Transcript

9.4.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please
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join me now for part one of the article titled
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two years after Cormac MacCarthy's death, Rare access to his
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personal library reveals the man behind the myth. The famously
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reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books, ranging
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in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to The
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Naked Mule Rat by Richard Grant. Cormac McCarthy, one of
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the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of
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the most private, had been dead for thirteen months when
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I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high,
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with beam ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set
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back from a country road in a valley below the mountains.
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First built in eighteen ninety two, the house was expanded
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and modernized in the nineteen seventies and extensively modified by
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McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self taught
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architect as well as a master of literary fiction. I
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was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who
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were embroiled in a herculean endeavor, working unpaid with help
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from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students. They had
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taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog
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every single book in McCarthy's enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library.
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They were guessing it contained upwards of twenty thousand volumes.
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By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left
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behind a person library of nine thousand. What makes McCarthy's
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library so intriguing is not just its size, nor the
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fact that very few people know about it. His books,
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many of which are annotated with margin comments, promised to
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reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the
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few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive. For
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as long as people have been reading McCarthy, they have
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speculated about which books and authors informed and inspired his work,
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a subject he was loath to discuss. They have wondered
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about his interests and true personality because all he presented
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to the public was a reclusive, austere, and scrutable facade.
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When Brian Ginza, a scholar of literature and humanities at
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Texas Tech University, offered me exclusive journalistic access to McCarthy's
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library and the cataloging project, what he was really offering
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was an unprecedented insight into McCarthy's life work. As a
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further enticement, he said that cormack's younger brother, Dennis McCarthy
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would be there. Dennis probably knew him as well as
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any one. Gaimesa said, I parked behind the house between
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a silver nineteen sixty six Buick Riviera resting on deflated
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tires and a weathered red Lincoln Mark eight. These were
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among the last survivors of McCarthy's little known vehicle collection.
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Dennis had sold thirteen other cars, including two Alared racing
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cars from the early nineteen fifties, a nineteen ninety two Lotus,
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and a four g T forty racing car. McCarthy, who
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labored in obscurity and chronic poverty until he was sixty,
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became a multi millionaire later in life, and freely indulged
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his desires and obsessions, with classic sports cars high on
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the list. Most of the money came from Hollywood, which
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turned three of his novels, All the Pretty Horses, No
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Country for Old Men, and The Road into star studded movies.
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I knocked on the imposing front door, an Indo Portuguese
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antique made of teak and fortified with iron strappings, metal studs,
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flattened veils, and small chains. There was no response, so
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I tried the handle. The door swung open and revealed
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a dimly lit hallway reduced to a narrow passage by
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head high stacks of cardboard boxes on both sides. All
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those boxes were packed with books. The first room off
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the hallway, the room where McCarthy died at age eighty nine,
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was now so crammed with book boxes that it was impenetrable.
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Scholars called it the Beast Room. The next room was
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nearly as full. One open box showed volumes about the
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architect Frank Lloyd Wright, country houses in Ireland, Schizophrenia, African history,
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and British antique. Rifle barrels. In the dining room underneath
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a beautiful hanging light fixture of wood and colored glass
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that McCarthy designed and built himself. Scholars were sitting at
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the table scanning books, isbn barcodes through their phones into
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the library, catalog and software on their laptops. I found
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Ginza in the living room wrestling with an Internet connectivity problem.
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Kormack didn't have a WiFi in the house, so we
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had to bring our own, he said. Nor did McCarthy
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use a computer. Ever. He typed out his pages on
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a cheap, durable Olivetti typewriter, and I learned later did
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most of his work propped up on pillows in bed.
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The living room, like the house in general, had a sturdy,
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old fashioned and decidedly masculine fuel, but its clean lines
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were obscured by a chaotic overlay of clutter, mainly books,
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but also piles of nameless junk and hundreds of bulls,
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glasses and kitchenware items still in their packaging. Some of
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the book boxes and loose books had been moved into
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the room for a cataloging project, but not the rest
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of it. One of the first discoveries made by the
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visiting scholars was that McCarthy was something of a hoarder.
