Cormac McCarthy Interviews

[ToALonelyPeace]

A segment of the interview with Oprah I haven't seen before on Ytube.
Cormac McCarthy Bombs on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ - video dailymotion

Not sure if this has been posted here before but here's an interview of McCarthy on The Counselor, The Road and his son.

Interview with Cormac McCarthy (2012) - YouTube

Interview with Wall Street Journal in 2009 from this reddit thread.

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Novelist Cormac McCarthy shuns interviews, but he relishes conversation. Last week, the author sat down on the leafy patio of the Menger Hotel, built about 20 years after the siege of the Alamo, the remains of which are next door. The afternoon conversation, which also included film director John Hillcoat of "The Road," went on 'til dark, then moved to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Dressed in crisp jeans and dimpled brown cowboy boots, Mr. McCarthy began the meal with a Bombay Gibson, up. 0:00 / 0:00 The 76-year-old author first broke through with his 1985 novel "Blood Meridian," a tale of American mercenaries hunting Indians in the Mexican borderland. Commercial success came later with 1992's "All the Pretty Horses," a National Book Award winner and the first installment of a Border Trilogy. Critics delved into his detailed vision of the West, his painterly descriptions of violence, and his muscular prose stripped of most punctuation. The writer himself, however, has proved more elusive. He won't be found at book festivals, readings and other places novelists gather. Mr. McCarthy prefers hanging out with "smart people" outside his field, like professional poker players and the thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical-science foundation in New Mexico where the author is a longtime fellow. In recent years, his circle has inched further into Hollywood. Many new readers discovered him as the source of the 2007 film "No Country for Old Men," a thriller that hinged on a briefcase full of drug money and a remorseless killer. Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, it won four Academy Awards. Now, set for release Nov. 25 is a screen adaptation of "The Road," a novel that marked another major stage of Mr. McCarthy's career. As intimate as it is grim, the book tells the story of a man's bond with his young son as the two struggle for survival years after a cataclysm has erased society. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 and was promoted heavily by Oprah Winfrey as a surprising selection for her book club. Viggo Mortensen in the movie adaptation 'The Road' directed by John Hillcoat. ENLARGE Viggo Mortensen in the movie adaptation 'The Road' directed by John Hillcoat. DIMENSION FILMS The movie, starring Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee (11 years old at the time of shooting) as his son, closely follows the book's bleak narrative, including encounters with cannibals. Mr. Hillcoat is an Australian who made the violent 2005 Western-style tale "The Proposition," set in the Outback. To replicate the blighted landscapes in "The Road," Mr. Hillcoat shot much of the movie in wintertime Pittsburgh, where remnants of the region's coal and steel history lent to the desolation. The backstory of Mr. McCarthy's novel is deeply personal, springing from his relationship with his 11-year-old son, John, whom he had with his third wife, Jennifer. As death bears down in "The Road," the main character obsessively protects his son and prepares him to carry on alone: "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." Mr. McCarthy flew here from his home near Santa Fe to visit the production office of his friend Tommy Lee Jones. A star of "No Country for Old Men," the actor directed and starred with Samuel L. Jackson in a film based on a play by Mr. McCarthy, "The Sunset Limited." It begins with one man preventing another from hurling himself in front of a subway train, and will air on HBO next year. Messrs. McCarthy and Hillcoat showed easy affability in their friendship, despite what could have been a prickly collaboration. Mr. Hillcoat told him, "You relieved a huge burden from my shoulders when you said, 'Look, a novel's a novel and a film's a film, and they're very different.'" In a soft voice, chuckling frequently and gazing intently with gray-green eyes, Mr. McCarthy talked about books vs. films, the apocalypse, fathers and sons, past and future projects, how he writes—and God. The Wall Street Journal: When you sell the rights to your books, do the contracts give you some oversight over the screenplay, or is it out of your hands? Mr. McCarthy: No, you sell it and you go home and go to bed. You don't embroil yourself in somebody else's project. WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw "The Road" in your head? CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in "The Road" did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, "This is just hell. Who would do this?" Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window. WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing? CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs. WSJ: When you discussed making "The Road" into a movie with John, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story? CM: A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows. WSJ: What kind of things make you worry? CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night. WSJ: "The Road" is this love story between father and son, but they never say, "I love you." CM: No. I didn't think that would add anything to the story at all. But a lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say that he's the co-author of the book. A lot of the things that the kid [in the book] says are things that John said. John said, "Papa, what would you do if I died?" I said, "I'd want to die, too," and he said, "So you could be with me?" I said, "Yes, so I could be with you." Just a conversation that two guys would have. WSJ: Why don't you sign copies of "The Road" CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book. WSJ: How many did you have? CM: 250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, "I have a signed copy of the 'The Road,'" and I say, "No. You don't." WSJ: What was your relationship like with the Coen brothers on "No Country for Old Men"? CM: We met and chatted a few times. I enjoyed their company. They're smart and they're very talented. Like John, they didn't need any help from me to make a movie. WSJ: "All the Pretty Horses" was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out? CM: It could've been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours. WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much? CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you're going to write something like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "Moby-Dick," go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don't care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different. WSJ: People have said "Blood Meridian" is unfilmable because of the sheer darkness and violence of the story. CM: That's all crap. The fact that's it's a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That's not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary. WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent? CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time. WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work? CM: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing? CM: I don't think there's any rich period or fallow period. That's just a perception you get from what's published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O'Connor why she wrote, and she said, "Because I was good at it." And I think that's the right answer. If you're good at something it's very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who've had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, "The most significant thing in my life is that I've been extraordinarily lucky." And when you hear that you know you're hearing the truth. It doesn't diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail. WSJ: Can you tell me about the book you're working on, in terms of story or setting? CM: I'm not very good at talking about this stuff. It's mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she's already committed suicide, and it's about how he deals with it. She's an interesting girl. WSJ: Some critics focus on how rarely you go deep with female characters. CM: This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She's committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try. WSJ: You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in Tennessee. Why did you end up in the Southwest? CM: I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they'll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here's a good subject. And it was. WSJ: You grew up Irish Catholic. CM: I did, a bit. It wasn't a big issue. We went to church on Sunday. I don't even remember religion ever even being discussed. WSJ: Is the God that you grew up with in church every Sunday the same God that the man in "The Road" questions and curses? CM: It may be. I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, "It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart." And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you. WSJ: Because "The Road" is so personal, did you have any hesitations about seeing it adapted? CM: No. I've seen John's film ["The Proposition"] and I knew him somewhat by reputation and I thought he'd probably do a good job in respect to the material. Also, my agent [Amanda Urban], she's just the best. She wasn't going to sell the book to somebody unless she had some confidence in what they would do with it. It's not just a matter of money. JH: Didn't you start "No Country for Old Men" as a screenplay? CM: Yeah, I wrote it. I showed it to a few people and they didn't seem to be interested. In fact, they said, "That will never work." Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn't take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it." WSJ: For novels such as "Blood Meridian," you did extensive historical research. What kind of research did you do for "The Road"? CM: I don't know. Just talking to people about what things might look like under various catastrophic situations, but not a lot of research. I have these conversations on the phone with my brother Dennis, and quite often we get around to some sort of hideous end-of-the-world scenario and we always wind up just laughing. Anyone listening to this would say, "Why don't you just go home and get into a warm tub and open a vein." We talked about if there was a small percentage of the human population left, what would they do? They'd probably divide up into little tribes and when everything's gone, the only thing left to eat is each other. We know that's true historically. WSJ: What does your brother Dennis do? Is he a scientist? CM: He is. He has a doctorate in biology and he's also a lawyer and a thoughtful guy and a good friend. WSJ: Brotherly conversation just turns to the apocalypse? CM: More often than we can justify. WSJ: What kind of reactions have you gotten to "The Road" from fathers? CM: I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England, but they all said the same thing. They said, "I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3:45 the next morning, and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them." JH: Cormac, do you think we caught the spirit of the book? CM: Yeah, absolutely. I haven't seen the final print version. JH: Be glad you didn't have to sit through the assembly cut, which was four hours. Look, I've never made a film anywhere