Cormac McCarthy(1)
What a fine book. Very, very well written and quite beautiful. It concerns a young man, John Grady Cole, whose family lost the ranch they had owned for generations. Having nothing, the young man got on his horse and rode with a friend into Mexico. There he was hired as a cowhand on a ranch, became recognized for his skill with horses, fell in love with the rancher's daughter, and because of an entanglement with the law, was thrown in jail. Through the influence of the father of the girl he loved, he was set free. Once out of jail, he found her and asked her to marry him. She, however, with tears and sorrow, felt compelled to hold to her life, the life of a wealthy landowner's daughter, educated in the capital, of high social pedigree. That is the core narrative.
Unlike many books, the characters, especially the character of John Grady Cole, are rendered. That is, the writer allows readers to know John Grady Cole for themselves. By his words and deeds, and only rarely, through brief comments on his inner state, the reader comes to know the young man. His character is significant.
First, he faces life as it is. The novel takes place in the 1930s before the therapeutic revolution announced by Freud, promoted by modern self-centered therapies, touted in every book store by a plethora of self-help books, and proclaimed from the pulpits of the "Christian" churches. John Grady Cole had nothing to do with this deadly disease. He faced life simply. He did not expect to be coddled, mothered, fawned over, given a break, or excused. He went to Mexico, started work, and when things went bad, he accepted the consequences, did what he could, and rode on.
Second, he was utterly honest and believed in an absolute moral code, not as something socially conditioned, not as personal spin for the sake of advancement, but as something absolute and utterly binding. Near the end of the book, having reclaimed his horses from those who robbed him, having lost the one he loved, he went back to Texas where he was arraigned for horse stealing, having a horse that did not appear to be his. Taken before a judge, he told his story. The judge asked him several penetrating questions and acquitted him. That night, he went to the judge's house and told the judge that he did not want to appear a righteous man. Here he is, talking to the judge.
It was like I was in the right about everything and I don't feel that way.
What way do you feel?
He sat looking at his hat. He sat for a long time. Finally he looked up. I dont feel justified he said.
The judge nodded.(2)
He did not feel justified because he had slept with the daughter of the man who had employed him and treated him well. He did not feel justified because he had killed a man who had been sent to kill him, even though it was surely self-defense. In his words, "I don't know that he's supposed to be dead."(3) In other words, it was not simply a matter of being good to someone who had been good to him, namely the father of the girl he loved, it was the fundamental fact that saving his life was not justification for anything because there was something greater than his life. "I don't know that he's supposed to be dead."
Nor did Grady accept the justifications of the judge, that he hadn't gotten the girl pregnant and that the man John Grady had killed "wasn't a pretty good old boy."(4) There is a justification, but it doesn't entail excuses.
Third, John Grady Cole had a soul, a real soul. At the beginning of the novel, having just gone to a funeral in which the "preacher's words were lost in the wind," he saddled his horse and went out to where the old "Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch."
At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-salves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their travelling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across the mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.(5)
This is a haunting passage, a passage of a lost people who could only be redeemed in blood. John Grady Cole could still hear them, "When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses ..." John Grady Cole was like them. He belonged to a lost nation. As the novel goes forward, John Grady Cole lives, he loves, he fights for what seems true, and when he is done, the things that happened to him were so real -- love, life, death, horses, beauty, and haunting sorrow -- that he no longer belonged in the world. At the very end of the novel he goes to say goodbye to his friend Rawlings who had accompanied him for much of his time in Mexico. Rawlings asks him what he is going to do.
What are you going to do?
I don't know.
You could get out on the rigs. Pays awful good.
Yeah, I know.
You could stay here at the house.
I think I'm going to move on.
This is still good country.
Yeah, I know it is. But it aint my country,
He rose and turned and looked off toward the north where the lights of the city hung over the desert. Then he walked out and picked up the reins and mounted his horse and rode up and caught the Blevins horse by its halter.
Catch your horse, he said. Or else he'll follow me.
Rawlins walked out and caught the horse and stood holding it.
Where is your country? he said,
I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.
Rawlins didn't answer.
I'll see you old partner, said John Grady.
All right, I'll see you.(6)
What does John Grady leave behind? He leaves money, the comfort of a friend and a familiar setting, "civilization" where the "lights of the city hung over the desert," and above all, a country, which in this case is the United States of America. John Grady Cole had no country, and he shouldn't have, because this world, this country, this place, is not worthy of us. All these things could not give John Grady what he wanted, what he was willing to die for, that is love, and there is no love without sacrifice, and no sacrifice without blood. And for that, he belonged to that lost nation that “came down out of the north with their faces chalked … pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.”
Latin Americans have abused many things, but they got that part right. They know that life is tragic and they know that nothing is proven without blood. The aunt of the young woman that John Grady loved, a woman of Mexico, reserved, imposing, intellectual, aristocratic, and lonely, confronted him, telling him that her niece would not, in the end, go with John Grady. Her niece, like the Latins, knew that life was tragic. She would remain loyal to her father, her culture, and her way of life As the aunt told John Grady these things, she spoke of the Latin soul,
In the Spaniard's heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all forms, but not in its substance. And a deep conviction that nothing can be proven except that it can be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.(7)
North Americans may hide from blood, but no one escapes fundamental truths: North Americans require as much blood as anyone else. Iraq, though innocent, paid in blood for 9/11, but you won't find the government publishing pictures showing the blood of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the horror unleashed by the U.S. invasion. Latin governments hide their crimes as well, but the Latin American press shows blood, and for those with courage, they show the blood of government crimes.
The back cover of the book contains the usual accolades by the press. Newsweek considers the book as "rambunctious, high-spirited, bottomless inventiveness." This trivializes the book. The New York Times Book Review states that McCarthy "repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy." This finely wrought bit of doggerel deals with style, not substance. The Boston Globe notes that McCarthy writes with a "passion most writers either couldn't muster or wouldn't dare," another comment on style with no regard to substance. A paragraph on the back also describes the book as "an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid in blood." This utterly fails to do the book justice. The bit about the blood, in the context of the North American reading public, simply means gratuitous violence disconnected from any deeper meaning.
The book ends with John Grady utterly alone, riding west. Here are the final lines.
The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was a barren country indeed yet at evening he came upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chattering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.(8)
If you want substance and not just style, if you want to see the themes of this book addressed in a penetrating, comprehensive, and challenging fashion, read the gospels. Read them the same way you read Cormac McCarthy. You will discover that you too live in a "barren country," and you will meet the solitary one, suffering "like an animal in sacrificial torment," the one who, by his suffering, founded a nation "pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.” Do not ride on. Avail yourself of "the world to come."
Endnotes
1. Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage International, 1992.
2. p. 290.
3. p. 291.
4. p. 291
5. p. 5.
6. p. 299.
7. p. 23.
8. p. 302.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
May, 2009
