The Pretty Horses Thus Far:
Philip Meyer and Cormac McCarthy: The Son and All the Pretty Horses—the first literary analysis essay compares the work of Philipp Meyer and Cormac McCarthy and chooses one for the first read along.
The Secret of Style: Part 2 — from the prose style series, I take a look at how Cormac McCarthy teaches us the secret to a successful prose style.
The First Pretty Horse Ain’t So Pretty — a critical examination of the book’s first sentence.
A picture of my desk with my copy of All the Pretty Horses which I picked up at a used books store. Also seen: I love that bookend. He’s holding up The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth, Ulysses by James Joyce, Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J Seidman, and Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola.
Behind them in a Father’s Day card from my daughter that’s several years old now but I always keep it on my desk. Behind that is the laptop I use to format eBooks. To the right you see my treasured Qwerky keyboard—and on the computer you can see Substack’s back-end homepage for Literary Salon, declaring 15.8k views in the last 30 days.
The big surprise, though, has been the number of views my last Pretty Horses essay received from email subscribers:
That essay received my largest number of email opens. In total, it’s had 1.04k views, which I think is my third most viewed essay ever. I almost said “third most popular,” but not everyone appreciated me finding fault with that first sentence. Reading it now, I know exactly what it means and see nothing but beauty. but I did stumble out of the gate. Such is the life of a reader.
(And a writer.)
I want to get back to that picture for a moment before we move on. Not pictured, on the right side of the desk, is a collection of The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett. Like Ulysses, it’s there because it’s something I aspire to. I’ve been tackling Ulysses off and on for years and still haven’t conquered it. Beckett’s prose fiction, with its lack of paragraph structure, is a bit intimidating. I’ve set it aside for now.
I say all this to wipe aside any pretense of literary genius. I’m a struggler. I think it’s why I can teach prose style. I can speak to others who struggle, too.
Let’s get back to that list of books I keep on my desk. The one mentioned that’s hardest to see is Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola.
It’s a comic book, and it’s one of my greatest obsessions. This is the hardback Library Edition. I also own it in the paperback omnibus, along with all the omnibus collections in the main Hellboy series. Finally, I own that same Hellboy in Hell collection in digital format. I haven’t been a comic book reader in decades, but this I love.
I share all this to keep things real between us. Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author, but I have a favorite comic book author, too. This is who I am.
For my wedding anniversary in a couple of weeks, we’re going to the symphony where they will accompany the James Bond movie, Casino Royale—one of my favorite films.
This is me.
Now, if you’re still willing to come along, let’s dig into All the Pretty Horses.
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And now let’s talk about All the Pretty Horses
In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
John Grady has just left the funeral and is taking his horse for a ride.
Contrasts define McCarthy’s work in so many ways. I studied his use of similes in Blood Meridian with the essay, Simile and Cormac McCarthy Similes with You, and discovered that he uses mundane similes with the most provocative images and provocative similes with mundane ones.
Earlier, during the funeral, the wind had been chaotic and cruel, now it “was much abated and it was very cold.” Abated is a nice choice, but otherwise, we have a simply-worded beginning to the sentence which quickly becomes something different.
“…and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him.”
The image of reefs of clouds is so wonderful, I missed the hypnotic duplication of “blood red” and “bloodred.” The contrast with that earlier simplicity allows the imagery to stand out.
What follows is a long sentence broken into two. He rode where he would always choose to ride (begins one sentence) at the hour he'd always choose (begins the next “sentence.”) The first part provides the basic facts, setting our understanding for the Comanche road, and the grammatically-odd break distinguishes that from the imagery to come.
He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
It’s a thematically vital moment in demonstrating the mind and motivation of John Grady. He longs for a time that no longer exists.
In introducing the choice of this book, I set it against The Son by Philip Meyer, and this moment demonstrates a wonderful cross-pollination between them. The Son chronicles times changing and lost. This particular image in Ponies reminds me of my favorite sections from The Son, which follow a settler’s kidnapping by the Comanches.