near two hours. I admire the films, back in the day, when they were 90 minutes. CM: One school of thought says that directors shouldn't be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal. JH: Viewers are being hardwired differently. In film, it's harder and harder to use wide shots now. And the bigger the budget, the more closeups there are and the faster they change. It's a whole different approach. What's going to happen is there will be the two extremes: the franchise films that are now getting onto brands like Barbie, and Battleship and Ronald McDonald; then there are these incredible, very low-budget digital films. But that middle area, they just can't sustain and make it work in the current model. Maybe the model will change and hopefully readjust. CM: Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so. JH: No, you're absolutely right. Just as an example, the Toronto Film Festival is one of the biggest in film festivals. They have made it, for the first time ever, much more difficult to submit a film. They charge an entry fee and they still had 4,000 submissions just this year and they boiled that down to 300. CM: This is just entry level to what's coming. Just the appalling volume of artifacts will erase all meaning that they could ever possibly have. But we probably won't get that far anyway. JH: You got that from the horse's mouth. Did someone at the Institute give you some inside information? Can you tell us a date? CM: For what, the end of the world? [Laughing] No, they don't have the date. JH: Your writing, it's a form of poetry. But so much of what you read and study is technical and based in fact. Is there a line between art and science, and where does it start to blur? CM: There's certainly an aesthetic to mathematics and science. It was one of the ways Paul Dirac got in trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. But he really believed, as other physicists did, that given the choice between something which was logical and something which was beautiful, they would opt for the aesthetic as being more likely to be true. When [Richard] Feynman put together his updated version of quantum electrodynamics, Dirac didn't think it was true because it was ugly. It was messy. It didn't have the clarity, the elegance, that he associated with great mathematical or physical theory. But he was wrong. There's no one formula for it. WSJ: Is there a difference in the way humanity is portrayed in "The Road" as compared to "Blood Meridian"? CM: There's not a lot of good guys in "Blood Meridian," whereas good guys is what "The Road" is about. That's the subject at hand. JH: I remember you said to me that "Blood Meridian" is about human evil, whereas "The Road" is about human goodness. It wasn't until I had my own son that I realized a personality was just innate in a person. You can see it forming. In "The Road," the boy has been born into a world where morals and ethics are out the window, almost like a science experiment. But he is the most moral character. Do you think people start as innately good? CM: I don't think goodness is something that you learn. If you're left adrift in the world to learn goodness from it, you would be in trouble. But people tell me from time to time that my son John is just a wonderful kid. I tell people that he is so morally superior to me that I feel foolish correcting him about things, but I've got to do something--I'm his father. There's not much you can do to try to make a child into something that he's not. But whatever he is, you can sure destroy it. Just be mean and cruel and you can destroy the best person. WSJ: What do you and your son do together? Where do you find common ground? CM: My feeling is that consanguinity doesn't really mean much. I have a large family and there is only one of them I feel close too, and that is my younger brother, Dennis. He's my kind of guy. I'm his kind of guy. And John's my kind of guy. WSJ: You're both fathers of young children. From watching them, do you get the sense that artistic skills are passed down from parents to children? CM: John draws all the time, but I have to say he's not very good, and I was very good. I was a child artist. A wunderkind. I did all kinds of stuff. Big showy paintings of animals. I haven't done it in years. All that stuff vanished. I never followed it up. JH: We share that. I had severe dyslexia and drawing was my survival mechanism. I ended up having a separate career at a young age where I had stuff in the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Canada when I was very young. I was doing murals for the city. WSJ: Really? I'm the odd man out who wasn't showing my artwork as a boy? CM: I had shows when I was eight years old. It was just for prestige. Local art shows. I can remember some of the paintings. One of them was of a rhinoceros charging. It was kind of nice. A big watercolor, mixed media thing. Another one was really bright red, a volcano exploding. It was fun. Later on I drew birds and things like that. Nature paintings. WSJ: Do you feel like you're trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways? CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. Things I've written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there's something about writing about it that flattens them. You've used them up. I tell people I've never read one of my books, and that's true. They think I'm pulling their leg. WSJ: Earlier you referred to the role luck plays in life. Where has luck intervened for you? CM: There was never a person born since Adam who's been luckier than me. Nothing has happened to me that hasn't been perfect. And I'm not being facetious. There's never been a time when I was penniless and down, when something wouldn't arrive. Over and over and over again. Enough to make you superstitious.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Here's the 1992 NYT interview.

