Cormac McCarthy and Leslie Garrett: A Literary Friendship
p. 27-59
Résumés
Drawing on print and film interviews with novelist Leslie Garrett by Knoxville journalist Don Williams, this article examines McCarthy’s friendship with Garrett from the perspectives of biography and literary influence. Their relationship constitutes the only long-term literary friendship we can currently document for McCarthy, but it calls into question the cliché that McCarthy is reclusive and/or indifferent to other novelists. The two writers met in Ibiza in 1967 shortly after each had published a prize-winning first novel, and the friendship continued, with intermittent contact, for the rest of Garrett’s life. Garrett’s The Beasts (1966) won the Maxwell Perkins Award, but because of his addictions and personal problems, Garrett did not publish another novel until the year before his death in 1993. The article traces Garrett’s early life, comparing it with McCarthy’s, and contrasts their literary careers. Then it explores their mutual influence, simultaneously providing an introduction to Garrett’s novels.
Traces of the Prophet from The Beasts are reinscribed in Judge Holden; the loneliness and decline into corruption of the protagonist Farley Grimm adumbrate Lester Ballard; the final scenes of Blood Meridian recall the closing of The Beasts, where Grimm is arrested and tormented by his dreams and later by the Prophet and his dwarf accomplice before a final violent confrontation; and the language and imagery of the last line of The Beasts are echoed in the prologue to Outer Dark. As a dream-narrative, The Beasts may also have influenced McCarthy’s increased emphasis on the dream-experience in works published after The Orchard Keeper.
Vernon Monday in Garrett’s In the Country of Desire (1992) descends from Farley Grimm through Lester Ballard. The story of Emil, guilty of incest with his daughter Madeleine, resonates in several ways with Culla Holme’s. And Madeleine has intriguing affinities with Magdalena of Cities of the Plain, although we have insufficient information to determine the direction of influence. A chronology of Garrett’s life is appended.
McCarthy, Garrett, biography, influence, dream, incest.
À partir d’entretiens publiés ou filmés avec le romancier Leslie Garrett, réalisés par le journaliste de Knoxville Don Williams, cet article étudie l’amitié qui lia McCarthy et Garrett sous l’angle de la biographie et de l’influence littéraire. La relation des deux écrivains constitue certes la seule longue amitié littéraire connue et tangible chez McCarthy mais elle remet en question le cliché selon lequel McCarthy vit en reclus et/ou indifférent aux autres romanciers. Les deux écrivains se sont rencontrés en 1967 à Ibiza peu de temps après que la publication de leur premier roman respectif soit récompensée par un prix, et leur amitié se poursuivit, entretenue par des contacts intermittents, jusqu’à la fin de la vie de Garrett. Le roman de Garrett, The Beasts (1966), gagna le prix Maxwell Perkins mais en raison de son addiction à la drogue et de problèmes personnels, l’auteur ne publia rien d’autre avant l’année qui précéda celle de sa mort survenue en 1993. Cet article retrace les débuts de Garrett, en les comparant à ceux de McCarthy, et met en regard leur carrière littéraire. Puis il explore leur influence mutuelle, tout en constituant une introduction aux romans de Garrett.
On trouve des traces du personnage du Prophète (The Beasts) dans celui du Juge Holden ; la solitude du protagoniste, Farley Grimm, et son naufrage dans la corruption préfigurent Lester Ballard ; les scènes finales de Blood Meridian rappellent la clôture de The Beasts, où Grimm est arrêté et tourmenté par ses rêves, puis par le Prophète et son complice nain, avant l’ultime confrontation violente ; le langage et les images de la dernière ligne de The Beasts trouvent un écho dans le prologue de Outer Dark. Le récit de rêves qu’est The Beasts peut aussi avoir pesé quand McCarthy écrivait des scènes de rêve, nombreuses dans les romans publiés après The Orchard Keeper.
Le personnage de Vernon Monday dans In the Country of Desire de Garrett (1992) vient de Farley Grimm mais aussi du Lester Ballard de McCarthy. L’histoire d’Émile, coupable d’inceste avec sa fille Madeleine, renvoie à plus d’un titre à celle de Culla Holme dans Outer Dark. En outre, Madeleine a des affinités intéressantes avec Magdalena de Cities of the Plain, même s’il est impossible de déterminer laquelle a servi de modèle à l’autre. On trouvera une chronologie de la vie de Garrett en annexe.
McCarthy, Garrett, biographie, influence, rêve, inceste.
Texte intégral
1In 1992, when Richard Woodward published the only full-length interview with Cormac McCarthy to date,1 he wrote of McCarthy’s “hostility” to the literary world and cited novelist and environmental activist Edward Abbey, whom McCarthy met shortly before Abbey’s death in 1989, as one of the “few [writers] he acknowledges having known at all” (30). However, two years before Woodward’s interview, Knoxville journalist Don Williams had written feature articles on Cormac McCarthy for which he interviewed McCarthy’s ex-wife Anne DeLisle and a then almost unknown writer named Leslie Garrett.2 Garrett described his meeting with McCarthy in Europe in 1967:
I was in Ebiza [Ibiza], an international watering hole for writers, painters. My novel, “The Beasts,” had just won a prize.
We were both young literary lions, circling each other, claws extended. Within five minutes, I knew that I had met a future friend. He and Annie and I were the Three Musketeers.
We did a lot of carousing, a lot of champagne. Cormac doesn’t drink now. ( “Cormac” E2)
2This was the earliest printed mention of the connection between the novelists, and at the time no one writing about McCarthy had heard of Leslie Garrett, as his alcohol and drug addictions, manic depressive disorder and suicide attempt prevented him from publishing again until very late in his life, when his second published novel, In the Country of Desire (1992), came out shortly before his death. Nor did Woodward mention Garrett, presumably because McCarthy told him nothing of his friend whose early promise had remained so unfulfilled. But here, in Williams’ articles, was news of a writer who had befriended McCarthy early in his career, who had even moved to Knoxville, and who at one time was intimate enough to tease his buddy, “I don’t mind that you are a great writer, and almost as intelligent as me, but God was very cruel when he made you so good looking” (Williams, “Cormac” E1).
