In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews Read online

  Protected by a modicum of inherited wealth from needing to engage in any crucial way with the outside world, the Collyer brothers age without maturing. As a young man, Homer is a promising pianist enrolled at the West End Conservatory of Music; his blindness is no handicap in the Collyers’ social circle but rather an attribute—“[My] helplessness was very alluring to a woman trained since birth, herself, to be helpless. It made her feel strong, in command, it could bring out her sense of pity…She could express herself, give herself to her pent-up feelings, as she could not safely do with a normal fellow.” Homer has a thwarted love affair with a Hungarian housemaid who is accused—by Langley—of being a thief; both brothers fall in love with a pious young Catholic girl who enters a religious order and, years later, is one of four nuns raped and shot to death in a “remote Central American village”—a revelation that provokes the already misanthropic Langley to permanently close the shutters of their house. Langley, the more troubled brother, attends Columbia University for a while but becomes permanently disabled—his lungs ruined by mustard gas and his soul gutted by the “monstrousness” of the world—as a soldier in World War I.

  The brothers’ characters are of less interest than the narrative uses to which their reclusive lives are put by Doctorow in his signature sleight-of-hand melding of private and public lives: during Prohibition, the brothers visit speakeasies, and become acquainted with gangsters; during the Great Depression, they open their brownstone to “tea dances” at which Homer plays piano; in the 1960s they mingle with hippies at an antiwar rally in Manhattan and allow a commune of hippies to “crash” with them for a month—Homer has a final love affair, hardly more than a few sexual encounters, with the flower child Lissey whose youthful body is attractive to him even as her ideas seem “silly.” It’s in these sections in which, as in Doctorow’s most widely read novel Ragtime, “real” people cavort with “historical figures,” that Homer & Langley is most buoyant and entertaining. But with the departure of the hippies from their already cluttered brownstone, the brothers’ “abandonment of the outer world” becomes irreversible.

  As in the much-lauded 1975 documentary film Grey Gardens, which depicts the lives of the two Edith Beales in their squalid East Hampton mansion, the appeal of the Collyer brothers’ story lies in its lurid setting. Doctorow notes, following the bizarre inventory first published in the New York Times in 1947, not only the countless stacks—tons!—of newspapers “[that] had, like some slow flow of lava, brimmed out of (Langley’s) study” [p. 76] but also a complete Model T automobile, reconstructed in the dining room, in the hope of generating electric energy from the motor; many thousands of books spilling out of the brownstone’s original library owned by the Collyers’ physician-father, now long deceased; broken furniture, records, phonographs and turntables; children’s toys, gas masks…

  The house by this time in our lives was a labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends. With enough light someone could make his way through the zigzagging corridors of newspaper bales, or find passage by slipping sideways between piles of equipment—the guts of pianos, motors wrapped in their power cords, boxes of tools, paintings, car body parts, tires, staked chairs, tables on tables, headboards, barrels, collapsed stacks of books, antique lamps, dislodged pieces of our parents’ furniture, rolled-up carpet, piles of clothing, bicycles…stacks of lumber, used tires, and odd pieces of furniture, a legless bureau, a bedspring, two Adirondack chairs…items stored in the expectation that someday we would find uses for them.

  Yet there is a nightmare logic to the brothers’ withdrawal to a suffocating safe haven where “our footsteps echoed, as if we were in a cave or an underground vault.” There is something of the romance of rebellion in Langley—initially—his postwar bitterness transformed “into an iconoclastic life of the mind”—but as the brothers age and are obliged to live ever more primitively, in a dwelling bereft of electricity, heat, water and even, once they barricade the windows, daylight, the grubbiness and horror of their situation are impossible to ignore, even by the blind Homer:

  [I]n the minds of the [neighborhood] juvenile delinquents who’d begun to pelt our house Langley and I were not the eccentric recluses of a once well-to-do family…we had metamorphosed, we were the ghosts who haunted the house we had once lived in.

  As if foreseeing his and his brothers’ lurid tabloid fate to come: “What could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history?”

