Texas Blood

by Roger D. Hodge

  Lobo Canyon

  And it was in this remote corner of Texas that Cormac McCarthy set his great neglected novel No Country for Old Men. The title comes from a line by William Butler Yeats, in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium.”

  The evocation of Byzantium amid the vast wastes of the Chihuahuan Desert might seem jarring at first, but McCarthy’s novels are messages from lost worlds, artifacts of vanished histories. His characters are solitaries, dying animals, fugitives from the present who go forth into the rotten holdings of the vanquished in search of something they cannot name. They know not what they are. McCarthy, at his best, gives voice to a strange traveler from a distant land who has taken it upon himself, as in Yeats’s poem, to keep a drowsy emperor awake by singing of what is past, passing, or to come.

  Who is that traveler and what does he want? The horseman approaches but dear friend do not attempt to call out his name, for to do so is to ask him in. Rest content with the telling. Read the news of civilizations old and new. Read those records of blood and violence, conjugations of joy and sorrow. As it was then, is now and ever shall be. Curious the small and lesser fates that lead a man to his end, the small enigmas of time and space and death. What do you believe? He said he believed the last and the first suffer equally. That a curtain is falling on the western world.

  —

  No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s ninth novel, unfolds right along this stretch of the Texas-Mexico border, in the 1980s, when the drug war was just beginning to change the character of all the communities along the Rio Grande and beyond. The book can be seen as a coda to the enormously ambitious and successful Border Trilogy (which comprises All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain). Like many of McCarthy’s novels, it plays with the conventions of genre, but unlike the last four the genre in question is not the western but the thriller. Critics made much of this formal shift when the book appeared in 2005. James Wood, writing in The New Yorker, declared the book “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller” that “gestures not toward any recognizable reality but merely toward the narrative codes already established by pulp thrillers and action films.” Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, dismissed the novel as being little better than a “meretricious thriller.” It was, she said, “increasingly confused” and “ineffectual” and yet somehow perfectly suited to the movie screen.

  Perhaps it is not so unusual for major writers to receive bad reviews for good books, but there was something about the rough treatment this novel suffered that struck me as being symptomatic of the shallowness and haste that characterizes so much of our literary culture. It was hard to miss the malice creeping into the reviews but not so easy to explain it. William Deresiewicz, who wrote an intemperate review in The Nation, and Joyce Carol Oates both objected to the novel’s alleged politics; Deresiewicz went so far as to claim that McCarthy had enlisted his fiction in the culture wars and was “rubbing our tender little modern liberal noses in death’s horror by making us watch it in slow motion.” Wood, one of the finest literary critics writing in English and the author of a novel called The Book Against God, admitted that McCarthy was good, but not that good, and insinuated that there was something morally suspect, offensive even, about his books. “McCarthy stifles the question of theodicy before it can really speak. His myth of eternal violence…asserts, in effect, that rebellion is pointless because this is how it will always be.” The thriller, Wood concluded, “is the perfect vehicle for McCarthy’s deterministic mythmaking, matching his metaphysical cheapness with a slickness unto death all its own.”

  How interesting, I thought, that Cormac McCarthy should fail so spectacularly at writing a theodicy—which is to say, a James Wood novel. But it might be even more interesting, at least when confronted with an author of McCarthy’s undeniable skill, to figure out what he was trying to do and to evaluate the book on its own terms instead of trying to plug it into an arbitrary category like “theodicy.” Wood’s claim that the events and characters and landscape of No Country for Old Men correspond to no recognizable reality, it seemed to me, confused the limits of reality with those of suburban domesticity. To anyone born and raised in the border country, which McCarthy since 1985 has taken as his primary setting, McCarthy’s novels just feel like home. They may be the products of a world that in large part is already extinct, but they are not figments of a merely literary imagination. McCarthy’s novels are the works of an artist who has excavated the tailings of that dying world.

  In the years between 1965 and 1979, McCarthy published four Appalachian novels. His method, so far as one can tell, was as rigorous as it was unusual. He lived among the people about whom he wrote. Like them, he worked in almost complete obscurity and in absolute poverty. McCarthy’s second ex-wife, Annie DeLisle, reports that she and her husband lived for almost eight years in an old dairy barn and used a nearby lake for baths. McCarthy spent much of his time with old woodsmen and moonshiners. His work was beginning to attract the attention of professors, but he firmly rejected the seductions of the lecture and workshop circuit. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books,” DeLisle told a reporter, “and he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page.” Throughout these years, as he published The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God, McCarthy was husbanding his experiences, working on Suttree, his great comic novel of Knoxville in the 1950s, and that book did not appear until five years after he moved to Texas in 1974. McCarthy’s habit of holding on to his manuscripts (Cities of the Plain apparently existed as a screenplay for more than ten years prior to the publication of All the Pretty Horses) beggars attempts to divide his career into distinct periods. In 1985, McCarthy published his first Texas novel, Blood Meridian, and the Border Trilogy began to appear in 1992. Critics tend to draw a line between the Appalachian and the southwestern novels, but Suttree and Blood Meridian resemble each other more than they do the other books whose landscapes they share.