3In the years after his 1990 pieces on McCarthy for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Don Williams wrote a feature article on Garrett himself, scripted and videotaped an extended interview with Garrett entitled Passions Awry: The Leslie Garrett Story, and continued to write news articles about this transplant to Knoxville until Garrett’s death on June 3, 1993 and after, functioning as Garrett’s literary executor and loyal friend. Each of Williams’ pieces mentions Cormac McCarthy, sometimes quoting Garrett on their relationship or his opinion of McCarthy’s books. In his extended obituary of Garrett, Williams describes the two men as “lifelong friends” ( “Nationally Lauded”). Much of the information about Garrett’s relationship with McCarthy is reprised in Williams’ two articles for New Millennium Writings, the semi-annual journal which he edits. And he adds substantial new information in an interview with Garrett published in Poets & Writers Magazine in 1993. Although primarily focused on Garrett, Williams’ articles offer significant biographical information about Cormac McCarthy, tracing incrementally McCarthy’s meeting Garrett in Europe, his urging Garrett to leave the life of drinking and partying in Ibiza so that he might write again,3 his and Annie’s rediscovering Garrett in Philadelphia and inviting him to come to Knoxville with his fiancée Linda Kerby, where the McCarthys gave them a “magnificent wedding” (Anon., “Leslie Garrett”),4 Anne’s later helping a divorced and desperate Leslie to move to Knoxville in 1980, McCarthy’s irritation and withdrawal from Garrett after his comments about their friendship were published in Williams’ 1990 feature ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 15), and his relenting in a generous letter in 1993 when Garrett was dying of throat cancer at sixty-two. Perhaps most significantly, Williams’ interviews offer ample evidence to temper clichéd journalistic assertions both about McCarthy’s hostility to the literary world and his reclusiveness.5
4When they met in the sixties, McCarthy and Garrett had more in common than might first appear. Both had come from middle class families, although Garrett’s father, Herbert Henry Feldman ( “Garrett, Leslie”) made and lost money regularly, while Charles McCarthy’s law career advanced without a hitch. Garrett’s childhood memories included growing up in Philadelphia alternately in a mansion of twenty rooms with servants for the house and grounds and then in a “ghetto” when his father lost his fortune (Passions). As an attorney for the TVA, McCarthy’s father was a respected member of the Knoxville community, but after renting6 a two-storey white frame in prestigious Sequoyah Hills (Neely 135) in the early years after their move from Providence, Rhode Island to Knoxville, their large family later lived in a modest house. McCarthy spent his formative years from the age of nine in the gabled cottage in the rural Vestal community south of Knoxville.7 It is not, by absolute standards, the “large white house” that Woodward asserts (perhaps he conflates the Sequoyah Hills house with the one in Vestal), but it seemed so to McCarthy’s neighbors “because”—as McCarthy told Woodward— “all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks”. And like Garrett’s home in better times, the McCarthys’ was “staffed with maids” (Woodward 31). Cormac—then called “Charlie” or “Charles” (Fields, “Knoxville”)—and his five sisters and brothers went to private Catholic schools in Knoxville. Garrett—then named “Herbert Feldman”—went to public schools until he dropped out at the age of fifteen. Both McCarthy and Garrett have expressed their sense of themselves as precocious boys with disdain for their schooling (Passions; Woodward 31).8
5 Both seem to have had troubled relationships with their fathers. Garrett recalled that his father—a former state high school gymnastics champion— admired two kinds of people: athletes and outlaws. Garrett was very small of stature, and as a youngster he could more easily imagine himself as an outlaw than an athlete. He dreamed of masterminding criminal escapades and writing out the plans to sell them to less inventive crooks. But with self-deprecating irony he has confessed that his criminality was less than brilliant; that phase of his life culminated in his participating in youth gangs to steal things out of cars. Garrett earned his father’s approval when he sold his first short story at sixteen and brought home a check that was larger than his father’s. Sadly, this was the only time he felt he had impressed his father (Passions). He told Williams, “I’ve been estranged from my own family since 1959,9 and I don’t regret that, but there’s something in all of us that wants roots.... In my unfinished novel, The Resurrection of H, Cara says, ‘All I ever wanted was a home. That ain’t asking too much is it, H?’... Maybe I do want that, I don’t know” ( “Interview” 55).
6Not surprisingly, the evidence for McCarthy’s difficulty with his father is less direct and less ample. We know that Charles McCarthy left his family in Knoxville for a year and a half to serve as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in 1938 and 39 ( “McCarthy Named”), residing in Washington DC when Cormac was five and six. Williams writes that “The elder McCarthy was in the air so much that for a while he was one of only four Knoxvillians in Trans World Airline’s Million Mile Club”, and his impression, based on interviews with Anne DeLisle and Leslie Garrett, is that McCarthy “had some sort of falling out with his... father” ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 19). McCarthy’s works almost without exception depict main characters alienated from their fathers through abandonment (by either the father or the son), estrangement, or death—and a longing for re-attachment that has become progressively apparent later in his career.10 (McCarthy’s father died in 1995 at the age of 87 [Anon., “Charles”]. Like Suttree’s father, who chides him that if it is life he is looking for, he will find it in the businesses and law offices of downtown Knoxville rather than on the streets and river-front (S 13-14), at least initially Yale Law School-educated and Roman Catholic Charles Joseph McCarthy, Sr. may have felt disappointment in his son’s rootlessness, his divorces, and his reluctance to settle into a mainstream career. Cormac’s siblings all followed more traditional paths: his three sisters married,11 his brother William ( “Bill”) initially intended to become a Jesuit priest (Anon., First Fifty 79), but became a folklore scholar instead, and the youngest, Dennis, followed in Charles’s footsteps, becoming an attorney for TVA. Thus Cormac struck out on a very different path from those followed by the rest of his family, and like Garrett he saw himself as something of an outlaw by his family’s standards.12 “I was not what they had in mind,” McCarthy told Woodward of his relations with his parents. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen” (31).
7Both Garrett and McCarthy rejected the names given them by their parents when they began to write, but Garrett’s change from his birth name, Herbert Feldman, perhaps constituted a repudiation not only of his father but also of his Jewish religion and ethnicity, while McCarthy’s adoption of his childhood nickname in preference to his patronymic first and middle names (Charles Joseph), while keeping his surname, suggests greater comfort both with his family and with his Irish heritage. Indeed, Garrett once said that McCarthy changed his name because “he didn’t like associations with another Charlie McCarthy, the famous wooden dummy that played comedian to Edgar Bergen’s straight man” (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 19). And Wesley Morgan has found evidence that McCarthy’s high school classmates were well aware he bore the name of the comic dummy: an article about the staff of the Gold and Blue joked that its Artist was “certainly not similar to Edgar Bergan’s [sic] ‘Blockhead, ’ in any respect” (qtd. in Morgan 2). Nevertheless, Williams, who has talked not only to Garrett and Anne DeLisle, but also to Dennis McCarthy, and to Knoxville friends Jim Boruff and Gary Goodman, has formed the impression that Cormac’s father, “already estranged, [...] might have taken the act as a personal affront” ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 19).
8Garrett and McCarthy both left home and traveled throughout the United States as young men, and especially while they were developing as writers. McCarthy took a year to roam the country after his freshman year (1951-52) at the University of Tennessee (Fields, “Knoxville”; Jordan). Then, according to the back fly-leaf of the first edition of The Orchard Keeper, he enlisted in the Air Force in 1953 and spent two of his four years in Alaska. Several years earlier Garrett had enlisted in the Navy at seventeen and was stationed in Pensacola, Florida (Williams, “Experiences” E3). McCarthy took several months to hitchhike cross-country in the summer of 1959, going as far as California (Anon., “Contributors” 12), and Williams writes—perhaps on Garrett’s authority—that McCarthy visited San Francisco and the haunts of the Beat writers after leaving the Air Force ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 19). By 1969 he would tell a reporter that he had lived in all fifty of the states (Jordan). We know he lived in Chicago, Asheville, North Carolina and New Orleans between 1961 and 1965, when he published The Orchard Keeper (Anon. “Author Lives in Blount”; Woodward 31). Garrett’s travels took him to some of the same places. According to the dust jacket of The Beasts, Garrett “left school at fifteen and wandered the United States, Mexico13 and Canada.” He had been publishing pulp fiction for some time before his interest in jazz led him to New Orleans in the early 1960s, where he wrote the first story of which he was “truly proud”— “A Walk Through the Streets of the City”—published in the little magazine, Climax. Friends encouraged him to leave his boring job as a file clerk in New Orleans for the literary environment of San Francisco, where he claims he was immediately recognized as “the cat who wrote ‘A Walk Through the Streets of the City’” (Passions) and welcomed into the circle of Beat writers. He met Jack Kerouac, but he never fully embraced the Beat movement. “Though I shared their lifestyle and appreciated their social ideals, as a writer I didn’t think very highly of the prose writers of the Beat period. I consider them all pretty second rate,” he told an anonymous interviewer (Anon., “Leslie”). However, he told Williams with some regret that when Mademoiselle magazine wanted to use him as a representative of the Beat prose writers for its photographic profile of the movement, he declined, and they featured Kerouac instead (Williams, “Leslie” E1).14
9In New York City, Garrett met Seymour Krim, editor of Nugget, where he placed some of his fiction.15 Krim offered to “open doors” to get Garrett’s novels published. When Scribner’s accepted his novel-in-progress, The Beasts, and asked what kind of advance he would need to complete it, Garrett asked for enough to take him “back to Paris, where I had written well before” (Williams, “Interview” 53). Working on his book there in 1965, Garrett met James Jones and James Baldwin, and he heard from Seymour Krim that The Beasts was to be named a Maxwell E. Perkins Commemorative Novel when it was published in 1966. In honor of the celebrated Scribner’s editor, the commemorative novels were “chosen on the basis of their evidence of literary talent, their individuality, and their serious artistic purpose” (dust jacket for The Beasts). When The Beasts was published, its dust jacket announced that “In recent years [Garrett] has traveled in central Europe and North Africa, and he now lives on the island of Hydra, off the Greek coast.”