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His particular fixation on kitchenware, much of it bargain kitchenware,
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remains mysterious and a mark of his eccentricity. The second
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major discovery discernible in his work, but confirmed beyond doubt
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in his library, was that McCarthy was a genius level
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intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity. His interests ranged from
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quantum physics, which he taught himself by reading one hundred
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ninety books on the notoriously challenging subject, to whale biology, violins,
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obscure corners of French history in the early Middle Ages,
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the highest levels of advanced mathematics, and almost any other
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subject you can name. Gimeza marveled at the heavy duty
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philosophy books they were finding. Seventy five titles by or
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about Wittgenstein so far, he said, referring to the Austrian
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philosopher of mathematics, logic, language, and the mind, and most
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of them are annotated, meaning Carmack read them closely. A
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lot of hegel That was his light evening reading. Apparently,
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in the living room was a pool table piled with
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books and a leather couch facing two tall windows and
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three sets of nine foot tall wooden book shelves designed
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by McCarthy that held approximately one thousand books. Moving closer,
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I saw there were nearly all non fiction hardbacks, with
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no obvious system of organization. One shelf held volumes about
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meso American history and archaeology, along with Charles Darwin's collected
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note books, Victor Klemperer's three volume Diary of the Nazi Years,
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books about organic chemistry and sports cars, and an obscure
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volume titled The Biology of the Naked mul Rat, Monographs
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in Behavior and Ecology. Another shelf held book about Grand
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Prix and Formula one racing, a great passion of McCarthy's,
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and the collected writings of Charles s Pearce, the American scientist,
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philosopher and logician, in six fat volumes of dense, difficult prose.
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Trying to take it all in, I felt both fascinated
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and overwhelmed. It seemed almost inconceivable that an author who
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produced twelve novels, two plays, and five screenplays had also
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found the time, energy and brain power to master architecture, woodworking, stonemasonry,
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and a wide range of intellectual disciplines. Some of his
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math books were nearly all equations. Then we found an
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intricate drawing he'd made for an engine modification to one
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of his cars, and another showing how to rifle a
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gun barrel with hand tools. We found dozens of well
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thumbed engine repair manuals and auto mechanics tools in the outbuildings,
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and learned that he could disassemble, reassemble, and redesign an
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engine to increase its horse power. Then I learned he
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had an idetic memory and could remember nearly everything he
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had read or heard, including the lyrics to thousands of songs.
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McCarthy was starting to seem like a man whose talents
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and intelligence were without limits, Yet he lived in a
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hoarder's shambles and couldn't stop buying nonstick skillets and fruit bowls.
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By studying his library work closely, I hoped to gain
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a better understanding of McCarthy, but it was possible the
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mystery of his character would only deepen. Gimza introduced me
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to his colleague Stacy Peebles, a professor of film and
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English at Center College in Danville, Kentucky, and the current
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president of the Kuromac McCarthy Society. It was Peebles, who
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first met with Dennis McCarthy, the author's brother and literary executor,
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and suggested that the Society take on the monumental task
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of cataloging the books. The society's mission is to further
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the study and appreciation of McCarthy's work, and Peebles thought
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there was enough material in the library to keep scholars
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busy for decades scrutinizing the annotations, tracing connections between the
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research books and passages in the novels, interpreting literary and
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philosophical influences. If we were a well funded institution, we'd
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take all these boxes into an empty building where we
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had plenty of space to work, a dedicated team of people,
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and all the time we needed, she said. But Peebles
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and her small team all have full time jobs, so
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the project has required a trade off between detail and efficiency.
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We can't be as meticulous as we'd like and scan
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all the annotations because we've got limited time and a
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massive amount of books to get through. McCarthy often had
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a pencil when he was reading and would make tiny
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vertical marks next to sentences that interested him, and add
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com comments in the margins in small print handwriting. Sometimes
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he shotted down thoughts on slips of paper that he
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left between the pages. Inside The Life of Saint Teresa
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of avela by herself, first published in fifteen sixty five,
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we found him musing philosophically. There is an intelligence to
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the universe of which we are fractal, and that intelligence
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has a character, and that character is benign, intends well
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toward all things. How could it not. McCarthy is known
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for the bleak, violent nihilism in many of his novels,
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so it was a surprise to see him describing the
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universe as intelligent and well intentioned. He was a lapsed
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Catholic who went back and forth on the question of
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God's existence, sometimes changing his mind from one day to
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the next. Peebles was collecting her favorite annotated books on
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the pool table. One was Realism and Mathematics by Penelope Mattie.
