Cormac McCarthy: Sentimental journey

If you've read any or most of McCarthy's first five novels, you may think of his fictional imagination as overpowering and baroque, especially in its renderings of violence. But, in fact, his imagination has an astonishing range. I found myself at first strongly affected, and then admiring, of the following passage, an elegiac preparation for an evening game of chess between the young John Grady Cole and the recent widower Mac, his boss and the owner of the ranch:

He walked back up the hallway. Socorro brought the pot from the stove and spooned the last of the caldillo onto his plate. She brought him more coffee and poured a cup for Mac and left it steaming on the far side of the table. When he was done eating he rose and carried his plate and cup to the sink and he poured more coffee and then went to the old cherrywood press hauled overland in a wagon from Kentucky eighty years ago and opened the door and took out the chess set from among the old cattleman's journals and the halfbound ledgers and leather daybooks and the old green Remington boxes of shotgun shells and rifle cartridges. On the upper shelf a dove-tailed wooden box that held brass scaleweights. A leather folder of drawing instruments. A glass horsecarriage that once held candy for a Christmas in the long ago.

You can see here, too, even in the lovely precision of this evocation, a deep sentimentality to McCarthy's writing that is never far from view, in his violence at times, in his sense of loss and history at others, and in his romance always. In "Cities of the Plain" he offers up, without a hint of apology, that durable creature of male |ber-narrative, the Whore With a Heart of Gold. Of course, he is too good a writer to try fobbing off a straight Whore With a Heart of Gold: The symbolically named Magdalena, McCarthy's lady of the sorrows, is afflicted with seizures and a wan saintliness, an Evita-meets-St. Teresa type. The other Mexican whores gather around her and light candles. She spasms and bites through sticks. We gather that she makes love quite well. John Grady Cole falls in love with her just looking at her, and from that moment forward McCarthy, who does just as well with no plot at all, has burdened himself with a story to tell. Much, much blood will be shed over this Idea of Woman before the book comes to a close.

What McCarthy is after in the "Border Trilogy," what he has always been after in a way, is an American re-creation of an Elizabethan, or you could even say Shakespearean, literature -- lyrical, neologistic, tragic, allegorical. Often he is not so much employing a language as creating one, a condition the Elizabethans found themselves faced with by historical coincidence and that McCarthy has created by force of his geographical sensibility and his imaginative will. He blends the uncomfortable tongues of the past and the present. He litters the stage with corpses. He is capable of moving from the witty to the horrifying and from the ornate to the severe with a certainty of footing and speed worthy of Shakespeare. He is forgivable (mostly) where he is too broad and brilliant where he is narrow, also in the way of Shakespeare. In the "Border Trilogy" he has created a kind of Romeo and Juliet tragedy, rehearsed in "All the Pretty Horses" and fully realized in "Cities of the Plain." These are doomed, ultimately fatal romances of American boy with Mexican girl, and in McCarthy's vision the two nations are the Montagues and the Capulets, forever hostile yet inseparably, catastrophically linked.

'You think you'll ever go back there?'

'Where?'

'Mexico.'

'I don't know. I'd like to. You?'

'I don't think so. I think I'm done ...' Billy sat with his hands crossed palm down on the pommel of his saddle. He leaned and spat. 'I went down there three separate trips. I never once come back with what I started after ... Sooner or later they're goin to run all the white people out of that country. Even the Babmcora wont survive. ... I damn sure dont know what Mexico is. I think it's in your head. Mexico. I rode a lot of ground down there. The first ranchera you hear sung you understand the whole country. By the time you've heard a hundred you dont know nothin. You never will. I concluded my business down there a long time ago.'

You may well end up mildly irritated by the sentimentality of "Cities of the Plains," by its muscular promises put aside in favor of romantic melodrama. And yet as the book settled back into my remembering imagination I found myself wiping away the excesses, the oils and dust spilled at its edges. The characters are thoroughly likable, the landscape a vast seduction (as it always is in McCarthy's novels) and certain scenes -- most, in fact -- stand unblemished, lovely or harrowing or both, by any soppiness of the plot. I can say why a writer has succeeded to my way of thinking, or failed, but I'm harder pressed to explain why I'm more willing to forgive one author or work more than another. Perhaps this: McCarthy is a genius, like the old MacArthur crowd said almost 20 years ago. On every page, he still shows it.

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