ARTS

McCarthy's writing process comes alive in archives

By Charles Ealy
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

When Bryan Woolley reviewed "No Country for Old Men" in 2005 at The Dallas Morning News, I, as the books editor, added an editor's note to his favorable assessment: "There's a factual error in the first line (of the book). ... Mr. McCarthy refers to a Texas execution in a gas chamber, but the state has never used that method."

At the time, I suspected that McCarthy, one of the most meticulous of contemporary writers, knew that the reference to the gas chamber was erroneous but that he must have used it for personal reasons, perhaps regarding the wording as a matter of artistic license. I also realized that, by noting the error, I might sound like an irritating gnat buzzing around a literary giant.

As it turns out, the punctuation-averse, word-combining McCarthy was indeed aware that Texas never used a gas chamber - or, as he put it, "gaschamber" - when writing "No Country for Old Men." In one draft, McCarthy uses "electric chair" instead. And that same draft has a note in the margins, in McCarthy's handwriting: "lethal injection starts in '82." (That was the date of the first Texas execution by lethal injection, which had been adopted in the 1970s.)

In the grand scheme of things, such details don't really matter. But as the drafts show, McCarthy is a driven, self-conscious, detail-obsessed writer, one who writes and rewrites, tweaking a word here and there and making notes in the margins. He rarely feels the need to explain himself, sometimes directing editors' questions about word usage with a simple note: "See OED," the Oxford English Dictionary.

But he does take himself seriously - very much so, despite the occasional self-deprecation. "I appreciate your inquiry about my manuscripts," he wrote in 1988 to J. Howard Woolmer, a bibliographer who advised him to keep his writings. "I've got - I suppose - most of them packed away in a storage locker along with corrected proofs and galleys and such. I dont really propose to do any thing with this junk except keep it."

These glimpses into McCarthy's personality and art are on full display in the newly opened Cormac McCarthy Papers, part of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University's Alkek Library in San Marcos.

Acquired in 2007 by Texas State University, the McCarthy collection is massive, with 98 boxes of papers arranged chronologically by Texas State archivist Katie Salzmann. She oversees the necessarily strict security procedures for accessing the papers, which arrived more than a year ago in plastic containers from the author, who lives near Santa Fe, N.M.

For Texas State, the acquisition was a literary coup. McCarthy's papers were long coveted by some of the biggest universities in the nation, including the University of Texas. But the writer ended up choosing Texas State, in part because of his friendship with Wittliff.

And now that Salzmann has completed her archiving efforts, the collection is available, by appointment, to researchers who want to know more about the man whom many consider to be the greatest living American novelist.

The canon debate

When you use such phrases as "the greatest living American novelist," you're bound to get an argument. What about Philip Roth? Don DeLillo? Toni Morrison? Fair points, all.

For McCarthy, the argument over his place in the literary canon got its most visible airing in 2005, 40 years after the publication of his critically acclaimed but little-read first novel, "The Orchard Keeper."

The salvo came from critic James Wood of The New Yorker, a magazine that has, in the past, built up and then attempted to tear down numerous writers, many of them from the South and West. (Two cases in point: the reputations of Eudora Welty, savaged by Claudia Roth Pierpoint in 1999 for allegedly avoiding racial issues, and Harper Lee, whose "To Kill a Mockingbird" was labeled failed liberalism earlier this year by Malcolm Gladwell.)The occasion for the attack on McCarthy was the publication of "No Country for Old Men."

While acknowledging McCarthy to be a "colossally gifted writer," Wood called him "one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner."

And as for "No Country for Old Men," Wood found it "an unimportant, stripped-down thriller" that will aggravate disagreement about McCarthy's place in the canon, which has been cultic since the publication in 1985 of "Blood Meridian." (The critic Harold Bloom called "Blood Meridian" a major aesthetic achievement of the age, "a universal tragedy of blood.")

Nothing begets critical vindictiveness and jealousy like success, of course. And by the time of the Wood attack in 2005, McCarthy was an unqualified literary star, having won the National Book Award in 1992 for the best-seller "All the Pretty Horses."

Curiously, none of the boxes of Texas State papers related to "No Country for Old Men" includes documents showing how McCarthy responded to the Wood controversy. Instead, nearly every box is single-mindedly devoted to the writing - and rewriting and translations - of his various novels and plays.

The translations

Typical of the McCarthy collection is a 1994 letter from Hiroshi Hayakawa to the author about the Japanese translation of "All the Pretty Horses."

"Our translator has found some difficulty with certain nuances in the book," wrote Hayakawa, the president and chief operating officer of Hayakawa Publishing Inc. in Tokyo, which secured the translation rights. "We are herewith attaching a questionnaire, and respectfully ask you to elaborate on them."

Some of the questions seem rather ridiculous, while others illustrate the difficulty of explaining regional peculiarities of language.

"Did the Comanche cut the telegraph wires in order to ride across the ranch?" one question asks. "Were the wires put up so low that the Indians could not pass under them?"

To which McCarthy replies, in pencil: "To disrupt the messages (in 19th century.)"

Question 7 asks: "Will you paraphrase 'You better load up good'?" McCarthy responds: "Load yourself up (with food), eat a lot."

And then there's Question 9: "What is 'the Big Rock Candy Mountains'"?

