Cormac McCarthy has passed from this world at the age of 89 and he was an icon of American literature and his real and violent words and stark sentences unabashedly embraced the run-on sentence to paint a real and brutal picture of the world.
From my perspective, fiction the likes of McCarthy’s inspires creativity and realism in our vast and challenging world. Stories and characters transcend words, stirring our imaginations, revealing endless possibilities. McCarthy brought such things to life with a combination of plain language and writing that was so crisp and direct and real that it left no fat on the bone.
Here is a perfect example from my favourite book of McCarthy’s, All the Pretty Horses:
The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm was pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed mustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.
Not a lover of commas or quotation marks, McCarty also wrote bedeviling dialogue (on more than one occasion I’ve reread pages to figure out who is talking to who):
What time you want to see me in the morning?
Early.
Early it is.
They slung their bags over their shoulders and headed for the parkinglot. You get cold dont you? Red said.
Yeah. My head gets cold.
Yeah. There’s a certain level of cold that after a while it’s hard to get warm again.
Dry suits.
Yeah. They’re a pain in the ass.
Bear suits. Thermal underwear.
I hear you.
Parkinglot is one word now. Thanks, Cormac McCarthy.
This exchange between Red and Bobby is from McCarthy’s latest and last book, The Passenger, which I will finish today and reflect more on how loving an author who loves to craft great fiction inspires creativity and connection to the world.