10Meanwhile, McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, completed in Chicago three years earlier (Fields, “Knoxville”), was published by Random House in May 1965 and was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel by an American that year. With a travel fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he sailed for England and Ireland, meeting his second wife, Annie DeLisle, on board ship. They married in Hamble, in Hampshire, England nine months later, on May 14, 1966 (Williams, “Annie” E1; “McCarthy, Cormac” 1493), and then continued to travel through Western Europe in 1966-68 with McCarthy’s newly-awarded Rockefeller Foundation Grant ( “McCarthy, Cormac” 1493). McCarthy’s and Garrett’s wandering paths finally converged in a bar on the Spanish island of Ibiza (Williams, “Fading” 117). The two were close in age; both had been divorced once, each leaving behind one child; both were intensely serious about their writing; both had absorbed and admired the work of James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway (Williams, “Experiences” E3); both had served apprenticeships into their thirties and then received substantial recognition for their first novels. Garrett would later follow McCarthy’s lead in choosing a pretty singer and dancer, Linda Kerby, as his second wife (Williams, “Leslie” E3), and for both, these second marriages would end in divorce. Too, Garrett always considered himself a writer, even in the decades when he was not writing. But in all things else, as Williams has demonstrated, their lives and fortunes diverged dramatically in the years after Ibiza.
11Given their early competition and the depth of their friendship, we can be relatively confident that McCarthy read Garrett’s The Beasts close to its publication date in 1966 while the “three Musketeers” were living in Ibiza. Garrett claimed that McCarthy affably plugged his friend’s book, lauding Garrett’s “rare and perceptive insight into the human condition” (Passions).16 Aside from their uses of narrative frames, The Beasts and The Orchard Keeper have very little in common, but there are enough traces of mutual influence in the subsequent works of both writers to constitute a muted dialogue between the two. Garrett’s published work is more consistently urban, gritty, and focused on the psychology of lonely, obsessive, and even grotesque characters,17 while McCarthy’s is more often (but not exclusively) rural, foregrounds the natural world, melds violence with lyricism, and maintains both the humanity and the mystery of his lost though often seeking protagonists. The Beasts has the feel of Sherwood Anderson cum Nathaniel West, with its translucent style, its ironic look at both American entrepreneurialism and the San Francisco bohemian culture, its mocking narrative stance in respect to its protagonist, and its deepening surrealism. Its central character, the naïve yet highly imaginative Farley Grimm, moves to California from Louisiana, takes a stultifying job as a mailing room clerk in an insurance company, but is full of romantic yearnings for love and culture. In an early scene based on one of Garrett’s own experiences (Williams, “Interview” 53), Grimm goes to a bohemian party where he meets the neurotic waif Lenore, who tells him she was once raped by the gigantic black man who has already fascinated Farley at the party:
It was not just that the Negro was large; he was monstrous. He was perhaps just a bit under seven feet; a giant in fact; proportionately broad, with large ham-like hands that had been used obviously for years in toil; but there was something about the eyes, the face, that proclaimed a hate-filled but flaccid nature seeking completion. The eyes were very small; but fierce and strange in that broad, huge face. (17)
12Later, we learn that the turbaned and beady-eyed Negro is completely hairless and, naked after the rape, he strikes Lenore as “strangely fat and child-like” (55)—like McCarthy’s monstrous but childlike child-rapist Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985). “He calls himself the Prophet” Lenore tells Farley, and Farley asks “Of what?” (21), like the kid in Blood Meridian, who asks about the huge hairless Holden, “What’s he a judge of”? (135). Neither receives an illuminating answer.
13Lenore’s revelation piques Farley’s interest in her, and he attempts a chaste embrace “as if he could placate... all of her misery and loneliness” (23), but his compassion quickly morphs into lust in a scene that adumbrates the larger movement of the novel. The initial revulsion of the “strayed moralist” (25) gives way to growing compulsion as he becomes obsessed with the eccentricities in Lenore that had first shocked him, and especially with the image of her rape by the Prophet. Gradually it becomes clear it is the Prophet Farley seeks:18
The Prophet: more caricature than prophet, bizarre and perhaps mad too; cunning surely, festering with hatred—yet the intensity of that caricature, the audacity that inspired him to couple it with his grotesque hugeness, compelling beyond mere inventiveness: his power was always short-lived, his conquests brief; the novelty soon wore off and he moved from city to city. He had a sort of genius: he called up briefly the secret admiration in all of us for evil made comfortable to face. (46)
14Like Judge Holden, the Prophet is an obfuscater.19 In an attempt to seduce Lenore, he tells her: “when God made man He made him to love His image. We got to get God back into our lovin’; we got to love Him; otherwise we corrupted. You love me and you got to love God; cause I’m His fiery angel” (49). Ultimately, though, his pretense of love and sacrament yields to violent rape.20
15As the novel unfolds, Garrett traces Farley’s inexorable decline into evil— much as McCarthy would later do with Lester Ballard in Child of God but with more compassion and none of Garrett’s hallucinatory warp. Farley abandons his bourgeois aspirations, losing his job and all pretense of respectability as he increasingly identifies with the Prophet, becoming “a drunkard of the spirit” (79),21 and appearing to his shocked co-workers as “the now-revealed dark aberrant beast” who must be “exorcised” (84-85). Currying favor with the Prophet, he joins him in a house of derelicts next to a vacant lot, where in an open room he discovers the Prophet’s “collection” of minions arranged like “dolls... nearly as still as toys” on ledges of the broken ceilings (115-16)—like the lonely necrophile Lester Ballard’s collection of corpses in his cave in McCarthy’s Child of God (1973)22; later Farley takes the Prophet and his followers— “derelicts, winos, old whores” (135) and an assertive dwarf—into the apartment he shares with Lenore. “He was not unhappy about it.... It was as if a community were forming; a beggar community true, but out of his long loneliness he felt it better than no community at all” (139). He begins shoplifting regularly and systematically to support this community.