  Historically, Homer Collyer (1881–1947) was the elder of the Collyer brothers; he didn’t go blind until he was an adult, and had a degree in admiralty law, which he seems never to have used; Langley (1885–1947) claimed to have a degree in engineering from Columbia University—which claim was disputed by Columbia. In fictionalizing the brothers’ story Doctorow alters the record in minor but significant ways: he updates the narrative by at least twenty years and makes of his Homer the younger and more sensitive brother, a concert pianist of musical ability but lacking confidence. The historical Langley wasn’t a World War I veteran, still less a victim of gas warfare, but was the pianist of the family, not Homer; evidence would seem to suggest that Langley was severely psychotic. Doctorow’s Langley is corrosively eloquent, a modern-day Diogenes, or a prophet out of the Hebrew Bible; his cynicism suggests the later, embittered years of America’s most popular and beloved writer Mark Twain. Here is Langley’s Theory of Replacements:

  Everything in life gets replaced. We are our parents’ replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation. All the herds of bison they are slaughtering out west, you would think that was the end of them, but they won’t all be slaughtered and the herds will fill back in with replacements that will be distinguished from the ones slaughtered…(Time) advances through us as we replace ourselves to fill the slots.

  Homer interprets his brother’s theory as Langley’s “bitterness of life or despair of it.” In Doctorow’s novel Langley’s obsession with saving newspapers isn’t a random symptom of psychosis but an intellectual if quixotic project reminiscent of the maniacal effort of Flaubert’s deluded seekers after truth Bouvard and Pecuchet—a fanatic effort of

  counting and filing news stories according to category: invasions, wars, mass murders, auto, train, and plane wrecks, love scandals, church scandals, robberies, murders, lynchings, rapes, political misdoings with a subhead of crooked elections, police misdeeds, gangland rubouts, investment scams, strikes, tenement fires, trials civil, trials criminal, and so on. There was a separate category for natural disasters such as epidemics, earthquakes and hurricanes…As he explained, eventually…he would have enough statistical evidence to narrow his findings to the kinds of behavior that were, by their frequency, seminal human behavior…He wanted to fix American life in one edition that he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need.

  Unlike the brothers of Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper, destroyed by female duplicity and manipulation, amid a romantic-melodramatic plot involving a beautiful Italian soprano and a tyrannical family matriarch, Doctorow’s brothers eke out their lives as victims of their own stunted personalities. No single, significant drama defines their lives, only just the whimsical vicissitudes of fate. There is a Beckett-like bleakness to Homer’s final lines, addressed to his remote muse Jacqueline Roux:

  There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. The images of things are not the things in themselves…My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in…Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food? There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

  The circumstances of the brothers’ deaths were more sensational—and pathetic—than Doctorow indicates in Hom
er & Langley: Langley was crawling through a newspaper tunnel to bring food to his blind, now-paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps was triggered causing him to be crushed beneath tons of debris. Homer starved to death. Yet it was Homer’s body that was found first, while Langley, believed still alive, was the object of a highly publicized citywide “manhunt” for several days until his body too was found amid the rubble, only a few feet from his brother’s body. In Homer & Langley Doctorow has evoked an American folk-myth writ small, a touching and poignant double portrait of individuals whom social background and class privilege could not protect from extinction.

  IN ROUGH COUNTRY I: CORMAC McCARTHY

  If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?

  —BLOOD MERIDIAN

  Pascal’s enigmatic remark in the Pensées, “Life is a dream a little less inconstant,” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy that unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian; from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to the tightly plotted crime novel, No Country for Old Men, McCarthy’s fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy’s worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.

  Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor. Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force for four years of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy’s first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern-Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mockepic Blood Meridian, set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849 to 1878, marks the author’s dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest.

  Rare among writers, especially contemporary American writers, Cormac McCarthy seems to have written no autobiographical or memoirist fiction or essays. Suttree (1979), set along the banks of the Tennessee River at Knoxville, has the sprawl, heft, and gritty intimacy of autobiographical fiction in the mode of Jack Kerouac, but is not. McCarthy’s most intelligent and sensitive protagonist so far has been John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain, a stoic loner at the age of sixteen who plays chess with surprising skill, is an instinctive horseman, and, in other circumstances, would have studied to be a veterinarian, but John Grady is not representative of McCarthy’s characters and shares no biographical background with the author. More generally, McCarthy’s subjects are likely to be individuals driven by raw impulse and need, fanaticism rather than idealism, for whom formal education would have ended in grade school and who, if they carry a Bible with them like the nameless kid of Blood Meridian, “no word of it could he read.”