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In the Marks Margins, McCarthy summarizes the author's points and
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comments on them, frequently disagreeing gibberish. He noted at one
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point it was an exciting find for the scholars because
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McCarthy mined this book deeply for his final novel, Stella Maris.
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Its protagonist, Alicia Western, is a young mathematical genius with schizophrenia.
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Another of people's favorite finds is an annotated copy of
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Shakespeare's Hamlet. McCarthy, who once said the ugly fact as
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books are made out of books, borrowed in altered elements
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from Hamlet for his nineteen seventy nine novel Suttry. It
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was his most ornate and poetic book, and the closest
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he ever came to writing autobiographically. The main character is
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a troubled dropout who has rejected a life of privilege
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and responsibility in Knoxville, Tennessee, where McCarthy grew up as
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the black sheep among six children in a well to
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do Catholic family with t wrong Irish roots. He was
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born in nineteen thirty three and christened Charles Joseph McCarthy
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junior after his father. In his youth, he was known
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as Charlie or sometimes Doc, until he changed his name
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to Cormac as a young man, partly inspired by the
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medieval Irish king Cormac Macert. The name change was probably
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also a declaration of independence from his father. Charles McCarthy
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senior was an attorney who became the chief counsel for
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the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Cormac always characterized him as
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a domineering, violent man who beat him viciously for trivial offenses.
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His brother Denis disputes this description and says that Cormac
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was grossly exaggerating. MacCarthy told his own son John and
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some of his friends that the beatings started when he
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was three years old. Readers and critics have often wondered
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where the darkness and violence in MacCarthy's work comes from,
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and if Cormac's characterization is true, his childhood might account
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for some of it. He loved his mother, Gladys, but
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she was psychologically fragile and frequently absent from the family
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in mental health institutions. He hated his Catholic school and
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loved roaming outdoors. Talking about his school days in a
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rare nineteen ninety two interview, MacCarthy said, there was no hobby.
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I didn't have name anything, no matter how esoteric I
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had found it and dabbled in it. He made money
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trapping muskrats around Knoxville and selling the pelts, and somehow
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also established himself as an authority on antique American rifles.
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In nineteen fifty three, McCarthy dropped out of the University
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of Tennessee, where he was studying engineering and physics, and
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joined the Air Force. He was stationed in Anchorage, where
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he became the radio disc jockey for the base and
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started reading in earnest in his spare time. After four
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he returned to the University of Tennessee, but dropped out
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again and started writing novels. The first three, The Orchard Keeper,
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Outer Dark, and Child of God, were Gothic tales set
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in the rural Appalachia he knew from his youth. In
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lyrical prose with marvelously rendered vernacular speech, they tackled dark
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subjects murder, infanticide, incest, necrophilia, while displaying a reverence for
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nature and folk traditions. The fourth novel was Sutry, McCarthy's
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richly comedic evocation of nineteen fifties Knoxville. These novels earned
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critical praise and prestigious grants and awards, but each sold
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more poorly than the last. One of the few details
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we have about McCarthy's personal life comes from his second wife,
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Ann Delile, an English singer and dancer, whom he met
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on a ship to Ireland in nineteen sixty five. Their
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home was a partially converted dear Mary Barne outside Knoxville.
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They bathed in a lake. Some one would call up
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and offer him two thousand dollars to come speak at
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a university about his books, she once said, and he
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would tell them that everything he had to say was
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there on the page, So we would eat beans for
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another week after leaving her without an explanation. In nineteen
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seventy four, MacCarthy drifted around cheap motels with his typewriter,
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a pile of books, and a light bulb for good
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reading light. In nineteen seventy six, MacCarthy took up residence
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in El Paso and turned his attention on the American
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Southwest and northern Mexico, setting himself the task of learning
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the culture, history, natural history, geology, folk ways, and distinctive
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Spanish idioms of the borderlands. According to a letter he wrote,
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MacCarthy read over three hundred books to research Blood Meridian
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nineteen eighty five, an ultra violent philosophical western based on
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the true story of a state funded scalp hunting gang
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in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. Now widely regarded
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as his greatest masterpiece, it sold a pitiful one thousand,
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eight hundred and eighty three copies when it was first published.
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MacCarthy's fortunes changed with the publication of All the Pretty
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Horses in nineteen ninety two. This elegiac western, set in
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nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty in Texas and Mexico,
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became a bestseller, won a National Book Award, and was
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adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruise.
