Cormac McCarthy – the greatest Western writer ever – didn't actually write Westerns

Cormac McCarthy has departed into the Big Retirement, leaving behind a body of words that rate him admittance into the pantheon of prose alongside such literary titans as Homer, Cervantes, Melville and Joyce. Accordingly, many are marking his passage by revisiting his work, particularly in the context of his conclusive, just-in-the-nick of time dual releases "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," which many readers have noted came as a deviation from the conventional McCarthy fare. Most probably expected something akin to a Western.

But while McCarthy is and will always be associated with the Western genre, he was never actually a Western writer. He penned a few Westerns, to be sure, but deviation and violation of convention were inherent to his career. As great a wanderer of genre as his characters were wanderers of the Blakian landscapes he hallucinated, McCarthy was a model of ineffable storytelling. There is no descriptor that can cage his style, let alone as cliched a category as the "Western."

His final works settled conclusively that no genre could pin Cormac McCarthy down.

In the opening pages of "The Passenger," we are introduced to an otherworldly character called The Thalidomide Kid who stands three feet tall, is covered with scars, wields flippers for hands "sort of like a seal has" and engages with the doomed heroine via a burlesque of costumes, superannuated puns and double entendre. As a longtime McCarthy aficionado I'd been anticipating the book for many years, and — while "The Passenger"/"Stella Maris" duet proved to be a satisfying if occasionally mystifying read — I don't think anyone expected anything like The Kid.

He seems more like something straight out of the withdrawal delirium of William S. Burroughs' "Junkie" or "Naked Lunch" rather than the ultrapoetic realism of McCarthy. Further hints of Burroughs are daubed here and there throughout the twin McCarthy books: the unseemly characters populating a down-and-dirty underworld, dubious detectives and layers of pulp noir, mental wards and medical jargon, an unreliable plot — plenty of elements feel like they would be right at home in the infamous Beat writer's Interzone junkscape.

While they are recognizably McCarthian, his closing works are a notable shift from pretty much everything he produced previously, and not only because of the aforementioned Burroughs vibes. One is a treatise on physics disguised as a restlessly plotted dime store detective novel; the other a coda in the form of a series of transcribed conversations between psychiatrist and patient, again delving into McCarthy's almost spiritual affinity for math and physics. We're a long way from "All the Pretty Horses."

With this last, strange leap, McCarthy proved once and for all the breadth of his storytelling powers, for few authors since Shakespeare have eschewed genre with such dramatic variance. 

McCarthy was never a Western writer — as so many have described him — but rather a writer who occasionally wrote Westerns in addition to exploring an expansive range of other literary spaces.

An early exploration of genres

Cormac McCarthy's name is bound to the Western genre with good reason. You certainly can't say he never wrote one, because did he ever.

Across the 1980s and '90s he produced some of the best-in-class titles to ever hit the shelves in the form of "Blood Meridian," "All the Pretty Horses," and the rest of the Border Trilogy. The trilogy — undoubtedly his most straightforward Western writing in terms of the narrative, which follows the experiences of two young cowboys who flee the runaway modernization of the U.S. in favor of a more rustic life south of the border — is as fine an example of the genre as has ever been produced. 

While technically classified as such, "Blood Meridian," however,  is more than a mere Western; it's a masterpiece free from the constraints of classification that transcends easy categorization, elevated by its thematic and poetic grandeur to a similar echelon as the likes of Joyce's "Ulysses," Melville's "Moby Dick," and Bolaño's "2666." And if you look over the rest of McCarthy's oeuvre, Westerns are nowhere to be seen, are in fact completely absent during his early and later career. It seems he had a bit of a fixation there for a couple of decades, but beyond that he defies pigeonholing.

His opening forays, for example, were Southern gothic tales so dark that they make Flannery O'Connor's murderous "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" seem practically cheery by comparison. "The Orchard Keeper," "Outer Dark," and "Child of God" are grisly tales of Faulknerian rural horror that could have drawn a grimace from the Marquis de Sade. Set in the Appalachians far from the "west," they follow the stories of cursed people trapped in cycles of pain and violence: a clutch of bootleggers ensnared by murder and madness; a young woman lost in the dark as she searches the forest for her abandoned baby, itself the product of incest; a necrophiliac serial killer on a path of devastation. There's not a lot of light between those pages.

Suddenly, however, all that Faulkner was slathered with a healthy dollop of Steinbeck. The former's "Light in August" gets crossbred with the latter's "Tortilla Flats" plus a dash of Joyce, and the resulting "Suttree" was damn near a comedy — if as grim a comedy as can be. McCarthy's previous efforts dealt largely with the inhuman potential of humanity, but "Suttree" was a deeply humanist novel, relating its casts' quotidian, humbly Sisyphean efforts to stay alive and find a bit of happiness in a world that simply won't let it be so.

