9.4.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please
join me now for part one of the article titled

(00:22):
two years after Cormac MacCarthy's death, Rare access to his
personal library reveals the man behind the myth. The famously
reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books, ranging
in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to The
Naked Mule Rat by Richard Grant. Cormac McCarthy, one of

(00:47):
the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of
the most private, had been dead for thirteen months when
I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high,
with beam ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set
back from a country road in a valley below the mountains.

(01:09):
First built in eighteen ninety two, the house was expanded
and modernized in the nineteen seventies and extensively modified by
McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self taught
architect as well as a master of literary fiction. I
was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who
were embroiled in a herculean endeavor, working unpaid with help

(01:34):
from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students. They had
taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog
every single book in McCarthy's enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library.
They were guessing it contained upwards of twenty thousand volumes.
By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left

(01:59):
behind a person library of nine thousand. What makes McCarthy's
library so intriguing is not just its size, nor the
fact that very few people know about it. His books,
many of which are annotated with margin comments, promised to
reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the

(02:19):
few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive. For
as long as people have been reading McCarthy, they have
speculated about which books and authors informed and inspired his work,
a subject he was loath to discuss. They have wondered
about his interests and true personality because all he presented
to the public was a reclusive, austere, and scrutable facade.

(02:44):
When Brian Ginza, a scholar of literature and humanities at
Texas Tech University, offered me exclusive journalistic access to McCarthy's
library and the cataloging project, what he was really offering
was an unprecedented insight into McCarthy's life work. As a
further enticement, he said that cormack's younger brother, Dennis McCarthy

(03:05):
would be there. Dennis probably knew him as well as
any one. Gaimesa said, I parked behind the house between
a silver nineteen sixty six Buick Riviera resting on deflated
tires and a weathered red Lincoln Mark eight. These were
among the last survivors of McCarthy's little known vehicle collection.

(03:26):
Dennis had sold thirteen other cars, including two Alared racing
cars from the early nineteen fifties, a nineteen ninety two Lotus,
and a four g T forty racing car. McCarthy, who
labored in obscurity and chronic poverty until he was sixty,
became a multi millionaire later in life, and freely indulged

(03:47):
his desires and obsessions, with classic sports cars high on
the list. Most of the money came from Hollywood, which
turned three of his novels, All the Pretty Horses, No
Country for Old Men, and The Road into star studded movies.
I knocked on the imposing front door, an Indo Portuguese
antique made of teak and fortified with iron strappings, metal studs,

(04:11):
flattened veils, and small chains. There was no response, so
I tried the handle. The door swung open and revealed
a dimly lit hallway reduced to a narrow passage by
head high stacks of cardboard boxes on both sides. All
those boxes were packed with books. The first room off
the hallway, the room where McCarthy died at age eighty nine,

(04:34):
was now so crammed with book boxes that it was impenetrable.
Scholars called it the Beast Room. The next room was
nearly as full. One open box showed volumes about the
architect Frank Lloyd Wright, country houses in Ireland, Schizophrenia, African history,
and British antique. Rifle barrels. In the dining room underneath

(04:57):
a beautiful hanging light fixture of wood and colored glass
that McCarthy designed and built himself. Scholars were sitting at
the table scanning books, isbn barcodes through their phones into
the library, catalog and software on their laptops. I found
Ginza in the living room wrestling with an Internet connectivity problem.

(05:19):
Kormack didn't have a WiFi in the house, so we
had to bring our own, he said. Nor did McCarthy
use a computer. Ever. He typed out his pages on
a cheap, durable Olivetti typewriter, and I learned later did
most of his work propped up on pillows in bed.
The living room, like the house in general, had a sturdy,

(05:40):
old fashioned and decidedly masculine fuel, but its clean lines
were obscured by a chaotic overlay of clutter, mainly books,
but also piles of nameless junk and hundreds of bulls,
glasses and kitchenware items still in their packaging. Some of
the book boxes and loose books had been moved into
the room for a cataloging project, but not the rest

(06:02):
of it. One of the first discoveries made by the
visiting scholars was that McCarthy was something of a hoarder.
His particular fixation on kitchenware, much of it bargain kitchenware,
remains mysterious and a mark of his eccentricity. The second
major discovery discernible in his work, but confirmed beyond doubt