16Farley has had his body tattooed with the same leopard that adorns the Prophet’s, and he imagines covering his body with such tattoos:
Before each new acquisition of tattoo, he dreamed, there would be some secret (to him), ritualistic intimacy with the Prophet. (131]
17 But in the face of the Prophet’s contempt, Farley first enacts the feminized role of jealous housewife and then begins wearing women’s panties and a blond wig in another foretaste of the psychosis of McCarthy’s Lester Ballard, who precipitates his own detection and arrest when, wearing a “fright wig and skirts” taken from his murder victims, he assaults the man who has bought his foreclosed farm (CoG 172).23 As Farley discovers that despite his efforts, he is “powerless to obtain [the Prophet’s] favor” (153),24 his eyes take on a “haunted, lost look” (146), and he steals a mannequin from an orthopedist’s shop window, enthralled with its featureless and truncated shape because “enclosing it as if in some medieval torture vest” are “the belts and harnesses and straps and tight girdle-like objects sold in the store.... For was he not misshapen too? Was he not constrained and twisted and without final form?” (151). When he lays this icon at the Prophet’s feet, the Prophet scorns it, and Farley dons the constraints himself, only to find that his mock-community jeers him, chanting that he is evil (156).25
18Key images and events in the final chapter of The Beasts eerily foreshadow the closing of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, suggesting that the least historical section of McCarthy’s surreal Western, as original as it may feel to readers, stands partly as private homage to his friend Leslie Garrett. Like the kid, who waits for someone to arrest him in San Diego, speaks urgently of the horrors in which he has participated, wakes (perhaps) to find the judge watching him in his cell, is subject to further visits from the judge in his ether dreams and his dreams that follow, and ultimately faces the judge in a violent resolution, Farley undergoes a similar crisis in which he indulges in self-punishment, is taunted and tormented by the Prophet and his minions and finally confronts the Prophet in violence. Challenged while shoplifting, Farley asks to be arrested because he is evil, faints and wakes as he is being locked in a dark storeroom, where in a panicky hallucination he feels himself surrounded by rats and screams out “for mother, for God, for anything” (164).26 After his release, he suffers four days of hysteria and fever dreams on his mattress in Lenore’s apartment, then dresses each day and sits motionless, appearing to be waiting for something. Lenore understands this to be “part of some obscure rite he was performing” (169), and she watches in horror as he breaks liquor bottles to walk barefoot on the shards of glass and performs further rituals of self-flagellation. As he waits, Farley gradually brings into focus his idea
that perhaps there was not one beast, but many that formed the one; that it drew apart and merged again and again, as the cells in a human organism. But in this, each was complete in itself; each could merge at will into the enormous whole: they could, one day, be that towering thing that would come at last to devour him.... (172-3]
19The narrator of Blood Meridian comments similarly on the communal nature of evil:
For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world than conjectural winds. (152)
20But Judge Holden has a different idea: “Hear me, man.... There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone”, he portentously tells the kid in the final moments of their last conversation, initiated in the Fort Griffin saloon just after the kid has witnessed the wanton shooting of a dancing bear (BM 331). The judge claims that he himself will live forever ( “He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die” [BM 335]), and it is clear he means to be the sole beast on the stage: “All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance. Bears that dont” (BM 331).
21Farley’s waiting ends when the Prophet bursts into his room, an act which announces the final phase of daily baiting. The Prophet controls Farley, whose “fall had made him his personal victim” (175): he sends him on errands, grabs him by the neck with one giant hand and drags him from room to room “as one would a kitten” (174), and commands him to dance. The Prophet’s minions join in “happily”—like the sidekicks of the bearded leader of the triune in Outer Dark—responding to the scent of victimhood that clings to him. “[A]ll were aware that a prey was at large” (179) the narrator comments, prefiguring too the image of the huntsman whose “work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not” in the ending of Suttree, where Suttree as narrator counsels, “I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them” (471). The Prophet’s followers torment Farley: “they seemed to slither into him on paths of darkness: where the darkness was, they came to life and reached out for him”; “[I]t was like a dance—some weird, chthonian dance in which each one used him in his turn” (184; 175). “This is an orchestration for an event” the judge tells the kid in the saloon at Fort Griffin, “For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time” (BM 328-29).
22The dance in which Farley is forced to participate humiliates and unmans him repeatedly. In one instance, he is ordered to strip naked, and the leopard he has tattooed on his body in emulation of the Prophet is revealed to all. The Prophet orders Farley again to don the panties and wig and to dance. But when Farley’s somber movement displeases the Prophet, he waltzes Grimm around the room in a mad whirl, finally hurling him atop a nearly naked whore, who throws him off “with a curse of contempt” (178) when he fails to respond sexually. Farley’s sexual humiliation is repeated in two scenes involving the dwarf, whose role is reprised in Blood Meridian partly in the dwarf whore with whom the kid cannot perform sexually and partly in the idiot James Robert, whose speech is likewise described as “gibbering” (Beasts 168; BM 258). In the first of these scenes, the Prophet again makes Farley to stand naked before them all, revealing his emaciated and withered body. They laugh derisively when the dwarf came out to inspect him: coming barely to its level, he stared curiously, almost in awe.
“You ain’t no man atall,” the Prophet pronounced.... (182)
23Later Farley is summoned to a mock wedding ceremony at which the Prophet officiates as mock-preacher.27 The dwarf is dressed for the role as groom, and the derelicts prepare a passive Farley for his assigned role as bride, adorning him with the blond wig and lace curtains. But when the Prophet pauses drunkenly in the ritual recital, he hears Lenore aping his voice with perfect mimicry, and he breaks out of his false preacher suit, “as if he were shedding another, brittle skin” (187), hurls Farley against the wall, and pursues Lenore. Farley wakes from unconsciousness, retrieves a butcher knife he has hidden under his mattress and creeps to Lenore’s room—hitherto an inviolate sanctuary from the derelicts—where he sees that “A giant mouth seemed to be feeding there: upon the bed, a white, small form was being devoured by it: only the arms and legs rooted out of the mouth, the legs kicking up uselessly, but the arms pounding and tearing at it”. Farley stabs at the “creature”, whose “beady eyes [are] now wide with horror and disbelief”, and kills it (190).
24Wrapping the form and its turban in a sheet, Farley takes it to the roof, ties a rope under its arms, and lowers it into a courtyard: “Farley could see it receding toward the ground; dangling, now and then bumping against the wall and spinning slightly” (191)—an image that McCarthy revises in Child of God when Lester raises the body of his first victim, ironically reanimating her as the pressure of the rope makes her appear to sit up and pause, “dangling” and then to rise again (95). Farley buries the body at the feet of a small statue of Christ that stands behind a fence in the courtyard, mutilating the corpse to fit it in the small enclosure. As Farley works throughout the night, digging with a large cooking spoon, hacking with the knife, he believes that “For the first time he could feel the real, hidden strength of righteousness surging in him; he hummed to himself the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ as he dug” (192).
25In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reverses this grotesque, Poe-esque ending. The kid neither escapes nor kills the judge, the beast who claims hegemony over all; rather, he is himself overpowered by Holden, devoured or raped or slain. But a germ of McCarthy’s re-inscription inheres in the last line of Garrett’s novel, a line which captures the movement of the book in its imagery of light fading to darkness as the bright moon illuminating Farley’s work becomes obscured by filmy clouds and then denser ones, “and he was in shadows; and then he was in darkness” (192). “[Which suited him] very well” (OD 3) we might add, in recognition that incipient in the last line of The Beasts is also the opening of McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark (1968), his portentous parable that constitutes an early working out of allegorical elements that would be reconfigured in Blood Meridian. There we find a dialogic continuity with The Beasts, as the prologue of Outer Dark similarly employs imagery of a darkening landscape to foreshadow the movement of the triune and of Culla Holme, whose familiars they are: the dark triune crest “out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass”, then drop “under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well” (3).
26As I have hinted, The Beasts, with its surreal and hallucinatory qualities, can be read as an extended dream narrative. Farley’s narrated experiences occur between intervals of sleep or unconsciousness, leaving in doubt the waking reality of the events. In much of the novel, his perception is mediated by drunkenness, and he is a devolving madman who owes much to Garrett’s early fascination with the works of Poe; indeed, its dust jacket announces that Farley’s “emotional dissolution” occurs “through a descending series of fantasies”. In “‘Go to sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy,” Edwin T. Arnold has demonstrated how consistently dream-narrative characterizes the work of Cormac McCarthy, but it seems clear that his use of dreams to structure such works as Outer Dark and Blood Meridian or to reveal dimensions of the character’s inner lives, as in Suttree and the Border Trilogy, is more pronounced in the works he completed after meeting Leslie Garrett. In McCarthy’s early story, “Wake for Susan” (1959), and his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, the narrative frames contain acts of memory and imagination, and though it is possible that the protagonists, especially in the case of “Wake for Susan”, may be sleeping in the opening frame scenes, the narratives’ status as dreams per se is neither insisted upon nor, finally, essential to our understanding of the narration.28 This changes with Outer Dark, McCarthy’s second novel, which is explicitly framed as a dream narrative. Similarly, while Ather Ownby’s dreams of panthers in The Orchard Keeper reveal aspects of his personality, they do not carry the weight of the “visionary experience” in McCarthy’s western works, which as Arnold demonstrates, functions as an alternate and often truer way of knowing. In Suttree (1979), Arnold points out, “the hallucinatory reel” of the “[s]tates of drunkenness, of psychedelic perception, of hyper-awareness spiraling away from and beyond ratiocination... in which Suttree confronts his own inner guilt, self-disgust, alienation... counterpoint equally brilliant examples of expository description that mirror the physical everyday life of Knoxville and its environs” ( “Dreams” 42-43). Arnold points to William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and James Joyce’s Ulysses as “likely influences” on this “hallucinatory reel”, and it seems appropriate to add Leslie Garrett’s The Beasts to the list as well.
