I’m shell shocked. I don’t know what to say. A giant, one of the great creative minds of the last century, has passed on. Cormac McCarthy dead at 89. You best believe he achieved immortality a long time ago.
This one hurts. Loved his writing. Will miss him terribly. I’m glad he got to write two books back to back last year. Few authors throughout history have written so many indelible works of art.
McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, about men, horses, pain and loyalty. His best book was known to be “Blood Meridian”, which “Harold Bloom said he hated so much for its violence he threw it across the room twice, and then read it, declared it a masterpiece, and wrote the introduction for the Modern Library edition”.
McCarthy’s language was such that every page contained words you've never seen before, but they had a shape and music to them that you understood perfectly just what he meant.
Some have succeeded in adapting McCarthy novels for the screen (“No Country For Old Men”) and others haven’t (“All the Pretty Horses”). He was in the process of writing the screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian.” I’m not sure what will happen to that project now.
As I wrote, a few weeks back, If you’re adapting “Blood Meridian” then you best not miss. Everybody knows that. Cormac McCarthy’s masterfully violent 1985 novel is a tough read but also an essential American novel. It’s surely McCarthy’s magnum opus.
I’ll leave you with a passage that has always resonated with me, its from McCarthy’s own Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy, #3):
“Every man’s death is standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honour the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?”