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Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction Date: April 19, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Richard B. Woodward; Lead: " You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?" Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks; he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars in his soft Tennessee accent. "Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra's," he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal's two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. He had come upon the creature while traveling along an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. McCarthy doesn't write about places he hasn't visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, "Blood Meridian," published in 1985. And this unpopulated, scuffed-up terrain again dominates the background in "All the Pretty Horses," which will appear next month from Knopf. Text: "It's very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead," he says with a smile. "The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. And that's an odd feeling, because there's no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he's going to move in some other direction, which could be yours." Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. But another, clearly McCarthy's kind of man, put the matter in perspective. "We don't know how dangerous they are," he said. "We've never had anyone bitten. We just assume you wouldn't survive." Finished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy's venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, the good chance of a painful quietus. Each of his five previous novels has been marked by intense natural observation, a kind of morbid realism. His characters are often outcasts -- destitute or criminals, or both. Homeless or squatting in hovels without electricity, they scrape by in the backwoods of East Tennessee or on horseback in the dry, vacant spaces of the desert. Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep. McCarthy appreciates wildness -- in animals, landscapes and people -- and although he is a well-born, well-spoken, well-read man of 58 years, he has spent most of his adult life outside the ring of the campfire. It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent. But among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer's writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: "McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him." A man's novelist whose apocalyptic vision rarely focuses on women, McCarthy doesn't write about sex, love or domestic issues. "All the Pretty Horses," an adventure story about a Texas boy who rides off to Mexico with his buddy, is unusually sweet-tempered for him -- like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback. The earnest nature of the young characters and the lean, swift story, reminiscent of early Hemingway, should bring McCarthy a wider audience at the same time it secures his masculine mystique. But whatever it has lacked in thematic range, McCarthy's prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader. A page from any of his books -- minimally punctuated, without quotation marks, avoiding apostrophes, colons or semicolons -- has a stylized spareness that magnifies the force and precision of his words. Unimaginable cruelty and the simplest things, the sound of a tap on a door, exist side by side, as in this typical passage from "Blood Meridian" on the unmourned death of a pack animal: "The following evening as they rode up onto the western rim they lost one of the mules. It went skittering off down the canyon wall with the contents of the panniers exploding soundlessly in the hot dry air and it fell through sunlight and through shade, turning in that lonely void until it fell from sight into a sink of cold blue space that absolved it forever of memory in the mind of any living thing that was." Rightful heir to the Southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is a radical conservative who still believes that the novel can, in his words, "encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity." And with his recent forays into the history of the United States and Mexico, he has cut a solitary path into the violent heart of the Old West. There isn't anyone remotely like him in contemporary American literature. A COMPACT UNIT, SHY OF 6 feet even in cowboy boots, McCarthy walks with a bounce, like someone who is also a good dancer. Clean-cut and handsome as he grays, he has a Celtic's blue-green eyes set deep into a high-domed forehead. "He gives an impression of strength and vitality and poetry," says Bellow, who describes him as "crammed into his own person." For such an obstinate loner, McCarthy is an engaging figure, a world-class talker, funny, opinionated, quick to laugh. Unlike his illiterate characters, who tend to be terse and crude, he speaks with an amused, ironic manner. His involved syntax has a relaxed elegance, as if he had easy control over the direction and agreement of his thoughts. Once he had agreed to an interview -- after long negotiations with his agent in New York, Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who promised he wouldn't have to do another for many years -- he seemed happy to entertain company for a few days. Since 1976 he has lived mainly in El Paso, which sprawls along the concrete-lined Rio Grande, across the border from Juarez, Mexico. A gregarious recluse, McCarthy has lots of friends who know that he likes to be left alone. A few years ago The El Paso Herald-Post held a dinner in his honor. He politely warned them that he wouldn't attend, and didn't. The plaque now hangs in the office of his lawyer. For many years he had no walls to hang anything on. When he heard the news about his MacArthur, he was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tenn. Such accommodations have been his home so routinely that he has learned to travel with a high-watt light bulb in a lens case to assure better illumination for reading and writing. In 1982 he bought a tiny, whitewashed stone cottage behind a shopping center in El Paso. But he wouldn't take me inside. Renovation, which began a few years ago, has stopped for lack of funds. "It's barely habitable," he says. He cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat. McCarthy estimates that he owns about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. "He has more intellectual interests than anyone I've ever met," says the director Richard Pearce, who tracked down McCarthy in 1974 and remains one of his few "artistic" friends. Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for "The Gardener's Son," a television drama about the murder of a South Carolina mill owner in the 1870's by a disturbed boy with a wooden leg. In typical McCarthy style, the amputation of the boy's leg and his slow execution by hanging are the moments from the show that linger in the mind. McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. "We lived in total poverty," says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. "We were bathing in the lake," she says with some nostalgia. