Every time I finish a Cormac McCarthy novel, I am gripped by
a vision of Marlon Brando’s jowls. Specifically, I think of the end of Apocalypse Now, where Marlon gasps to
Martin Sheen in his dying breath a condemnation of the whole brutal world and
the brutal life he lived in it. “The horror. The horror,” he says. And then he
dies.
It’s worth noting that I don’t think of the novel upon which
the movie is based, and from which those lines are taken, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. No. I think only of
Frank’s movie and Brando’s beautiful jowls. Old, sad, fat bastard Brando, so
bloated and diminished from the immaculate shimmering demon thug of his Streetcar days, confessing drunkenly in
some sweaty fish bungalow over rum and coconut prawns to Dennis Hopper that he
hasn’t read a single word of the script. Not one word. But it doesn’t matter.
He’s Brando. And no one is more aware of this than he. He will improvise most
of his scenes; he will gain weight instead of lose it. He is Brando and he is
brilliant and he doesn’t need any other purpose.
Richard Brickner, writing for the New York Times in 1974, called Cormac McCarthy’s third novel
“morose,” “self-contained,” and that most dreaded of critic’s adjectives, “sentimental.”
His review is unimpressed and bored at best, repulsed and frustrated everywhere
else. I, too, am frustrated by the book. It is frustrating to read such
beautiful prose, such precise and exquisite imagery, wasted in the telling of a
story seemingly without purpose. As Brickner puts it, “Such moments, authentic
though they feel, do not much help a novel so lacking in human momentum or
point.” Certainly this is not the magnificent mad scientist of McCarthy’s later
Blood Meridian, a novel which forced
the towering grump Harold Bloom to swaddle McCarthy in velvet robes and crown
him America’s greatest living writer, King of All Books Forever.
But despite my frustrations - with the story’s meandering
plot; with it’s characters’ predictable dullness; with the Coen brothers for
not snatching the Child of God script
from James Franco’s handsome hands before he turns it into a movie later this
year - I find the novel necessary and important as an example of McCarthy’s
growth. It stands as an example of McCarthy’s ever-bleak and impossibly scary artistic evolution, and as a
snapshot of his changing portrayal of evil as it stood in his early work.
Lester Ballard, the novel’s main character, does not articulate himself in
words. He howls. When he returns to find his murder victims “cold and wooden
with death,” instead of warm and lifelike as his raging case of necrophilia
prefers, he howls. All through the book, McCarthy describes Lester as “crouching,”
“hunkering,” and “ambulating,” no more capable of walking upright than the
beasts that populate his bleak and tortured Tennessee. He is a grunter and a
spitter and a pitiful captive, right down to the last page, where he dies in a
cage.
The book may read like an episode of Law & Order: Illiterate Victims Unit. Or maybe a television
marathon of NCIS: Parked Cars in
Appalachia. And yes, it doubles as an anti-necrophilia public service
announcement. But the writing, for all its ugliness, still commands moments of
profound beauty which indicate the later, greater McCarthy to come, and the
McCarthy whose vision of evil will mature. In his obsessions and preoccupations
he will soften, somewhat, and broaden his focus, going from “self-contained” to
expansive omniscience. And no other McCarthy novel gives us a clearer picture
of evil as he saw it then: a wounded animal turning blind hurt into blind
violence.
Then again, it might have just been the ‘70s.
