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. 

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. 

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."