"Rock candy," McCarthy writes, "a type of hard candy. Song of this title also has lemonade springs and cigarette trees. A well known tramp or hobo song from the 1930's. "

Question 13 raises questions of vernacular: "What does 'coonfooted' mean?" the translator asks.

"Coon is a contraction of racoon (the animal)," McCarthy says. "Coonfooted describes a horse that has one hoof smaller than the other three."

And then there's a personal favorite: "What does 'put up wet' mean"?

McCarthy answers explicitly but tactfully: "Put in the stall without being walked and cooled off and toweled down (wet with sweat)."

Sweating the details

If you had to sum up the overriding impression of McCarthy's archives, you'd have to say this: He's very Old School, in a quirky kind of way.

He uses a typewriter. Pages are double-spaced. He edits himself in pencil. He writes about two to three pages a day when he's working on a novel. He sometimes puts the date of the writing in the top left-hand corner.

During correspondence with his first editor, Albert Erskine at Random House, he explained that he wrote 1965's "The Orchard Keeper" on a "Royal Portable, Quite Deluxe model, vintage circa 1958."

He also said that he didn't use apostrophes in negative contractions, a writerly quirk with which Erskine was familiar. Erskine, after all, had been William Faulkner's editor.

In a rare 1992 interview published in The New York Times Magazine, McCarthy acknowledged that he didn't know much about how the literary world worked and sent the manuscript for "The Orchard Keeper" to Random House because "it was the only publisher I had heard of."

He was lucky to find Erskine, who was to remain his editor for more than 20 years. They worked together on the subsequent "Outer Dark," "Child of God," "Suttree" and, finally, "Blood Meridian." All but "Blood Meridian" were set in the Southeast, primarily the mountains of eastern Tennessee, where McCarthy grew up.

"Blood Meridian," considered to be McCarthy's masterpiece, was his first novel to deal with Western themes - and coincided with his move to the West, first to El Paso, then to the Santa Fe area.

When Erskine retired in the mid-1980s, McCarthy switched publishers, from Random House to Knopf, and proceeded to focus on the Texas-Mexico border with "All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing" and "Cities of the Plain" in the 1990s. And for the first time in McCarthy's career, he hit the best-seller lists.

While most of the archives are devoted to various drafts of McCarthy's novels, some folders include notes on his research - especially when dealing with gunshot wounds.

McCarthy sought the advice of Barry G. King, an El Paso orthopedic surgeon, when writing about a gunshot wound to serial killer Anton Chigurh's leg in "No Country for Old Men." In the novel, Chigurh is trying to get drugs to treat his wound, and he creates a diversion by blowing up a car in front of a pharmacy, to distract the pharmacist.

In the letters, King warns McCarthy that no pharmacist would ever leave the door unlocked to the medical supplies, no matter what the distraction. So Chigurh wouldn't be able to get to the drugs, he says. But McCarthy proceeded to write the following:

"He was little more than half way down the aisle toward the pharmacy when the car outside exploded into flame taking out most of the glass in front of the store.

"He let himself in through the little gate and went down the pharmacist's aisles. He found a packet of syringes and a bottle of Hydrocodone tablets and he came back up the aisle looking for penicillin."

Add another notch in the belt for artistic license.

The archives also reveal a shift in McCarthy's written comments about his manuscripts. When first asked about them in the late 1980s by Woolmer, McCarthy acted as though the papers had little value.

But in a note to Knopf editor Gary Fisketjen during the back-and-forth mailings of drafts of "No Country for Old Men," McCarthy wrote this personality-revealing note:

"If there is any way that you could weild your influence to restrain the people there from wrapping my manuscripts - and/or proofs - in rubber bands, thereby cutting and maiming the pages, and throwing them in a sack to mail to me, I would be more than appreciative."

In a previous lifetime, I'd probably have questioned McCarthy's spelling of wield. Perhaps I should "see OED."

cealy@statesman.com; 445-3931

The Cormac McCarthy papers span 1964-2007 and are divided into published and unpublished works. Novels, plays and screenplays include 'The Orchard Keeper,' 'Outer Dark,' 'Child of God,' 'The Gardener's Son,' 'Suttree,' 'Blood Meridian,' 'All the Pretty Horses,' 'The Crossing,' 'The Stonemason,' 'Cities of the Plain,' 'No Country for Old Men,' 'The Road' and 'The Sunset Limited.' Unpublished works include the screenplay 'Whales and Men' as well as an unfinished novel, 'The Passenger.' Access to 'The Passenger' is restricted until after the novel is published.

The entire collection is housed in 98 boxes, including meticulous notes and correspondence between McCarthy and various experts, translators and editors about his writings.

The Southwestern Writers Collection holds several other McCarthy-related papers:

• The Woolmer Collection, which documents the professional and personal friendship between book collector and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer and McCarthy.

• The John Sepich Papers, with research, correspondence and drafts of works of commentary on 'Blood Meridian.' Sepich published 'Notes on Blood Meridian' in 1993.

• Perspectives on the Cormac McCarthy Collection, with drafts and proofs of essays by various authors, edited by Edwin Arnold and Dianne Luce for the book 'Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy,' published by the University Press of Mississippi in 1993.

• Drafts of McCarthy's unfinished screenplay 'Whales and Men' and his screenplay version of 'Cities of the Plain,' donated by McCarthy and Bill Wittliff.