  In The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark the dreamlike opacity of Faulkner’s prose is predominant. These are slow-moving novels in which back-country natives drift like somnambulists in tragic/farcical dramas beyond their comprehension, let alone control. The setting is the East Tennessee hill country in the vicinity of Maryville, near the author’s childhood home. Very like their predecessors in Faulkner’s fiction set in mythical rural Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, McCarthy’s uneducated, inarticulate and impoverished characters struggle for survival with a modicum of dignity; though they may endure tragic fates, they lack the intellectual capacity for insight. In The Orchard Keeper, the elderly Ather Ownby, “keeper” of a long-decayed peach orchard, is an independent and sympathetic figure who winds up confined to a mental hospital after firing his shotgun at county police officers. His rebellious spirit has been quelled, he has little but banalities to offer to a neighbor who has come to visit him: “Most ever man loves peace, and none better than an old man.” In Outer Dark, the hapless young mother Rinthy searches the Appalachian countryside for her lost baby, taken from her by her brother, the baby’s father, and given to an itinerant tinker: a mix of Faulkner’s Dewey Dell, of As I Lay Dying, who vainly seeks an abortion, and Lena Grove, of Light in August, who vainly seeks the man who has impregnated her, Rinthy makes her way on foot through an increasingly spooky landscape, but never finds her baby. Outer Dark is a more willfully obscure and self-consciously literary novel than The Orchard Keeper, burdened by an excess of heavily Faulknerian prose in which even acts of startling violence come muted and dreamlike, lacking an elemental credibility:

  The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme [Rinthy’s brother] saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly.

  Beyond even Faulknerian obliqueness, McCarthy has eliminated all quotation marks from his prose so that his characters’ speech isn’t distinct from the narrative voice, in this way adumbrating the curious texture of our dreams in which spoken language isn’t heard so much as felt and dialogue is swallowed up in its surroundings. This manner of narration, which some readers find distracting and pretentious, like McCarthy’s continuous use of (untranslated) Spanish in his later novels, seems appropriate in these circumstances, and in any case will persist through his career:

  The man had stretched out before the fire and was propped up on one elbow. He said: I wonder where a feller might find him a pair of bullhide boots like them you got.

  Holme’s mouth was dust dry and the piece of meat seemed to have grown bigger. I don’t know, he said.

  Don’t know?

  He turned the shirt again. He was very white and naked sitting there. They was give to me, he said.

  Of McCarthy’s four Tennessee-set novels, Child of God is the most memorable, a tour de force of masterfully sustained prose set pieces chronicling the life and abrupt death of a mountain man named Lester Ballard with a proclivity for collecting and enshrining dead bodies, predominantly those of attractive young females, in a cave to be discovered by Sevier County, Tennessee, officials only after his death:

  The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray-cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew among them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tight…Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.

  Presumably based upon an actual case, or cases, of necrophiliac devotion in Appalachia, the legend of Lester Ballard is presented with dramatic brevity and an oblique sort of sympathy in a chorus of local voices:

  I don’t know. They say he never was right after his daddy killed himself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off…Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hanging. We just cut him down, let him fall on the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time.

  The narrator’s voice suggests an eerie channeling of the “child of God” (that
is, one who is “touched in the head”), Lester Ballard, if Ballard possessed the vocabulary to express his deepest yearnings: “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.” Ballard’s debased and choked voice in collusion with the author’s skill at simile yields wonderful results on every page:

  When Ballard came out onto the porch there was a thin man with a mouthful of marbles, articulating his goatbone underjaw laboriously, the original one having been shot away.

  Ballard squatted on his heels in the yard opposite the visitor. They looked like constipated gargoyles.

  Say you found that old gal up on the turnaround?

  Ballard sniffed. What gal? he said.

  Freed of the ponderous solemnity of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness, McCarthy has found a way to dramatize Faulknerian themes in a voice brilliantly his own. Like a balloon the author’s omniscient eye floats above the bleakly comic adventures of his mock-hero: “An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched [Lester Ballard] go.” Among the set pieces of Child of God are inspired riffs like outtakes from Erskine Caldwell’s luridly exploitative Tobacco Road (1932) and God’s Little Acre (1933), in which redneck Appalachians spawn swarms of dim-witted mammalian females as in a pornographic fever dream: the dump keeper’s “gangling progeny” with “black hair hanging from their armpits” and “sluggard lids,” named from a medical dictionary—“Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue”—who move like cats and like cats in heat attract “swains” by the dozens. Ballard is attracted to the “long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time.” Yet it isn’t Ballard but the omniscient narrative voice that presents such scenes: