Worth reading: Cormac McCarthy and the cowboy-artist myth
Anyone who writes about the desert inherits a costume. A hat, a truck, a long silence at the end of a bar, a notebook in a shirt pocket while the light goes orange over the creosote. Cormac McCarthy has worn that costume in other people's heads for most of my reading life, mostly because the books are so sure of horses, blood, and distance that readers assume the man must have been cut from the same hide.
The Publishing Times ran a short piece this week on a new biography that takes the cowboy-artist picture apart. I have not read the biography yet, and I am not going to summarize a book I have not opened. What I can do is set the legend beside the public record, which has been sitting in plain view for years, and say why the distance between the two matters to anyone who writes about the West. That includes me.
What the record already said
Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on McCarthy is not a secret document. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933. When he was four, his father joined the legal staff of the Tennessee Valley Authority and moved the family to Knoxville, where McCarthy grew up in what Britannica calls an affluent home. He went to the University of Tennessee, served in the Air Force from 1953 to 1956, went back to school, and left without a degree. He wrote his first novel while working as an auto mechanic in Chicago.
That first novel, The Orchard Keeper, came out in 1965. It was set in Tennessee, as were the next three. It won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a notable first novel, and one New York Times reviewer complained that the young writer had half submerged his own talent under a flood of Faulkner. A traveling fellowship took him to Europe and to Ibiza. He came home to Tennessee. The books sold poorly. Britannica notes that until the Border Trilogy, none of them sold more than 5,000 copies.
He moved to El Paso in 1976, when he was in his forties. A MacArthur grant in 1981 paid the rent while he researched the next book. That book was Blood Meridian, published in 1985, and its first printing sold fewer than 1,500 copies. Popular fame did not arrive until All the Pretty Horses in 1992, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Road won the Pulitzer. His last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, appeared in 2022, one about a salvage diver and the other about his sister, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. He died in Santa Fe in 2023.
Read in order, that is not the life of a man who rode out of the brush with a finished Western in his saddlebag. It is the life of a Southern novelist, raised in Knoxville by a lawyer father, who spent his first twenty years in print writing about Tennessee for very few readers, and who reached the border country in middle age by way of research and a grant. The West in those books was earned at a desk. The desk is the interesting part.
Why the legend was useful to everyone except the work
A myth like the cowboy-artist does a job. It tells a reader that the violence on the page was witnessed rather than assembled, which makes the violence feel more expensive. It gives a publicist a photograph. It gives an interviewer a first paragraph. It gives a younger writer a shortcut: if the authority of the book comes from the life, then the thing to build is the life, or at least the look of one.
McCarthy did very little to feed the machine directly. He granted very few interviews, and by Britannica's account he refused to supplement his income by teaching or lecturing. The trouble is that silence is not neutral. When a writer says almost nothing, readers fill the space with the most dramatic material at hand, and the most dramatic material at hand was the books. The scalp hunters and the horse wranglers walked off the page and into the author photo. Nobody had to lie for that to happen. The vacancy did the work.
What gets lost is the method. If the reader believes the authority came from a rough life, the reader has no reason to notice the research: the period documents behind a novel that Britannica describes as loosely based on historical events, the ear for local speech that critics kept comparing to Faulkner's. The myth takes the craft and files it under biography. That is a bad trade for the book, which has to survive on its sentences long after the photograph has faded.
The desert writer's version of the problem
I write about the Mojave and the country around it, and the costume is right there on the hook by the door. Desert Eccentric is about the dreamers, drifters, and defiant people who carved their stories into the desert floor along Route 66. When the Birds Go Silent is a novel of the Mojave War, beginning when the Rose-Baley wagon train reached the Colorado River crossing in August 1858. West of the War follows the Civil War into the territories most of us leave off the map. It would be easy, and it would probably sell, to stand in front of those books as the weathered guide who knows the washes by heart.
The honest answer is that those books came out of the record, the dull and necessary paperwork that a place and its people leave behind. Whatever authority they have lives in the sourcing and in the sentences, not in a hat. When West of the War promises that every quotation comes from a primary source, that promise is worth more than any picture of me squinting at a mesa, because a reader can check it.
The joke is that one of my books is about a man who understood the costume better than anyone. The King of Quacks tells the story of Curtis Howe Springer, who built a desert health resort, a radio empire, and a mail-order cure business on federal land he never owned, and kept it running for thirty years at Zzyzx. Springer sold a persona first and products second. The desert gave his act a backdrop that made it look like revelation. Writing him meant learning to distrust exactly the kind of romance that a cowboy-artist legend runs on. I would be a poor student of my own subject if I put on his wardrobe to sell the book about him.
What a reader is owed instead
The alternative to a myth is not a confession. Nobody needs an author's tax returns, and a writer who turns every private fact into marketing has only built a different costume. What a reader is owed is narrower and more useful: a clear line between what the record shows and what the writer imagined, and the work done on both sides of that line.
In the nonfiction, that means no invented dialogue and no borrowed certainty. If a source is thin, the page should say so rather than paper over it. In a novel such as When the Birds Go Silent, it means the events come from the record and the interiors are imagined, and the book does not pretend the second is the first. That is a less glamorous contract than "I was there." It is also one a reader can rely on, which is the whole point of a contract.
McCarthy's record, read plainly, is an argument for that kind of patience. Twenty years of small sales. A move west in middle age. A grant spent on research. A masterpiece that sold fewer than 1,500 copies in its first printing and found its readers anyway, slowly, because the sentences held. None of that fits on a poster. All of it is more encouraging than the legend, because a legend can only be envied, and a working life can be copied.
Doing the work
If the new biography does what the early notices suggest, it will strip away a romance a lot of people enjoyed. I think the man underneath is the better story. A writer who did not finish college, fixed cars while drafting a first novel, kept writing through decades when almost no one was buying, and reached the border country through research before he wrote it as a novelist. That is not a cowboy. That is someone who showed up.
So here is the test I am keeping on my own desk this week. When I describe a book, does the description lean on the work or on the look of the worker? If it leans on the look, cut it and put a fact from the book in its place: a date, a name, a document, a sentence. The desert will still be there, and it will be more convincing for having been researched instead of worn.