The Failure of Cormac McCarthy
Our reading of All The Pretty Horses
America doesn't read and you can't talk about books on television.
Oprah Winfrey
LARRY KING: What do you make of your influence with books? That you can ...
OPRAH WINFREY: Well, it just started as a fluke. I was saying that I started out with a young intern who started the exact same day that I did, Alice McGee. …and then she moved up and became an associate producer, producer. And Alice and I used to exchange books all the time and we would say what are you reading now?
And one day she said, why don't we do this on TV? And I go, it'll never work on television, you know. America doesn't read and you can't talk about books on television. And she said, what if we had a club. So that's how it all started. And I am surprised every time.
KING: And then you stopped it for a while.
WINFREY: I stopped it because I was overwhelmed trying to… because somebody just said -- an audience member just said to me the other day as I handed out the latest book, "The Road," by Cormac McCarthy. Have you read this book?
KING: No.
WINFREY: I should have brought you that for your anniversary. You should read that book.
KING: "The Road."
WINFREY: Yes, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. You know why? Because it's about a father and son at the end of time and fathers love this book.
… [Material cut because the interview strays in a dozen directions. I thought they’d never wind they’re way back around to McCarthy.] …
KING: We had that -- an incident. James Frey came on our show. He'd written a book called "A Million Little Pieces." It was one of the books you selected as your book of the month. Later, people complained that it was fraud or he didn't do the things he said he did. At the end of the show when he was on, being contrite, you called in, his mother was on with him. You said, I stand by you.
WINFREY: I stand by you.
KING: The mother started to cry, they grabbed his hands. It was one of the great moments on television. Headlines next day, "Oprah Stands By."
WINFREY: Yes.
KING: Next week, "Oprah Annihilates James Frey."
WINFREY: I didn't annihilate him. You can even ask him. I didn't annihilate. At the end of that conversation on my show, I said, look, I know I was tough on you but I had to be tough on you because you really disappointed me and so he understood that. And actually I called him a couple days later to see how he was doing.
KING: What's your -- now, in looking back.
WINFREY: Well, it made me very wary of doing memoirs and so you will notice that since that time I've only chosen two memoirs. First of all, I went a whole year because I had chosen Elie Wiesel's book.
KING: Great book.
WINFREY: Yes. And I chose "Night" because I so believe in Elie Wiesel and I know that everything that he had said in that book was true and you knew that was true. So I felt that that was really -- not only did I love that book or wanted other people to experience it the way I had experienced it, but also I could trust that it was the truth.
And so -- and then I went a year and didn't choose a book because I was working for the school and just honestly didn't have time to read any other books. And then the next book I chose that I could trust was the truth was Sidney Poitier's book. And so ...
KING: Which was the next number one paperback?
WINFREY: Yes, number one. So now I've moved on from memoirs because I don't know -- you know, because a lot of publishers -- I was surprised to find, that the publishers do not vet the stories or vet the books. And in the case of James Frey, it hadn't been. So I was trusting the publisher, you know.
KING: When you get a major publisher that's logical.
WINFREY: That's right.
KING: We all in this business trust the publisher.
WINFREY: I was trusting that the publisher knew that it was true or not and so that's why I felt so comfortable, you know, calling up at the end of the show. I couldn't find the number. What's the number, what's Larry's number? How do we get through and there's only a minute left. So I called up and then later regretted that I had made that call. And I made it because I'm thinking, well, if it wasn't true, the publisher would have said it wasn't true. They would have said it was fiction but that is not always the case.
KING: What's your barometer for picking the book? What does it have to do?
WINFREY: I just have to -- it's the same thing as anybody else who reads a book and says, you know, God, I love that book.
KING: Don't you love five, six books a month? I do. I love a lot of books.
WINFREY: I don't get a chance to read five or six that I love because I have read so many things that are -- that I have to read for this show.
And so in terms of like a good book that I feel I love it and at least a million other people love it, I don't run into that very often.
KING: Do you. What ...
WINFREY: And I have to read every book. That's why I was saying the other day on my show, a woman said to me, did you read the book? How insulting is that? Did I read the book?
KING: So I've got to get "The Road."
WINFREY: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.
Let’s talk about Cormac McCarthy.
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Now, let’s discuss: Cormac McCarthy.
“If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You should probably be doing it.”
—Cormac McCarthy, the Oprah Winfrey interview
The biggest shocker in McCarthy’s interview with Oprah was his explanation about his approach to punctuation. He mentions James Joyce as a good model, but then he talked about being hired by a professor to re-punctuate essays from the 18th century. When the professor was pleased with the first essay, Cormac though, “Yeah, punctuation is important. It’s important to punctuate so that it’s easy for people to read.”
To all those people who feel they can’t get into a McCarthy book because of a lack of punctuation, he says he was just trying to make it easy for you.
“Simple declarative sentences. I believe in periods and capitals and the occasional comma, and that’s it. Well, you can use a colon if you’re getting ready to give a list that follows something just said.”
McCarthy’s Greatest Failure as a Writer
As a writer, I say, although life plays into fiction.
In the 1992 interview with the New York Times, McCarthy says, "I will never be competent enough to write about a woman. But at some point you have to try."1
There exists a certain kind of pedestal on which a woman can stand, a pedestal that seems to elevate her for her mystery, a bewilderment beyond the capacity of man to understand, and that pedestal belongs to the misogynist. Other people adopt and use this pedestal because it seems like a place of honor, and McCarthy’s use of it here isn’t sufficient to declare him a misogynist. It certainly doesn’t exclude him from the accusation, and such accusations abound—with much evidence to support it, from both his life and his fiction.
