Cormac McCarthy's Final Work: The Masterpiece and the Beautiful Mess (Part 1)
Cormac McCarthy worked on his final novel for 40 years. Biographers, friends, and readers recall the novelist’s final sprint, against illness & doubt, to complete the work
Cormac McCarthy’s final project, published in 2022, was written mostly in the 1980s. Biographers, friends, and readers recall the novelist’s final sprint, against illness and doubt, to complete a work that’s either a beautiful mess, or elusive masterpiece.
This first installment utilizes interviews with—and is deeply indebted to the participation of—the filmmaker John Hillcoat (director of The Road, and currently adapting Blood Meridian); the two full-dress biographers currently working on (separate) McCarthy projects, Laurence Gonzales and Tracy Daugherty; McCarthy scholar/biographer Dr. Dianne C. Luce, as well as co-founder of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Richard Wallach; theoretical physicist, filmmaker, author and teacher Lawrence Krauss made the time for two interviews, and Dr. Scott Yarbrough, host of the Reading Cormac McCarthy podcast helped guide me into the subject, provided encouragement, and has been a general mensch.
It’s 1991 and Richard Wallach, a graduate student based in New York, is doing research in Melbourne when a colleague—the late Patrick White scholar John McLaren— asks him, over dinner, if he’s ever read Cormac McCarthy.
Wallach says he’s heard the name but, “No,” hasn’t read any of the novels.
McLaren says McCarthy’s great, you really oughta give him a shot.
A few days later Wallach and his wife and their young daughter are boarding a train called The Ghan for a nineteen-hour trip when Wallach, glancing in his carry-on, realizes he doesn’t have anything reading material.
Panicked, looking around the station, he spots a pharmacy (“Although,” he cautions, “they say ‘chemist’ over there…”), ducks inside to browse the spinner racks and finds a paperback by Cormac McCarthy.
Small world.
Time’s tight and so, whatever, he buys it without much thought, gets on the train, settles in with his wife and daughter in a first-class sleeper car as the sun goes down. They eat and hang out. Evening settles in.
When his wife and daughter fall asleep he grabs his paperback, slips out into the hall, heads down to the lounge car where the other loners are sitting. Toasting one another. Talking softly. Latenight Australia skating along outside the window and the whole car trundling with, as he remembers, “a nicotine atmosphere.”
Wallach sits with his book, Blood Meridian, turns the first page,
“And I literally sat there all night long. Finished it just as the sun was coming up.”
Thirty years later, it marks a turning point in his life.
“I remember putting it down and thinking, How the hell did I miss this guy?”
In 1991, McCarthy was entirely out of print, but a year later he would publish All the Pretty Horses, his first bestseller, and with a sequel coming two years on its heels, and a threequel four years after that, McCarthy continued coasting, at a broken pace, through the novel he’d been working on just prior to Blood Meridian. What he described, back then, as his “next book” after the western.
It had to do with physics. Math. Suicide. One of his few contemporary-set works. Stranger than anything he’d tried before.
What seemed like his next book, in the early 1980s, would in fact be his last, published a few months shy of his death, nearly forty years later.
Wallach, by accident, would be one of the only people to see it before then.
Jump ahead, 2008, and Cormac McCarthy is one of the most decorated novelists in America.
His most recent novel, The Road, is an Oprah Book Club pick, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. It’s sold nearly a million copies. He sells his archive to the Wittliff Collection at the University of Texas for $2 million.
He’s about to turn his attention back to The Passenger.
He gives a few early drafts of it to the Wittliff Collection. He doesn’t need these anymore. The book has evolved.
Part of the agreement is, the library will set these pages aside.
They promise: Nobody will see a word until after the novel is published.
Wallach is at the McCarthy archive in Texas, 2013. Maybe ‘14.
“Bit of a blur,” says Wallach, “I was visiting the archive every two or three months, so it’s tough to pinpoint.”
Wallach is now a co-founding member of the Cormac McCarthy Society, a group of likeminded enthusiasts; many are scholars but not all. They publish a journal, they meet at conferences.
He’s writing a paper about Suttree (1979), McCarthy’s huge Joycean comedy set in 1950s Tennessee, looking through early drafts. Suttree shed almost a novel’s worth of material on its way to publication. Whole set pieces that’ve been read by researchers, described to fans, and turned into lore. He dropped a scene involving a cockfight at a barn, for instance, where someone lights a cat on fire and the cat runs into a hay bale and suddenly the whole barn’s burning…
Wallach’s paging through all this when he finds something new.