27When Don Williams asked Garrett how his personal ordeal had influenced his writing, Garrett responded that recovery had enabled him to let go of ego enough to begin listening to people, and that when he did, “suddenly my characters were talking in individual voices” ( “Interview” 49). He continued:
Before my breakdown I was... intolerant of everyone who didn’t have my, quote, remarkable qualities—writers who didn’t have the kind of dedication I have, for instance—and I expressed it and I hurt a lot of people along the way. I think I’ve learned a lot of tolerance since then, and if you’re going to create people in a novel, it’s not necessary that you love them, but you do have to be tolerant of their weaknesses and you have to understand them, because if you don’t, your reader won’t. (50)
28Here Garrett puts his finger on a major weakness in The Beasts, and though he did a great deal of writing during his recovery, much of it destroyed, the rest unpublished,29 his new perspective is clearly evident in his last novel, In the Country of Desire (1992). Ambitious but stylistically uneven and less the technical tour de force that The Beasts represents, In the Country of Desire is also more derivative; in structure, theme, tone and characterization it is more indebted to William Faulkner—especially to Light in August—and perhaps even to Faulkner’s step-child, Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron, than to the avant garde novels of the 1950s. Indeed, Garrett thought of his novel as partly an exposé of the destructive influence of the Beat and hippie movements of the 50s and 60s—especially the drug culture and the sexual revolution. He told an interviewer:
I always despised Jack Kerouac and the rest of them for one main reason. They lied about the 60s. It wasn’t all parties, and wam-bam, and zooming around the country and highjinx. There was a lot of misery. I can’t count on both hands the number of people I knew who died of suicides, O.D.s or whatever.... I’m kind of presenting the 60s in its whole. I’m not saying the fun wasn’t there, but that was just one side of the picture. This whole darker side has never been presented. [Anon., “Leslie”]
29 In important ways, In the Country of Desire offers evidence of a continued conversation between the works of Garrett and McCarthy. In the person of Vernon Monday, Garrett reprises his life-long interest in grotesques. But Vernon’s lineage can be traced from Garrett’s Farley Grimm through McCarthy’s Lester Ballard (Child of God).30 Necrophilic Lester, who peoples his cave with corpses, owes some of his longing for community and his perverted achievement of it to Farley; and Vernon, while he proves not the criminal that Lester becomes, owes his voyeurism and discomfort with autonomous women to Lester. Odd-looking and reclusive, Vernon longs for physical and emotional contact, but is psychologically incapable of achieving it. He follows people on the streets of the city and pilfers objects of their clothing as a way of simulating contact. He arranges these articles in his bed to form the outline of a woman and sleeps embracing them (11). After becoming the surprised recipient of one night of sexual favor from Willa Rhineman, a young girl who has come to the city in search of her lost mother and who is increasingly desperate for a place to sleep on her first night there, Vernon buys a mannequin and dresses it in Willa’s stolen hat and an overcoat, posing it and drawing his lace curtains so that from outside the window “the mannequin could have been mistaken for the girl.” Then he masturbates, “looking into the hidden face of the mannequin, which was lifting its arms in recognition of him” (83). McCarthy’s Lester Ballard, more egregious than Vernon, masturbates on the fenders of the cars in which young couples have sex at the Frog Mountain turnaround (CoG 20). After recovering a female corpse from one such car, he undresses her and arranges her before the fire, then goes outside his cabin to gaze at her through the window before returning to lie down with her in a necrophilic act (CoG 91-92).
30 In another, subsequent scene that is highly indebted to McCarthy’s Child of God and that achieves similar weirdly comic effect, Vernon goes to Miller’s Discount Department Store31 to buy clothing for the mannequin to match the outfit purchased by Willa. When the clerk begins flipping through the rack of dresses, Vernon “looked as if he were in pain as he watched the dresses coming alive” and he looks away (117). Like Lester buying lingerie in Sevierville for his first corpse/beloved, “his eyes slightly wild as if in terror of the flimsy pastel garments there” (CoG 97), Vernon’s sexual angst is triggered in the presence of feminine undergarments; when he accidentally rests his hand on a display of something soft and finds that they are panties and brassieres, he snatches his hand away (117). He is both puzzling to and abashed by the clerk who attends him. She tells him the panties are on special at three for five dollars, but he remarks, “I only want her to wear one.”
She stared at him. He began blinking.
After she had rung up the sale and given him his change, she said “I just remembered your friend bought a hat too. Would you like one of those?”
“She has a hat” he said, and hurried away from the woman and out of the store hugging his packages to him. [117]
31In Child of God, Lester has difficulty asking for the underwear he wants to buy, but he finally blurts out, “She needs some drawers....” When the salesgirl coughs into her hand and turns to the display, Lester follows, “his face afire.” But he overcomes his embarrassment more readily than Vernon does, and he selects black panties and a red slip. When the girl asks if she also needs a bra, Lester responds abruptly, “No. You ain’t got them drawers in the red have ye?” (98-99).
32A more somber plot parallel has Willa’s grandfather/father Emil—his incestuous relationship with his daughter Madeleine now exposed, and longing for his lost contact with her—sneaking a slip from her bureau and spreading it out on his bed so that he can lie with his face on it (143). In preparation for what he hopes will be a renewed sexual tryst, he buys Madeleine a nightgown in what will become her signature color:
The negligée the saleslady brought him was milk-white with a modest neckline pulled tight at the throat by a thin ribbon. She laid it out for him on the counter, where Emil untied the bow and drew down the shoulder straps and the top. His movements were very slow, very thoughtful. He stood looking down at it for so long that after a while the saleslady turned away in embarrassment. (144)
33Garrett’s treatment of incest resembles Faulkner’s psychological probing more than McCarthy’s metaphysical focus and strategies in Outer Dark (1968), his only novel to give overt expression to the theme. However, in several plot details, Emil’s story resonates with Culla Holme’s. As a young man, taken up by the older and repressive Lydia (whose character owes much to Joanna Burden), Emil is “delivered” to the Ball Creek Baptist Church of the Pentecost. Embracing Lydia’s plans for him as a kind of salvation, even though, or perhaps because, “There were times when he feared her more than he had ever feared anyone or anything on earth”, Emil rises with the “newly saved” and stands “before a blind preacher, who told him that Jesus would heal him as... he received God’s visitation” (102). The scene plays off of both Culla’s dream of the preacher who tells him he can be cured in the opening of Outer Dark (5-6) and the blind man in its final chapter who tells Culla of hearing such a preacher make such a prophecy, but that “they’s darksome ways afoot in this world and it may be he weren’t no true preacher” (241). Emil will marry Lydia for salvation, only to fall in love with his own daughter and transgress unthinkably. His “salvation” is no cure for his inner weakness, and when Madeleine later gives birth to Emil’s child, he “fled the house and rushed into the woods, where he took up his station among other tenants of the night” (180)—mirroring Culla’s nocturnal flight after his sister Rinthy gives birth to their child of incest (Outer Dark 15-18). At birth Emil and Madeleine’s child is “misshapen”, with “the fierce face of a gnome.... It might have been a shrunken soul come back out of hell.” As Lydia holds the child and gazes into the night after Emil, she sees a doll on the kitchen table. “One side of its face was caved in as if it had been dealt a blow with a heavy object”. Like Culla and Rinthy’s chap, who at the age of one is scarred over half of its body and missing an eye, Madeleine’s doll “lay on its back looking up at her out of one terrible crooked eye” (180). As the abused doll forecasts, however, in Garrett’s novel Willa, the child conceived in incest, is denied and fled by her mother as well as her father, and this gives rise to Willa’s search for Madeleine after the deaths of Emil and Lydia. In contrast, the child in Outer Dark, who is left for dead by Culla, is avidly sought by its mother Rinthy, who rests only after her son has been murdered by the dark triune.
