Classics 3: No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

The literary critic Harold Bloom has asserted, in his own inimitable style, that the four greatest living American writers are Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Roth. I have severe doubts about two of those — Pynchon and DeLillo. John Updike and Richard Ford seem to me significantly greater writers. But I have no doubts about either Roth or McCarthy.

When a reader or viewer approaches a sincere work of art, he or she enters a kind of subconscious contract with the artist. If that reader or viewer is remotely experienced or skilful, the first thing he will attempt to do is try to understand what the artist is trying to do, and then judge it in those terms. The worst thing he can do is try and impose his own views on the artist’s assumptions, to make assumptions that the artist never made.

Sometimes this can be difficult. When I approach Cormac McCarthy, it seems to me that I am addressing someone who is almost on a different planet. I happen to be an atheistic, liberal, left-leaning European. McCarthy is a deeply conservative American, with what seems to me a highly romantic view of the old West. His books are to a great extent a lament for a former order (which I strongly suspect is largely imaginary), supported by and infused with traditional nostrums of masculinity which I also suspect are as fabled as the Knights of the Round Table. In these and other respects he resembles another great author from the south, William Faulkner.

It’s as well to get this off my chest, because what follows is largely a paean of praise. Though at first McCarthy’s prose seems almost showy, its supple strengths soon show through. After a few pages the reader becomes involved, enters the narrative, and the magic takes over.

No Country for Old Men, which has recently been made into a fine film by the Coen Brothers, is one of McCarthy’s most successful works, and also perhaps the work in which he allows his own deeply personal considerations to breathe and give life to the narrative. It begins in classic McCarthy style in the voice of Ed Tom Bell, a Texan sheriff. The first few lines set up the philosophical tone of the novel — that the old morality has broken down, and a nameless evil has entered civil life:

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion in it. He’d been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember.

Bell finds this admission haunting. He remembers the boy’s lack of any sense of guilt or contrition:

Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me wonderin if maybe he was some new kind.

This fear of a new and nameless metaphysical evil sets up the novel for the action to come. It begins when a local man, a welder called Llewelyn Moss, a former Vietnam veteran, is out hunting pronghorn antelope and comes across several four-wheel-drives parked in the middle of the desert. He approaches cautiously. Dead bodies of men and dogs lie all around. It looks like a gang shootout. Only one man remains partially alive. When Moss approaches him he groans “Agua” (“water”). Moss does not have any water and tells him so, and then continues to look around. He pulls open the back door of one of the vehicles and discovers a huge hoard of drugs. That confirms his view about what has taken place. Then he sees that there is a trail of blood leading away. He follows cautiously until he finds a man lying back against a tree. He suspects a fatal gut shot and, not wishing for an unnecessary confrontation, waits for a while and then approaches silently. The man is dead. Between his legs is a .45 automatic; leaning against his knee is a briefcase. Moss opens the briefcase and finds it full of stacks of one hundred dollar notes, in denominations of $10,000. He can see at a glance it is a sizeable amount, probably more than a couple of million of dollars in all. With a sense of excitement and foreboding Moss picks up the briefcase and takes it with him, and so the plot unrolls.

Moss returns to his trailer where he lives with his young wife Carla Jean. He enters the trailer and tells her about his finding the money. She, understandably, is nervous. That night, asleep in the early hours, Moss wakes up and remembers the man who asked him for water. He regrets that in the excitement of finding the money he forgot to help him. Against all his survival instincts, he decides to go back with a bottle of water for the wounded man. This single virtuous act will be responsible for giving away his identity. When he parks his pickup in the night and walks towards the killing scene he finds everything much the same, except that the wounded man has died. But when Moss turns around to glance back at his own truck parked on a ridge, he sees another truck has parked alongside it in the dark, and two men are examining his own vehicle with a sinister, methodical intensity. Soon afterwards he is being chased through the night, running through the brush with the other truck trying to run him down and its occupants trying to shoot him. He manages to throw off his pursuers and get back to his trailer on foot. But he knows that at 9:30 the following morning they will be able to phone in his car plate number and obtain the owner’s details. He tells his wife they have to leave, that she has to stay with her mother. Much of the rest of the novel is the story of how Moss is hunted down by the gang’s enforcer, a psychopathic killer called Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is a powerful literary creation. He is a philosophical nihilist, but he has his own peculiar sense of honour. McCarthy has attempted to create a character who is evil, but at the same time eerily believable. Chigurh’s calm and obsessive character, his utter ruthlessness and attention to detail, combine to evoke a strange resonance.

