This past weekend, Evelyn Gill organized a celebration of the life and work of Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy, who was born in 1933, died on June 13. He’s claimed by more than one place, but Knoxville’s claim is strong. He moved here with his family when he was a small child and grew up in the area. He served as an altar boy at Immaculate Conception on Vine Avenue and attended the University of Tennessee in two different stints, though he never graduated. He lived in east Tennessee, in and around Knoxville, until 1976 at which point, he moved west, first to El Paso and later to just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His early works such as The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and Suttree were set in East Tennessee, with Suttree (1979) being his most Knoxville-centric novel. I first encountered his work in the mid-1990s when a friend passed me a copy of Suttree she had lifted from a bed-and-breakfast. I was struggling to write a novel and she felt I needed to read his work. It wasn’t easy. His famous lack of punctuation and attribution, as well as his stunning vocabulary (sometimes concocted from the ether) forced me to struggle.
But through the struggle, I came to love his work, eventually reading all or nearly all his novels (I haven’t gotten to the two published late last year). When the wider world of readers discovered him with the publication of The Road (2006) a common theme in any conversation surrounded the darkness of the subject matter. Clearly, they didn’t know his body of work. In that book he offered characters that readers could like and a flicker of hope at the end! It was McCarthy-lite! Well, maybe not lite, but read his work and you’ll understand. I bought it for the middle school library.
Despite his success in later years, he remained out of the stream of pop culture. He famously refused interviews and his work would never be considered reading for the masses. In some respects, his success was a surprise given the denseness and darkness of his writing. That he would be considered a literary great by critics is no surprise, but that his later works sold as well as they did was nothing that was ever assured.
I’m not sure why his death took me by such surprise. He was 89 years old and would have been 90 in just a few weeks. I think perhaps it was because his work was so forceful, so relentlessly alive, so spitting-in-the-face-of-death, that he seemed unstoppable. I don’t know a living writer who approaches his forcefulness with language. Among the dead, I would count what I consider to be his literary genealogy: Joyce, Wolfe, Faulkner.
And so, a small group gathered, appropriately, at James Agee Park, situated just a few short blocks from the site of Agee’s childhood home. The home that Knoxville tore down. McCarthy, moved by the destruction, removed bricks from the rubble and used them to build a fireplace in his home in Louisville.
There were no more than about thirty of us sitting amid what has become a beautiful park, surrounded by the few remaining Victorian survivors of the development apocalypse that has systematically devoured Fort Sanders. Rain threatened, then abated, and a perfect summer evening descended on the small crowd. Cellist Kailey Bostick set the tone perfectly.
Steve Dupree started the night, remembering his first encounter with Cormac McCarthy at Harold’s Deli on the 100 block of Gay Street. Black Atticus, Knoxville’s newest Poet Laureate recited a piece. Evelyn read a bit from Suttree and readings of McCarthy’s works followed at the hands of Trudy Monaco, Michael Gill, Grae Potter, Leslie Gengozian and Musu Hawa Hoffman. Michael also read a wonderful original poem, “Strange Pigtails,” as did Kay Newton, who read “Grieving for Cormac – A Sonnet.”
Along the way, Maurice Hendricks moved the crowd with a powerful rendition of “Let us garlands bring, Op. 19: No. 3 Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun.” Historian and Music Critic Gerald Nicosia ended the night with an essay about McCarthy.
It may not have been the largest celebration of his life, nor the most polished, but it was intimate and beautiful in its own way. There may have only been thirty or forty people there, but they were some of Knoxville’s best, most gentle souls. The soft night sang of praises to one of our own. Today, as we celebrate the good things about our country, I would count its artists as one of those qualities worth cherishing. Cormac certainly stands tall among that group.