(06:23):
in his library, was that McCarthy was a genius level
intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity. His interests ranged from
quantum physics, which he taught himself by reading one hundred
ninety books on the notoriously challenging subject, to whale biology, violins,
obscure corners of French history in the early Middle Ages,

(06:45):
the highest levels of advanced mathematics, and almost any other
subject you can name. Gimeza marveled at the heavy duty
philosophy books they were finding. Seventy five titles by or
about Wittgenstein so far, he said, referring to the Austrian
philosopher of mathematics, logic, language, and the mind, and most

(07:07):
of them are annotated, meaning Carmack read them closely. A
lot of hegel That was his light evening reading. Apparently,
in the living room was a pool table piled with
books and a leather couch facing two tall windows and
three sets of nine foot tall wooden book shelves designed
by McCarthy that held approximately one thousand books. Moving closer,

(07:30):
I saw there were nearly all non fiction hardbacks, with
no obvious system of organization. One shelf held volumes about
meso American history and archaeology, along with Charles Darwin's collected
note books, Victor Klemperer's three volume Diary of the Nazi Years,
books about organic chemistry and sports cars, and an obscure

(07:52):
volume titled The Biology of the Naked mul Rat, Monographs
in Behavior and Ecology. Another shelf held book about Grand
Prix and Formula one racing, a great passion of McCarthy's,
and the collected writings of Charles s Pearce, the American scientist,
philosopher and logician, in six fat volumes of dense, difficult prose.

(08:15):
Trying to take it all in, I felt both fascinated
and overwhelmed. It seemed almost inconceivable that an author who
produced twelve novels, two plays, and five screenplays had also
found the time, energy and brain power to master architecture, woodworking, stonemasonry,
and a wide range of intellectual disciplines. Some of his

(08:37):
math books were nearly all equations. Then we found an
intricate drawing he'd made for an engine modification to one
of his cars, and another showing how to rifle a
gun barrel with hand tools. We found dozens of well
thumbed engine repair manuals and auto mechanics tools in the outbuildings,

(08:57):
and learned that he could disassemble, reassemble, and redesign an
engine to increase its horse power. Then I learned he
had an idetic memory and could remember nearly everything he
had read or heard, including the lyrics to thousands of songs.
McCarthy was starting to seem like a man whose talents
and intelligence were without limits, Yet he lived in a

(09:20):
hoarder's shambles and couldn't stop buying nonstick skillets and fruit bowls.
By studying his library work closely, I hoped to gain
a better understanding of McCarthy, but it was possible the
mystery of his character would only deepen. Gimza introduced me
to his colleague Stacy Peebles, a professor of film and

(09:41):
English at Center College in Danville, Kentucky, and the current
president of the Kuromac McCarthy Society. It was Peebles, who
first met with Dennis McCarthy, the author's brother and literary executor,
and suggested that the Society take on the monumental task
of cataloging the books. The society's mission is to further

(10:02):
the study and appreciation of McCarthy's work, and Peebles thought
there was enough material in the library to keep scholars
busy for decades scrutinizing the annotations, tracing connections between the
research books and passages in the novels, interpreting literary and
philosophical influences. If we were a well funded institution, we'd

(10:25):
take all these boxes into an empty building where we
had plenty of space to work, a dedicated team of people,
and all the time we needed, she said. But Peebles
and her small team all have full time jobs, so
the project has required a trade off between detail and efficiency.
We can't be as meticulous as we'd like and scan

(10:46):
all the annotations because we've got limited time and a
massive amount of books to get through. McCarthy often had
a pencil when he was reading and would make tiny
vertical marks next to sentences that interested him, and add
com comments in the margins in small print handwriting. Sometimes
he shotted down thoughts on slips of paper that he

(11:06):
left between the pages. Inside The Life of Saint Teresa
of avela by herself, first published in fifteen sixty five,
we found him musing philosophically. There is an intelligence to
the universe of which we are fractal, and that intelligence
has a character, and that character is benign, intends well

(11:27):
toward all things. How could it not. McCarthy is known
for the bleak, violent nihilism in many of his novels,
so it was a surprise to see him describing the
universe as intelligent and well intentioned. He was a lapsed
Catholic who went back and forth on the question of
God's existence, sometimes changing his mind from one day to

