Not To Be Surpassed

As the last wisps of Zozobra (the idol of gloom we burn every September) drift away, on the verge of diving into another eventful Santa Fe autumn ahead, it might be a fit moment to briefly take note of our city’s paramount 21st-century literary non-event: the presence among us of our neighbor somewhere out toward Tesuque, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Cormac McCarthy.

You’re not likely ever to see McCarthy onstage at the Lannan Readings & Conversations series, or signing a new novel at Collected Works or Garcia Street Books. Apart from rare interviews (and the gigantic exception that proved the rule of an Oprah appearance, shot at the Santa Fe Institute, where he likes to hang his hat and punch the clock), he eschews entirely the literary self-marketing and schmoozing that is the lot of every author this side of Salinger and Pynchon. Sightings provide occasional fodder en el mitote, both printed and word-of-mouth. How cool is it to live where you might catch a glimpse of this credible contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature—a guy who sat down in front at the Oscars with his young son, John, when No Country for Old Men won Best Picture in 2008—ambling down the aisle at Albertson’s or Home Depot? Meanwhile, it seems a modest point of pride for us that Santa Fe is a place that respects the privacy of McCarthy and his family, respects his choice to sidestep the flak a public figure often faces. If he doesn’t want to be a big deal in our midst, Santa Fe doesn’t have a problem with that. Yet I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that mere proximity, and knowing that literary history, reportedly a new novel set in New Orleans around 1980, is taking shape up the road, shines a glint of reflected glory on the least of us.

Outside the circle of a quiet life in Santa Fe, Cormac McCarthy’s reputation and influence grow. Tommy Lee Jones has directed and stars (with Samuel L. Jackson) in a film of McCarthy’s 2006 play, Sunset Limited, airing on HBO in February. (The West Coast stage premiere of the play is opening now in San Francisco.) Movie versions by A-list directors of both Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain are being planned. Over in Texas, not far from where McCarthy lived before moving to New Mexico, Texas State University in San Marcos is opening its inaugural exhibit of selections from McCarthy’s papers in the Witliff Collections at Alkek Library.

But McCarthy himself, like many other Santa Fe artists and writers, is probably not very far away right now, working. As he recently told the Wall Street Journal, "I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time."

Illustration by David Levine via the New York Review of Books
The title of this post is from a Harold Bloom essay on Blood Meridian.
[cross-posted at Santa Fe Literary News]