From all his works, when someone wants to defend him from such an accusation, they turn to All The Pretty Horses, with John Grady being the heroic figure standing in opposition to McCarthy’s usual cast of godless men. One reason I believe this difference exists is because John Grady is both an idealist and an ideal. He believes in the promise of a west that never was, and we know it never was because we’ve read McCarthy’s other books.
Usually, it’s McCarthy’s interest to show us the worst of our nature, and this becomes another defense until we look back at All The Pretty Horses where the idealist chases the dream. So, what does All The Pretty Horses say about women?
Discover all my essays on:
To Write About a Woman
Some women in the book exist to serve, others to foil the desires of the main character. His mother is in the latter category, and some have cast Alejandra there was well. In Cormac’s idealized west, the hero isn’t a bastard, but the women still fill stereotypical roles, and maybe that’s the point of the idealist—it reduces people to their ideal and places them on that pedestal.
If there’s an aspect to the book that critics say is lacking, its in the romance, which isn’t a point of misogyny, perhaps, but certainly of McCarthy’s discomfort with women. We’re given a reason for Alejandra to be interested in John Grady. He’s a competent horse tamer, and…
Okay, hold on. I was researching what people said about women in the book—not race—so it’s not strange that I didn’t come across this, but part of the western ideal is that a white man can show up anywhere in the world and outperform the locals in their own expertise and livelihood. This breaks with the tradition in that John Grady doesn’t show up as a novice and become the greatest, he’s special the moment he arrives. People come for miles to see him break horses, and it’s that skill that attracts the attention of Alejandra.
Alejandra’s qualifications are beauty and her father’s position. However, this can be seen as the shallowness of the western ideal that McCarthy is portraying. If so, one would have to depend on Alejandra’s speeches about her mistreatment for any signs of McCarthy rising above that shallowness.2
A man's novelist whose apocalyptic vision rarely focuses on women, McCarthy doesn't write about sex, love or domestic issues. "All the Pretty Horses," an adventure story about a Texas boy who rides off to Mexico with his buddy, is unusually sweet-tempered for him -- like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback. The earnest nature of the young characters and the lean, swift story, reminiscent of early Hemingway, should bring McCarthy a wider audience at the same time it secures his masculine mystique.
Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times Interview
I haven’t brought all this up to argue the point one way or the other. The argument exists, and we’re going to take is as granted—for the moment—that the books are misogynistic. Like many others, I love his work. Why and what does this say about me?
I ignore all the talk about men not reading any more and about how (literary) books have lost their masculinity, but if there’s any truth to that, McCarthy would be the antidote. Perhaps I love him for the masculine mystique. Perhaps it’s true what he says about his books being easy to understand, despite the lack of punctuation (or maybe because of it.) Maybe, his is a manly sort of poetry, and we’re all enjoying that difference from our normal reading. Maybe it’s none of that.
Okay, it’s definitely, partially, that he’s not hard to follow or understand, along with the punctuated moments of violence and the proverbial wisdom that spill from mundane moments.
Do I Have a McCarthy Book in Me?
I took a book away from my friend’s small publisher because it didn’t meet my standards, and that choice was the final of several blows that turned me away from publishing for several years. A character from that book has haunted me ever since. He was meant to be a minor character, but then the character made a choice that I didn’t make for him and took over the book.
If I were every to write a book inspired by love for McCarthy’s westerns in particular, it would be about that character. It’s a scary thought, because I’ve tried again since—but the failure there was in not letting go of the story completely. This time, I’d keep the heart of the character and place him a McCarthy story.
Maybe it doesn’t need to be a novel. I have enough big ideas ahead of me. Maybe in a short story, he could finally live.
[Edit: see update after the essay.]
That’s not a conclusion to the discussion on misogyny is it? Or maybe it is. I try to do better in my own writing, but I embrace McCarthy because of what he does right, not because of where he fails. If I write this story, it will be my attempt at the masculine mystique. No intentional misogyny, but neither will it have the characters I often write that are born out of struggle with such failures.
If you want to read a story about my struggling characters, I’ve recently published a well-received story called Such was the Epiphany of Theodore Beasley.
— Thaddeus Thomas
1 I remember the teasers from the Oprah interview where he says basically the same thing, although I seemed to have missed it while watching the interview for this article.
2 I’ll save a discussion on the ending for its proper place.
If you want to write about a woman just go talk to them. What are the oddities and quirks of my mom and sister? They're part of the human race.
I found this essay fascinating because I had never considered the idea that writing from a female perspective would be a difficult thing. Firstly I have never read Cormac McCarthy - in fact prior to Substack I'd never come across him... so I have nothing to add about him but I do read a lot of female authors and, strangely ( or perhaps not so strangely), this never seems to be an issue for them to write male characters, male leads, male villains, because they write people. That is, they observe real people and use their knowledge to bring those characters to life. Ursula Le Guin, for one, no matter how fantastical her story, the characters are always grounded in a reality that makes sense for the narrative. I so rarely think about gender, it always amazes me when it crops up as something we need to discuss. Characters are made up of so many elements, needs, wants, upbringing, circumstance, age ( only as a framework for understanding/knowledge - never as a device), and maybe somewhere gender comes into it but it's a tiny part of bringing a character to life - there are so many more important things. Aren't there?