For those who are keeping tally, that's four books down — McCarthy's opening volley — and not a single Western to be seen.

Westward ho

Now McCarthy spent two decades in his scorching vision of the American West spanning the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico. It was during his Western period proper that he finally found widespread acclaim when "All the Pretty Horses" became a bestseller (never let it be forgotten that its antecedent "Blood Meridian" initially sold only a few thousand copies), but even when working within the genre he didn't hesitate to sidestep.

Sometimes his characters resided in a romantic fantasy, while — not infrequently — they also found themselves tramping through one of McCarthy's famously hellish fever dreams. They were more complex than the typical two-dimensional figures stamped out across the Western genre, and the themes explored were loftier and profoundly philosophical. These are books of ideas rather than adventurous feats, even if those ideas are packaged and doled out through chronicles of adventure. 

There's no denying that there are smart books within the Western genre, but nothing up to snuff with McCarthy. 

With "No Country for Old Men" it was almost as if McCarthy was weaning off of the genre that had for 20 years treated him so well. Here we find him delivering a familiar Western-tinted tone through a familiar borderland setting, but now he'd begun to lean away from classic cowboys and more toward a contemporary thriller. Set in 1980 — well after typical Western time periods — it follows a Vietnam veteran protagonist who, yes, wears a cowboy hat and boots and knows how to shoot, but he's up against a cartel hitman rather than a greedy oil baron or jilted ranch owner. I happened to speak with Hernan Diaz the morning after McCarthy died, who accurately noted that McCarthy had "Westerns with horses and Westerns with pickup trucks." And while it's true that the book can technically fit within the latter description, "No Country" is more of a post-Vietnam War novel than anything, much in the vein of "First Blood" — a Rambo tale of PTSD survival.

Continuing his genre tour 

And then out of nowhere, McCarthy entered the post-apocalypse. While stylistically "The Road" was a recognizable if stripped-to-the-bone version of his voice, he had nevertheless veered hard into new territory. No longer in the horrible if occasionally nostalgic past, here was a warning or at least premonition of a dreadful future to come. Cormac McCarthy as the prophet of doom. It's a story of a man and his son drifting through the afterscape of a ruined world that has more in common with "I Am Legend" than "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."

Finally, the kabbalistic noir of "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris." Again we find McCarthy in somewhat familiar dominion — the south, subdued suggestions of "No Country" thrills, characters with the trappings of Suttree dereliction — but while the ingredients are all there, he concocts them into a wholly different feast. There's even The Kid, only in "Blood Meridian" this namesake is a human youth, whereas in "The Passenger" he is the Burroughsian apparition with seal hands.

We haven't even touched on his scripts for "The Counselor" and "The Sunset Limited," which took McCarthy into the disparate realms of drug smuggling crime thriller and kitchen sink drama. Suffice it to say that, other than the borderland setting of "The Counselor," there's nary a Western trope to be seen.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Daring stuff, all these elaborate shifts. He very easily could have realized the earning potential of westerns a la "Pretty Horses" and decided to keep doubling down on that forever, But McCarthy was famously austere in his habits and devoted to his craft. As it was he did what he wanted to do with his border stories, then moved on in an entirely different direction.

Genre relocations like these demand that a writer have unrelenting confidence in their capabilities and trust in their audience's willingness to come along for the ride — or they have to ignore the audience altogether. I suspect McCarthy largely sided with the second camp, though he also didn't seem to lack in confidence, persistently electing to go with an inexorable take-it-or-leave-it approach.

Gone a month shy of 90, McCarthy was certainly no spring chicken, but he still closed out his life working on a number of projects that he ostensibly intended to finish, including a screenplay for "Blood Meridian," long purported to be an unfilmable book. What it would have been to see what he would have done with it, and where he would have gone after the oddity of "The Passenger" duo. Clearly his work on "Meridian" implied an abiding interest in spending time in the Western creative space, but his final pair of novels made plain his habit of forging into narrative frontiers far beyond the confines of genre.

We'll never know where his singular literary divining rod would have drawn him next, but judging from the closing words of Stella Maris, it certainly feels like McCarthy was bidding the world farewell:

I think our time is up.
I know. Hold my hand.
Hold your hand?
Yes. I want you to.
All right. Why?
Because that's what people do when they're waiting for the end of something.

Quite the tearjerker, coming from some old Western writer.