(11:49):
the next. Peebles was collecting her favorite annotated books on
the pool table. One was Realism and Mathematics by Penelope Mattie.
In the Marks Margins, McCarthy summarizes the author's points and
comments on them, frequently disagreeing gibberish. He noted at one
point it was an exciting find for the scholars because

(12:11):
McCarthy mined this book deeply for his final novel, Stella Maris.
Its protagonist, Alicia Western, is a young mathematical genius with schizophrenia.
Another of people's favorite finds is an annotated copy of
Shakespeare's Hamlet. McCarthy, who once said the ugly fact as

(12:31):
books are made out of books, borrowed in altered elements
from Hamlet for his nineteen seventy nine novel Suttry. It
was his most ornate and poetic book, and the closest
he ever came to writing autobiographically. The main character is
a troubled dropout who has rejected a life of privilege
and responsibility in Knoxville, Tennessee, where McCarthy grew up as

(12:55):
the black sheep among six children in a well to
do Catholic family with t wrong Irish roots. He was
born in nineteen thirty three and christened Charles Joseph McCarthy
junior after his father. In his youth, he was known
as Charlie or sometimes Doc, until he changed his name
to Cormac as a young man, partly inspired by the

(13:16):
medieval Irish king Cormac Macert. The name change was probably
also a declaration of independence from his father. Charles McCarthy
senior was an attorney who became the chief counsel for
the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Cormac always characterized him as
a domineering, violent man who beat him viciously for trivial offenses.

(13:40):
His brother Denis disputes this description and says that Cormac
was grossly exaggerating. MacCarthy told his own son John and
some of his friends that the beatings started when he
was three years old. Readers and critics have often wondered
where the darkness and violence in MacCarthy's work comes from,
and if Cormac's characterization is true, his childhood might account

(14:04):
for some of it. He loved his mother, Gladys, but
she was psychologically fragile and frequently absent from the family
in mental health institutions. He hated his Catholic school and
loved roaming outdoors. Talking about his school days in a
rare nineteen ninety two interview, MacCarthy said, there was no hobby.

(14:25):
I didn't have name anything, no matter how esoteric I
had found it and dabbled in it. He made money
trapping muskrats around Knoxville and selling the pelts, and somehow
also established himself as an authority on antique American rifles.
In nineteen fifty three, McCarthy dropped out of the University

(14:45):
of Tennessee, where he was studying engineering and physics, and
joined the Air Force. He was stationed in Anchorage, where
he became the radio disc jockey for the base and
started reading in earnest in his spare time. After four
he returned to the University of Tennessee, but dropped out
again and started writing novels. The first three, The Orchard Keeper,

(15:09):
Outer Dark, and Child of God, were Gothic tales set
in the rural Appalachia he knew from his youth. In
lyrical prose with marvelously rendered vernacular speech, they tackled dark
subjects murder, infanticide, incest, necrophilia, while displaying a reverence for
nature and folk traditions. The fourth novel was Sutry, McCarthy's

(15:32):
richly comedic evocation of nineteen fifties Knoxville. These novels earned
critical praise and prestigious grants and awards, but each sold
more poorly than the last. One of the few details
we have about McCarthy's personal life comes from his second wife,
Ann Delile, an English singer and dancer, whom he met

(15:54):
on a ship to Ireland in nineteen sixty five. Their
home was a partially converted dear Mary Barne outside Knoxville.
They bathed in a lake. Some one would call up
and offer him two thousand dollars to come speak at
a university about his books, she once said, and he
would tell them that everything he had to say was
there on the page, So we would eat beans for

(16:15):
another week after leaving her without an explanation. In nineteen
seventy four, MacCarthy drifted around cheap motels with his typewriter,
a pile of books, and a light bulb for good
reading light. In nineteen seventy six, MacCarthy took up residence
in El Paso and turned his attention on the American
Southwest and northern Mexico, setting himself the task of learning

(16:39):
the culture, history, natural history, geology, folk ways, and distinctive
Spanish idioms of the borderlands. According to a letter he wrote,
MacCarthy read over three hundred books to research Blood Meridian
nineteen eighty five, an ultra violent philosophical western based on
the true story of a state funded scalp hunting gang

(17:02):
in the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. Now widely regarded
as his greatest masterpiece, it sold a pitiful one thousand,
eight hundred and eighty three copies when it was first published.
MacCarthy's fortunes changed with the publication of All the Pretty
Horses in nineteen ninety two. This elegiac western, set in