McCarthy as a writer is a virtuoso of physical description — of landscape, light, and the physical hardships suffered by man. Several brilliant and brutal action scenes follow as the philosophical psychopath closes in on the Vietnam vet and the two fight it out to unremitting death. Just as Chigurh hunts down Moss, so Sheriff Bell continues to agonise about the country he inhabits.

There’s no requirements in the Texas State Constitution for bein a sheriff. Not a one. There is no such thing as a county law. You think about a job where you have pretty much the same authority as God and there is no requirements put upon you and you are charged with preservin nonexistent laws and you tell me if that’s peculiar or not. Because I say that it is. Does it work? Yes. Ninety percent of the time. It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Sheriff Bell continues doggedly to follow up the crime trail on horseback with his deputy. When the two of them examine the scene of the gang slaying in the desert, there are some nice touches of understated humour. After examining the carnage, they too find the blood spoor to the man who has wandered off and died alone:

The sheriff shook his head. He got down and walked to where the dead man lay slumped. He walked over the ground, the rifle yoked across his shoulders. He squatted and studied the grass.
We got another execution here Sheriff?
No, I believe this one’s died of natural causes.
Natural causes?
Natural to the line of work he’s in.

The powerful plot propels itself, and we are carried with it. Moss is wounded by Chigurh, escapes over the Mexican border, recovers in hospital, sends word to his wife that Chigurh will come looking for her too. Eventually Chigurh kills Moss. But the brutalities of the various manhunts are overlaid by the beautifully evoked character of Sheriff Bell.

The sense of a different world, a world of motiveless evil, causes Bell to reconsider his own life. He eventually decides to visit his uncle Ellis and attempts to offload something that has been troubling him for a long time. His uncle asks him what it is he wants to speak about and Bell says he has felt guilty all his adult life about leaving behind several wounded fellow soldiers when he was fighting the Germans in the Normandy invasion. He was decorated for his bravery, but that hasn’t allayed the private sense of failure. When night came down, and he knew his position was hopeless, Bell left the wounded men to their own fate. And the fact that he had saved them until then, had held off a German counterattack against all the odds, doesn’t mean a damn thing to him anymore. His uncle says maybe he should ease up on himself. Bell thinks:

Maybe. But if you go into battle it’s a blood oath to look after the men with you and I dont know why I didnt. When you’re called on like that you have to make up your mind that you’ll live with the consequences. But you dont know what the consequences will be. You end up layin a lot of things at your own door that you didnt plan on. If I was supposed to die over there doin what I’d give my word to do then that’s what I should of done. You can tell it any way you want but that’s the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasnt mine. It never has been.

But his uncle’s words soothe him to some extent at least. And talking about it after all this time helps a little too. He reflects that escaping death, admittedly under circumstances that continue to haunt him, perhaps enabled him to live a reasonably useful life. And even the ache of his guilt perhaps played a part in keeping him on his chosen path. He tries to explain some of this to his uncle:

When he asked me why this come up now after so many years I said that it had always been there. That I had just ignored it for the most part. But he’s right, it did come up. I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all. When I told it, well it took a shape I would not have guessed it to have and in that way he was right too. It was like a ballplayer told me one time he said that if he had some slight injury and it bothered him a little bit, nagged at him, he generally played better. It kept his mind focused on one thing instead of a hundred. I can understand that. Not that it changes anything.