34Because Willa hangs herself after learning the terrible secrets of her family, reprising Garrett’s own attempted suicide by hanging, Williams once asked Garrett if he were the orphaned child Willa, and Garrett denied this ( “Interview” 55). But Williams might as reasonably have inquired if Garrett were Madeleine, the budding poet, the child of the sixties abused by her parents and consequently abused by the underground culture in the city to which she flees. Here she becomes a drug addict and a prostitute, preyed upon by people who pretend to love her. But she struggles to free herself, and as she recovers she returns home to claim her child, only to be struck down and killed by her mother Lydia.
35In the figure of Madeleine one imagines that McCarthy might see the reflection of his friend Les, claimed by death in the moment of reclaiming his writing career. She appears to inform McCarthy’s depiction of Magdalena in Cities of the Plain, the child whore associated with madonna blue and often dressed in Madeleine’s white32—the child who is sold and finally killed, at least partly as a sacrificial victim of her culture’s sins—and who shares Leslie Garrett’s epilepsy.33 However, the direction of the influence is difficult to determine, since Magdalena’s character and some of the particulars concerning her had been drafted in the screenplay titled “Cities of the Plain” apparently some ten years before the publication in 1992 of both the first volume of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and In the Country of Desire (see Arnold, “Last”). It may be that McCarthy shared some version of his screenplay with Leslie Garrett before 1990, when they were still corresponding. Or Garrett may have shown McCarthy drafts of In the Country of Desire as he worked on that novel over an eight year period from 1983 to 1991 (Williams, “Literary” B1). In correspondence with me, Don Williams wrote that Garrett had never mentioned seeing drafts of McCarthy’s screenplay but that he found the second possibility quite likely since Garrett was not averse to looking for help to get his work published.34 What is clear is that Madeleine and Magdalena are, on one level, literary twins whose dual conception began in the 1980s rather than after the publication of Country in 1992—one character fleshed out in psychological realism, the other mysterious, under-determined, both charged with significance.
36“She was like a madonna, or perhaps a fragile princess,35 come among us and sitting there with us night after night at my table at the High Note,” the lesbian madam, Mary, tells Willa of her mother:
She had the quality of innocence that is unaware it is doomed. She didn’t know then that it was death she was in love with. We were all aware—even Chatto, who was her lover by then—that she didn’t belong there among us. (154)
37In Cities of the Plain, but not in the script from which it evolved, the blind maestro tells John Grady, “My belief is that [Magdalena] is at best a visitor. At best. She does not belong here. Among us” (81).
38Despite her love for Madeleine’s innocence, Mary takes advantage of her drug addiction to make her a whore,36 telling her, “You see, Madeleine, the difference between what you were and a tramp has always been a very fine line” (270)—a cruel taunt that reverberates in Cities of the Plain in the pimp Eduardo’s insistence to John Grady and Billy that Magdalena has the mind and heart of a whore (Cities 133, 249; script 144, 146) and in both Eduardo and Tiburcio’s litany to Magdalena herself that she is nothing (Cities 183, 213; cf. script 129). Near the end of In the Country of Desire, Willa finds her mother’s journal kept during the months of recovery and reads this entry: “I had to concentrate this morning to remember my name. Madeleine. Magdalene” (350). In Cities of the Plain, when Magdalena tells John Grady her name, he repeats it instead of telling her his own. This prompts her to look down, “[a]s if the sound of her name were troubling to her” (67).
39Early in their literary careers, Garrett and McCarthy were on similar trajectories, and before they met their paths spiraled around one another’s like those of Culla and Rinthy in Outer Dark. Both men undeniably had talent. But their roads led to very different places, a fact of which Garrett was painfully aware in his later years. Garrett’s talent remained under-developed and unrecognized while McCarthy’s has so far manifested itself in eight challenging, philosophically intense novels written in his unique, stirringly resonant prose style over a lifelong career. When Garrett discovered that In the Country of Desire and All the Pretty Horses would be published in the same spring, his hopes rose at the thought that he might join his friend in the limelight as he had done in 1966. With the bravado that perhaps was necessary to keep him writing again at the end of his life, he told Williams:
There are only two great writers at work in America today. Me and Cormac. And we’re going mano a mano, hand to hand, just me and him.37 ( “Fading” 118)
40But All the Pretty Horses won positive and extensive reviews, best-seller status, and literary prizes, while In the Country of Desire was little noticed. The momentum of Garrett’s career had been seriously disrupted almost at its inception, and he no longer had a Seymour Krim, nor an Albert Erskine or a Gary Fisketjon,38 to open doors for him. Read out of context of the finished Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses seemed comparatively tame fare to Garrett (and to some reviewers): “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody” he told Williams ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 12). But when All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award and Garrett was dying, McCarthy wrote him a gracious letter, which Williams paraphrases: “It should have been you, old friend; such honors mean nothing to me” ( “Fading” 116).39
Bibliographie
A Leslie Garrett Chronology
5 July 1931 Born Herbert Feldman in Philadelphia ( “Garrett, Leslie”).
c. 1944 Juvenile gang-member at age thirteen; hears Peter Lorre read Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”; writes his own first story, “Mother Hagen’s Glass Eye” (Williams, “Experiences” E1-E3).
c. 1946 Leaves school at fifteen ( “Garrett, Leslie”).
c. 1947 Sells first story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction at sixteen (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
c. 1948 Joins Navy at seventeen; stationed at Whiting Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida; writes for base newspaper (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
4 June 1949 Marries first wife, Jean Collier; daughter Dawne born ( “Garrett, Leslie”)
1949 (?)-50 Writes for Milton Gazette; run out of town for writing “too-frank expose of how the authorities were trying to pin the rape of a white girl on a black man”; returns to Philadelphia (Williams, “Experiences” E3; “Garrett, Leslie”).
early 1950s Works for Tales from the Crypt comic book in New York (Williams, “Experiences” E3; Williams, “Leslie” E1); takes clerical job on Wall Street; reads Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner; “A Rose for Emily” inspires him to resume writing; divorced from Jean (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
c. 1955 Lives in New Orleans; meets editor of Climax and sells him “A Walk Through the Streets of the City” (Williams, “Experiences” E3); novel, Faces of Hatred and Love, completed (unpublished); begins The Beasts; arrested for shop-lifting (Williams, “Interview” 53); works as a filing clerk (Passions).
c. 1956 Lives in San Francisco; meets Jack Kerouac; turns down Mademoiselle’s offer of a literary profile (Williams, “Leslie” E1); “The Letters” published in Four Quarters.
mid-late 1950s Returns to New York; meets Allen Ginsberg; does readings (Williams, “Experiences” E3); sells stories to “girlie magazines” (Williams, “Leslie” E3).
1957 Kerouac’s On the Road published.
1959 Death of grandmother, Florence Bradley, to whom In the Country of Desire is dedicated (Williams, “Above All”); estrangement from family begins (Williams, “Interview” 55).