When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
His “and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders” makes me think of his famous description from Blood Meridian:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy clearly isn’t afraid of a long sentence, tied together with polysyndeton1 and no commas, but he could have tied these three sentences together. The first two even belong together, but he chose to present them otherwise. He presents the road. He presents the memory of the Comanche (seen in the mind’s eye of one who dreams of a people and a time he’s too young to remember.) Then finally, he presents the sound of that memory, marching them again down that road as they’ve repeatedly done in John Grady’s imaginings.
This is what he’s chasing. This is why he goes to Mexico.
The Second Pretty Horse Rides an Alien Shore
They crossed the river under a white quartermoon naked and pale and thin atop their horses. They'd stuffed their boots upside down into their jeans and stuffed their shirts and jackets after along with their warbags of shaving gear and ammunition and they belted the jeans shut at the waist and tied the legs loosely about their necks and dressed only in their hats they led the horses out onto the gravel spit and loosed the girthstraps and mounted and put the horses into the water with their naked heels.
Midriver the horses were swimming, snorting and stretching their necks out of the water, their tails afloat behind. They quartered downstream with the current, the naked riders leaning forward and talking to the horses, Rawlins holding the rifle aloft in one hand, lined out behind one another and making for the alien shore like a party of marauders.
They rode up out of the river among the willows and rode singlefile upstream through the shallows onto a long gravel beach where they took off their hats and turned and looked back at the country they'd left. No one spoke. Then suddenly they put their horses to a gallop up the beach and turned and came back, fanning with their hats and laughing and pulling up and patting the horses on the shoulder.
Goddamn, said Rawlins. You know where we're at?
All the Pretty Horsess — Cormac McCarthy
From San Angelo to Mexico is somewhere between 150 to 200 miles, depending on where the crossing took place, and they traveled by horse at a time when such things weren’t done. It’s enough to make you (want to) believe they’ll survive the adventure that awaits them.
McCarthy tells us the whole crossing in the first sentence: They crossed the river under a white quartermoon naked and pale and thin atop their horses. Then he pulls back to tell it again.
Warbags of shaving gear and ammunition turns my mind back to the Comanches who were “each armed for war which was their life.”
All My Literature-Related Essays
Goddamn, said Rawlins. You know where we're at?
He sat leaning forward in the seat with his elbows on the empty seatback in front of him and his chin on his forearms and he watched the play with great intensity. He'd the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all. When the lights came up there was applause and his mother came forward several times and all the cast assembled across the stage and held hands and bowed and then the curtain closed for good and the audience rose and made their way up the aisles. He sat for a long time in the empty theatre and then he stood and put on his hat and went out into the cold.
John Grady discovers that the life he started with, the life he knew and wanted, didn’t belong to him. It belonged to his mother, and she didn’t want it. No one did. It’s worth was bled dry.
He’d only ever known two worlds, and one of those worlds was a ghost. He chases that ghost across the border, hoping some aspect may still live on in the flesh.
This is the play performed upon our stage, the one we watch with great intensity, holding onto the notion that there will be something in the story itself to tell us about the way the world is or is becoming.
What it was didn’t belong to us.
—Thaddeus Thomas
Looking for more fiction writers on Substack? I’ve started a list of recommendations:
End Notes
I discuss McCarthy’s use of polysyndeton in The Secret of Style: Part 2.
Always thought McCarthy’s prose could be way smoother. I’ve read writers who go long and fast, and they glide way more than he does. But reading him is like running your hand down a broomstick with little slits chopped into it or like feeling the edges of a finished puzzle. You catch every break. Half the time, I can’t even tell if it’s fast or slow. Gotta read it again. Can’t even explain it. Feels like he wrote and rewrote, picking every word on its own. And then most of it, two- or three-syllable words... ninety percent of a novel.
No clue how he makes me love him that much. The guy was unreal. And I really appreciate you helping me get this stuff. Keep it up.