as a public school kindergartner he was sprung for the day. This was one of those golden grandparent days complete with bike rides, trampoline jumping, the 3-D movie Journey, burgers and shakes for lunch, a trip to Barnes and Noble, and book reading—lots of book reading.
My grandson, as it turns out, is crazy about pirates. During our day he was read many books about pirates, most more than once. A very active six year old, he sat absolutely still, listening intently for 65 minutes as his grandmother read his carefully considered B & N purchase: Piratetologoy: a Pirate Hunter’s Companion Guide.
After one book reading he was playing outside unmindful of his grandfather’s voyeur gaze. Even without so much as a stick, I could tell he was battling a fierce opponent. Jumping up onto the tampalene in order to obtain an advantage, he was soon bouncing up and down while thrusting and parrying. How fluid were his connections to a world that only he could know. I wanted to run out, have him describe the world he inhabited while physically bouncing up and down in an Austin suburb–but I did not. I remembered the bitter disappointment when my parents called me back from my life as the fifth Musketeer or the Hardy boys other investigator.
I don’t doubt my grandson’s interest in Pirates has something to do with his being confined to a school desk in the same way I transported myself out of grade school through books. Watching the immediate imaginative alchemy between our reading a story and his expanded living into of that world while on the trampoline and then to his memory’s distillation as he later described the afternoon to his mother, made me wonder what residual would be evident in his adult imagination. Robert Olen Butler once said [of writing] “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”
But despite his grandparents and parents best efforts, I know my grandson’s childhood memories won’t be all good. As we all do, he will have bitter disappointments, moments opaque to family and friends, moments silent but not forgotten. Yet these memories, like yesterday’s successful battle with the pirates, will also provide the “compost” for his growing imagination.
Which again brings me to wonder about Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. Is the writer’s creation of such difficult characters and stories actually revealing a personal psychopathology or the results of a depraved or deprived childhood? Critic Lionel Trilling once said of fiction writing, “Disguise is not concealment. . . The more a writer takes pains with his work to remove it from the personal and subjective, the more—and not the less—he will express his true unconscious.” While this statement carries some truth, I do not think it is the whole story. Writer Grace Paley—quoted by David Jauss in his excellent book, Alone With All That Could Happen—said it more completely, “You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.” McCarthy writes of an evil he knows something about but his stories explore and explicate what he doesn’t know and can only imagine: the implications, borders, and mysteries of human desire, human fantasy, and a human heart taken up with evil.
McCarthy’s stories have characters that are grotesque in part because we have gotten so adept at ignoring evil and compartmentalizing suffering that only the “terrible” or “bigger than life” will get our attention. If we fertilize our garden with only the minerals that produce green leaves we may be left with beautiful but impotent plants. Flannery O’Connor once said, “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
My son the lawyer informs me legal writing speaks only of what is known, an argument that must have precedent for assertion. Fiction writers pursue a different tack. McCarthy’s fiction explores, using the act of writing, what he doesn’t know. What is painful for many of his readers including me is McCarthy does not allow us to start with a sentimentalized version of the human heart. He starts by wondering what does an individual and world look like if love were gone? O’Connor again observed, “children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”
It was not the Mexican prison or killing a man that broke John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses. Rather, it was when Alejandra told Cole, “I didn’t know that he [her father] would stop loving me. I didn’t know he could. Now I know.” Cole could not, “make things right” because what was wrong wasn’t fixable.” Finally, the young cowboy got it. When she repeated that she loved him but would not go away with him, would physically withdraw from their love, he suddenly had a new imaginative capacity. “He felt something co
ld and soulless enter him like another being and imagined that it smiled malignly and he no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”
McCarthy could not imagine love’s absence without having an imagination seasoned by memories of love or explicate a world without hope unless he had, however scant or provisional, some knowledge of hope’s character.
I suppose like McCarthy’s dark fiction, the imagining that my writing is without visible evidence of an imagination is proof of its existence–or at least, the scant basis for hope.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy–my initial annotation
This week I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” after a lapse of nearly fifteen years. I reluctantly turned the last page at 3 am in the morning, sighing with an amalgam of satisfaction and discontent, an emotion that serves as the book lover’s brand of erotic experience. Perhaps, like the knight’s confusion concerning his future after rescuing the damsel, I wanted to immediately start rereading the story but hesitated knowing the experience could never be quite the same. A portion of my reading pleasure, as in all forms of delight, appeared because it was unexpected. C.S. Lewis once said, “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” I was significantly older than ten when I first read “All the Pretty Horses.” I suspect the gulf between this current reading and my memories of the novel does not reside so much in what I missed in McCarthy’s prose during my initial sojourn but rather that I am now a different reader.
