I want you to imagine, for just a second, a writer,
but not just any writer. Picture a guy who is
so intensely, almost terrifyingly devoted to
his craft that he's living in a literal dairy
barn. Wow. Yeah, bathing in a nearby lake. He
and his wife are basically eating beans to survive,
and the phone rings. Right. Someone is offering
him $2 ,000 to just come speak at a university
about his books, which, you know, back then is
an absolute fortune when you're literally living
in an unheated barn. Oh, absolutely. And he turns
it down. He tells them, everything I have to
say is there on the page. And they just go back
to eating beans for another week. It's just it's
the ultimate rejection of the literary spotlight.
Yeah. You know, a complete and utter indifference
to well. anything outside of the work itself,
which is a level of discipline most people simply
cannot comprehend. Exactly. So welcome to this
custom deep dive. Today we're exploring the enigmatic
life, the brutal, uncompromising themes, and
the paradoxical genius of the man in that dairy
barn, Cormac McCarthy. Okay, let's unpack this.
Because we aren't just talking about a novelist
today. We're looking at a man who lived a life
of almost like monastic dedication to his art.
He sacrificed practically everything for the
written word. And that is exactly what makes
him so compelling to study. Cormac McCarthy is
widely regarded today as one of the absolute
greatest American novelists, a giant of literature.
Right, for sure. But his path to that status
was decades of obscurity, deliberate isolation,
and an unwavering commitment to a very specific,
very stark vision of the world. Well, and you'd
naturally assume a guy who ends up bathing in
a lake and living in a barn came from nothing,
right? Well, he was born into deep poverty and
just never escaped it. Exactly. But he wasn't.
He was born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. And his
father was actually a highly successful lawyer
for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yeah, they
lived in an upscale subdivision. Right. He grew
up wealthy. So how does someone with that kind
of safety net consciously choose to live in total
destitution. By actively stripping away the comforts
and expectations of his upbringing. He didn't
just walk away from the money, he rejected the
entire identity prepared for him. Right. You
can even see that in his name. He changed his
name from Charles to Cormac, partially to avoid
being compared to the famous ventriloquist dummy
of the time, Charlie McCarthy. Changing your
name to avoid association with a ventriloquist
dummy is such a brilliantly specific, stubborn
detail. It really is. And that stubborn rejection
of the expected path just like became the theme
of his 20s. He enrolls at the University of Tennessee,
drops out, joins the Air Force, gets stationed
in Alaska. And was actually up in Alaska serving
in the military where he suddenly started reading
voraciously. Yeah. It's like a switch flipped
in the freezing cold. And then he returns to
college after that. drops out a second time,
and just completely commits to the page. Right.
He decides he's simply not going to work a regular
job. He actually told people he always knew he
didn't want to work, that writing was his number
one priority. And that decision didn't lead to
sudden success. It plunged him into extreme poverty
for a very, very long time. Decades, yeah. The
details of this poverty are staggering. I was
reading that he got evicted from a $40 a month
room in the French Quarter of New Orleans because
he couldn't scrape together the rent. Wow. And
when he traveled, he carried a 100 watt light
bulb in his bag. Wait, really? Just a loose bulb?
Just a loose light bulb. So that no matter where
he was sleeping, a cheap motel, a friend's couch,
he could screw it into the lamp and ensure he
had enough light to keep reading and writing
deep into the night. That's incredible. It shows
you how writing wasn't just something he did.
It was an environmental necessity. like oxygen.
Yeah. And then there's the dairy barn you mentioned
earlier. He bought it in Tennessee with his second
wife and Delisle, and he renovated it entirely
himself. Literally did the stone work. Yeah.
When the writer James Akey's childhood home was
being demolished in Knoxville, McCarthy went
out, salvaged the bricks from the rubble, and
used them to build the fireplaces in his own
shack. That is so symbolic. Right. He was physically
building his environment by hand, stone by stone.
Brick by brick. In his personal life, I mean,
it reflects that same unconventional restless
energy. He was married three times. And the biographical
record points out a relationship that started
when he was 42 years old. He met a young woman
named Augusta Britt at a motel in Arizona. She
was 16 at the time. Right. They hit it off. He
used their experiences as inspiration for his
novel, Setree. And the next year, when she was
17, they took a trip to Mexico where the relationship
became physical. Yeah. And they ended up remaining
lifelong friends. Exactly. Exactly. And to be
clear to you listening, our goal here is simply
to impartially report the biographical facts
as they exist in the text. We aren't taking a
moral stance or endorsing his personal choices.