(17:22):
nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty in Texas and Mexico,
became a bestseller, won a National Book Award, and was
adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruise.
MacCarthy followed with two more novels about drifting cowboys, then
shifted course with No Country for Old Men two thousand five,

(17:43):
a crime thriller that the Cohen Brothers turned into a
quadruple Oscar winning movie starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardin, and
Tommy Lee Jones. Next came The Road, a post apocalyptic
father son journey that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
in two thousand seven and was made into a film
with Vigo Mortensen playing the father. McCarthy had moved to

(18:07):
Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their
young son John in two thousand one. He found the
town off putting lee liberal, moneyed and artsy, and moved
there for only one reason. His great friend Murray Gellman,
the Nobel Prize winning physicist, invited him to join the
Santa Fe Institute, serving as a sort of in house

(18:30):
literary intellectual. This elite scientific think tank, co founded by
gell Mann, brings together some of the world's most brilliant
minds to research complex, interconnected systems. McCarthy had long preferred
the company of scientists to that of literary people, and
he delighted in the high flying conversations at the Institute.

(18:52):
He went there nearly every day to work on his
writing and kept up with all the institute's scientific research.
Macar Dorothy was famous for refusing to discuss his work,
so there was widespread amazement in literary quarters when he
agreed to do a televised interview in two thousand and
seven with Oprah Winfrey, who had picked the Road as

(19:13):
her book club selection. Viewers saw a courteous, gray haired
Southerner with a high domed forehead and a flashing smile.
When Oprah asked if he was passionate about writing, he replied,
passionate sounds like a pretty fancy word. Oprah, knowing it
was true, asked if The Road was a love story

(19:33):
to his young son John in a way, I suppose
that's kind of embarrassing, he said. She made slightly better
headway on the subject of punctuation. McCarthy didn't use quotation marks,
hated semi colon's, and kept commas to the barest minimum.
There's no reason to block the page up with weird
little marks, he said. If you write properly, you shouldn't

(19:56):
have to punctuate. McCarthy could pull it off because as
he was a virtuoso renowned for his powers of description
and ear for dialogue. The Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul
Bellow extolled McCarthy's absolutely overpowering use of language his life
giving and death dealing sentences. MacCarthy's detractors, meanwhile, found his

(20:19):
writing overly mannered, his characters overly masculine, and accused him
of relishing the violence he wrote about so vividly. When
MacCarthy died in June twenty twenty three, after battling leukemia,
prostate cancer, dehydration, and what he once called the sheer
velocity of time, the accolades were immediate and fulsome. Stephen

(20:41):
King called him the last great white male American novelist.
Sebastian Junger compared him to Mount Everest. The Guardian headlined
its remembrance with the prophecy, his work will sing down
the centuries. Dennis McCarthy, the youngest of the six children,
his Way through the book choked Hallway into the books

(21:03):
strewn living room. A retired lawyer, editor and conservation biologist,
Denis published his first novel in twenty twenty one, a
spiritual western about Billy the Kid, now eighty one. He
was fit and trim, with blue eyes, a radiant smile,
and a strong resemblance to Kormac. He was my best

(21:23):
friend for seventy years, and a fabulous older brother who
always looked out for me. He said, we were very,
very close. I asked him about which authors his brother
most admired. Moby Dick was Kormak's favorite book, without question,
and Faulkner was more of an influence than he liked
to admit. He said he loved him, Ingway's short stories,

(21:44):
James Joyce, Tostoyevsky, and Shakespeare. Of course, readers and scholars
had already identified these literary forbears, but it was satisfying
to hear them confirmed. Of the many thousands of books
in the house, the basement, and the outbuildings, how many
had MacCarthy actually read. If you exclude the encyclopedias and

(22:05):
reference books, I would guess about eighty five percent. Dennis said.
Cormac kept on ordering books after he was too sick
and frail to read because it was a compulsion. But
until that point he would read for hours and hours
nearly every day. He never left the house without a book.
He never left the house without a gun. Both were

(22:26):
equally unthinkable. Why was he always armed? He was a
conservative country boy from the South who understood that the
world is a dangerous place. When he was twenty four,
McCarthy accidentally shot himself in the leg while practicing alone
on a gun range in Tennessee. Dennis didn't know any
more details because his brother refused to discuss the incident,

