Roadside Philosophers
ALLEN, BROOKE
Writers & Writing ROADSIDE PHILOSOPHERS By Brooke Allen CORMAC McCarthy published five novels between 1965 and 1985, before he undertook the Border Trilogy that he has just completed with the...
...Magdalena is the whore with the heart of gold, owned and controlled by Eduardo, the evil pimp...
...forever attracted and never united...
...Lion been over in Texas said I don't know...
...If the world was a tale who but the witness could give it life...
...but he might just as well have...
...John Grady is 19...
...Said I'm about starved out...
...During those years he was awarded Rockefeller Foundation and MacArthur Foundation grants, and his prodigious gifts earned him considerable, if not universal, respect within the literary community...
...They share a single voice, a prophetic, pseudo-King James tone of high artificiality...
...The custodian is one in a long series of roadside philosophers who pop up throughout The Crossing and the final novel in the trilogy, Cities of the Plain...
...John Grady falls in love with Magdalena and decides he will rescue her from her captors, take her over the border to Texas and marry her...
...But he seemed fated to remain an author with a rather narrow cult following...
...In All the Pretty Horses he failed to win his fair lady, the beautiful daughter of the Mexican rancher he worked for south of the border...
...And the witness to that witness...
...Said what's happened to you...
...On a trip to a Juarez whorehouse with Billy and the other cowboys, John Grady catches sight of a beautiful young girl named Magdalena...
...Billy is now a wiser and slightly more cynical 28...
...John Grady has changed from the idealized but real person he was into a paragon, pure in heart, modest, unflinchingly courageous...
...McCarthy possesses all the gifts of a great writer except, perhaps, restraint...
...Agreed to meet up in the spring and see how they'd done and all and whenever they done it why the old lion been over in Texas looked just awful...
...This country ain't the same," one of them says...
...And it was partly because of the way he rubbed the reader's nose in blood and physical agony...
...The prose veers at this point into a high rhetoric and low bathos that threaten to ruin the entire novel...
...In general, I believe that an inaccessible novel is a flawed novel, and that this is richly illustrated by the trilogy's second volume, The Crossing...
...The atomic bomb tests at Alamogordo are a very recent memory...
...Outstanding, too, was his evocation of the Texas border country's arid, subtly-colored landscapes, his attractively stoic young protagonist, and his quiet humor...
...This was partly because of the "literary" nature of his prose...
...Lion from New Mexico he looked at him and he said Lord son you look awful...
...In the process, he has been flattened out...
...McCarthy does not, as he did in Blood Meridian (1985), refer to his characters by their archetypal designations ("the judge," "the ex-priest," "the kid," etc...
...Cities of the Plain exhibits all the same flaws of The Crossing, flaws that finally cheapen what ought to have been a very fine trilogy...
...Rolling across the blue prairie through the night and on toward Langtry and Del Rio...
...The herders in the hills standing with their serapes about their shoulders watching the train pass below and the little desert foxes stepping into the darkened roadbed to sniff after it where the warm steel rails lay humming in the night...
...Or thought they was...
...Yet the book, like its predecessors, is also studded with magical passages that vividly evoke a lost world: "When they had used to spend winters at the old house on the southeasternmost section of the ranch the last thing he would hear before he fell asleep at night was the bawl of the train eastbound out of El Paso...
...Other old lion said well, said tell me what you all been doin...
...Or, as the Mexican Eduardo says, "They drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them...
...This then was his thought...
...The significance of McCarthy choosing this as a title for the final novel in the Border Trilogy becomes apparent when we learn that the action is set on a ranch in southern New Mexico during the early 1950s...
...They are working as cowboys on a ranch that has seen better days and trying not to think too much about their future, for the ranch is soon to be taken over by the U. S. Army...
...The young heroes of the trilogy's first two novels, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing, have been brought together for the final installment...
...The War changed everything...
...In All the Pretty Horses McCarthy achieved artistic balance through the use of a fine rhetorical understatement that reflected the land and the people living there...
...Only the witness stood firm...
...Said you might be doin something wrong...
...An alert reader will know from the beginning that this quixotic notion is destined to fail...
...A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name...
...The original "cities of the plain" were Sodom and Gomorrah, communities whose unrepentant wickedness brought about their destruction by an angry God...
