It’s hard to mourn—to express sorrow and loss, or really much of any emotion—for a writer like Cormac McCarthy. His bleak, near-nihilistic view of life and humanity does not inspire or really even allow for tears.
My eyes sting nonetheless.
At least, I suppose, his literature prepared me for the hollow sense of loss and emptiness I feel now at his passing.
And yet: I remember more than a decade ago, I was having dinner with Tom Franklin in a bar in Portland, Oregon, and we got to talking about McCarthy. Tom Franklin was the writer who first told me to read McCarthy. I started with Child of God and was hooked immediately. I quickly moved on to the early novels The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, the latter the home of my favorite sentence in the English language:
“Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight.”
All he’s saying, I like to tell my students, is, “She walked like a zombie,” but look at the poetry, at the rhythms and the beauty of these words!
Of course, I also use it as an example of verbosity (as opposed to conciseness), and it was this early influence that probably led to the worst excesses of my own first novel, Hagridden.
As a younger man, I was drawn to the beauty of McCarthy’s bleakness, to the way he could make violence poetic, to his intimate understanding of—even sympathy for—humanity’s darkest impulses.
But on that evening in Portland, over beers with Tom Franklin, we were discussing my favorite McCarthy novel, The Road. I won’t say it’s McCarthy’s best—it’s hard to top Blood Meridian, and I appreciate more and more the subtleties of Suttree—and in truth, I had originally felt frustrated with The Road. I considered the early chapters almost cliché, like McCarthy was doing a pastiche of himself. But as I fell into the relationship between the father and his son, I fell in love with the novel. Bleak as it is, I latched onto the love and devotion that these two characters held for each other.
The publisher of Hagridden, Brad Pauquette at Columbus Press, once described my novel as being about “two women with nothing left to live for, doing everything they can to stay alive.” I wasn’t thinking about The Road when I wrote Hagridden, but then, maybe I was? Because that’s one of my prime takeaways from McCarthy’s novel: the absolute love of the father for his son, and of the son for his father—the willingness, in the face of apocalypse and the demise of the entire human race, to do anything, no matter how horrifying, to keep each other alive. At one point in the novel, the father gazes at his son and thinks, “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (My friend Michael Levan wrote beautifully about this many years ago.)
So I was talking about this with Tom Franklin, and Tommy said that The Road was the bleakest ending McCarthy had ever written. That ending [SPOILER!?] sees the father and son reach the coastline they’d spent the whole novel traveling toward, only for the father to die and leave the boy alone to be picked up by strangers on a boat, taken away out to sea, to what end the novel doesn’t say but given how every other person behaves in the story—and especially given the infamously monstrous hint at a pedophilic ending to Blood Meridian—we have every reason to fear their motives. So, Tommy had a point.
And yet! I told Tommy—and yet! Look at the penultimate paragraph of The Road, where the boy is trying to pray to God but does not know God and could only talk aloud to his dead father, “and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. And the woman [who had rescued the boy] said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”
There is hope in that paragraph! I told Tom Franklin. There is the promise of continuity, the fact of living on in those we love and protect, in those whose lives we helped ensure, and in the final paragraph still there is hope for the world itself, regardless of human beings, a future with or without us but a future, and “In the glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery,” and if that isn’t the most hopeful ending Cormac McCarthy was ever capable of writing, then there is no hope at all in this world.
I stand by that reading of The Road. In the most broken, violent, hopeless world McCarthy could invent, he closed that story with notes of hope and endurance, if not of us then at least of something. Beauty, perhaps. Life, anyway. Everything dies, but something will always endure.
That’s what I’m thinking about now, on hearing the news of Cormac McCarthy’s passing. He was a literary man who always seemed “older than man,” and I hold hope that as he died, he heard the hum of mystery, and hummed along.
And in 
Samuel Snoek-Brown 