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." McCarthy would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, Wittgenstein -- anything -- than himself or his books. "Of all the subjects I'm interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn't," he growls. "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list." His hostility to the literary world seems both genuine ("teaching writing is a hustle") and a tactic to screen out distractions. At the MacArthur reunions he spends his time with scientists, like the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne, rather than other writers. One of the few he acknowledges having known at all was the novelist and ecological crusader Edward Abbey. Shortly before Abbey's death in 1989, they discussed a covert operation to reintroduce the wolf to southern Arizona. McCarthy's silence about himself has spawned a host of legends about his background and whereabouts. Esquire magazine recently printed a list of rumors, including one that had him living under an oil derrick. For many years the sum of hard-core information about his early life could be found in an author's note to his first novel, "The Orchard Keeper," published in 1965. It stated that he was born in Rhode Island in 1933; grew up outside Knoxville; attended parochial schools; entered the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of; joined the Air Force in 1953 for four years; returned to the university, which he dropped out of again, and began to write novels in 1959. Add the publication dates of his books and awards, the marriages and divorces, a son born in 1962 and the move to the Southwest in 1974, and the relevant facts of his biography are complete. The oldest son of an eminent lawyer, formerly with the Tennessee Valley Authority, McCarthy is Charles Jr., with five brothers and sisters. Cormac, the Gaelic equivalent of Charles, was an old family nickname bestowed on his father by Irish aunts. It seems to have been a comfortable upbringing that bears no resemblance to the wretched lives of his characters. The large white house of his youth had acreage and woods nearby, and was staffed with maids. "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks," he says. What went on in these shacks, and in Knoxville's nether world, seems to have fueled his imagination more than anything that happened inside his own family. Only his novel "Suttree," which has a paralyzing father-son conflict, seems strongly autobiographical. "I was not what they had in mind," McCarthy says of childhood discord with his parents. "I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it." Pressed to explain his sense of alienation, he has an odd moment of heated reflection. "I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn't have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home." WRITING AND READING seem to be the only interests that the teen-age McCarthy never considered. Not until he was about 23, during his second quarrel with schooling, did he discover literature. To kill the tedium of the Air Force, which sent him to Alaska, he began reading in the barracks. "I read a lot of books very quickly," he says, vague about his self-administered syllabus. McCarthy's style owes much to Faulkner's -- in its recondite vocabulary, punctuation, portentous rhetoric, use of dialect and concrete sense of the world -- a debt McCarthy doesn't dispute. "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," he says. "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." His list of those whom he calls the "good writers" -- Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner -- precludes anyone who doesn't "deal with issues of life and death." Proust and Henry James don't make the cut. "I don't understand them," he says. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." "The Orchard Keeper," however Faulknerian in its themes, characters, language and structure, is no pastiche. The story of a boy and two old men who weave in and out of his young life, it has a gnarliness and a gloom all its own. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, the allusive narrative memorializes, without a trace of sentimentality, a vanishing way of life in the woods. An affection for coon hounds binds the fate of the characters, who wander unaware of any kinship. The boy never learns that a decomposing body he sees in a leafy pit may be his father. McCarthy began the book in college and finished it in Chicago, where he worked part time in an auto-parts warehouse. "I never had any doubts about my abilities," he says. "I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this." In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, whom he had met at college; they had a son, Cullen (now an architecture student at Princeton), and quickly divorced, the yet-unpublished writer taking off for Asheville, N.C., and New Orleans. Asked if he had ever paid alimony, McCarthy snorts. "With what?" He recalls his expulsion from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for nonpayment of rent. After three years of writing, he packed off the manuscript to Random House -- "it was the only publisher I had heard of." Eventually it reached the desk of the legendary Albert Erskine, who had been Faulkner's last editor as well as the sponsor for "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry and "The Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. Erskine recognized McCarthy as a writer of the same caliber and, in the sort of relationship that scarcely exists anymore in American publishing, edited him for the next 20 years. "There is a father-son feeling," says Erskine, despite the fact, as he sheepishly admits, that "we never sold any of his books." For years McCarthy seems to have subsisted on awards money he earned for "The Orchard Keeper" -- including grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the William Faulkner Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Some of these funds went toward a trip to Europe in 1967, where he met DeLisle, an English pop singer, who became his second wife. They settled for many months on the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he wrote "Outer Dark," published in 1968, a twisted Nativity story about a girl's search for her baby, the product of incest with her brother. At the end of their independent wanderings through the rural South the brother witnesses, in one of McCarthy's most appalling scenes, the death of his child at the hands of three mysterious killers around a campfire: "Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly." "Child of God," published in 1973 after he and DeLisle returned to Tennessee, tested new extremes. The main character, Lester Ballard -- a mass murderer and necrophiliac -- lives with his victims in a series of underground caves. He is based on newspaper reports of such a figure in Sevier County, Tenn. Somehow, McCarthy finds compassion for and humor in Ballard, while never asking the reader to forgive his crimes. No social or psychological theory is offered that might explain him away. In a long review of the book in The New Yorker, Robert Coles called McCarthy a "novelist of religious feeling," comparing him with the Greek dramatists and medieval moralists. And in a prescient observation he noted the novelist's "stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era," calling him a writer "whose fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted." "MOST OF MY FRIENDS FROM those days are dead," McCarthy says. We are sitting in a bar in Juarez, discussing "Suttree," his longest, funniest book, a celebration of the crazies and ne'er-do-wells he knew in Knoxville's dirty bars and poolrooms. McCarthy doesn't drink anymore -- he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends -- and "Suttree" reads like a farewell to that life. "The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking," he says. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking." Written over about 20 years and published in 1979, "Suttree" has a sensitive and mature protagonist, unlike any other in McCarthy's work, who ekes out a living on a houseboat, fishing in the polluted city river, in defiance of his stern, successful father. A literary conceit -- part Stephen Daedalus, part Prince Hal -- he is also McCarthy, the willful outcast. Many of the brawlers and drunkards in the book are his former real-life companions. "I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous life style," he says. Residents of the city are said to compete to find themselves in the text, which has displaced "A Death in the Family" by James Agee as Knoxville's novel. McCarthy began "Blood Meridian" after he had moved to the Southwest, without DeLisle. "He always thought he would write the great American western," says a still-smarting DeLisle, who typed "Suttree" for him -- "twice, all 800 pages." Against all odds, they remain friends. If "Suttree" strives to be "Ulysses," "Blood Meridian" has distinct echoes of "Moby-Dick," McCarthy's favorite book. A mad hairless giant named Judge Holden makes florid speeches not unlike Captain Ahab's. Based on historical events in the Southwest in 1849-50 (McCarthy learned Spanish to research it), the book follows the life of a mythic character called "the kid" as he rides around with John Glanton, who was the leader of a ferocious gang of scalp hunters. The collision between the inflated prose of the 19th-century novel and nasty reality gives "Blood Meridian" its strange, hellish character. It may be the bloodiest book since "The Iliad." "I've always been interested in the Southwest," McCarthy says blandly. "There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West." More profoundly, the book explores the nature of evil and the allure of violence. Page after page, it presents the regular, and often senseless, slaughter that went on among white, Hispanic and Indian groups. There are no heroes in this vision of the American frontier. "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." This tooth-and-claw view of reality would seem not to accept the largesse of philanthropies. Then again, McCarthy is no typical reactionary. Like Flannery O'Conner, he sides with the misfits and anachronisms of modern life against "progress." His play, "The Stonemason," written a few years ago and scheduled to be performed this fall at the Arena Stage in Washington, is based on a Southern black family he worked with for many months. The breakdown of the family in the play mirrors the recent disappearance of stoneworking as a craft. "Stacking up stone is the oldest trade there is," he says, sipping a Coke. "Not even prostitution can come close to its antiquity. It's older than anything, older than fire. And in the last 50 years, with hydraulic cement, it's vanishing. I find that rather interesting." BY COMPARISON WITH the sonority and carnage of "Blood Meridian," the world of "All the Pretty Horses" is less risky -- repressed but sane. The main character, a teen-ager named John Grady Cole, leaves his home in West Texas in 1949 after the death of his grandfather and during his parents' divorce, convincing his friend Lacey Rawlins they should ride off to Mexico. Dialogue rather than description predominates, and the comical exchanges between the young men have a bleak music, as though their words had been whittled down by the wind off the desert: They rode. You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways. Well suppose you were ill at ease and didnt know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasn't supposed to be and didnt know it? What the hell's wrong with you? I dont know. Nothin. I believe I'll sing. He did. A linear tale of boyish episodes -- they meet vaqueros, are joined by a hapless companion, break horses on a hacienda and are thrown in jail -- the book has a sustained innocence and a lucidity new in McCarthy's work. There is even a budding love story. "You haven't come to the end yet," says McCarthy, when asked about the low body count. "This may be nothing but a snare and a delusion to draw you in, thinking that all will be well." The book is, in fact, the first volume of a trilogy; the third part has existed for more than 10 years as a screenplay. He and Richard Pearce have come close to making the film -- Sean Penn was interested -- but producers always became skittish about the plot, which has as its central relationship John Grady Cole's love for a teen-age Mexican prostitute. Knopf is revving up the publicity engines for a campaign that they hope will bring McCarthy his overdue recognition. Vintage will reissue "Suttree" and "Blood Meridian" next month, and the rest of his work shortly thereafter. McCarthy, however, won't be making the book-signing circuit. During my visit he was at work in the mornings on Volume 2 of the trilogy, which will require another extended trip through Mexico. "The great thing about Cormac is that he's in no rush," Pearce says. "He is absolutely at peace with his own rhythms and has complete confidence in his own powers." In a pool hall one afternoon, a loud and youthful establishment in one of El Paso's ubiquitous malls, McCarthy ignores the video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A skillful player, he was a member of a team at this place, an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative demeanor. But more than one of his friends describes McCarthy as a "chameleon, able to adjust easily to any surroundings and company because he seems so secure in what he will and will not do." "Everything's interesting," McCarthy says. "I don't think I've been bored in 50 years. I've forgotten what it was like." He bangs away in his stone house or in motels on an Olivetti manual. "It's a messy business," he says about his novel-building. "You wind up with shoe boxes of scrap paper." He likes computers. "But not to write on." That's about all he will discuss about his process of writing. Who types his final drafts now he doesn't say. Having saved enough money to leave El Paso, McCarthy may take off again soon, probably for several years in Spain. His son, with whom he has lately re-established a strong bond, is to be married there this year. "Three moves is as good as a fire," he says in praise of homelessness. The psychic cost of such an independent life, to himself and others, is tough to gauge. Aware that gifted American writers don't have to endure the kind of neglect and hardship that have been his, McCarthy has chosen to be hardheaded about the terms of his success. As he commemorates what is passing from memory -- the lore, people and language of a pre-modern age -- he seems immensely proud to be the kind of writer who has almost ceased to exist.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Excerpted from Brick 27, Spring 1986 called “Rash Undertakings” by Leon Rooke.