No, of course not. But it really underscores
how entirely detached he was from any kind of
societal norm. It absolutely does. He operated
entirely on a different frequency than the rest
of society, often at the great expense of conventional
stability and those around him. I do have to
push back a little on this though. We tend to
romanticize the, you know, the starving artist
trope, but is this actually admirable dedication
or is it just sheer selfish stubbornness? It's
like he took a monastic vow of poverty, choosing
to strip away every distraction, including basic
comforts and sometimes his own family's financial
stability, just to keep the creative channel
pure. Well, what's fascinating here is you're
entirely right to call it stubbornness. From
the outside, it looks incredibly selfish to subject
your family to that kind of precarity over a
$2 ,000 speaking fee. Yeah. But to understand
him, you have to realize that writing wasn't
the career trajectory for McCarthy. It was an
all consuming priority. a biological compulsion.
He wasn't playing the literary game. For his
first decades, he was known as the best unknown
novelist in America. Up until 1991, none of his
books had sold more than 5 ,000 hardcover copies.
Over decades of work, for a guy we now consider
a legendary American author, you'd think after
10 years of selling barely any books, a normal
person would pivot. They'd hire a PR team or
write something more commercial. He just doubled
down. A lack of commercial success did not alter
his process one bit. And that absolute refusal
to carry excess baggage in his life extended
directly to the page. How so? Just like he didn't
want the distraction of a comfortable home. He
didn't want the distraction of traditional grammar.
Oh, which brings us to how he actually wrote.
If you pick up a Cormac McCarthy book, the very
first thing you notice is what isn't there. Exactly.
He had an absolute hatred for punctuation. He
refused to use quotation marks for dialogue.
He famously said there was no reason to blot
the page up with weird little marks. Yeah, he
thought some A -colons were idiocy. Idiocy. He
relied almost entirely on simple declarative
sentences, capital letters, periods, and the
occasional comma. And instead of using commas
to separate clauses, he utilized a grammatical
technique called polysyndetum. Right. That's
right. He would string together these long flowing
biblical sounding sentences just using the word
and like and they rode on and the wind blew and
the sky turned dark. He actually went out of
his way to aggressively edit other people's commas
too. I read he copyedited an article for the
Harvard Business Review. Oh yeah. And physics
papers for scientists at the Santa Fe Institute
just so he could go in and strip their commas
out. It's a brilliant manifestation of his philosophy.
You strip away the ornamental to reveal the structural.
Wow. And considering he wrote millions of words
this way, his physical tools matched that bare
-bones philosophy perfectly. Wait, I was wondering
about this. What kind of setup did he actually
use for all those decades? Was he writing by
hand? In the early 1960s, he bought a portable
mechanical typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32,
at a Knoxville pawn shop for $50. $50. And he
proceeded to type every single draft. every single
letter on that exact machine for nearly five
decades. We were talking roughly five million
words. A mechanical typewriter for 50 years?
I can't imagine how many times that thing must
have broken down. How did he maintain it? His
maintenance routine was literally taking it down
to the local gas station and blowing the dust
out of the keys with an air hose. You're a king!
That's it. And then in 2009, this $50 pawn shop
typewriter goes up for auction at Christie's.
They estimated it would get maybe 20 grand. It
sold for $254 ,500, which he immediately donated
to the Santa Fe Institute. A quarter of a million
dollars. And then what did he write on? A friend
bought him an identical replacement Olivetti
typewriter for $11. That's amazing. Plus shipping.
Oh, of course, plus shipping. That is just phenomenal.
But let's dig into the why of this. Why does
his syntax and his lack of punctuation actually
matter? How does it change the experience for
the reader? It's a good question. Because when
I think about it, it's like taking a race car
and ripping out the dashboard, the radio, and
the seat belts just to make it go faster. By
removing the quotation marks and the attributions,
you know, the he said, she said, he removed the
fences between the characters and the reader.
Precisely. Think about how your brain processes
reading. When you see quotation marks, your brain
categorizes that as a specific type of information.
It's a sign post. Right. When you remove those
sign posts, the reader can't passively consume
the text anymore. It forces you to pay closer
attention. You have to completely immerse yourself
in the flow of the dialogue and the rhythm of
his world to know who is speaking. Ah, I see.
It induces a kind of hypnotic immersive state.