(22:48):
but it was likely a quick draw gone wrong. When
I asked Dennis about his brother's reputation as a recluse,
he said it was totally inaccurate. He was very sociable
and could get along with anybody well almost anybody. He
didn't suffer fools gladly or people who rushed up to
him gushing about his books. But he had a lot

(23:09):
of friends, and he loved dining in conversation and five
hour lunches that sometimes turned into ten hour lunches. Those
friends included physicists and quark discoverers Gell Mann and George Swig,
the whale biologist Roger Payne, the movie star Josh Brolin,
plus a bar owner and Tucson who calls himself God,

(23:30):
and a silver tongued con man from Knoxville named John Sheddon,
who appears exactly as himself under his own name in
MacCarthy's penultimate novel, The Passenger. Rolin got to know McCarthy
during the filming of No Country for Old Men and
was at the author's bedside the night before he died.
It was me, his ex wife, his son John, and

(23:53):
that was it, Brolin tells me on the phone. He
was telling these wild stories about drinking wine with Andrea
the Giant in Paris, and all this stuff was coming
out totally lucid, sharp, funny inspired. Then he would go
into this lost dementia and he'd be grabbing at stuff
that wasn't there. Then he'd go to sleep, and then

(24:13):
he'd wake up and tell another story. Soon after Brolin left,
MacCarthy drew his final breath. McCarthy's son, John, the model
for the boy character in the Road, was now twenty
six and sleeping in his father's old bedroom upstairs. He's
a licensed pilot, a composer, and a musician. The first

(24:34):
time I met John, he was coming sleepily down the
wooden stairs in search of coffee. I had just learned
that Dennis had emptied two storage units full of books
in Albaso and two more in Santa Fe and moved
the boxes into the house for cataloging. So I'm getting
a totally unrealistic picture of what the house was like
when you were growing up here, I said to John,

(24:57):
not really, He said, this is pretty much how it was.
Boxes everywhere, piles of books everywhere, The hallway stacked up
with boxes, with the little path through the middle, Whole
rooms so full of books you couldn't go in there.
It didn't bother me at all. It was John who
told me that McCarthy worked in bed a California king

(25:17):
with high thread count sheets. The olivetty on a wooden
platform with a leather pillow underneath it and piles of
typed pages magazines, books, and catalogs. Writing, McCarthy once said,
was not a conscious process for him. He put a
blank piece of paper in the olivetty, the words arrived
and he typed them down. But that was just the

(25:39):
first stage of an extensive rewriting and structuring process, and
some of his books took twenty years or more to
get right. Dad didn't like being interrupted when he was
working or when he was reading. John said, no, no, no,
I'm reading. Go away, he would say. But he was
a great father, always there for me, and I learned

(25:59):
so much from him. We would have these long conversations
about science and history and music and whatever else. And
he was the funniest person I've ever met, just a
natural comedian. I asked John what else his father collected
apart from books, cars and kitchenware. I would say clothes
were the other big one. He had hundreds of tweed jackets,

(26:22):
hundreds of shirts, hundreds of suits that he'd never worn.
John once spent three days dragging stuff out of a
room he wanted to use as a bedroom. When I
was done, I said, you ever think you might be
a little bit of a hoarder, and he looks at
me and goes, yeah. Probably he attributed it to all
those years when he had no money. Dennis isn't buying

(26:44):
that explanation. Kormack always lived in chaos, which I found
fascinating because he had such a fabulous artistic sense. He
could design things beautifully and he dressed impeccably, but his
living quarters were always a disaster. He was an incredibly
complicated individual. The cataloging scholars could only spare four or

(27:05):
five days at a time, then they would go back
to their jobs for a few months and try to
carve out another long weekend. In New Mexico, the stalwarts
were Peebles and Rick and Jonathan Elmore, whip smart twin
brothers who looked nothing alike, taught at different colleges, and
wrote academic papers together about McCarthy's work. The cataloging was dusty, repetitive,

(27:29):
eye straining work, but it was conducted with good humor
and camaraderie, and you never knew what might come out
of the next box. One afternoon, after looking through a
batch of Cistercian abbeys, violin makers, metaphysics, meta ontology, the
Incesse Taboo, and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.

(27:50):
I said, was there anything he wasn't interested in? This
concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader
had it has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening,
and have a great day.