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MacCarthy followed with two more novels about drifting cowboys, then
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shifted course with No Country for Old Men two thousand five,
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a crime thriller that the Cohen Brothers turned into a
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quadruple Oscar winning movie starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardin, and
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Tommy Lee Jones. Next came The Road, a post apocalyptic
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father son journey that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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in two thousand seven and was made into a film
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with Vigo Mortensen playing the father. McCarthy had moved to
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Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their
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young son John in two thousand one. He found the
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town off putting lee liberal, moneyed and artsy, and moved
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there for only one reason. His great friend Murray Gellman,
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the Nobel Prize winning physicist, invited him to join the
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Santa Fe Institute, serving as a sort of in house
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literary intellectual. This elite scientific think tank, co founded by
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gell Mann, brings together some of the world's most brilliant
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minds to research complex, interconnected systems. McCarthy had long preferred
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the company of scientists to that of literary people, and
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he delighted in the high flying conversations at the Institute.
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He went there nearly every day to work on his
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writing and kept up with all the institute's scientific research.
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Macar Dorothy was famous for refusing to discuss his work,
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so there was widespread amazement in literary quarters when he
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agreed to do a televised interview in two thousand and
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seven with Oprah Winfrey, who had picked the Road as
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her book club selection. Viewers saw a courteous, gray haired
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Southerner with a high domed forehead and a flashing smile.
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When Oprah asked if he was passionate about writing, he replied,
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passionate sounds like a pretty fancy word. Oprah, knowing it
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was true, asked if The Road was a love story
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to his young son John in a way, I suppose
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that's kind of embarrassing, he said. She made slightly better
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headway on the subject of punctuation. McCarthy didn't use quotation marks,
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hated semi colon's, and kept commas to the barest minimum.
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There's no reason to block the page up with weird
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little marks, he said. If you write properly, you shouldn't
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have to punctuate. McCarthy could pull it off because as
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he was a virtuoso renowned for his powers of description
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and ear for dialogue. The Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul
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Bellow extolled McCarthy's absolutely overpowering use of language his life
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giving and death dealing sentences. MacCarthy's detractors, meanwhile, found his
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writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him
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of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly. When
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MacCarthy died in June twenty twenty three, after battling leukemia,
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prostate cancer, dehydration, and what he once called the sheer
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velocity of time, the accolades were immediate and fulsome. Stephen
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King called him the last great white male American novelist.
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Sebastian Junger compared him to Mount Everest. The Guardian headlined
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its remembrance with the prophecy, his work will sing down
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the centuries. Dennis McCarthy, the youngest of the six children,
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his Way through the book choked Hallway into the books
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strewn living room. A retired lawyer, editor and conservation biologist,
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Denis published his first novel in twenty twenty one, a
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spiritual western about Billy the Kid, now eighty one. He
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was fit and trim, with blue eyes, a radiant smile,
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and a strong resemblance to Kormac. He was my best
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friend for seventy years, and a fabulous older brother who
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always looked out for me. He said, we were very,
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very close. I asked him about which authors his brother
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most admired. Moby Dick was Kormak's favorite book, without question,
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and Faulkner was more of an influence than he liked
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to admit. He said he loved him, Ingway's short stories,
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James Joyce, Tostoyevsky, and Shakespeare. Of course, readers and scholars
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had already identified these literary forbears, but it was satisfying
21:53
to hear them confirmed. Of the many thousands of books
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in the house, the basement, and the outbuildings, how many
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had MacCarthy actually read. If you exclude the encyclopedias and
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reference books, I would guess about eighty five percent. Dennis said.
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Cormac kept on ordering books after he was too sick
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and frail to read because it was a compulsion. But
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until that point he would read for hours and hours
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nearly every day. He never left the house without a book.
