A new biography of the late novelist details his youthful escapades, messy relationships and intense commitment to his craft.
Tracy Daugherty's "Cormac Mc Carthy: A Legacy Revisited" offers the first full-dress biography of the reclusive author of "Blood Meridian," "All the Pretty Horses," "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road," who died in 2023. Mc Carthy often wrote in bed, balancing his typewriter on a piece of wood in his lap, and he didn't like to be disturbed. His life, in this telling, was also packed with cars, cheap hotel rooms, interstates, young women, crazy friends, dive bars, and wives and children left behind, not necessarily in that order.
The biography divulges a lot of new information, dispels myths, has strong set pieces and does a bloodhound's job of tracing the overlaps between the life and the work. On the downside, it's hampered by consistent intrusions of flowery language, as if the biographer got too excited and tried to compete with his subject. It also imparts the slightly hollow sense that for every person willing to talk with Daugherty, 10 hung up the phone.
Mc Carthy appears to have dabbled, when broke, in credit card fraud. Back in Knoxville, Tenn., where he grew up, he liked to attend cock fights, for the outlaw atmosphere and for the clashing social milieu: guys in overalls bumping into guys in tuxedos. He was longtime friends with the actor Stacy Keach (both liked shooting pool) and once played a round of golf with Clint Eastwood. He admired Robert Bly's "Iron John" (1990), about rescuing masculinity, and bought an audiobook of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" (1992), the best-selling self-help book. He was a dandy. One woman reports that, more than a week into a long river-rafting trip, he would still "emerge from the tent like he was in GQ magazine." He was a sophisticated man whose friends needled him for his terrible taste in art. At the Santa Fe Institute, the interdisciplinary research center where Mc Carthy spent a lot of time later in his life, mingling with scientists and naturalists, he'd bring back cheap prints from Hobby Lobby and tack them on the walls. Mc Carthy had a pitch-black worldview. It's never been hard to imagine him as a political conservative, but Daugherty brings the receipts. Mc Carthy had American flag bumper stickers on his trucks — one also had a nationalistic "Power of Pride" sticker — and watched "Yellowstone," a TV show that emphasized rugged individualism, property rights and gun ownership. He joined the Republican National Committee and read The Spotlight, a magazine known for promulgating right-wing conspiracy theories. There's an interesting detour in which Daugherty, leaning on Mc Carthy scholarship, argues that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's novel "The Yearling" (1938), about a boy in rural Florida who's forced to shoot the orphaned pet fawn he's adopted, is a key that helps unlock many of the themes in Mc Carthy's novels. Mc Carthy read Rawlings's book when he was young. Indeed, he auditioned in Knoxville and nearly got the lead role in the 1946 film version...
Источник: New York Times Top Stories · Сводку подготовил HeadlinesBriefing