Quote

‘I reached McCarthy by phone in Texas and put it to him that perhaps the public found his tales a mite bleak. “Jolly tales,” he said, “are not what it is all about. My feeling is that all good literature is bleak. When a work gets a certain gloss on it with age, and the current reality of it is dulled, then we can say what has and what does not have the true tragic face. I’m guided by the sweep and grandeur of classical tragedy. Mine are the conditions common to people everywhere and finally the work has little to do with any personal aberration of the characters.” I suggested that perhaps one reason his work has not secured its deserved audience was that his characters were indeed cast adrift in some ‘unanimous dark of the world’ within a ‘lethal environment’ which offered neither relief nor instruction, re-wheel times, time without mercy, time presided over by the implacable face of Nothingness, with a will to survive, fortitude, as the only and last testament. Whereas today’s reader wanted events explained, lamented, accounted for; Lester is the way he is because he comes from a broken home, his parents whipped him, he had no shoes until he was ten years old. “I don’t doubt it,” McCarthy said, “Modern readers are a lot more familiar with Freud than Sophocles.” I asked him how difficult he finds it to write these amazing novels. “I work on each for several years,” he said, “and am brought to the brink of innumerable suicides. I want, even for the worst of the characters, grace under pressure, some slinking nobility.” I asked him what he had been reading lately. “I’ve just finished Shakespeare and the Common Understanding,” he said. “And one of your guys, Michael On-? How do you say it?” “Datchie” “That’s right. Ondaatje. Wonderful stuff.” So the circle, in this nicest of ways, came round.’

