Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #10 "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' "

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's (1909)

Time to kick off my “Top Ten New Yorker & Me” archival series. Each month I’ll look back and choose what I consider to be one of this blog's best posts. Today’s pick is "George Bellows's 'Stag at Sharkey's' and 'Both Members of This Club' " (July 26, 2012):

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in his An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said in her great "The Treasure of Comanche County" (The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005) about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates relishes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

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. 

December 19, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is James Wood’s superb “The Numbers Game,” a review of Cormac McCarthy’s two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The opening paragraph is quintessential Wood, an analysis of McCarthy’s style:

There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.”

Wood identifies a third McCarthy style:

The third style holds in beautiful balance the oracular and the ordinary. In “The Road,” a lean poetry captures many ruinous beauties—for instance, the way that ash, a “soft black talc,” blows through the abandoned streets “like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.” This third style has, in truth, always existed in McCarthy’s novels, though sometimes it appeared to lead a slightly fugitive life. Amid all the gory sublimities of “Blood Meridian” (1985), one could still find something as lovely and precise as “the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs,” or a description of yellow-eyed wolves “that trotted neat of foot.” In “Suttree,” published six years before the overheated “Blood Meridian,” this third style was easier to find, the writer frequently abjuring the large, imprecise adverb for the smaller, exact one—“When he put his hand up her dress her legs fell open bonelessly”—or the perfect little final noun: “while honeysuckle bloomed in the creek gut.”

Wood says this third style is often The Passenger and Stella Maris’s “dominant rhetoric.” He assesses other aspects of these books, as well, e.g., their “mathematical mysticism” and “bitter metaphysics.” But it’s his stylistic analysis that I relish.  

Kevin Barry's "Night Boat to Tangier"

Not often do I post about novels. That’s because I’m generally not a fan. There’ve been exceptions. Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time comes to mind. Now there’s another – Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier. I recognize a brilliant stylist when I see one. Barry is the real deal. Samples:

The years are rolling out like tide now.

His aura is of brassy menace.

I fucken hate ignorance, he says.

From the glare of the arclights, the lingering of pollutants and the refraction of heat left by the late October sun, the air is thick and smoky, and it makes the night glow a vivid thing, and dense.

An attack dog barks a yard of stars.

They exchange a dry look.

The bar awaits grimly beneath the glare of its strip lights. It runs the thread of its voices.

The head waiter looked like a ’tacheless Salvador Dali and drank a ball of coñac and was sustained.

The city ran a swarm of fast anchovy faces.

The hours were heavy and cumbersome and moved by like old horses.

The barman drooped a heavy eye over the football pages. He had the look of a long shift off him.

A dead hotel was chained up, its windows blind.

That’s enough to give you a taste. Oh yes, and this beauty:

He drank Powers whiskey from a naggin clamped between his thighs and slowed for the bends that he knew by touch.

What’s it about? Drugs, sex, violence. Need I say more? Just finished chapter eight, “The Judas Iscariot All-Night Drinking Club.” What an extraordinary piece of writing! Haven’t read anything like it since the knife fight in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. Barry’s style crosses McCarthy on Tarantino. Beware! Fucken addictive. 

Postscript: The New Yorker recently ran a terrific Kevin Barry short story – “The Pub with No Beer.” That’s where I first encountered him.

June 10 & 17, 2013 Issue

The transfixing specificity of the procedure used to decapitate the “green-leather motorcyclist” in Cormac McCarthy’s “Scenes of the Crime,” in this week’s issue, invaded my imagination, and still haunts me, as I write this, three days after I read it. Only McCarthy could’ve written it – the same McCarthy who wrote what is, for me, one of literature’s most vivid, powerful, lyrical, horrifying, mesmerizing, violent scenes. I’m referring to the deadly knife-fight between the pimp Eduardo and John Grady Cole near the end of McCarthy’s extraordinary Border Trilogy. “Bar ditch” and “blacktop” figure in the Border Trilogy (although only in passing), as they do (more centrally) in “Scenes of the Crime.” In the series' second book, The Crossing, McCarthy writes, “He crossed through the bar ditch and rode up onto the blacktop and slowed the horse and looked back.” In “Scenes of the Crime,” the green rider is killed on the blacktop, and the septic-tank truck driver (“the wire man”) is fatally shot by “the wounded man” in the bar ditch. It’s all very surreal. Yet the details [e.g., the flatbed truck, the floodlight, the humming wire, the bouncing helmet (with the green rider’s head inside it), the brown sewage spouting from the bullet hole in the septic-tank] are amazing – “solidity within unreality,” as Updike said about Magritte (Always Looking, 2012). As spellbinding as “Scenes of the Crime” is, it contains only one sentence that’s comparable to the Border Trilogy’s inspired writing. It’s a description of what happens to the motorcycle after its rider’s head “zips away”: “The bike continues on, the motor slows and dies to silence, and in the distance we see a long slither of sparks recede into the dark.” That “long slither of sparks” is very fine. 

