In the darkness, a home: Cormac McCarthy’s Catholic center

Years ago, in the midst of a doctoral program, as my wife and I were expecting our third son, I took a seminar devoted entirely to the novels of Cormac McCarthy. The Road (2006) had just won the Pulitzer. The course was led by the late, great Dr. James E. Barcus: a professor of the old school who fairly vibrated with enthusiasm for his subject, delighting in vigorous debate and holding up the objects of our inquiry with the unconscious wonder of a born truth-seeker. This was in autumn.

Our son was due in April, so we were in the tentative early stages of trying on names. I don’t remember if it was my wife Meghan who suggested “Cormac” as a possibility or if the idea was mine. Either way, we laid the name cautiously by. Cormac is of course an ancient saint and, in legend, the first Christian king of Ireland, but that would not be most people’s first reference point. I was falling in love with McCarthy’s work, but was leery of committing to a living namesake. Meghan undoubtedly was thinking of middle school playground liabilities, and insisted that he at least have a “normal” middle name.

The news cycle following McCarthy’s death last week predictably referred to him as the “author of the stark and the dark” (or was it the other way round?), with variations on the theme. On the face of it, there is truth to the label. Harold Bloom famously recounted how he started reading Blood Meridian (1985) twice, stopping and hurling it across the room each time, before finally finishing it and declaring it the best novel of the last fifty years.

Perhaps at the farthest end of the “dark and stark” spectrum lies McCarthy’s third book, Child of God (1973), at once his most grotesque and funniest work. It concerns a lone man, Lester Ballard, living on the periphery of a small mid-century Appalachian town. He is run off his ancestral land by the auctioneer after the bank forecloses, is falsely accused of rape, and somewhat incidentally falls into necrophilia after he is released from prison. From there, the arc of the story traces the outer limits that this two-legged Imago Dei can travel. It was unexpectedly after reading one scene near the end of the novel that I closed my eyes, shut the book, picked up my old Nokia, and laboriously punched out “His name is Cormac” on the number pad.

It is telling that I first heard of McCarthy’s passing on June 13th on a text thread with old friends (this time on glowing blue and white screens). The common response among us was real sadness. Not the impersonal giving of news, but a feeling of almost familial loss. A great light—and kindred spirit—had gone out of the world. Classically, literature had a purpose: to show how one ought to live, to die, and to love. The Greek tragedies incarnated the realities of human character, and thereby of cause and effect, on the stage. Gilgamesh embodies the awakening human sense of what it means to be civilized, and what obligations and limits this condition entails. Shakespeare and his characters are as alive as those around us (though somehow outsized and unified in their humors), allowing us to observe and criticize the naked human condition. This is not to say that great literature is didactic—far from it. Instead, in its striving to capture and transcend our lived experience, it becomes a shared inheritance. A possession to return to throughout one’s life.

McCarthy’s work was strongly Catholic in several ways. Biographically he was a “lapsed Catholic” and is widely considered an agnostic. And it is natural—and a fallacy—to want to possess a great artist as one’s own. But in this case the claim is borne out in the novels. I first wrote about this after noticing the intricate way that McCarthy uses the Catholic sacraments, hidden in plain sight, to mete out existential revelations to his most autobiographical protagonist in his fourth novel, Suttree (1979). When called upon to say a few words after one of his friends dies, Suttree says, “The only words I know are the Catholic ones.”

This could be seen as a merely cultural admission on the part of his author. But though troubled, this Catholicity is not the mere resentful cataloging of discarded furniture of so many ex-Catholic writers. Despite the adult McCarthy’s apparent outward lack of religion, he structures access to reality within his novels in sacramental ways. Suttree actually partakes of all the major sacraments while progressing on his Camusian, Absurdist journey. This dynamic shows up constantly in The Road, with the sacramental elements even more pervasive and precisely honed. Even the boy in Blood Meridian carries a Bible that he cannot read (following Faulkner’s precedent in The Sound and the Fury). That is, if there is any transcendent reality to be sought, it is not found only through the written word, but firstly through more elemental, ineffable—and physical—means.

On that text thread where I first heard the news of his death, everyone gravitated toward the ending of The Road. Someone recounted the time he had to leave a class to finish it elsewhere. “I was right at the end of the novel,” he wrote, “and it was pretty clear that I was going to full on weep and I didn’t want to do that in front of my students, so told them they were doing great work and needed to leave. I then finished the novel in a windowless room in Sid Rich under fluorescent lighting while I wept by myself. That moment was weird and beautiful and definitely memorable.”

This common experience with The Road is not sentimentality. I’ve read The Road about five times, teaching it several times along the way, and the effect grows stronger. The last time I taught the book, I realized that I simply cannot read the last five pages aloud. I had to have a student volunteer to finish for me. But it is more than an individual’s tragedy—or hope. If literature traditionally is described as “getting at the human condition,” The Road does so at a fundamental level. Throughout the novel, the man and the boy are headed “south,” toward an unknown end. They reach the sea (probably the Gulf of Mexico), but find no real practical help there. The true paradise they blindly seek—and which the father never sees—is family itself. The father dies and the boy, after having taken from the father the “fire” they carry and standing ready to face the inhospitable and hopeless world, holding the pistol with one shot left, meets a man and wife who themselves have a son and a daughter. A family of “good guys.” The boy asks the man who finds him on the road, “Do you have any kids?”

We do.
Do you have a little boy?
We have a little boy and we have a little girl.
How old is he?
He’s about your age. Maybe a little older.
And you didn’t eat them.
No.
You don’t eat people.
No. We don’t eat people.
And I can go with you.
Yes. You can.
Okay then.
Okay.