Since first reading McCarthy’s book I now pay increased attention to the writing craft. After numerous literary awards, NYT reviews, and a Matt Damon movie adaptation, the story of John Grady Cole’s quest in “All the Pretty Horses” is well known and McCarthy’s many apocalyptic themes extensively critiqued. But often overlooked in a general discomfort with McCarthy’s non human-centric view of the world or his unique grammatical prose style or the Flannery O’Connor-esque fascination with twisted gothic-like characters is McCarthy’s use of classic tragic forms. Early on in this novel we know, as the characters do not, a foreboding sense of decisions being made that will produce awful consequences. Like reading of Oedipus on the road, we know John Grady Cole’s assisting Blevins or his love affair with Alejandra will not end well. McCarthy remains one of the few modern authors writing in this tragic style.
However, I wonder if it was McCarthy’s creation of dissonance between his young character’s innocence and an older cynacism (either by age or experience) that most resonated in my current reading. The author remains fascinated with the mythic shape of our lives. An innocence pervades everything about the 16 y/o John Grady Cole and the other young characters we meet. This innocence stands in contrast with the older characters who have forever lost the ability to aspire or enter into a quest. The old seem determined to confront the innocent, as if innocence in the geometry of McCarthy’s world is a vacuum to be filled. The confrontation between Cole and the formidable but bitter great-aunt over the young lover’s affair suggests experience has little benefit or worse, is the requirement of evil.
Since I first read “All the Pretty Horses” I have also spent more time reading the Old Testament Prophets. The fictional world created by Cormic McCarthy seems strikingly like the world imagined in Job. Perhaps McCarthy’s books are counter-cultural for our narcissistic times in the same way contemporary churches find little in common with the biblical prophet: they both articulate a world and a God that seem to accord human beings far less “pride of place” than we humans believe we deserve. Readers are uncomfortable when McCarthy, without rationale, puts inexplicable kindness in juxtaposition with inexplicable cruelty just as we are frustrated when attempting to justify an all loving God with a suffering world.
This is not a novel that can be described as a “feel good” read. As with all his novels, McCarthy has written a book teeming with unexplained suffering and awful evil; events like imprisonment in a Mexican jail that are profoundly disturbing and difficult, the stuff of our worst dreams. Yet, with this second read I found the novel oddly beautiful. To be sure, it is a novel containing a captivating story full of beautiful imagination, an exemplar that all who write can read for profit. But, journeying through the pain and evil, I also found this classic tragedy beautiful in a larger sense. “All the Pretty Horses” is a novel about the human heart and renders a truthful and painful prose portrait, an image of good entwined with evil. It is not often an author gives us such close-ups of what it means to be fully human.
Cormac McCarthy’s prose contains such aching beauty that I was at times struck dumb by the correspondance of his words to my most private desires, words provoking an entrance into a magical and surreal space. But my silence was also constructed by visceral horror. The author’s story is magically too real, conjuring a consonance with my most dreaded imaginings and nightmares. We can close our eyes, struggle to deny or discredit or ignore John Grady Cole’s story, but these are close-ups of humanity that we know are not wrong and contain shards of our own stories. This is a novel that will haunt my thinking and perhaps my dreams for a long time.
Creativity, Discipline, and Space
While the writing craft and visual arts might appear to be quite different enterprises, I have found a number of interesting similarities. I now think all creative enterprises more like a river with ebbs and flows rather than an isolated event. Just as rivers are a symbiosis of earth and water, I find creativity balances discipline and space.
Of course, as Flannery O’Connor tartly pointed out, “Creativity consists in showing up at the typewriter every morning just on the off chance the muse might show up.” Putting one’s arse in the chair to write or hands in the studio to work on a regular basis turns out to be a daunting challenge. Without delving too deeply into “man’s basic nature,” I can say that if given a choice between almost any diversion and the hard work necessary to hone my writing or drawing, I will consistently opt for the easy. These habits of the craft, the daily writing and drawing, occur despite my feeling that I have nothing to say with words or line, and become akin to prayers uttered despite a premonition that God might be deaf. I write in the early mornings. More days than I care to admit both my prayer time and writing appears more like a liturgy of desperate hope than any imagined beautiful creative effort.
