Cormac McCarthy RIP

See the freelance opinion columnist. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged hoodie. He opens a can of soft drink. Outside lie dark turned streets with clumps of dog shit and the darker housing estates beyond that harbour yet a last few football hooligans.

He thinks, pale and unwashed. He can just about read and write yet in him lurks already a taste for other people’s mindless violence.

A novelist dead. Words to be written. Blood to be spilled. He pours a bowl of cereal and eats the bowl of cereal and wishes he had bought fresh milk and drinks some Coke because his mouth is dry and is it because of the death or the granola?

“Cormac McCarthy was perhaps the last great American novelist…”

He looks out into the grey light and asks himself if Thomas Pynchon is still alive. Or Don DeLillo. Is Don DeLillo a great American novelist? Does he have two “l”s before the “i” and one before the “o”? Or is it the other way around?

“His Blood Meridian has been described as ‘the Great American Novel’…”

By who? And what is a “meridian” anyway? Some kind of fruit? No, he’s merging “blood orange” and “mandarin”. Google. “Meridian definition”. “Meridian: the highest point reached”. Fancy that.

He thinks a problem with writing about books is that you can’t express quite how you felt when you read them. Kingsley Amis wrote something similar about women. Is there an article in that? Do we love books like we love women? Maybe not. Certainly not The Road. Unless it is a very particular kind of woman.

With the first blue sky he rises and leaves his dog sleeping and walks out the bathroom and studies his hairline. He brushes his teeth and spits the toothpaste out into the sink and it is streaked with blood.

“A true artist, McCarthy once refused a speaking engagement for two thousand dollars because everything he had to say he had said in his books…”

He checks his bank account to see if the Spectator has paid him. It has. Should he ask for a higher fee next time? Or should he just feel glad to be accepted at all?

“McCarthy travelled the border between barbarism and civilisation…”

He looks at his phone and opens Twitter and sees what people have been posting about in the night and it’s about dating and if you can be in relationships with people who have different politics to you and Ukraine is flooding and some guy stabbed three people to death in Nottingham and a trans person flashed their tits on camera outside the White House for some reason.

“He was a poet of masculinity…”

Did he say that about Martin Amis too?

“He was a poet of American masculinity…”

Perfect.

He picks his nose. He looks at what’s beneath the nail. He should go to the gym, he thinks. His ancestors grew strong in mountains. So did Sisyphus.

“His fame was secured by the enormous success of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men…”

He rubs the stubble on his jaw. The fraying edges of his soul. No one must ever know he thought the ending was a bit anticlimactic.

“He was part of a dying breed…”

By which he means old people. And authors who wrote about scalpings, not queer poets in space.

“Perhaps we shall not see his kind again…”

Which means he doesn’t have to read new books. Or write them. He thinks perhaps writers enjoy announcing the end of things because they don’t have to commit to something new. McCarthy forged his own style. He laid his imagination across our world. But that takes a lot of work. And you might look stupid.

“Above all, he was honest about human nature.”

Other people’s human nature. People in the Wild West. People in the Donbas. People in books.

The dog should go outside. He carries her down the stairs. Her legs aren’t too good any more. They walk into the morning air. She pees against the fence. Life renews itself just long enough to keep death at bay.