It takes place on an offshore oil platform. A character named Bobby is helicoptered in to do a job but, once he’s dropped on the helipad, and starts roaming around, he realizes he’s alone. There’s nobody here. The whole place is quiet. He puts his bag down inside. He walks around. He eats. He reads and sleeps. One morning, eating eggs, he freezes: there’s a coffee cup on the counter. He hadn’t seen it before.
Wallach freezes too.
This page isn’t supposed to be here either.
That Wallach read an early excerpt of The Passenger became lore among “Cormackians” but he prided himself on the fact that, as McCarthy’s brother Dennis relayed, the publicity-shy novelist was pleased with the Society’s work: that they studied it, respected it, and left him alone.
Wallach wouldn’t describe what he’d read until publication.
All he’d say is that the book is worth waiting for.
For another ten years, the experience was entirely his own.
2022 and The Passenger comes out and everyone’s relationship to the novel appears fraught. Different.
The compliments come with caveats.
The caveats come with doubts.
The novel, on its surface, is a crime story without a crime; a mystery without a solution; it centers on a salvage diver in New Orleans named Bobby Western. When his story opens he’s diving with his partner to investigate a plane that crash-landed in the water and sank. There’s no obvious damage to the inside or outside. The pilots are dead in the cockpit and the black box is missing. Nine passengers are buckled dead in their seats but a tenth one appears to be missing.
So who’s the missing passenger? Where are they? Did they have anything to do with the crash?
It’s a good setup for a crime story; in fact, after collaborating on The Gardener’s Son for KCET, McCarthy and the filmmaker Dick Pearce shopped the premise around as a film treatment.
But the novel drifts away from that storyline. It focuses on Bobby’s father, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan project in Oak Ridge and met his wife there. It focuses even more so on Bobby’s sister Alice (or Alicia), whom we glimpse in a prologue, and in flashbacks throughout the novel, though she’s killed herself before the action has begun. A math genius, schizophrenic, she and Bobby shared a chaste romantic love for several years before her death.
In those flashbacks—presented as brief italicized prologues to every chapter—we see Alice speaking with a hallucinated companion; a cohort (“hort” for short), a diminutive, hairless, flipper-handed vaudevillian who speaks to her in puns, non sequiturs, dirty jokes.
When The Passenger finally comes out, it’s a two-book event, with Alice getting a volume of her own: Stella Maris, a closet drama in seven chapters, transcribing Alice’s conversation with her psychologist at the eponymous in-patient facility where she’s mourning her “braindead” brother—the other volume’s hero. At this point in the larger story, or this branch of the timeline, or this alternate dimension, Bobby’s in a hospital, comatose after a car wreck.
In The Passenger, Bobby has survived the coma while Alice has killed herself in fear that he would never wake up; in Stella Maris, Alice is alive and her brother has no chance of recovering. Both volumes are consumed with death, absence, departure, a dark and churning ocean, fallen things (dead birds on a helipad, a helicopter in a tree, an airplane at the bottom of a lake) fading light.
Is each an account of the other’s dying dream? Is one volume more “real” than the other? The Passenger’s protagonist rarely speaks at all, Stella Maris’s protagonist does nothing but. Is one more reliable than the other?
Would McCarthy have had an answer?
The novel is knowingly elusive, in some spots, but at others—as readers and his biographers have noticed—the loose-ends seem less calibrated than others. Like something’s missing.
After all, a few years before he died, McCarthy was telling interviewers and friends he was working at three books at once.
These are the two that we’ve got.
Cormac McCarthy seems to have started thinking about The Passenger in the late 1960s, but wasn’t working on it steadily until the early 1980s, setting it aside as Blood Meridian occupied more and more of his attention, involving extensive travel of the west and a reading list of roughly 300 volumes, by his own later estimate.
He thought The Passenger might be his “next book” until he got caught up in another western, which expanded into a trilogy, published through the 1990s.
But he always circled back to The Passenger, a project that, as Wallach later put it to Newsweek, appeared to have become “mired in its own complexity.”
By the time of its release, one book had become two, reflecting a few decades of research, conversation, personal experience and stylistic experiments; his last literary feat was to synchronize its moving parts, tie it all together, and give both volumes a polish.
All with an eye on the clock.
There’d been a cancer diagnosis. Then radiation. “The side effects of the treatment were so severe,” said McCarthy’s official biographer, Laurence Gonzales, “they made it virtually impossible for Cormac to work.”
“I don’t feel good,” McCarthy once told him, a colleague at the Santa Fe Institute, “and it’s hard to write when you don’t feel good.”
His movement and comfort hampered by age, and the lasting effects of radiation, McCarthy was resolved to finish The Passenger and Stella Maris, but his stamina wavered.
