The Road

[McCarthy wrote all of his fiction and correspondence with a single Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter between the early 1960s and 2009. At that time he replaced it with an identical model. Ex Wikipedia]

This being notice of my first serious attempt at Cormac McCarthy since I read his ‘Blood Meridian’, many years ago, possibly when it first appeared, since I seem to own a first edition. I think I dabbled with one of his more recent books but did not get on with it. Was I put off by its violence?

This copy of ‘The Road’, reference 1, a Christmas present, is a nicely produced paperback from Picador. About 300 short pages set in a rather large type with short lines and lots of spacing. A short introduction at the beginning and some advertisements at the end.

An end-of-the-world story, the sort of thing that they seem to like in the US, set in what seems like California, some years after some cataclysmic event – unspecified but maybe a huge earthquake, a volcano eruption or a meteor strike. Layers of ash and debris everywhere. All the plants and most non-human animals seem to be dead and the humans who are left are running out of food. The author does not go into very small animals, like amoebae and bacteria, but maybe some of them make it. The ones, that is, that don’t depend on plants.

A lot of the food which is to be found is in tins, which is fair enough. And a lot of that seems to be peaches.

I would imagine that this fondness for end-of-the-world stories is all mixed up with a fondness for roughing it in the wilderness, perhaps with few if any modern conveniences like knives and matches. Mixed up in turn with a fondness for the Old Testament – this being what got a lot of immigrants over from Europe in the first place.

Back with the book, a sense that this new world has become very selfish, pretty much every man left for himself, with little regard for others – and no regard for those outside the immediate group, if there is one. A modest amount of off-stage cannibalism. I wonder to what extent all this reflects the personality of the author, whom I suspect, possibly quite unfairly, of having been a rather unpleasant person. Maybe he did delicate water colours when not writing gruesome stories – in the way of Charles Bronson.

A man and his son on the road, the mother having died some time previously, heading south for the winter. Pulling their few battered possessions in a shopping trolley. Very few other people about – and one is very wary when one does come across someone else. A bit short on food, but they do have fire – and there is plenty of dead wood about for fuel. One might say that the book is mostly about the relationship between these two: how they get on when they are up against the wall, as it were.

At the end of the book, the man dies of some kind of lung complaint, the sort where you spit blood. So breaking his promise never to leave the boy. At which point he, the boy, comes across some decent people who take him on. So ending on a rather hopeless – but at least ambivalent – note.

The same spare, bleak prose that I remember from ‘Blood Meridian’. And the same scattering of curious words, some obscure, some possibly old. But a bleak prose which fits well with the bleak subject matter. Of life reduced to a minimum.

Again, one wonders what sort of a person would want to dwell on the bleak and gruesome in quite this way. I associated to Damien Hirst with his pills & corpses. But I dare say I shall read the book again before too long. BH probably not, at least that is my guess.

Oddities

I have mentioned odd vocabulary, which includes the rather anatomical ‘colliculus’. From where I associate to Simenon’s considerable interest in medical matters. 

McCarthy also knows that the edge of an obsidian blade might only be a few molecules across, something that I noticed as I have been reading about same recently.

We get a passage about how well made an old sextant was – suggesting that the author had a taste for the well made object. Did he collect luxury guns? He did hang on to the typewriter snapped above.

From something turned up by Google, I learn that McCarthy was keen on the rewilding of wolves. He was also keen on ‘Moby Dick’, a novel which is elemental in a different way to this one.

And that his service in the US Air Force came just after the Korean War, so it is not combat experience which fuels its bleak world view..

While in a rather gushing review of the novel by one John Banville at the front, we get ‘haecceity’ – the quality by which something becomes an individual. From the late Latin. Inkhorn word from the 17th century? – and ‘katabasis’ – a military retreat. An allusion to Xenophon. Inkhorn word from the 19th century? Both to be found in Websters and both new to me. Oddly, Wikipedia gives a quite different story for katabasis.

Thinking in pictures

Along the way, I turned up McCarthy’s unexpected essay spun out of the Kekulé Problem and the idea that humans probably still thought, at least subconsciously, more in pictures than in words. Words, after all, have not been around that long in evolutionary terms. This led to the post at reference 8. 

And I am still working around references 9, 10 and 11 – inter alia renewing an ancient acquaintance with projective geometry. It seems not only that McCarthy might have had a point, but that projective geometry – or at least its presentation - has moved on. And, by way of a bonus, there is also a connection to the essay on ‘Shakespeare and perspective’ mentioned at reference 12.

Gemini

I thought to check that my memory of Bronson painting was correct, and Bing was not having it. Only recognising the quite famous paintings of another Charles Bronson, a violent offender who spent many years as prisoner in the UK. Born as Michael Peterson in 1952.

Next stop Gemini, who agreed with Bing.

I then tried Google and turned up a couple of references to my Bronson being a hobby painter, including one in his obituary in the New York Times at reference 13.

Going back to Gemini with this news, he now agrees with me.

Apart from the fact that Gemini appears to have got it wrong on this occasion, he was not on his best form on this one, with various other lapses in performance.

References

Reference 1: The road – Cormac McCarthy – 2006.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/religious-freedom.html. A previous mention.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/snap-of-day.html. A stray find while looking for more McCarthy. I have a vague memory of his having cropped up rather more recently than reference 2, perhaps a review of one of his books which I decided that I did not need to read. Present but not helpful at https://psmv4.blogspot.com/, along with McCarthy & Stone.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy. 

Reference 5: Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West – Cormac McCarthy – 1985. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Banville. An Irish writer of whom I had not previously heard. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabasis. 

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/two-mccarthys.html. 

Reference 9: Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought – Peter Gärdenfors – 2000.

Reference 10: Axiomatic projective geometry – Goodstein, Primrose – 1953. 

Reference 11: Projective Geometry: From Foundations to Applications – Albrecht Beutelspacher, Ute Rosenbaum – 1998.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/01/weaver-two.html. 

Reference 13: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/01/nyregion/charles-bronson-81-dies-muscular-movie-tough-guy.html.