George Bellows’s "Stag at Sharkey’s" and "Both Members of This Club"

George Bellows’s great boxing paintings Stag at Sharkey’s (1909) and Both Members of This Club (1909) have always been regarded as realist pictures, pitiless depictions of boxing’s viciousness. Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent "Young and Gifted" (The New Yorker, June 25, 2012), describes Stag at Sharkey’s as follows:

The fighters at Sharkey’s collide in no way that I’ve ever seen in the ring: each with a leg lifted far from the floor, as one man jams a forearm into the bloody face of the other, while cocking a blow to the body. Their livid flesh, radiating agony, is a marvel of colors blended in wet strokes on the canvas. The picture is at once a snapshot of Hell and an apotheosis of painting. It evinces sensitive restraint by muting the expressions of the riotous ringsiders. Almost as good, though flawed by overly indulged caricature, is “Both Members of This Club” (1909), in which a black fighter reduces a white one to a howling incarnation of pain.

David Peters Corbett, in An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters (2011), says of Both Members of This Club:

The prominent bone of the left-hand fighter’s raised forearm, his sharp ribcage above the meaty drop of his belly, his raw, red face and ribs, call to mind the unforgiving realism of Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef.

“Livid flesh, radiating agony,” “snapshot of Hell,” “howling incarnation of pain,” “raw, red face and ribs,” “unforgiving realism” – descriptions that reflect the standard realist reading of Bellows’s boxing paintings.

But Joyce Carol Oates, in her “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings” [included in her 1989 essay collection (Woman) Writer], takes a slightly different view. She writes: “Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club, realistic in conception, are dreamlike in execution; poetic rather than naturalistic.”

What does Oates mean by “poetic”? Is she suggesting that Bellows’s boxing paintings are, somehow, nonrealist? I recall George Segal’s comment on Edward Hopper: “What I like about Hopper is how far poetically he went, away from the real world” (quoted in John Updike’s “Hopper’s Polluted Silence,” Still Looking, 2007). Is Oates saying that Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club depart, in some way, from “the real world”? I don’t think so. I think what she’s referring to is the way Bellows has painted them so as to emphasize the blood. She says, “However the eye moves outward it always circles back inward, irresistibly, to the center of frozen, contorted struggle, the blood-splattered core of life.” She contrasts Stag at Sharkey’s and Both Members of This Club with Bellows’s bloodless Dempsey and Firpo (1924), in which “Bellows makes no attempt to communicate what might be called the poetic essence of this barbaric fight.”

Reading Oates’s “George Bellows: The Boxing Paintings,” I was reminded of what she said, in her great “In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy” (In Rough Country, 2010), about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence.” Oates likes works of art that unflinchingly show “the blood-splattered core of life.” Interestingly, she describes McCarthy’s prose as “poetic.” For her, it seems, blood and poetry are synonymous.

Credit: The above painting is George Bellows’s Stag at Sharkey’s (1909).

Knife-Fight / Tire-Change: The Elegiac Impulse in Cormac McCarthy's "Cities of the Plain"

The most memorable scene in Cormac McCarthy’s great Cities of the Plain is, without a doubt, the blood-soaked knife fight between Eduardo and John Grady Cole. Joyce Carol Oates describes it as “a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence … stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play” (“The Treasure of Comanche Country," The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005). If you choose to understand Cities of the Plain solely in terms of its violence, you’ll likely focus on the knife fight. But if you’re more inclined, as I am, to interpret McCarthy’s novel as an elegy for a vanishing way of life, you may want to consider some of the book’s less dramatic passages.

One such scene is the tire-change: Billy and Troy are in a pick-up, driving through the desert night, heading back to the ranch. They meet “a truckload of Mexicans pulled off onto the grass. They stood almost into the road waving their hats.” Billy drives past them. But then he stops. Against Troy’s objections (“You’re fixin to get us in a jackpot here we won’t get home till daylight”), Billy puts the truck in reverse and backs down the highway to the Mexicans’ location. The Mexicans’ truck has a flat tire. Billy speaks to the Mexicans in Spanish. They need a jack. Billy loans them one from the back of his truck. The Mexicans jack up the front end of their truck. “They had two spares and neither of them would hold air. They spelled each other at the antique tirepump. Finally they raised up and looked at Billy.” Billy gets his tire tools, patch kit, and flashlight from his truck. He removes the inner tube from one of the spares, patches it, puts it back inside the spare, and laboriously pumps it up. When it’s fully inflated, the Mexicans install it on the truck.

My rough summary of the tire-change makes it seem mundane and ordinary – hardly worth bothering with, you’d think. Most writers probably wouldn’t even mention such a routine matter. If they did mention it, they’d likely just sketch it, in a line or two, and quickly move on. But McCarthy lingers over the scene, lavishing more than a thousand exact, luminous words on its description, detailing everything from the inner tube (“The innertube that he snaked out of the tire’s inner cavity was made of red rubber and there was a whole plague of patches upon it”) to the wrench (“made from a socket welded onto a length of heavy pipe”). The precision and vividness of his imagery are amazing! Consider this extraordinary passage, for example:

Billy took the stub of chalk from the patchkit and circled the leaks in the tube and they unscrewed the valvestem from the valve and sat on the tubes and then walked it down till it was dead flat. Then they sat in the road with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife, and they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets. They scuffed the rubber with the little tin grater stamped into the lid of the kit and they laid on the patches and fired them with a match one by one till all were fused and all were done. When they had the tube pumped up again they sat in the road in the quiet desert and listened.

That image of the men sitting in the road “with the white line running past their elbows and the gaudy desert night overhead, the myriad constellations moving upon the blackness subtly as sealife” is very fine.

Why does McCarthy concentrate the full force of his immense descriptive power on something as tedious as a tire-change? My theory is that McCarthy deeply admires the craftsmanship of Billy’s work. He wants us to appreciate it, too, because he sees it as an aspect of a way of life that’s rapidly disappearing. That’s why he describes it so precisely, in such scrupulous detail. He sees cowboys like John Grady Cole and Billy Parham as craftsmen and, as such, endangered species that modernization is rapidly wiping out. Note, in the above quotation, McCarthy’s reference to two other types of craftsmen, namely, tailors and menders of nets (“they worked with the dull red shape of rubber in their laps, squatting like tailors or menders of nets”). And note the careful detail of another work-related scene that McCarthy describes later in the novel:

He waited until the calf had bucked itself into a clear space among the creosote and then he put the horse forward at a gallop. He paid the slack rope over the horse’s head and overtook the calf on its off side. The calf went trotting. The rope ran from its neck along the ground on the near side and trailed in a curve behind its legs and ran forward up the off side following the horse. John Grady checked his dally and then stood in one stirrup and cleared his other leg of the trailing rope. When the rope snapped taut it jerked the calf’s head backward and snatched its hind legs from under it. The calf turned endwise in the air and slammed to the ground in a cloud of dust and lay there.

This is skillful, specialized ranch work that’s been closely observed and precisely rendered. The writing enacts the craftsmanship of the work it describes.

My “craftsman” interpretation is one way of considering the tire-change scene, but not the only one. The New Yorker’s brief review of Cities of the Plain suggests another approach. The anonymous reviewer writes:

This tragic last volume of the Border Trilogy sees the American West enter the modern world, as the cowboy John Grady looks down from a rock bluff at the city lights “strewn across the desert floor like a tiara laid out upon a jeweller’s blackcloth.”

McCarthy’s language carries a brooding, evolutionary sense of time and labor – in his hands the changing of a tire on an old truck becomes a mythic deed.

The weight of history rests on the shoulders of John Grady, too, and he’s doomed to learn that “when things are gone they’re gone. They ain’t comin back.” [“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, August 10, 1998]

This is an excellent description of Cities of the Plain, distilling the book’s elegiac theme into three swift paragraphs. But I’m perplexed by that second paragraph. In what way is the tire-change mythic? James Wood, in his stimulating “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 5, 2005), a review of McCarthy’s work, says that “McCarthy’s novels are deeply engaged with founding American myths, in particular those of regeneration through violence, Southern pastoral, the figure of the sacred hunter, and the frontiersman’s conquest of the endless Western spaces.” None of these myths appear to apply to the tire-changing scene. In my opinion, when McCarthy wrote the scene, he was not mythologizing. He was memorializing an instance of Billy’s craft of experience in action. Joyce Carol Oates, in her “In Rough Country 1: Cormac McCarthy,” says that the Border novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain) are “elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world.” I submit that the tire-change scene is best understood as an aspect of that elegiac impulse.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by David Levine.

Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #3: James Wood's "Red Planet"

James Wood has emerged as one of this blog’s major guiding lights. His marvelous definition of “thisness,” as set out in his How Fiction Works (2008), is, for me, a touchstone. “By thisness,” he says, “I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.” Wood has a jeweler’s eye for thisness. My favorite parts of his reviews are where he picks out descriptive details from the work under consideration and holds them up to the light for a closer look. For example, in his “Asylum” (The New Yorker, June 28, 2010), a review of Adam Foulds’s novel The Quickening Maze, he begins with this magnificent collage of details:

It is a remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose. Here is a man caught in a coughing fit, whose “eyes thickened in their sockets.” And here is a young woman brushing her hair “until it was glossy and fluent.” And another young woman, also brushing her hair, her face “vacant with concentration.” Here are some patients in a mental asylum, “shuffling, drowsy as smoked bees.” And an old attendant at the asylum: “His face was so detailed, so full of character, that John always found encountering him to be a small event, like eating something.” Mademoiselle Leclair, a French tutor: “She was a dumpy spinster from somewhere in Picardy with a pale extensive face that ran mostly downhill from a long, white nose.” The study of a doctor who runs the asylum: “a private red gloom of papers and piled books.” And the natural world, noticed exactly and reimagined exactly: “The forest made its little sounds.” (Yes, that could very well be how a forest sounds, and I hadn’t known until I read it.) Icicles: “They were smooth at the top and tapered and tapered down with bulges, like a pea pod, to a stopped drop round as a glass bead.” Birds in a tree: “Small birds, titmice, swapped their places, switching back and forth, then flew off together in a pretty wave of panic.” Winter: “She liked the pinch of absence, the hollow air, reminiscent of the real absence.” To be truly alive to winter, as is one of the novel’s characters, is “to feel the sharp winterness of the day.”

Wood is a connoisseur of literary details. But it’s not every detail that satisfies him. He says, in How Fiction Works, “But I choke on too much detail.” [If you want to see him choking (it’s not a pretty sight), check out his “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate).] That’s why “Asylum” and his great “Red Planet” (The New Yorker, July 25, 2005) are key; they show us details that Wood considers satisfying.

In “Red Planet,” a review of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Wood artfully assembles and presents a collection of choice details similar to the one set out in “Asylum,” except that in “Red Planet” his commentary is itself more detailed. Consider the following passage:

He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), has this picture of lightning: “Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly.” The protagonist of “Child of God” (1973), a psychotic necrophiliac named Lester Ballard, lights a fire in an old grate, and as it races up the disused chimney sees a spider that “descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.” How strange and original that “clutching itself” is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shriveling. “Blood Meridian” is a vast and complex sensorium, at times magnificent and at times melodramatic, but nature is almost always precisely caught and weighed: in the desert, the stars “fall all night in bitter arcs,” and the wolves trot “neat of foot” alongside the horsemen, and the lizards, “their leather chins flat to the cooling rocks,” fend off the world “with thin smiles and eyes lack cracked stone plates,” and the grains of sand creep past all night “like armies of lice on the move,” and “the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake.” McCarthy like this last phrase so much that he repeated it, seven years later, in “All the Pretty Horses” (1992): “Where a pair of herons stood footed to their long shadows.”

In McCarthy, such repetition is a sign not of haste but of a style that has achieved consistency. That curious word “footed” is characteristic of his willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearean liberality, “Footed to their long shadows” perfectly conveys the sense of a bird that is all foot and leg, and that, moreover, seems fastened by its feet to the ground. (“Footed to” surely suggests “fitted to” or “fastened to,” and for this reason “legged to” wouldn’t work.)

In the above passage, it’s not only the quotations from McCarthy’s work that I enjoy; I also appreciate having the benefit of Wood’s comments. For instance, that wonderful “How strange and original that ‘clutching itself’ is, and how appropriate that the loveless Lester Ballard might think this way about a spider’s shrivelling,” is one of my favorite lines in all of Wood’s writings.

Just as “Literature teaches us to notice,” to quote a memorable line from Wood’s How Fiction Works, so, too, do reviews such as “Asylum” and “Red Planet.” In fact, I’d submit that “Asylum” and “Red Planet” are literature. “Red Planet” is slightly richer in commentary. Therefore, I’ve chosen it for my “Top Ten.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing"

I first met the genius of Cormac McCarthy in the pages of The Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 2005). The encounter was accidental. I’d bought the journal to read a travel piece by Tom Bissell called “A Polar Turn of Mind.” The issue also happened to contain an excerpt from a new novel by Cormac McCarthy. The excerpt was titled "Agua." I read the opening sentence – “Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars” – and I was hooked. I immediately read the whole piece straight through, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. It seemed to me it was like Hemingway evolved to another level. Not long after, in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005), I read James Wood’s "Red Planet," a review of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Wood didn’t think much of the novel. He called it “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller.” Wood can be a severe critic, but in McCarthy’s case, he gentled his attack with very high praise for some of McCarthy’s other work. For example, he said that McCarthy “has written extraordinarily beautiful prose.” And he also said this, which touches directly on the reason I love McCarthy’s writing: “He is also a wonderfully delicate noticer of nature.” I would go further and say that McCarthy is one of the world’s great nature poets.