Yeah. You are dropped directly into the environment
without a safety net. And what an environment
it is, because that stripped down elemental engine
of his prose was really the only way to drive
through the worlds he was building, the worlds
that were, to put it mildly, deeply brutal. The
turning point for his career, where he finally
gets some breathing room to build these worlds,
comes in 1981. He's awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
The genius grant. Exactly. And he received this
largely because literary heavyweights like Saul
Bellow and Shelby Foote forcefully recommended
him to the committee. And he uses that money
to travel the American Southwest to research
his next book, which becomes Blood Meridian.
Yes. It was initially snubbed by a lot of critics
who didn't know what to do with it. But today.
It is widely considered his magnum opus. The
literary critic Harold Bloom called it the greatest
single book since Faulkner's asylee dying. Some
academics even argue it's the great American
novel. But it is incredibly relentlessly violent.
The New York Times called it the bloodiest book
since the Iliad. And this is a crucial point.
This wasn't violence for shock value. It wasn't
like Hollywood action. It was deeply intrinsically
tied to McCarthy's worldview. He was quoted in
an interview saying, there's no such thing as
life without bloodshed. He actually went further
than that. He said, The notion that humanity
can be improved, that everyone could eventually
live in perfect harmony is a, quote, really dangerous
idea. Yeah. He believed that desiring that kind
of utopian harmony will enslave you and make
your life vacuous. Which is a remarkably bleak
outlook. He views violence as an elemental force
of nature, like a hurricane or an earthquake.
You can't reason with it. Right. After Blood
Meridian, he finally breaks through to massive
mainstream success with all the pretty horses,
which wins the National Book Award. And then
comes No Country for Old Men, which gets adapted
by the Coen brothers into an absolute cinematic
masterpiece, winning best picture at the Oscars.
Right. And what's fascinating about No Country
is that it was originally written as a screenplay,
which perfectly explains why the book is so heavy
on rabbit fire dialogue and so sparse on setting
description. Ah, that makes total sense. The
strip -down style fit the screenplay format perfectly,
and a huge theme in that story is the sheer ineptitude
of authority and law enforcement. The good guys,
like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, are completely overwhelmed.
Exactly. They realize that the rules and laws
they represent are just an illusion, a thin veneer
over the chaotic elemental violence represented
by the killer, Anton Chigurh. It's the realization
that you cannot police human nature. And then
he strips away society entirely, and we get to
the road. The road, yeah. He's staying in a motel
in El Paso with his young son. He looks out the
window at the city at night, and he just starts
imagining what it will look like in 50 or 100
years. He pictures fires up on the hill. Right,
and everything being laid to waste. That late
night vision turns into this Pulitzer Prize winning
novel about a father and son walking through
a freezing apocalyptic wasteland hunted by cannibals.
It's terrifying. And what grounds that unimaginable
horror is that many of the conversations between
the father and son in that book were verbatim
conversations McCarthy actually had with his
own son. That intimate connection is what anchors
the narrative. It grounds the bleakest landscape
imaginable in this profound, desperate, very
real love between a parent and a child. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Because you
have this extreme violence and bleakness in his
work. And in one of his rare interviews, McCarthy
said he didn't understand writers like Marcel
Proust or Henry James because they didn't deal
with, quote, issues of life and death. Right.
So I have to ask you, does his absolute obsession
with violence and survival make him a nihilist,
a pessimist? Or is he actually a highly moralistic
writer just searching for light in the darkest
possible places? Well, that is the exact debate
academics have been having about his work for
decades. It's heavily contested. I bet. Some
critics... absolutely label his work as nihilistic,
pointing to the senseless, unpunished slaughter
in Blood Meridian or the terrifying, unstoppable
nature of the killer in No Country for Old Men.
Yeah, they call him the great pessimist of American
literature, arguing he sees humanity as fundamentally
doomed. But there is a totally different way
to read him. Yes. Other scholars argue that Blood
Meridian is actually a gnostic tragedy, a deep
spiritual exploration of evil. Yeah. And when
you look at the road, many academics point out
that it depicts a deeply individual secular morality.