  Amistad Reservoir, west of Del Rio

  McCarthy’s singular vision was already fully formed in his first novel. His insistence on time, on the rhythm of the seasons, the phases of the moon, and most of all the evening redness in the West, manifests itself in almost the first image of The Orchard Keeper, and in the last, and rises to its most extreme pitch in Blood Meridian. In Suttree, McCarthy exchanges solar time with animal metabolism, and his temporal markers become urination, defecation, and vomiting. His Tennessee River is a slow-moving septic mass, a colossal intestinal tract, beside which the damned and forgotten give themselves over to drink and debauchery, their “lives running out like something foul, nightsoil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark.”

  By whatever means McCarthy measures before and after, the shape of the story so defined is always tragic. In The Orchard Keeper, the motions of the drama are as old as Antigone: a father killed; the son befriended by the killer, who becomes a surrogate father; an old man hounded out of his home by the law, because he follows an older law.

  In the interplay of such primeval oppositions, McCarthy obsessively explores the borderline between the human and the animal, especially in those instinctual rites by which some humans maintain their ancient allegiance to the predator. Wolves and coyotes, panthers and house cats, hawks, owls, minks, and other varmints populate his novels, as do those human hunters, trappers, and fishermen who are animal in their innocence and love of blood. They hunt because they live, and they feel the blood rise with the moon and must run their bluetick hounds or set their traps. (A reference work, Trapping North American Furbearers, a rare written testament of a dying craft, is cited both in The Orchard Keeper and in The Crossing.) Other men, damaged by violence or some nameless perversion, lose the pure sense of the hunt and descend into a subhuman realm of murder and treachery. True hunters smell the murder on the skins of such men and recoil from them instantly.

  But these perverted hunters are not the worst of the killers i
n McCarthy’s fiction. His true villains arrive at murder as if it were a higher calling and consciousness, the purest and most scientific expression of civilization. They are rationalists, technicians of amorality. We first glimpse such a killer in Outer Dark, a smiling, bearded, and black-suited highwayman who travels with two brutal companions and builds his fires high, because you never know who might be passing by. “We ain’t hard to find. Oncet you’ve found us.” He gives no name because “some things is best not named,” though he admits that “they’s lots would like to know that.” A dark rider bound, he declares, “by nothin,” this figure will follow the western road to Texas.

  McCarthy’s plots are austere tragedies interwoven with absurdly comic set pieces. Gene Harrogate fucking watermelons or chasing pigs or poisoning bats in Suttree; the stampede scene in Outer Dark, which turns into a near lynching after a band of pig herders attempts, with the help of a compliant preacher, to blame Culla Holme for the death of their fellow herder, who was swept off a cliff by the panicked hogs. And everywhere the magnificent imagery of onrushing doom. Small gray nameless birds struggle and cry out, having been blown by the wind of a desert cloudburst onto the sharp daggers of a cholla cactus; drinkers on a saloon’s back porch, poised over a hollow, fall into the abyss when the old boards and nails give way; a ferry breaks free and shoots down a swollen river as a crazed horse rushes back and forth on the deck until it finally goes over the rail; a hawk so intent on its prey that it fails to notice an approaching automobile.

  —

  McCarthy’s youths all set out to recapture something lost and elusive. One, the nameless kid of Blood Meridian (born in ’33, like his author, though in a different century), is so ignorant and damaged that he knows not for what he searches or even that he searches at all. He simply drifts and in drifting finds his vocation as a hunter of men, an Indian killer, and a trader in scalps. Even as he participates in the slaughter of men and women and children, both Indian and Mexican, he seems somehow other than his compatriots and especially other than Judge Holden, one of the most vivid and demonic characters in American literature. The judge accuses the kid of a tacit treachery, an unwillingness to give himself over completely to the task of war, war not only on the Indian but against all autonomous life. The freedom of the birds is an insult to man, says the judge, who would have them all in zoos.

  Driven by a merciless causality, McCarthy’s characters wander through nightmare landscapes, horse-borne witnesses to a tree adorned with the pale larva-like corpses of dead babies, a shallow desert pond surrounded by the bones of a thousand sheep, a mummified Apache hanging from a wooden cross. A lone tree burning at night in the midst of an empty plain. A prairie covered with the gleaming white skeletons of a million buffalo. Men hung upside down, scalped, strange menstrual wounds between their legs and genitals protruding from their mouths. Horsemen rope wild dogs atop a mesa and drag them to death. A boy on horseback with a muzzled she wolf in tow crosses the low border scrublands toward Mexico. Gypsies carry a tattered airplane through the desert and tell enchanting lies about its provenance. And everywhere are the ruins of those ancient and not so ancient peoples who were slaughtered in those places and whose lives left no articulate testament to bear witness to the joys and hopes and dreams and sorrows that they shared before pale riders the color of dust swooped down and spilled their blood onto the thirsty ground.