1960 “Three Lonely Men,” from Faces of Hatred and Love, published in New World Writing.
early 1960s Meets editor and journalist Seymour Krim, who offers to “open doors” (Williams, “Experiences” E3; Passions).
1964 Goes abroad ( “Garrett, Leslie”).
1965 Lives in Paris, working on The Beasts (Williams, “Interview” 53); meets James Jones and James Baldwin (Williams, “Rebound”); Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper published, winning the William Faulkner Award.
1966 The Beasts published, dedicated to Seymour Krim; wins Maxwell Perkins Award; receives $ 15,000 advance for British publication rights (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
1966-1968 (?) Lives in Ibiza; meets Cormac and Annie McCarthy; begins abusing alcohol (Passions).
c. 1968 Returns to New York; takes job in car delivery business (Williams, “Experiences” E3; Williams, “Interview” 54).
1969-1973 Owns car delivery franchise in Philadelphia; continues abusing drugs and alcohol; experiences writer’s block (Williams, “Experiences” E3); Cormac and Annie McCarthy seek him out in Philadelphia, visit him there (Passions); marries Linda Kerby in Knoxville, with Cormac McCarthy as best man and Annie as matron of honor (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
1974 Attempts suicide (Passions); contracts double pneumonia; marriage to Linda ends (Williams, “Nationally Lauded”; Williams, “Experiences” E3).
1977-1979 In recovery; diagnosed as manic-depressive; resumes writing with “Cat’s Wake,” a novella in the collection The Book of Little Crucifixions (unpublished) after drying out for good (Williams, “Experiences” E3; Williams, “Interview” 54); writes three novels and twenty stories in eleven months (Passions).
1980 Mugged in Philadelphia; inherits $ 4,000; moves to Knoxville, where Anne DeLisle (McCarthy) takes him in for several days; finds a room (Williams, “Interview” 48, 54; Williams, “Experiences” E3).
1980s-1993 Lives in apartment at 1409 Clinch Avenue in Fort Sanders neighborhood of Knoxville (Anon. “Leslie Garrett”; Passions).
1983-1991 Writes In the Country of Desire (Williams, “Experiences” E3; Williams, “Interview” 48).
1990 Gives interviews to journalist Don Williams; alienates Cormac McCarthy by talking about him to Williams (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 15).
Mar. 1991 Passions Awry: The Leslie Garrett Story airs on Knoxville television (Anon., “Channel 20”).
June 1991 Receives Alex Haley Literary Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission for short story “Choo Choo and the Last Dance” (Williams, “Rebound”).
Sept. 1991 In the Country of Desire accepted by Harper Collins; The Resurrection of H (unpublished novel) nearly finished (Williams, “Rebound”).
4 May 1992 Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses published; 100,000 copies sold within a year.
17 June 1992 In the Country of Desire published in a first printing of 10,000 copies.
June 1992 Reunited with daughter Dawne (Williams, “Writer”).
Dec. 1992 McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses wins National Book Award.
early 1993 Receives letter from McCarthy saying that honors should have gone to Garrett (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 15).
Mar. 1993 McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses receives National Book Critics Circle Award.
3 June 1993 Dies of throat cancer (Williams, “Nationally Lauded”).
1994 Leslie Garrett Short Story Contest established by Knoxville Writers Guild (Anon., “Knox Writers”); “Choo Choo and the Last Dance” published in Voices from the Valley.
Works cited
Anon. “Author Lives in Blount.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN). 6 Oct. 1968: F5.
Anon. “Channel 20 Program Profiles Leslie Garrett.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 17 Mar. 1991: Showtime 7.
Anon. “Charles McCarthy, 87, Former TVA Counsel.” Washington Times 17 Feb. 1995: C11.
Anon. “Contributors.” The Phoenix (U of Tennessee Orange and White Literary Supplement). Oct. 1959: 12.
Anon. “Cormac McCarthy among Book Award Nominees.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 8 Oct. 1992: B4.
Anon. The First Fifty Years: Knoxville Catholic High School, 1932-1982. (Knoxville: np, nd). Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville, TN.
Anon. “Knox Writers Guild Holding Fiction Contest.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 27 Jan. 1994: B3.
Anon. “Leslie Garrett: A Knoxville Author Ready for a New Beginning.” City Pages [Knoxville] 20 Feb. 1992. Leslie Garrett clipping file, Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville, TN.
Anon. “McCarthy Named Chief TVA Counsel.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville) 15 Feb. 1958: 7.
Arnold, Edwin T. “‘Go to sleep’: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy.” Arnold and Luce, Companion 37-72.
Arnold, Edwin T. “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain.” Arnold and Luce, Perspectives 221-47.
Arnold, Edwin T. “The World of The Orchard Keeper.” Ed. David Holloway. Proceedings of the First European Conference on Cormac McCarthy. Miami: Cormac McCarthy Society, 1999. 1-5, 7.
Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce, eds. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.
Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. 1993. Rev. ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.
Draper, Robert. “The Invisible Man.” Texas Monthly. July 1992: 42, 44-46.
Fields, Pat. “Knox Native McCarthy’s ’Outer Dark’ Second Novel Gets Good Reviews.” Knoxville Journal 7 Oct. 1968: A8.
Fields, Pat. “Knoxville Author Gets Award for Writing.” Knoxville Journal 19 May 1965: 13.
Garrett, Leslie. The Beasts. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966.
Garrett, Leslie. In the Country of Desire. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
“Garrett, Leslie 1931.” Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Authors and their Works. 1st revision. 1976.
Jordan, Richard. “‘Just Write’ Says Successful Author.” Daily Beacon (U of Tennessee) 28 Jan. 1969: 6.
Knox County Register of Deeds, City-County Building, Knoxville TN.
McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random, 1985.
McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. New York: Random, 1973.
McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain. New York: Knopf, 1998.
McCarthy, Cormac. “Cities of the Plain.” Unpublished ts. Cormac McCarthy papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Albert B. Alkek Library, Southwest Texas State U, San Marcos, TX.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Random, 1968.
McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. New York: Random, 1979.
“McCarthy, Cormac.” Who’s Who in America. 36th ed. 1970-71.
Morgan, Wesley G. “McCarthy’s High School Years.” Cormac McCarthy Journal. 5 pp. 18 Jan. 2003 www.cormacmccarthy.com/journal/ PDFs/Morgan.pdf
Neely, Jack. “A House on Noelton.” Knoxville’s Secret History. Knoxville: Scruffy City Publishing, 1999. 135-37.
Passions Awry: The Leslie Garrett Story. Videocassette. Dir. and Prod. Bob Alexander. Writer and interviewer Don Williams. 1991. 60 min.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Above All There was the Writer.” News-Sentinel [Knoxville, TN] 2 June 1995: B1.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Annie DeLisle: Cormac McCarthy’s Ex-Wife Prefers to Recall the Romance.” News-Sentinel [Knoxville, TN] 10 June 1990: E1-2.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Cormac McCarthy: “Knoxville’s Most Famous Contemporary Writer Prefers his Anonymity.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 10 June 1990: E1-2.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Cormac McCarthy Rides the Great Stylistic Divide... Invisibly: Profile of an Icon in Absentia.” New Millenium Writings 1 (Fall/Winter 1996): 11-22.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Experiences are Bigger than a Novel.” News-Sentinel [Knoxville, TN] 18 Nov. 1990: E1, E3.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Fading Star, Flaming Star.” New Millenium Writings 4.2 (Winter 1999-2000): 116-118.
