Cormac McCarthy's Consoling Breakfasts

Illustration by Bill Bragg, from Dwight Garner's "Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner"

One of the most enjoyable essays I’ve read recently is Dwight Garner’s “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (The New York Times, December 19, 2022), in which Garner notes the many wonderful food scenes in McCarthy’s work and wonders why they resonate so much. Garner says,

McCarthy likes to feed his characters, and the food in his fiction resonates more than it does in most novelists’ work. In part, this is because nearly all the lives in McCarthy’s world are lived close to the bone, often in isolation, and food is a rare respite from intricate forms of pain.

I think this is true. And maybe it’s also because McCarthy likes to describe process, whether it’s fixing a tire, roping a calf, breaking a wild horse, rolling a cigarette, or just eating a meal. Here, from The Crossing (1994), is one of his great breakfasts:

He was up in the morning before daybreak and he went through the dark house to the kitchen where there was light. The woman was sitting at the kitchen table listening to an old wooden radio shaped like a bishop’s hat. She was listening to a station out of Ciudad Juárez and when he stood in the door she turned it off and looked at him.

Está bien, he said. No tiene que apagarlo.

She shrugged and rose. She said that it was over anyway. She asked him if he would like his breakfast and he said that he would.

While she was fixing it he walked out to the barn and brushed the horses and cleaned their hooves and then saddled Niño and left the latigo loose and he strapped the old visalia packframe onto his bedhorse and tied on his soogan and went back to the house. She got his breakfast out of the oven and set it on the table. She’d cooked eggs and ham and flour tortillas and beans and she set it in front of him and poured his coffee.

Quiere crema? she said.

No gracias. Hay salsa?

She set the salsa at his elbow in a small lavastone molcajete.

Gracias.

He thought that she would leave but she didn’t. She stood watching him eat.

Es pariente del señor Sanders? she said.

No. Él era amigo de mi padre.

He looked up at her. Siéntate, he said. Puede sentarse. 

She made a little motion with her hand. He didn’t know what it meant. She stood as before.

Su salud no es Buena, he said.

She said that it was not. She said that he had had trouble with his eyes and that he was very sad over his nephew who was killed in the war. Conoció a su sobrino? She said.

Sí. Y usted?

She said that she had not known the nephew. She said that when she came to work here the nephew was already dead. She said that she had seen his picture and that he was very handsome.

He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.

Tiene que hacer un viaje largo? she said.

He rose and put the napkin on the table and took his hat up from the other chair and put it on. He said he did indeed have a long journey. He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there and asked her in spanish to pray for him but she said she had already decided to do so before he even asked.

That “He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her” is superb. Nobody does “and” like McCarthy, not even Hemingway, although he’s a close second. I like the details, too – “the old wooden radio shaped like a bishop’s hat,” and the salsa in the “small lavastone molcajete.” The whole scene is comfortingly rendered, a rare instance of solace in this otherwise cold, pitiless, brilliant western.