Cormac McCarthy passed away on June 13. What can one say about such a towering figure in American literature?

He started his literary career with The Orchard Keeper in 1966. When he mailed the novel to a publisher, he was a university dropout. This was an era when writers did not need literary agents to interact with publishers. The novel was published but did not prove to be a commercial hit. The second novel, Outer Dark, met the same fate. Between the publication of his first two novels, his wife left him and took their son with her because McCarthy had asked her to find a job and look after the house so that he could devote all his time to writing. He wanted to spend all his time writing novels but those were not bringing in any money. The same thing happened with the third and the fourth novel. He kept writing and publishing for the next 28 years without receiving a single royalty cheque. He supported himself with the money he received from various awards and grants, and when there was no money, he lived in extreme poverty, eating beans for weeks.

For almost three decades, he failed to meet the first requirement to be called a professional writer: the ability to pay one’s bills with the income from royalties. Grants and awards helped him, but publishing his work was not profitable for his publishers. He often refused to accept invitations to speak at different universities, saying that whatever he had to say was already in the pages of his published work. This kind of tenacity and dedication to writing is rare. His second marriage also fell apart during this period of poverty. In those years, before the publication of commercially and critically successful novels, he lived on his commitment to writing alone. He was 60 when he had his first bestseller, All the Pretty Horses. This was the novel that brought him out of poverty and into literary stardom. This is also the novel that got him the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Now, his name resonated across North America. He was also a formidable presence as a stylist. Like Hemingway, he created a unique rhythm with sparse use of punctuation marks. He replaced the comma with ‘and.’

The reader can get a glimpse of his style in these opening lines of All the Pretty Horses: “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pier-glass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting.”

The entire passage has only full stops. His use of polysyndeton put him in the same league as the translators of the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Hemingway. He used conjunctions to slow the pace of his sentences and create a sombre effect.

All the Pretty Horses also attracted the attention of the American filmmaking industry and was adapted into a film of the same name. Released in 2000, this was the first adaptation of a McCarthy novel.

The novel that brought him the greatest attention was No Country for Old Men. It was a lasting testament to his extraordinary talent and his ability to craft unforgettable characters, particularly the protagonist, Anton Chigurh, an embodiment of sadistic evil and perhaps the most accurate fictional representation of a psychopath. Cormac McCarthy became a global name when this novel was turned into a cinematic masterpiece by Coen Brothers. A Belgian psychiatrist, Samuel Leistedt, studied 400 films with his colleagues over a period of three years to figure out which fictional character was the truest representation of the clinical picture of a psychopath. They found Anton Chigurh to be the most clinically accurate fictional person resembling real-life psychopaths because Chigurh performs the act of killing in the same manner as a normal person would eat fish and chips. The researchers concluded that Chigurh “seems to be effectively invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity.” The film was nominated for eight academy awards and won four. Portraying Anton Chigurh made Javier Bardem the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar.

The cultural landscape of the world was transformed by the insights that Cormac McCarthy derived from his years of dealing with poverty and roaming around America and Europe. His exploration of psychopathy in No Country for Old Men serves as a reminder of the everlasting power of storytelling and its capacity to illuminate the enigmatic complexities of the human experience.

The writer teaches literature and critical theory at the University of Lahore.

He may be reached at saeed@saeedurrehman.com