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He never left the house without a gun. Both were
22:26
equally unthinkable. Why was he always armed? He was a
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conservative country boy from the South who understood that the
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world is a dangerous place. When he was twenty four,
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McCarthy accidentally shot himself in the leg while practicing alone
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on a gun range in Tennessee. Dennis didn't know any
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more details because his brother refused to discuss the incident,
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but it was likely a quick draw gone wrong. When
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I asked Dennis about his brother's reputation as a recluse,
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he said it was totally inaccurate. He was very sociable
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and could get along with anybody well almost anybody. He
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didn't suffer fools gladly or people who rushed up to
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him gushing about his books. But he had a lot
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of friends, and he loved dining in conversation and five
23:12
hour lunches that sometimes turned into ten hour lunches. Those
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friends included physicists and quark discoverers Gell Mann and George Swig,
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the whale biologist Roger Payne, the movie star Josh Brolin,
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plus a bar owner and Tucson who calls himself God,
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and a silver tongued con man from Knoxville named John Sheddon,
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who appears exactly as himself under his own name in
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MacCarthy's penultimate novel, The Passenger. Rolin got to know McCarthy
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during the filming of No Country for Old Men and
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was at the author's bedside the night before he died.
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It was me, his ex wife, his son John, and
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that was it, Brolin tells me on the phone. He
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was telling these wild stories about drinking wine with Andrea
23:59
the Giant in Paris, and all this stuff was coming
24:02
out totally lucid, sharp, funny inspired. Then he would go
24:06
into this lost dementia and he'd be grabbing at stuff
24:10
that wasn't there. Then he'd go to sleep, and then
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he'd wake up and tell another story. Soon after Brolin left,
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MacCarthy drew his final breath. McCarthy's son, John, the model
24:22
for the boy character in the Road, was now twenty
24:26
six and sleeping in his father's old bedroom upstairs. He's
24:29
a licensed pilot, a composer, and a musician. The first
24:34
time I met John, he was coming sleepily down the
24:37
wooden stairs in search of coffee. I had just learned
24:40
that Dennis had emptied two storage units full of books
24:43
in Albaso and two more in Santa Fe and moved
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the boxes into the house for cataloging. So I'm getting
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a totally unrealistic picture of what the house was like
24:54
when you were growing up here, I said to John,
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not really, He said, this is pretty much how it was.
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Boxes everywhere, piles of books everywhere, The hallway stacked up
25:04
with boxes, with the little path through the middle, Whole
25:07
rooms so full of books you couldn't go in there.
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It didn't bother me at all. It was John who
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told me that McCarthy worked in bed a California king
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with high thread count sheets. The olivetty on a wooden
25:20
platform with a leather pillow underneath it and piles of
25:24
typed pages magazines, books, and catalogs. Writing, McCarthy once said,
25:30
was not a conscious process for him. He put a
25:33
blank piece of paper in the olivetty, the words arrived
25:36
and he typed them down. But that was just the
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first stage of an extensive rewriting and structuring process, and
25:43
some of his books took twenty years or more to
25:46
get right. Dad didn't like being interrupted when he was
25:49
working or when he was reading. John said, no, no, no,
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I'm reading. Go away, he would say. But he was
25:56
a great father, always there for me, and I learned
25:59
so much from him. We would have these long conversations
26:02
about science and history and music and whatever else. And
26:06
he was the funniest person I've ever met, just a
26:09
natural comedian. I asked John what else his father collected
26:13
apart from books, cars and kitchenware. I would say clothes
26:18
were the other big one. He had hundreds of tweed jackets,
26:22
hundreds of shirts, hundreds of suits that he'd never worn.
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John once spent three days dragging stuff out of a
26:29
room he wanted to use as a bedroom. When I
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was done, I said, you ever think you might be
26:34
a little bit of a hoarder, and he looks at
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me and goes, yeah. Probably he attributed it to all
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those years when he had no money. Dennis isn't buying
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that explanation. Kormack always lived in chaos, which I found
26:48
fascinating because he had such a fabulous artistic sense. He
26:53
could design things beautifully and he dressed impeccably, but his
26:56
living quarters were always a disaster. He was an incredibly
27:00
complicated individual. The cataloging scholars could only spare four or
27:05
five days at a time, then they would go back
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to their jobs for a few months and try to
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carve out another long weekend. In New Mexico, the stalwarts
27:15
were Peebles and Rick and Jonathan Elmore, whip smart twin
27:19
brothers who looked nothing alike, taught at different colleges, and
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wrote academic papers together about McCarthy's work. The cataloging was dusty, repetitive,
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eye straining work, but it was conducted with good humor
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and camaraderie, and you never knew what might come out
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of the next box. One afternoon, after looking through a
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batch of Cistercian abbeys, violin makers, metaphysics, meta ontology, the
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Incesse Taboo, and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.
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I said, was there anything he wasn't interested in? This
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concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader
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had it has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening,
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and have a great day.