Dead Cormac McCarthy, the writer of “No country for old men”: he was 89 years old – Corriere.it

The American writer and screenwriter has died at the age of 89 Cormac McCarthybest-selling novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel The Road “The street”, in 2006 from which the film of the same name was based. His death was announced in a statement by his publisher, Penguin Random House.

Gloomy, raw to the point of generating horror, sometimes downright apocalyptic. But also capable of lyrical landscape descriptions, as vivid as ever.
In the American writer Cormac MacCarthy the harsh and often agonizing prose it was accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of cultural references, which ranged from the most illustrious novelists of his land (Mark Twain, Herman Melville, William Faulkner) to the great classics and the Holy Scriptures.

bashful man, from the stray life and full of hardships, completely extraneous to the literary environment of the metropolis, resistant to interviews (he had granted only one to television, made with Oprah Winfrey in 2007), he had gained enormous prestige step by step, so much so that a demanding critic like Harold Bloom had consecrated his “Blood Meridian” (1985; Einaudi, 1996) as the “definitive” westernthe most “mighty and memorable” novel written by a living American, to be placed next to Moby Dick.

In McCarthy’s books the narration, although far from flat, often has a dramatic trend, so much so that they are rather suitable for film adaptation. Works signed by him, such as «No country for old men» and «La strada», are better known to the general international public for their adaptations on the big screen than for the original literary version. But the group of readers fascinated by his books is vast and faithful: for example, in Italy a special site has been dedicated to him, full of interesting information.

Born in Providence, in the US state of Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, McCarthy, who was born Charles, had grown up in Knoxville, in that rural state of Tennessee where his first novel “The guardian of the orchard” (1965, Einaudi, 2002) is set. But when the author had published it, he already had a literary debut in a student newspaper, four years in the Air Force, a double drop out of university studies and a failed marriage, as well as the birth of his first child.

In the mid-1960s McCarthy had traveled to Europe and remarried. Meanwhile, the pace of release of his novels had become regular: in 1968 he had published “The dark outside”, in 1973 “Son of God”. Always scabrous events, torn characters, lost in that deep America of which he had become the most effective interpreter with his sentences endowed with a “biblical gravity”, the punctuation reduced to the bone, the long dialogues with dry sentences without ever the shadow of quotation marks.

McCarthy had returned to Tennessee, where he had led a secluded life in a farmhouse he had renovated himself. Despite the difficulties experienced in that phase of his existence, he claimed to have always been very lucky. But even his second marriage had not held up and he had then moved to Texas, to El Paso, in 1976. In 1979 he had left “Suttree” (Einaudi, 2009), costing twenty years of effort and considered by several critics McCarthy’s masterpiece: the partially autobiographical story set in the 1950s of a character who has severed all family and worldly ties to live hand-to-hand as a fisherman in a floating shack on the Tennessee River, in a severely run-down area of ​​Knoxville, surrounded by a humanity of outcasts destined for ruin. Other scholars of literature instead prefer “Blood Meridian”, published by McCarthy in 1985. Terrible novel, studded with atrocious violence, which takes place on the border between the United States and Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century. Here a stray boy joins a group of brutal Indian scalp hunters (really existed: the Glanton gang), whose most charismatic figure, in fact the real protagonist of the story, is Judge Holden, titanic, cruel and ingenious, almost an indecipherable mythological being. With this book McCarthy’s interest had shifted from the South to the Wild West, because “besides Coca-Cola, the other thing known throughout the world are cowboys and Indians”. He had thus published seven years later «Wild horses” (Guida, 1993; Einaudi, 1996), winner of the National Book Award and much appreciated by the public, his first bestseller, which was followed by two other novels, «Oltre il confine» and «Città della Piana», composing a powerful Frontier trilogy.

Even “Non è un paese per vecchio” (2005; Einaudi, 2006), initially conceived as a screenplay for the cinema, takes place between Texas and Mexico, but in 1980, at the crossroads of drug trafficking: it is a thriller that conveys a devouring tension, dominated by an absolute brutality, although always described in a dry tone. At stake are almost two and a half million dollars, found by chance in a briefcase by a hunter. Psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh and melancholy senior sheriff Ed Tom Bell confront each other. A film was then made from the novel, directed by the Coen brothers, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Woody Harrelson, awarded with four Oscars in 2008. Meanwhile McCarthy had published “The Road”, winner of the Pulitzer in 2007 and transposed in 2009 into a film of the same name, directed by John Hillcoat, with Viggo Mortensen and then 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee. We are in a post-apocalyptic scenario, due to a global catastrophe whose nature we do not know, in which human life is reduced to a desperate struggle for survival. Here a father and an eleven-year-old son roam in the most horrible desolation, but still bound by a tenacious affection, from which glimmers of hope can arise. A novel that also arises from the relationship between the author and the child he had at a mature age from his third wife: “Many of the dialogues in the book – McCarthy had reported – are conversations, transcribed word for word, between me and my son John”. At that point the long work for the novel «The Passenger» and for the very latest «Stella Maris» had begun: two intertwined novels that were published a few weeks apart from each other in 2022.

A man with a multifaceted and in some ways contradictory personality, especially in recent years McCarthy had found his fulfillment in work and in family affections. “My perfect day consists of sitting in a room with a few blank sheets. This is heaven,” he had confessed. At the same time he admitted that “creative work is often stimulated by pain.” But despite having thoroughly described the squalor, misery, violence and despair in his works, McCarthy had delivered an optimistic message to Oprah Winfrey: «Life is beautiful even when it seems ugly. And we should appreciate it more. We should be grateful. I don’t know to whom, but we must be grateful for what we have».

(Article being updated)