As Jonathan Hillcoat, a friend and collaborator (director of The Road, with whom McCarthy was planning Blood Meridian’s adaptation at the time of his death), wrote in a tribute, this was when McCarthy’s “family stayed close and rallied around him. We got him to finish the novels.” As Hillcoat elaborated in a phone call this summer, the help wasn’t collaborative, critical, or even explicitly encouraging; rather, it was bent on “facilitating” McCarthy’s progress.
Colleagues at the Institute might come to the house for a meal, or try (with varied success) to rouse him for a walk. The support network typed his handwritten corrections, submitted passages to colleagues who might vet the science in the novels, the math, the history. Created comfort around the bed where he worked, his typewriter perched on a strip of wood.
With the help of this network—despite worries about dying, and things left unresolved; despite constant sliding on a scale of discomfort and pain, despite even the dispiriting pandemic isolation—McCarthy finished his opus, capping a manuscript that first took shape half his life ago, in fits and starts between the largest works of his career; a project whose inspiration came to him a decade before that, from the unwritten verse of a dive bar ballad his friend used to sing in Chicago.
Dr. Dianne C. Luce is “a first-generation Cormackian,” in the parlance of peers, meaning she wasn’t only studying McCarthy before he was cool, she was there to see his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, hit the ground.
“Those of us who’ve been working on [McCarthy’s work since the 1980s] have known almost nothing. This whole time. About his work process, his life, his attitudes about his work—except that he wanted to not talk about it. So there’s a great deal that’s still unknown.”
But Luce has unearthed more than most. In a 2020 paper for The Cormac McCarthy Journal1, Luce studied McCarthy’s 1980s correspondence at the archive to decipher what she could of the novel’s subject matter and inspiration.
McCarthy heard a friend recite a poem in various Chicago bars, whose verse was “never writ down,” recounting the legend of a real-life jazz musician, Leon Rappolo, a musical genius who, in his twenties, was believed to have “tertiary syphilis and perhaps schizophrenia,” and who one night (apocryphally, as the poem tells it) walked out of the New Orleans bar where he was playing and threw his clarinet into Lake Pontchartrain.
According to biographer Laurence Gonzales, The Passenger “evolved from there,” a project he shorthanded among friends as “a novel having to do with New Orleans.” Along the way, Gonzales says, McCarthy spent time in bars with salvage divers.
There are at least three biographers working on Cormac McCarthy’s life story (all three interviewed for this piece) but Gonzales is, in the parlance of publishing, the “official” or “authorized” biographer. A former colleague at SFI, where he and McCarthy spoke over long lunches and tea breaks about the normal panoply of interests, it was Cormac’s brother Dennis who chose Gonzales for the job.
McCarthy himself, without fighting the appointment, didn’t cooperate either. Ailing, evasive on the subject of dying, McCarthy dodged questions. “He didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t like to talk about himself. Especially when it suggested he was going to die. A biography is what you do for dead people.”
Lawrence Krauss remembers that tone clearly.
“Well he wasn’t a great interview subject,” he told me, laughing, “but this was a huge—” he cuts himself off. Revises: “It was another huge gift he gave me, agreeing to [an] interview” about The Passenger.
A theoretical physicist and bestselling author, Krauss was a longtime friend of McCarthy’s. They met at the Santa Fe Institute around 2010, when Krauss was considering a role at the think tank. In 2022, McCarthy agreed to join Krauss on the Origins podcast for one of the few interviews of his career. It turned out to be his last.
The story of how they met begins—as it does with so many others—over an incredibly long lunch. “I was shocked to see him and chat with him. He was very friendly, an upbeat guy, and I said to him I was surprised [by his disposition], given the nature of his books, and he said, ‘I’m a pessimist but that’s no reason to be gloomy.’” They collaborated several times over the ensuing years, in print and radio, live events and film. The first—the one that still seems most meaningful to Krauss—was when McCarthy voiced his admiration for Krauss’s book Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science.
“I love that book,” McCarthy told him, “I’ll make it perfect if you let me edit the paperback.”
Krauss, taken aback, said sure.
“One condition,” said McCarthy, “I’m taking out all the semicolons.”
Nearly fifteen years later, KRauss begins the story at his standard clip, and glides toward something softer. “He copyedited the whole book, sent me the edits, then I sent it to the publisher.” When he went to thank McCarthy, and confirm that the edits were shipped out, soon to be processed, McCarthy hesitated: “You didn’t send the originals, did you?”
Krauss told him yes, the copy with all the markings.
“I think you should get those back.”