Like all things in their world, this fundamental catechesis is stripped to its barest parts. A family of good guys. The mother who greets and embraces him next fulfills the image. In contrast to the boy’s own mother who had embraced her death after echoing Job’s wife’s words of “curse God and die,” this mother functions as a second Eve, taking the boy in and “talking to him about God”—but also preserving the image and reality of his father for him.

Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

This moment can be seen as the rebirth of civilization and religion in their most basic forms. A potentially procreating pair, and a connection from “man to man” to the divine itself, the “breath of God”: the divinization of humanity in the body of Christ.

This moment and the surrounding passages stand as the climax of McCarthy’s oeuvre, but the centrality of home in his work is presaged many times. In The Road, we see this when the man and the boy stumble upon a survivalist’s hidden cache. The passage is achingly beautiful as the pair eat well for the first and only time in the book, and have a respite from their world of constant watching. The man bathes the boy and “laves” more water over his head in one of several pictures of baptism in the novel. The boy says, “Do you think we should thank the people?”

The people?
The people who gave us all this?
Well, yes, I guess we could do that.
Will you do it?
Why dont you?
I dont know how.
Yes you do. You know how to say thank you.

The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn’t eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didn’t get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

He looked up. Is that okay? he said.
Yes. I think that’s okay.

Towards the end, just before they reach the sea, they find one last abandoned house. It is far from the road and the man risks a big fire in the hearth. The night is dark through the rattling windows. The man builds the dwindling fire, covers the sleeping boy with blankets and brushes back his “filthy hair.” Then he says, “I think maybe they are watching … They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.” Perhaps he speaks of the unknown gods of this new wasteland or the souls of his forebears, or perhaps of the unseen “good guys” whom it is hinted the man knows have been watching them. But he creates in this moment a home, seen from the outside through glowing windows.

Decades before The Road, McCarthy had created the dark inverse of this picture in Child of God. Lester Ballard had been excluded from society since his youth. He found his own father who had hanged himself in the barn when he was “nine or ten,” as an anonymous townsperson reports: “The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and his tongue blacker’n chow dog’s.” As Lester grows up, he lives in absolute solitude before turning to increasingly dangerous voyeurism—watching “home” scenes through panes of glass. Finally, he comes upon a pair of lovers who have been accidentally asphyxiated in a parked car, and he takes the girl’s body back to his decrepit shack in the woods. Despite all the horror of his sins (and McCarthy manages to portray Lester’s fall as the unmaking of a human soul), Lester’s first night with a corpse is made heart-wrenching when see as the incoherent yearning for home:

He came in with an armload of firewood and got a fire going in the hearth and sat before it and rested. Then he turned to the girl. He took off all her clothes and looked at her, inspecting her body carefully, as if he would see how she were made. He went outside and looked in through the window at her lying naked before the fire. When he came back in he unbuckled his trousers and stepped out of them and laid next to her. He pulled the blanket over them.

Lester goes outside and “looked in through the window,” and for a moment has constructed, from the most grotesque of elements, the grisly image of a warm home and a welcoming bride.

It might seem strange that it was upon reading this novel that I felt suddenly the certainty in naming our third son after Cormac McCarthy and his own chosen namesake, St. Cormac. The decision came later, at the end of the book, after Lester has finally been caught for his crimes. He is taken from the hospital by a lynch mob, but manages to elude them when he tells them he’ll lead them to the caves where he has hidden the bodies of his victims. After days underground and a symbolic baptism in historic floods, he is walking down the road just before dawn in springtime. Unaccountably, a “churchbus” is following him.

He’d not gone far before a churchbus hove into sight behind him. Ballard scuttled into the roadside weeds and crouched there watching. The bus clattered past. It was all lit up and the faces within passed each in their pane of glass, each in profile. At the last seat in the rear a small boy was looking out the window, his nose puttied against the glass. There was nothing out there to see but he was looking anyway. As he went by he looked at Ballard and Ballard looked back. Then the bus rounded a curve and clattered from sight. Ballard climbed into the road and went on. He was trying to fix in his mind where he’d seen the boy when it came to him that the boy looked like himself. This gave him the fidgets and though he tried to shake the image of the face in the glass it would not go.

After this encounter, the roosters start crowing all over the countryside, sensing perhaps a “relief in the obscurity of night,” a relief that “the traveler could not yet read, though he kept watch eastward. Perhaps some freshness in the air.” And then he turns himself in: “It was dawn when he presented himself at the country hospital desk … His eyes were caved and smoking. I’m supposed to be here, he said.”

McCarthy has managed somehow to illuminate the Imago Dei in the most debased of human creatures. But there is no dramatic redemption arc here. Just the bare fact of a man twisted almost beyond recognition making one black-and-white decision: “I’m supposed to be here.” It is interesting to note that the archaic verb “hove” (a nautical term and the past tense of “heave,” as in the movement of a ship) appears only one time in both Child of God and The Road. Each instance shows up on the last pages of the novels. In The Road, it is used to describe the “good guy” who finds the boy after his father died: “The man that hove into view and stood there looking at him was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka.” In both cases the word heralds a glimmer of light on the darkest of fields.

In the end this reflection is merely a personal account of what Cormac McCarthy has meant to me and to my friends. Even as I write this, I hear behind me the shrieks of my own Cormac and several of his brothers playing some inscrutable game on the trampoline in the sun. What is it that Lester Ballard recognized on the churchbus, seeing himself as a child, looking out into the unfathomable darkness? We cannot know for sure. But perhaps he saw for the first time, as he recognized himself in this lonely and forgotten child, that “the breath of God is his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”

It is true that Cormac McCarthy himself looked out into the darkness where there is “nothing” to see. He did so as a sculptor searching for bedrock. The goodness that he found there will remain.