Writer Bret Lott has suggested writing is a “sacramental” act. When I first heard him say this I was quite taken by the thought, repeated it often—and, I still believe that writing is an outward sign mysteriously linked to an inward Divine grace. But the truth is, most of the time my early morning encounters with the “blank page” feel more like a solo hike across the Mojave Desert–without water—than a spiritual experience. I slog-on most mornings because I have, despite occasional outward bravado, no where else to turn except to the God I hope exists. I have no other strategy on offer to satisfy my obsession with creating beautiful sentences except more stoical effort, the same kind of effort proven unsuccessful in the past.
But, I am beginning to think while discipline is necessary, it is not sufficient for creative growth. I find I must intentionally work on space. I think of this space (with a significant nod to writer Jeff Goins) in three ways. First, there is physical space. The older I get the more I find “place” is reflected in my thoughts–clutter on my desk seems to breed unclear sentences. I am a life-long slob, so this confession comes at some cost. (The pandemonium you hear would be my mother, wife, and college roommate raising their glasses and shouting, “There is a God.”)
But this space also contains a mental component. Who can eliminate deadlines and stress? However, viewing my time writing or in the studio as a vocation, a vocation equivalent to when I wielded a scalpel, has improved my ability to put this creative time–no matter how “unproductive” it seems to others or me–at the top of the ever present “to-do” list. More practically, I need separation from family and others. Insisting on isolation is often not received well by friends or family–but it is necessary.
These days I reluctantly realize I must also insist on electronic isolation. While not a teckie, I do indulge in Facebook/Twitter/and the Blogosphere. After more failures and recriminations than I need, I now enter the studio and my writing time disconnected from the internet–I cannot, it seems, resist the seductive clang of an email hitting my inbox.
Finally, this space has a spiritual side. Space is not emptiness. Anne Lamott reminds us that sometimes when we feel “blocked” in our art, we are, in fact, empty. Space is something you make in your life, amidst the busyness, so that you can fill it. Emptiness is a spiritual void that cannot be filled no matter how much you create. ” Goins suggests that if you find yourself empty, it means your life is “lacking ” space. Space to dream. To think and reflect. You will have to face some demons and slay a few dragons before you can create.”
I was not much good as a physician when too much anger, too many desires, or too many agendas–mine and other’s–squeezed and pushed me into empty spaces, dark places where I couldn’t breath, my thirst remained unquenched, and I thought mostly about what I didn’t have. Today, I no longer answer to the tyranny of an on-call beeper or my obsession to be the first surgeon without complications or the only doctor who “met and exceeded” all patient expectations. But, the tyranny threatening my spiritual space hasn’t left the building; it remains hidden within the reaches of an incipient perfectionism and seemingly unlimited need for acceptance. I sadly conclude that despite changes in my outward circumstances these silent threats to my spiritual space remain unchanged. These days when I ignore my spiritual space I don’t do any better standing before a white canvas or blank page than I did teaching medical students.
On a practical level, I try to work on at least two projects at the same time. Not only do the ideas bounce off or between each project but, I am not bored–and I am easily bored. Also, I try to have one of the two projects be something new or beyond what I think are my capabilities (oh yes, great can be the wastage, disasters, and “never to be seen by another human eye” results) but on the other hand, I don’t get in a rut and surprise myself more often than my sometimes “half-empty” personality expects. Einstein put it best, “An expert is a person who has few new ideas; a beginner is a person with many.”
Two days ago I wrote to a fellow writer in order to answer her long ignored query: What was I working on? By my standards or any other generally acceptable (read: friends or colleagues) quantitative measures I have not been creative or productive these last six months. Have I been writing regularly —heck yes. Would I show anyone the period’s output? That is, would I expose the writing and art not already in the trash? I think not. But, I realized I did have three or four worthwhile projects that through this time continued to command my attention as well as my frustrations.
For the first time in months I realized I had enough space, a sufficient space that allowed me to write her of the projects and not include jokes or laments about my limitations. I wish there were more to show for the time, stories to submit or a novel to revise. I admit that seeing the new publications of my friends still prompts anxiety and not a little guilt. And I don’t know how I will answer, “the question” when I see my former mentor and teacher next month. But, I can take deep breath. And just now, that is enough.