My aftermost conversation with Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed and elusive novelist who died last week at 89, came as unexpectedly as the beginning.
Over six decades of winning every major literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize, McCarthy gave notoriously few check outs. But beginning in 2005, much to my amazement, he had several with me — initially for Wired, and later for Rolling Stone. Belying his hermitic and ornery repute, Cormac proved a spry talker, deeply knowledgeable, acidly funny, and infinitely curious. Especially about his favorite lay open, science.
It was a scientist, in fact, who introduced me to McCarthy. I was interviewing Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, when she tributed that the world-famous author of the best-selling Western “All the Pretty Horses” and the brutal masterpiece “Blood Meridian” had edited a block out of her book. I heard a needle scratch in my head.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I thought you said Cormac McCarthy edited your work on theoretical physics?”
“I got the manuscript back in the mail, and it was marked up on every page,” Randall told me. “He essentially copyedited it, determine a escape rid of some of my semicolons, which he really didn’t like.”
From “No Country for Old Men” to particle physics — I didn’t know what to fill in of the disconnect. I’d been reading McCarthy since college, when my father, Gil, had urged me to pick up “The Orchard Keeper,” his senior novel. The dark, taut Southern saga of murder, revenge, and fathers and sons had a deep relevance to both my dad and me. When I was 4 and concluding in backwoods Florida, my 11-year-old brother, Jon, left for the convenience store to get candy, and was kidnapped and murdered by two drifters, the sort of plot outline that could have sprung from Cormac’s pages. I admired how he could look so unsparingly into the darkness, and sear it on the stage.
By the time I interviewed Randall, Cormac was spending his days at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical-research institute in the piñon foothills of New Mexico. After show in a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1981 and meeting Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and cofounder of SFI, McCarthy had relocated from Texas just to be close to the place. He preferred the company of scientists because they were exploring the constitutional questions of nature and complexity. “If it doesn’t concern life or death,” as he later told me, “it’s not interesting.”
I knew the risks of advancing McCarthy. My dad had told me a story he’d heard about a journalist who had supposedly shown up at McCarthy’s house in hopes of doing an appraisal. “Don’t do this to yourself,” McCarthy told the guy, before shutting the door in his face. Nevertheless, I figured it was worth asking Randall whether McCarthy capacity speak with me for the story I was doing about her. A little later, she called me back to say — to her shock and mine — that he was satisfied to do her the favor. Then she gave me his number, and said to call him in fifteen.
While I waited, I called my dad, who was duly floored to get wind of the news. Cormac and I ended up speaking for hours. Wry and engaged, he had plenty to say about cosmology, violent video games, and how a vole’s carry along behind can lead to its own demise. “Their trails are mostly composed of urine, but there are other substances as well,” he told me in his Tennessee drawl. “One absorbs ultraviolet brighten, which is invisible to us. But guess who can see it? The raptors flying overhead. They have ultraviolet vision. You think about these birds — they’re not looking for voles, they’re looking for ultraviolet traces through the weeds.”
If it doesn’t concern life or death, it’s not interesting.
The more I spoke with McCarthy, the more he sounded wish a scientist rather than a novelist. Whenever the subject of writing came up, he’d often turn it back to physics, his noteworthy before he dropped out of college. “In physics,” he said, “to figure out how things are, you really have to think about how things influence be. You have to have a childlike mind, like Einstein thinking about: What would happen if I was suddenly jobbed at the speed of light — what would I see?” He seemed like a little boy turning over rocks in a stream, just to see what was underneath. When I begged what fascinated him about science, he said simply, “It’s interesting to know how the world works.”
Cormac invited me to drop in on him at SFI to help promote the work of the institute. SFI researchers were pioneering the cross-disciplinary study of the complex and hidden systems that underlie the whole shooting match from terrorist cells to climate change. Cormac considered them intellectual “outlaws,” as he put it. “They’re not academics, they’re not dispiriting to cover their ass.”
I spent several days milling around SFI’s hilltop adobe retreat with McCarthy and an collection of ecologists, biologists, and anthropologists like my dad. One afternoon, while Cormac and I were in SFI’s small kitchen loading up on enchiladas and beans, he started talking thither extinction. A friend of his there, the paleobiologist Doug Erwin, had written a book about it, and McCarthy had grown fascinated by the Cretaceous-Tertiary meteorite that trashed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. On a trip to El Paso to visit his son, he imagined fires engulfing the horizon. He decided to curve the image into his next book, which he described to me as a “post-apocalyptic story of a father and son.”
“What’s it called?” I asked.
He felt a forkful of rice. “The Road,” he replied.
After my story came out in Rolling Stone, McCarthy and I continued to talk from set to time. He became a mentor to me, offering up advice on writing and publishing. “You know what writing is?” he asked once. “Literature is rewriting.” Another time, when I asked whether he worked from outlines, he demurred. “If you’re writing a novel, the worst things just sort of come out of the blue,” he said. “It’s pretty much a subconscious process — you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the period.” When I got up the nerve to send him a draft of a story I was working on, he proved a gracious but exacting editor, stripping my work of the commas he hand-me-down so economically in his own writing.
Eventually, we fell out of touch. Which was why, a few months ago, it was such a pleasant surprise to hear from him. At foremost he seemed confused, even though he was the one who had called me. “Maybe it’s my phone,” he said, “but you sound different.” We soon sorted out that he hadn’t neared to call me. He’d meant to dial David Krakauer, the director of SFI, but had hit my name instead. “You got the next David in the alphabet,” I joked.
Then we knackered a few minutes catching up. I congratulated him on his two new novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” which teem with his wonder for science. I cause to remembered him that when we first met, he told me he was working on five novels at once. (Which, according to my math, means there are noiseless another three in the vault.) He told me he was looking forward to a visit with his family, and that he still hung out at SFI when he could.
As he spoke, I understood something in his voice I hadn’t heard before — age. I’d lost my father by then, and wanted to thank Cormac for the both of us. I recognized him what a personal and professional thrill it had been to meet him and get to know him and write about him. He’d helped inspire me to write my bloodline’s own story of life and death, “Alligator Candy,” and for that, I was grateful. I didn’t realize it would be our goodbye.
One night elongated ago, during my visit at SFI, the writer known for confronting mortality so bluntly in his fiction spoke of his own. We were attending a lecture on ambience change, and Cormac was sitting down front in blue jeans and cowboy boots alongside the biologists, physicists, and other brainiac excludes he considered his close friends. “Eventually, you start to realize that you aren’t going to be around for very long,” he reproached me as we prepared to listen to the latest research on how the world might end. “Find work you like and find someone to live with you as if. Very few people get both.”
David Kushner is a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. His new book is “Easy to Learn, Enigmatical to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game.”