Rarely signing copies of his own work, claiming to have a stash of autographed first editions he could bequeath to his family, McCarthy was attuned to the value of his work. “His typewriter had sold for a lot of money,” said Krauss, referring to the quarter-million dollar sale of McCarthy’s Olivetti, at a Christie’s auction in 2009, “he thought it would be worth something.”
(Krauss got the originals back.)
“I know he stretched himself to do things for me. He stretched himself to be on stage, hated that; agreeing to the podcast…”
Everyone who cares for McCarthy, while remembering him publicly, touches on the issue of his alleged “reclusiveness.” SFI’s president, John Krakauer, wrote a whole essay about it, and McCarthy’s “unauthorized” biographer, Tracy Daugherty, dispenses with the “hermit” thing quickly.
“He was adamant about not going on stage,” he said, regarding the suggestion, from earlier years, that McCarthy could have resolved his money troubles by simply taking a few questions at the nearest university, “but it was not a principled stand.” Apart from a distaste of MFA programs, he said, McCarthy didn’t scorn the idea of press, or an audience, or a university or bookfair stage. “In social circles and with friends he could be very extroverted and charming. Great storyteller. Wasn’t shy with friends.” When directly confronted with large-scale attention, however, “I think he was genuinely shy.”
Later in life, whether more confident or less irked, McCarthy was willing to suffer the burden if the cause or the company was right.
Another collaboration—Krauss describes it as a highpoint of his career—is a one-hour conversation he arranged between Cormac McCarthy and the German-American filmmaker Werner Herzog. “I found out they were fans of each other. Cormac didn’t want to talk about literature,” but he was fascinated by Herzog’s then-recent film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the etchings of early modern humans.
Later, in London, Krauss was filming his documentary The Unbelievers while McCarthy, nearby, was visiting the set of Ridley Scott’s The Counselor (for which he’d written the screenplay). He asked McCarthy to sit for a conversation in the film, Cormac agreed, and contributed a dose of clout beyond that.
“He convinced Cameron Diaz to appear in the movie.”
“I was honored he did a number of things with me, and for me, and showed some trust, friendship. In particular agreeing to be on The Unbelievers…that was a surprise.”
More surprising was the chance, a dozen years later, to get McCarthy on camera one more time.
There are two versions of the Origins interview on YouTube: the full episode, which is just over an hour long, and another, thirteen-minute version, emphasizing McCarthy’s own remarks.
Which are sparse.
“In this interviewer,” says a top commenter on the original video, “McCarthy sounds like a man politely trying to get off the phone.”
Says another, “Cormac is a really good listener.”
The comment section is heaped with criticism, with viewers attacking Krauss for being long winded, pedantic, conducting an interview in which his subject speaks for roughly 10% of the runtime.
“It wasn’t much of an interview,” he concedes, sounding somber. Almost regretful until, talking through the experience, it sounds more like nostalgia. The vague mournful note that builds through our conversation as Krauss piles up these accounts of his late friend’s favors.
On the day of the interview, Krauss said, he arrived at McCarthy’s house in El Paso a little before noon, allowing enough time to set things up, chat for an hour, and break it all down before it got late. “Cormac said, ‘No. We’re going to lunch.’ And so we went to lunch.”
Anything troubling about the trip?
“He moved slowly. I think he used a cane to get in and out of the car. [Then] it was hard to get him from the car to the restaurant.” Krauss pauses. Thinks. “Just had a sense he was tired.”
By the time they got back from the restaurant, with a meal and a margarita behind him, McCarthy looked exhausted. “We had a pleasant lunch,” Krauss explains, “but we’d talked about a lot of those topics [at the table], so some of [the interview] seemed rehearsed.”
They met at the peak of McCarthy’s fame, when a Pulitzer Prize and several Academy Awards were tied to his most-recent works, and the object of McCarthy’s creative focus was once again, as he confirmed in an interview on the set of The Counselor, the duology he’d been writing since the 1980s.
“He told me he was involved in three novels,” Krauss remembers, “and I had a sense it was a trilogy. I remember [he told me] the protagonists were scientists. Later on he said at least two [of the novels] were tied together…”
He thinks about it. Quiet on the phone. Then confirms:
“But I remember him telling me it was three.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article mentioned that Bobby and Alicia Western’s parents met at Los Alamos; they in fact met at Oak Ridge. Also, in describing Richard Wallach’s 1991 trip to Melbourne, I described other passengers as “talking softly” and have since been notified that Australians do not do this.
Luce, D. C. (2020b). Creativity, Madness, and “the light that dances deep in Pontchartrain”: Glimpses of “The Passenger” from Cormac McCarthy’s 1980 Correspondence. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.18.2.0085.