The core of Bell’s life is his quietly rewarding relationship with his wife Loretta, whose benign companionship has brightened the intervening years. Set against the terrible cold depredations of men like Chigurh out in the world, it is only a glimmer of happiness, a sliver of light in the darkness. But it is something to hold on to at least.

Only once in the whole gaunt book is Bell’s feeling for his wife expressed with any force. One day he returns home and finds that Loretta is not at the homestead. Knowing that Chigurh is still at large, and feeling a little nervous on her behalf, he saddles up his horse:

He rode out with the reins in one hand, patting the horse. He talked to the horse as he went. Feels good to be out, dont it. You know where they went. Dont you worry about it. We’ll find em.
Forty minutes later he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun, the horse slogging slowly through the loose sandy dirt, the red stain of it following them in the still air. That’s my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was.

No Country for Old Men is close to the most heartfelt of McCarthy’s novels, or at least the work where his own feelings appear to break the surface of his more familiar hardnosed authorial pose. You sense that Bell is to some extent an alter ego. The belated recognition of such small but important happinesses in Bell’s life doesn’t abolish the bleakness of his outlook. Nor does it stop him from constantly scratching that metaphysical ache for a lost world:

I think I know where we’re headed. We’re bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs. There is fortunes bein accumulated out there that they dont nobody even know about. What do we think is goin to come of that money? Money that can buy whole countries. It done has. Can it buy this one? I dont think so. But it will put you in bed with people you ought not to be there with. It’s not even a law enforcement problem. I doubt that it ever was. There’s always been narcotics. But people don’t just up and decide to dope theirselves for no reason. By the millions. I dont have no answer about that. In particular I dont have no answer to take heart from.

The randomness and essential unfairness of life doesn’t leave Chigurh unscathed either. When Chigurh has killed Moss and retrieved the money, Moss’s wife returns to her mother’s empty house. But she finds Chigurh there, patiently waiting for her, as if he had known she would arrive. He explains to her, with his usual chilling lucidity, that he told Moss that if he returned the money, Chigurh would spare his wife. But since Moss didn’t take his advice, he feels obliged to be true to his word. She asks him what good killing her will do to him, and Chigurh agrees that there is no benefit to him, he is merely fulfilling his promise.

Having shot her, he emerges from her house and gets into his truck and drives off. He is in a contemplative mood. But even pure metaphysical evil is not protected from the randomness of life. Crossing an intersection on a green light, his vehicle is T-boned at 60 miles an hour by another vehicle, carrying three young men high on drugs. The three youths are killed or fatally wounded. Chigurh drags himself to the side of the kerb and sits down and works out what to do about his broken ribs and badly smashed arm. Two young boys cycle up and watch in horror as Chigurh coldly studies the bared bone which has broken through the flesh of his forearm. Chigurh offers one of them a hundred dollars for his shirt and uses the shirt as a sling for his arm. Then, with an effort, he manages to get to his feet and limps away down the avenue, drifting away like a ghost, until he disappears from sight.

Ghosts of another kind continue to haunt Sheriff Bell. At night he finds himself dreaming of his dead father riding in the mountains. His father died when Bell was relatively young, when he was twenty years younger than Bell is now, and paradoxically Bell thinks of his father as a younger man than he is. In his dreams his father rides past without noticing him:

It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the colour of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

The film of No Country for Old Men, by the Coen Brothers, has just been nominated for eight Oscars as I write. It is a superb action movie, bleak and humorous and laconic, as you would expect from such adaptors, with Tommy Lee Jones superb as Sheriff Bell. There is also a remarkable cinematic performance by Javier Bardem as the chilling Anton Chigurh. But in a film, visual by its nature, it is difficult if not impossible to reproduce the overlay of metaphysical enquiry that characterises the book — the strange sense of an almost theological balancing of various goods and evils, and the complex and subtle ways that one interacts with another.

My advice, for what it is worth, is to see the film. It is a magnificent, violent and laconic entertainment, a return to the finest form by its directors. But if you possibly can, go and read the book too.