[ToALonelyPeace]

Interview in 1992 from German magazine's Der Spiegel translated by Ian Alexander Moore.

Quote

In our times, says the voice in conclusion, as calmly as a doctor who realizes that his patient is about to die, what we are dealing with is not the decline of culture, but with how to balance ultimate losses. Poetry, painting, music, they are irretrievably lost, they have petered out and are betrayed to the mediocrity or paralysis of modernity. “We are like primitive tribes that have been driven from their culture and have lost their orientation, their identity, their capacity to live.” Someone like Cormac McCarthy does not take part in the fashionable literary discussions of the arts sections and even less in the political ones of the headlines. He thinks politics is a gossipy system of placation that is not in a position to address the essential questions of humanity in general.

Quote

There’s something to be said, he says, for the fact that the experiment known as Man will soon be over. And remarkably—like the preachers in his novels, Cormac McCarthy is also a moralist. Less fanatical, more resigned. When he speaks about demise, he speaks not about ecological or economic catastrophes, but about the death of the inner man, about the death of meaning. “How can one live without morality?” he says at one point. We are sitting in the El Paso airport restaurant and watching the setting sun, gleaming red over the violet hills at the end of the tarmac. “The Evening Redness in the West” is the subtitle of his novel Blood Meridian, a book that, like the terrifying paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, provides metaphors for the decline of humaneness and thus of humanity. He will continue to write about this in a gleaming, solemn, lyric language, to write like no other writes—and then his books too will drift away, of that he’s certain. And he laughs.

SPIEGEL_1992_36_9284806.pdf
Cormac_McCarthys_1992_Interview_with_Der.pdf

[ToALonelyPeace]

This was taken in the 1992 interview.
The complete interview “Rash Undertakings” by Leon Rooke is said to be in The Brick Reader.

Amazon.com: The Brick Reader (9780889104228): Spalding, Linda, Ondaatje, Michael: Books

 

Amazon.com: The Brick Reader (9780889104228): Spalding, Linda, Ondaatje, Michael: Books

There's another interview with Garry Wallace in 1992 available here

Meeting Cormac McCarthy: plus 9 Notable Essays of the Year: Wallace, Garry: 9781466495906: Amazon.com: Books

 

Meeting Cormac McCarthy: plus 9 Notable Essays of the Year: Wallace, Garry: 9781466495906: Amazon.com: Books

I'll try to purchase and post them later.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Here is Cormac McCarthy on the Origin of Language. It's his first non-fiction, published in 2017 on nautilus.

Quote

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.” Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.

My SFI: Cormac McCarthy describes the Santa Fe Institute - YouTube

[xylokopos]

My heartfelt thanks for assembling these treasures here.

McCarthy has a vast and great mind and he is a true creative genius.

I was not familiar with his Nautilus piece on language and the unconscious but I do recollect him talking about Kekulé's dream in an interview.

Perhaps there is no better time than the present to revisit his work.

[ToALonelyPeace]

@xylokopos: Do you mean the Oprah interview? I remember in that one he mentioned "Consciousness is older than language..."
I have read "Blood Meridian" and "Child of God". I have tried to read "Outer Dark" but it was a struggle. I went on for pages without knowing what's going on as it was difficult to visualize who or what. The Cormac fans on TLO have praised it as his most harrowing book so I may tackle it again during this quarantine.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Revenant]

If I could have the skill of any writer, I'd probably have to pick McCarthy.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Other than his writing what most impressed me was his uncompromising attitude when it came to having a 9-5 job. He almost never had one. At most a brief part time job in an auto shop.

I agree with Bukowski when he said "Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working."