  The voices of hermits, anchorites, priests and ex-priests, herdsmen and gypsies and trappers, old men on their deathbeds and old women educated in Europe and horse traders and young peasant girls cry out their prophecies in these bloodlands of the West. These things are known to all the world. The world is construed out of blood and nothing else but blood. Death is the condition of existence and life is but an emanation thereof. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood. Before man was, war waited for him. The idea that man can be understood is an illusion. All horses possess one soul. What the wolf knows man cannot know.

  The course of history for McCarthy is one of never-ending destruction. He will give no solace to those who dream of an end to suffering, and yet offers some of the most delicate and sensitive representations of sorrow that I know. The sorrow of an old woman who lost five children and fills her days with milking and churning and cursing her sorry husband: “Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.” The sorrow of Rinthy Holme, in Outer Dark, her incestuous offspring stolen from her at birth, wandering barefoot and ragged, her rotten cotton dress soiled with two tear-shaped milk stains, searching for a tinker she has never met, hoping to retrieve a baby she has never seen. A stonemason’s sorrow for his grandfather, his father, his sister, and the life they all once shared. The stoic mourning of John Grady Cole, Lacey Rawlins, and Billy Parham, young cowboys born into a world that has no use for them or the high lonesome morality of honor and work that defines their way of life.

  What sweeps away these characters and all that they love is war—and not only the kind of war that announces itself as such. War is also the name for what civilization does to wildness, to autonomous life, whether it be human or not. The freedom of the birds is an insult. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. The American West, for McCarthy, is a place where the truth of history declares itself with unambiguous and ferocious candor. Men kill men for gold and glory. Women and children will be killed if there’s money to be made or good sport to be had. And yet, within the broad current of such slaughter, fragile eddies of safety form and sustain themselves briefly, before the floodwaters, touched here and there with pink foam, rise again and wash them downstream.

  Just as McCarthy’s change of landscape from Appalachia to West Texas and beyond reflects the historical path of American continental expansion, so does the trajectory of his Texas novels follow that of history. Blood Meridian depicts the savagery of conquest and genocide, and out of that southwestern holocaust emerged a society that began to disappear almost as soon as it was formed. Scarcely two generations enjoyed its prime. Horsemen and cattlemen and sheepherders, imperfect and often crude, dismissive of the Mexicans, with whom they had so much in common, became in the end tragic creatures of the West, more like the Indians than unlike. The Border Trilogy traces the arc of that ranching society’s decline, with old Mexico standing as witness.

  The broad sweep of the interlocking stories that make up All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain is historical, but the phantasmagoria of Blood Meridian has been replaced with an economy of scale more proper to a love story. The nostalgia for the Wild West that sends John Grady Cole and Billy Parham into Mexico, a nostalgia that superficial readers might be tempted to attribute to McCarthy himself, should be understood as one among the many forces that drive these characters to their unhappy fates. In their headlong pursuit of a way of life that in the larger temporal scale of this landscape can hardly be said to have existed at all, Cole and Parham, whose separate stories in the first two books of the Border Trilogy become one in the third, manage to destroy much more than their own lives. Parham makes a decision that ultimately leads to the death of both his parents and his little brother. Cole’s doomed love for a Mexican whore leads inexorably to lifeless bodies, drained of blood, staring at the blue vault of the sky. These individual stories, love affairs and knife fights, the loss of siblings and parents and friends and ranches, all take place within a matrix of converging histories, the encroachment of military bases, overseas wars, and national economic policies that render family-scale agriculture virtually impossible.

  With No Country for Old Men, the sun has set decisively upon the dream of the West, and the eternal law of McCarthy’s bloodthirsty landscape has reasserted itself absolutely. But with a difference, it seems. This novel is spare, shorn of the high rhetoric and gorgeous descriptive passages that McCarthy’s readers have come to expect. The absence is painful, and therein lies a clue to the writer’s intentions. Al
l the enchantment seems to have gone out of the world. Or nearly all. Here is a passage that comes just after Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff of Terrell County (not, as Joyce Carol Oates would have it, the sheriff of Comanche County, which is more than three hundred miles to the northeast, an error that explains the otherwise inexplicable title of her New York Review essay, “The Treasure of Comanche County”), has moved a dead red-tailed hawk from the blacktop, where, “lost in the concentration of the hunter,” it closed in on its prey, oblivious to fate hurtling toward it at seventy-five miles per hour: “He stood there looking out across the desert. So quiet. Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away.”

  Perhaps it is no accident that this small glimpse of McCarthy’s grander eloquence appears in the vicinity of a noble predator whose life has been snuffed out by our civilization’s bane and glory. Sheriff Bell, a contemporary of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham now grown old, can barely imagine the world that came before his own. He knows something of that country’s history but not enough. He knows that a change has come over the land, though he cannot fathom its depths. “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” Blood Meridian’s scalpers have returned to the borderlands, and Judge Holden has been reincarnated as Anton Chigurh, a cartel assassin whose philosophical disquisitions on the subject of murder are as chilling as anything in McCarthy’s body of work.