...With the sensational reception accorded All the Pretty Horses in 1992, the reclusive McCarthy suddenly found himself no longer a cult figure but a national celebrity...
...In The Crossing McCarthy gave in to the temptation to editorialize...
...Here, on the other hand, is the aged custodian of a ruined church in Mexico talking about someone he once knew: "He saw the world pass into nothing in the very multiplicity of its instancing...
...The initial volume of the trilogy won the National Book Award and gained McCarthy a wide middlebrow audience...
...For one thing, having spent a significant portion of my childhood in the neighborhood of San Angelo, Texas, the hometown of the novel's hero, I immediately recognized the truth of McCarthy's brilliant characters and dialogue, despite the fact that much had changed between John Grady Cole's day (the late '40s) andmy own (the '60s and '70s...
...For what is deeply true is true also in men's hearts and it can therefore never be mistold through all and any tellings...
...Writers & Writing ROADSIDE PHILOSOPHERS By Brooke Allen CORMAC McCarthy published five novels between 1965 and 1985, before he undertook the Border Trilogy that he has just completed with the publication of Cities of the Plain (Knopf, 296 pp., $24.00...
...It was a rare accomplishment, a straight genre piece—in this case a classic Western— that was also a fine novel...
...The Texas ranchers and the Mexicans right across the border are both laconic breeds, just as the area they inhabit is a forbidding place that reveals its beauty, and its complexities, only to those who know it intimately...
...The result was a novel with two discordant styles...
...So faithful in love and so dauntless in war...
...Although I am not a particular fan of Westerns or of American machismo, I found myself reading All the Pretty Horses with extraordinary pleasure...
...Of course, there are many who like this sort of thing...
...That about sums up John Grady...
...Now he tries again, this time with a different lady and a different border crossing...
...Such writing will always, for better or worse, turn off many people...
...It's another world," as Billy puts it...
...Cities of the Plain ends on a stupefyingly pretentious note when Billy, now an old man some time after the millennium, meets up with a seer who might, or might not, be Death...
...McCarthy belongs squarely within the ultramasculine American tradition of Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, one that holds less interest and intensity for women than for men...
...There never was knight like the young Lochinvar...
...I don't think people even know it yet...
...He is a "hero," and bears a striking resemblance to another hero from another border, who shares similar debts to the traditions of chivalry and courtly love: O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best, And save his good broadsword he weapons had none, He rode all unarm d, and he rode all alone...
...Where else could it have its being...
...The critic in the New York Times Book Review gave The Crossing an unqualified rave, comparing McCarthy not unfavorably with Shakespeare and Cervantes and singling out for special praise exactly the same sort of pretentious drivel I have quoted above...
...He adulterated the purity of the narrative with long passages that allow some wise or fey figure to wax philosophical or poetic at excruciating length and entirely at stylistic odds with the rest of the book, which retained much of the honesty of its predecessor...
...In McCarthy's scheme—from John Grady's aborted union with the rancher's daughter, to Billy's unsuccessful attempt to set a trapped female wolf free across the border, to the impossible romance with Magdalena—Mexico is female and America is male...
...Still, even if one considers this good writing, it is so rhetorically out of sync with the rest of the novel that its validity must be questioned...
...He repeatedly undermines his magnificent voice with a self-indulgent grandiloquence that breaks the frame in the most egregious way...
...Sierra Bianca, Van Hom, Marfa, Alpine, Marathon...
...The white bore of the headlamp lighting up the desert scrub and the eyes of trackside cattle floating in the dark like coals...
...Everbody I ever knew that ever went back was goin after somethin...
...The cowboy and his horse, conscious anachronisms since the very beginning of the Western as a genre, have completely had it...
...A comparison of All the Pretty Horses with McCarthy's other fiction—before and after—raises a troubling question: Does a novelist cheapen his work by making it more popular and accessible, or does he improve it...
...Here, for instance, is an old rancher beginning a joke: "There was this Texas lion and this New Mexico lion...
...They split up on the divide and went off to hunt...
...It is the system of metaphors the author has established throughout the trilogy, though, that makes failure inevitable: Mexico stands for a wilderness and mystery that must forever be inaccessible to the doomed race to the north...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
