My last conversation with Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed and elusive writer who died last week aged 89, came as unexpectedly as the first.
During six decades of winning every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize, McCarthy gave famously few interviews. But in early 2005, much to my surprise, he had a few with me—first for Wired and later for Rolling Stone. Belying his reputation as a recluse and lunatic, Cormac proved himself to be a smooth talker, deeply knowledgeable, hellishly funny and endlessly curious. Especially for his favorite subject, science.
Actually, a scholar introduced me to McCarthy. I was interviewing Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, when she mentioned that the world-renowned author of the bestseller All the Pretty Horses and the brutal masterpiece Blood Meridian had edited a draft of her book. I heard the scratching of a needle in my head.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I thought you said Cormac McCarthy edited your book on theoretical physics?”
“I got the manuscript back in the mail and it was marked on every page,” Randall told me. “He basically rewrote it, getting rid of some of my semicolons, which he really didn’t like.”
From No Room for Old People to Particle Physics, I didn’t know what to do with the break. I had been reading McCarthy since college when my father, Gil, made me pick up The Orchard Keeper, his first novel. The dark, suspenseful Southern saga of murder, revenge, and fathers and sons had a deep meaning for both my father and me. When I was 4 and living in the backwoods of Florida, my 11-year-old brother, John, went to the convenience store to get candy and was kidnapped and killed by two drifters, the kind of story that could have sprung from the pages of Cormac . I admired how he was able to look so dispassionately into the darkness and burn it onto the page.
At the time I interviewed Randall, Cormac was spending his days at the Santa Fe Institute, a theoretical research institute in the Piñon foothills of New Mexico. After receiving a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1981 and meeting Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and co-founder of SFI, McCarthy moved from Texas just to be near the site. He preferred the company of scientists because they explored the fundamental questions of nature and complexity. “If it’s not about life or death,” he told me later, “it’s not interesting.”
I knew the risks of approaching McCarthy. My father had told me a story he had heard about a journalist who allegedly showed up at McCarthy’s house hoping to give an interview. “Don’t do this to yourself,” McCarthy told the man before closing the door in his face. However, I thought it was worth asking Randall if McCarthy could talk to me about the story I’m doing about her. A little while later she called to tell me—to her shock and mine—that he was happy to do her the favor. Then she gave me his number and told me to call him after fifteen.
While I waited, I called my dad, who was appropriately upset to hear the news. Cormac and I ended up talking for hours. Wry and engaging, he had a lot to say about cosmology, violent video games, and how a vole’s trail can lead to its own demise. “Their tracks are mostly urine, but there are other substances as well,” he told me drawlingly in Tennessee. “A person absorbs ultraviolet light that is invisible to us. But guess who can see her? Birds of prey flying overhead. They have ultraviolet vision. Think about these birds – they’re not looking for voles, they’re looking for UV trails through the weeds.”
If it’s not about life or death, it’s not interesting.
The more I talked to McCarthy, the more he sounded like a scientist rather than a writer. Whenever the subject of writing arose, he often returned to physics, his major before leaving college. “In physics,” he said, “to understand how things are, you really have to think about how things could be. You have to have a child’s mind, like Einstein, who thinks: What would happen if I were suddenly projected at the speed of light – what would I see?” He looked like a little boy turning over stones in a stream just to see what was underneath. When I asked him what fascinated him about science, he said simply, “It’s interesting to know how the world works.”
Cormac invited me to visit him at SFI to help promote the Institute’s work. SFI researchers have pioneered the interdisciplinary study of the complex and hidden systems that underlie everything from terrorist cells to climate change. Cormac thought of them as intellectual “robbers,” as he put it. “They’re not academics, they’re not trying to cover their ass.”
I spent several days traipsing around SFI’s hilltop adobe shelter with McCarthy and an ensemble of ecologists, biologists, and anthropologists like my father. One afternoon, while Cormac and I were in SFI’s small kitchen loading up on enchiladas and beans, he started talking about disappearing. A friend of his there, paleobiologist Doug Erwin, had written a book about it, and McCarthy was fascinated by the Cretaceous-Tertiary period meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. On a trip to El Paso to visit his son, he imagined fires consuming the horizon. He decided to turn the image into his next book, which he described to me as “a post-apocalyptic father-son story.”
“How do you say?” I asked.
He took a forkful of rice. “The road,” he replied.
After my story appeared in Rolling Stone, McCarthy and I continued to talk occasionally. He became a mentor to me, offering advice on writing and publishing. “Do you know what writing is?” he once asked. “Writing is rewriting.” Another time when I asked him if he worked on contours, he demurred. “If you’re writing a novel, the best things just come out of nowhere,” he said. “It’s almost a subconscious process—you don’t really know what you’re doing most of the time.” When I plucked up the courage to send him a draft of a story I was working on, he proved a kind but demanding editor, removing my work from the commas he used so sparingly in his own writing.
Eventually we disappeared. That’s why it was such a pleasant surprise to hear it a few months ago. At first he seemed confused even though he was the one who called me. “Maybe it’s my phone,” he said, “but you sound different.” We soon realized that he didn’t want to call me. He intended to dial David Krakauer, the director of SFI, but had punched in my name instead. “You got the next David in the alphabet,” I joked.
We then spent a few minutes catching up. I congratulated him on his two new novels, The Traveler and Stella Maris, which abound in his marvel of science. I reminded him that when we first met he told me he was working on five novels at once. (Which, by my math, means there are still three more in the vault.) He told me he was looking forward to visiting his family and that he still hangs out at SFI when he can.
As he spoke, I heard something in his voice that I hadn’t heard before—age. I had lost my father then and wanted to thank Cormac for both of us. I told him what a personal and professional thrill it had been to meet him, get to know him, and write about him. He helped inspire me to write my family’s own story of life and death, Alligator Candy, and I was grateful for that. Little did I know this would be our goodbye.
One evening long ago, during my visit to SFI, the writer known for confronting mortality so bluntly in his prose spoke about himself. We were attending a lecture on climate change and Cormac sat up front in blue jeans and cowboy boots with the biologists, physicists and other smart criminals he considered his close friends. “Eventually you start to realize you’re not going to be here very long,” he told me as we prepared to listen to the latest research on how the world might end. “Find a job you like and find someone to live with you. Very few people get both.”
David Kushner is a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone. His new book is Easy to Learn, Hard to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of Video Games.