How so? The father and the son in that book are
constantly talking about carrying the fire. They
are keeping morality and human goodness alive
within themselves when the rest of the world
has completely abandoned it. Oh, yeah. It's a
very stark, stripped down kind of morality, but
it is undeniably fiercely present. He strips
down his life, he strips down his punctuation,
and he strips down human morality to its absolute
barest element. A father protecting his son at
the end of the world. Exactly. So he writes the
road, he wins the Pulitzer Prize, he has Oscar
-winning movies, Oprah Winfrey picks his book
for her club, and he actually does a rare TV
interview with her. He has finally achieved the
absolute pinnacle of literary fame. He has money,
he has universal acclaim. So what does he do
next? He completely rejects the literary world.
At MacArthur Fellowship Reunions, he literally
shuns the other famous author so he can go hang
out with whale biologists and physicists. He
had a profound aversion to the literary establishment.
He much preferred the company of scientists,
people who were dealing with hard facts and the
physical universe. Right. He became a trustee
at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a highly
prestigious multidisciplinary research center
focused on complex adaptive systems, things like
economies, ecosystems, the human brain. And he
didn't even have a formal scientific background.
The physicist Murray Gell -Mann said something
to the effect of, there's no place like the Santa
Fe Institute, and there's no writer like Cormac,
so they fit together perfectly. He was just absorbing
all this high -level theoretical physics and
math. And his time there actually led to his
first piece of published nonfiction in his entire
50 -year career, an essay called The Kick -A
-Lay Problem. Oh, right. He writes this essay
analyzing a dream by a 19th century chemist,
August Kikolay. But what he's really doing is
exploring the human unconscious and the origins
of language. McCarthy's theory was that the unconscious
mind is simply a machine for operating an animal.
It's an ancient biological system. And he argued
that language is not biological. It's a purely
human cultural invention. That's a huge distinction.
Yeah. He said the unconscious mind predates language
entirely, which is why our subconscious communicates
with us in dreams and images, not in words. It
shows how deep his intellectual curiosity ran.
He wasn't just interested in telling stories.
He was trying to drill down into the fundamental
mechanics of human consciousness. Yeah. And you
see the influence of these scientists heavily
in his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella
Maris, which were published just a year before
his death. And Stella Maris, notably, was his
first novel since the 1960s to feature a female
protagonist. Right. And both of these books are
deeply analytical, grappling with quantum mechanics,
mathematics, and the nature of reality. There's
a quote from him that just floors me. After all
the literary awards, all the masterpieces, McCarthy
stated, writing is way, way down at the bottom
of the list of his interests. Unbelievable. So
what does this all mean? How do we synthesize
a man who writes the great American novel, but
claims he cares more about theoretical physics.
Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture,
McCarthy's ultimate pursuit was never literary
fame. It wasn't about being a writer in the societal
sense of the word. His pursuit was a relentless,
uncompromising quest to understand the mechanics
of reality. Whether he was exploring that through
the bloody, instinctual history of the American
West, or the post -apocalyptic survival of a
father and son, or the evolutionary origins of
human language at the Santa Fe Institute, he
was always asking the exact same foundational
questions about what it means to be alive, to
survive, and to be conscious. The typewriter
was just the tool he used to explore those questions.
So let's bring this all together for you listening.
We've journeyed through the life of a man who
sacrificed every conventional comfort for his
craft, who ripped the commas and quotation marks
out of his sentences to pull you deeper into
his worlds, who stared unflinchingly at the darkest,
most violent aspects of human nature to find
a sliver of meaning, and who, in the end, sought
his answers in the company of scientists rather
than fellow novelists. In an era defined by constant
self -promotion and a desire for immediate recognition,
McCarthy's commitment is a radical act. He did
the work purely for the work's sake. Which brings
me back to that opening image. The man in the
dairy barn choosing the lake and the beans over
the $2 ,000 speaking gig because everything he
had to say was there on the page. Right. He believed
the work should speak entirely for itself. But
there is one final fascinating detail we have
to leave you with. Oh, this is great. When Cormac
McCarthy died in 2023 at the age of 89, he left
behind a personal library of roughly 20 ,000
books. And over 2 ,000 of those books contain
his own handwritten annotations. Right now, the
Cormac McCarthy Library Project is working to
digitize all of this. So for a man who famously
stubbornly refused to explain his work or talk
about his influences, What hidden keys to his
genius are sitting in the margins of those pages,
just waiting to be decoded by anyone curious
enough to look? It's the ultimate final mystery
from a writer who masterfully guarded his inner
world. Everything he had to say was on the page.
But maybe, just maybe, the secrets of how he
said it are hiding in the margins. Thanks for
joining us on this deep dive.