This week, I finished reading McCarthy’s The Crossing, which is the second volume of his Border Trilogy. It is filled with descriptions of land, weather, and animals that are, in their exactness, vividness, and felt detail, simply amazing. Here is the night sky: “The earliest stars coined out of the dark coping to the south hanging in the dead wickerwood of the trees along the river.” Here are cattle: “The cows stood their distance and studied them back, a leggy and brocklefaced lot, part mexican, some longhorns, every color.” A horse walking in snow: “The snow in the pass was half way to the horse’s belly and the horse trod down the drifts in high elegance and swung its smoking muzzle over the white and crystal reefs and looked out down through the dark mountain woods or cocked its ears at the sudden flight of small winter birds before them.” The taste of river water: “He led the horse and wolf into the shallows and all three drank from the river and the water was cold and slatey to the taste.” On and on – I bet I could quote a hundred such passages from this great book, all beautifully precise, brilliantly inspired.

McCarthy is also a master at conveying swift, violent action. Here is a brief excerpt from one of the book’s most memorable scenes – the rescue of a wolf from a dog-fighting pit: “He rose and stepped to the iron stake piked in the ground and wrapped a turn of chain about his forearm and squatted and seized the chain at the ring and tried to rise with it. No one moved, no one spoke. He doubled his grip and tried again. The beaded sweat on his forehead shone in the light. He tried yet a third time but he could not pull the stake and he rose and turned back and took hold of the actual wolf by the collar and unsnapped the swivelhook and drew the bloody and slobbering head to his side and stood.” Note the frequent usage of “and” in the aforesaid quote – seven of them in the concluding sentence alone. In his review, Wood says, “His sentences are commaless convoys, articulated only by the Biblical ‘and’.” Wood calls it Biblical; he may be right – I wouldn’t know. I would call it Faulknerian. Consider this passage from Faulkner’s “Old Man”: “Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved and beneath the boat, ridged with dirty phosphorescent foam and filled with a debris of destruction – objects nameless and enormous and invisible which struck and slashed at the skiff and whirled on.” “And” occurs nine times in that quote. Charles McGrath, in his wretched review of The Crossing, published in The New Yorker (June 27, 1994), says, “Cormac McCarthy may be the last of the great overwriters.” He says, “McCarthy never lets you forget that what you’re reading is writing.” Well, I strongly disagree. Like an over-zealous prosecutor, McGrath uses devious methods to indict McCarthy. For one thing, to provide grounds for the “overwriting” charge, he quotes from McCarthy’s early work. That’s like judging Faulkner solely on the basis of Pylon, and not on his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. For another, he quickly skates over the magnificent precision of McCarthy’s nature descriptions, preferring instead to dwell on what he calls McCarthy’s “orating and pumping up.” More than anything else, what really seems to bug McGrath about McCarthy is that “he’s uninterested in the kind of heightened clarity that amounts to invisibility in prose” – hence the “overwriting" charge.

My response to McGrath is that McCarthy specializes in narrating action. There is no better action writer than McCarthy. Hemingway seems almost quaint in comparison. The key to McCarthy’s action-writing mastery is his ability to link together successive steps or procedures in amazing fluid sequences that seem to unspool almost in real time. “And” is the linking word par excellence. No writer deploys it better than McCarthy. McGrath is stuck in the Elements of Style school of writing that requires economy and compression if “invisibility in prose” is to be achieved. To me this is an “old school” approach to writing. To be mimetic of the action it describes, writing must move; it must flow, and not lazily either, but with speed. This is what McCarthy’s action sequences do incomparably. I can think of no one writing today – fictionist or non-fictionist - who describes action as well as McCarthy does.

Piecemeal faults might be found with The Crossing. There’s a Felliniesque aspect to some of the scenes (e.g., those involving a traveling opera company and a group of gypsies). But McCarthy’s great gifts deserve great indulgence. It seems to me James Wood said it best when he observed that McCarthy shows a “willingness to stretch the sinew of language with Shakespearian liberality.” Narrow-minded McGrath, clutching his copy of The Elements of Style, would probably reply that Shakespeare was a great overwriter, too.

Credit: The above portrait of Cormac McCarthy is by Mark Ulriksen; it appears in The New Yorker (July 25, 2005) as an illustration for James Wood's "Red Planet."