I have had very few mentors on my quest to make this passion for writing into a career. I’m not sure why. In many ways, it’s the nature of the beast.
Writing is a lonely profession. Novels and short stories a singular product of the author’s mind. You sit in a room and commit your thoughts to a page. Then you send them off for complete strangers to judge.
In the past, collaborations with editors could shape a career. Meetings with peers too. But we’ve become so connected, we feel we can do it all ourselves.
I’ve met many great writers. Been encouraged and tutored by them. Had wonderful friendships too.
But most authors, when asked, will tell you about the works of complete strangers that give them the most inspiration. People respected for their work because they knew precisely that – how to put words on a page that would take root in the souls of readers. Communicate big ideas across vast and unknown distances with shocking clarity.
For me, Cormac McCarthy was one of those writers.
I used to have very few books I would read more than once. With so many great stories to absorb, reading one I’d heard already felt like an inefficient use of the little slice of time we’re given.
I made an exception for Blood Meridian. Then No Country for Old Men. There’ve been others. A few childhood favorites and Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy. But McCarthy not only tells fascinating stories, his work is a master class in the art of writing.
He uses no quotations for his dialogue. An artistic choice, but one that is intentional. Words spoken matter no more than the world around us. Or, taken another way, his descriptive text becomes the dialogue of the planet.
He can describe anything with a rare poetic clarity. In The Road, the man and the boy walk through a world turned to ash by some unnamed calamity. No corner is untouched. But in the gray and lifeless place, McCarthy finds endless variety.
His work is raw. Relentless. When he explores the American West he does so with the dispassionate eye of the natural world. His characters, the players on a stage for which they can’t choose the outcome. There is no romantic veneer applied. Only a naked truth engraved on the reaper’s blade.
Bleak, one could definitely say. Yet also honest about death, about human nature. A bold admission that we are, after all, just animals on this speck of dust.
However, if you can come to terms with that, then the accomplishments we’ve managed to achieve are only the more spectacular.
Many of his books speak to what most would call the brutality of history and particularly the Southwest. They are undeniably American in setting and tone but without the trappings of blind patriotism. They often pick at and find the rotten core beneath those things.
And as dark as it might be, tackling the nature of evil is in itself a worthwhile pursuit. We can refuse to speak it. Refuse to understand it. But then, and I truly believe this, we will cease to recognize it.
Yet, somehow, McCarthy made bleak and dark mesmerizing. He’s a true master of his craft. His words the keening of a wolf on the prairie or the thunderous strike of heaven’s anvil. They call to a very primal aspect we’ll deny we have but all share and a fate we will all one day encounter.
That’s the mark of a brilliant writer. His voice will be missed.
From Blood Meridian:
“It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that a passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog. The storm had long passed off to the south and the new sky was raw and blue and the spire of smoke from the burnt tree stood vertically in the still dawn like a slender stylus marking the hour with its particular and faintly breathing shadow upon the face of a terrain that was without other designation. All the creatures that had been at vigil with him in the night were gone and about him lay only the strange coral shapes of fulgurite in their scorched furrows fused out of the sand where ball lightning had run upon the ground in the night hissing and stinking of sulphur.”
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RUSS LINTON 
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