Williams, Don Stephen. “An Interview with Leslie Garrett.” Poets & Writers Magazine 21 (Mar./Apr. 1993): 48-55.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Leslie Garrett Writes his Way Back.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 18 Nov. 1990: E1, E3.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Literary Heritage and Revival Extol City.” News-Sentinel [Knoxville, TN] 23 Oct. 1992: B1-2.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Nationally Lauded Knoxville Fiction Writer Garrett, 62, Dies.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 4 June 1993: A4.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Rebound: Agent’s Blitz to Return Author to Literary Front.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 13 Sept. 1991: A2.
Williams, Don Stephen. “Writer Leslie Garrett Enjoyed a Special Day as a Father.” News-Sentinel (Knoxville, TN) 18 June 1999: A17.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times Magazine 19 Apr. 1992: 28-31+.
Notes de bas de page
1 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, McCarthy was also interviewed by several Knoxville-area reporters for brief articles about the writer and his books.
2 I am very grateful to Don Williams for his interest in and support of my exploration of the literary relationship between McCarthy and Garrett. Clearly I am very indebted to Williams’s many publications on the two writers. He has graciously shared copies of those pieces I could not locate, included his filmed interview with Garrett; and he has patiently answered several queries as I work with these materials.
3 In the 1990s Garrett told Don Williams, “I went to the island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain, where I fell apart. I was like a kid in a candy store. I’m not Errol Flynn or anything, but that was Mecca for single men. I had a friend who owned a nightclub and I would go in and she would have three or four women picked out for me, and she would introduce me as the author of The Beasts, which people were reading, and they thought I was charming and all. Then there was the booze and drugs, and the people on that island had nothing better to do than play musical beds, and I kind of just got into it and went overboard with it, and didn’t get out for a long time. Cormac McCarthy warned me that it would kill me as a writer, but I didn’t listen” ( “Interview” 54).
4 The videotaped interview Passions Awry: The Leslie Garrett Story includes photographs of the two couples together in Philadelphia and in Knoxville at Garrett’s wedding.
5 Many such comments clustered around the publicity frenzy that coincided with the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992. One may wonder if McCarthy’s agent, Amanda Urban, encouraged the myth of McCarthy as a recluse comparable to the famously elusive Salinger and Pynchon. “Cormac has staked out a life completely outside the literary system” she told Robert Draper (45). In his 1992 profile for Texas Monthly, Draper does not buy into the myth as readily as had many reviewers of All the Pretty Horses. Having spoken with some of McCarthy’s El Paso friends, Draper wrote that “Nowadays McCarthy is close to a few other local writers, notably University of Texas at El Paso writer in residence Rick DeMaranis, McCarthy’s neighbor” among his many non-literary friends (45). Draper concludes that “Though friends speak of his slavish commitment to his work, McCarthy is not a bona fide.... McCarthy socializes freely, with the knowledge that his friends won’t blow his cover” (45).
6 The house at 118 Cherokee Drive (now Noelton Drive) belonged to H. E. Christenberry, Sr., and then to H. E. Christenberry, Jr., when the McCarthys lived there in 1938-1941 (Knox County Register of Deeds, City-County Building, Knoxville TN; Neely 135-36).
7 Edwin T. Arnold’s photographs and description of this house are included in his presentation “The World of The Orchard Keeper” published in the proceedings of the Cormac McCarthy Society International Colloquy held in Berlin in 1998 ( “World” 4-5, 7). Williams described the house in 1990 as a “white, sprawling, gabled structure, now choked with weeds and debris, but once very sound and dignified” ( “Cormac” E2).
8 However, McCarthy does not appear to have followed the extreme path of delinquency and dropping-out that Garrett did. His Catholic High School class of 1951 was comprised of only thirty-one students, making for a far less anonymous environment than Leslie Garret would have encountered in the urban schools of Philadelphia (Anon., First Fifty 81). Wesley G. Morgan’s recent article about McCarthy’s high school years, based on information gathered from the Gold and Blue, the student newspaper of Catholic High School, shows that Cormac’s older sisters expected him to follow in their footsteps, becoming the editor of the newspaper. He did not, apparently, do so, but he was selected as Artist for the newspaper’s staff in his senior year. Morgan’s search of the newspaper uncovered several cartoons, but all were unattributed, making it difficult to assess how frequently McCarthy contributed artwork to the paper. But he did publish a poem, “Autumn Magic”—now his earliest known publication. (McCarthy’s Who’s Who entry for 1970-71 indicates that he has written articles, so perhaps he also published unsigned prose pieces in the school newspaper [ “McCarthy, Cormac” 1493].) Morgan has also found evidence that McCarthy sang in the high school choir. Morgan speculates that the McCarthy girls’ articles announcing that their younger brother would continue the “McCarthy tradition” at Catholic High School “might be interpreted as an attempt to bring an outsider brother into the mainstream of school life that had served his older sisters so well”; and he concludes that “Despite his expressed dislike for school, the contemporaneous reports of his school activities suggest that he conformed, at least in part, to some familial and school expectations during those years” (5).
9 Based on his talks with Garrett, Williams describes his mother as “cruel and dissolute” and alludes to his abusive and “blighted” childhood ( “Fading” 117).
10 For an excellent discussion of father/son relationships in McCarthy’s plays, one that establishes the sophisticated literary functions of the theme in McCarthy’s work, see J. Douglas Canfield’s “Œdipal Complexities in Cormac McCarthy’s The Stonemason and The Gardener’s Son,” Cormac McCarthy Journal 2 (Spring 2002): 12-22. See also Canfield’s discussion of fathers and sons in “The Border of Becoming: Theodicy in Blood Meridian” in his Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001): 37-48, especially 46-47.
11 According to Wesley G. Morgan, McCarthy’s older sisters, Jackie and Barbara, attended “exclusive northeastern schools for women” (2).
12 McCarthy’s ex-wife Anne DeLisle told Williams in 1990 that Cormac “was such a rebel that he didn’t live the same kind of life anybody else on earth lived” ( “Annie” E2).
13 In 1968, McCarthy and Anne told Pat Fields that they would not be staying in the Knoxville area long: “We want to go to Mexico and then back to Europe for awhile” ( “Knox Native”). By 1976, McCarthy had left Anne and moved to El Paso, from where he would make numerous trips into Mexico, researching his Western novels (Woodward 30).
14 The article by Michael Grieg, “The Lively Arts in San Francisco,” was published in February 1957.
15 Garrett also published in Escapade, Four Quarters, New World Writing, and Climax ( “Leslie Garrett” 269).
16 I repeat here a claim made in Passions, I have been unable to locate and thus confirm this. It does not appear on the cover of either the first hardcover edition or the American paperback of The Beasts (New York: Pyramid, 1967).
17 Garrett once affirmed, “I’ve become the poet laureate of obsessives” (Williams, “Experiences” E3).
18 The Lenore/Farley/Prophet triangle prefigures the Magdalena/John Grady/Eduardo and the Magdalena/Billy/John Grady triangles in McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. See Nell Sullivan’s provocative discussion of such triangulated relationships in “Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” Arnold and Luce, Companion 228-55.
19 For extended discussion of the various ways in which the judge hoodwinks and lies to the men who ride with him in Glanton’s gang, see my “Ambiguities, Dilemmas, and Double-Binds in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Southwestern American Literature 26.1 (Fall 2000): 21-46.
20 Williams refers to Judge Holden as a “prophet of carnage”, hinting his recognition of Holden’s analogous relation to the Prophet of The Beasts (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 17).
21 McCarthy would use an analogous metaphor in the script of “Cities of the Plain,” where Eduardo, repudiates Magdalena’s spirituality, insisting that she is “just a whore with a sickness. A gonorrea [sic] of the soul” (130).
22 When the young boys enter Lester’s cave through the sinkhole, they find “a chamber in which the bodies of a number of people were arranged on stone ledges in attitudes of repose” (CoG 195).
23 There is a significant difference, however, as Lester’s cross-dressing for murder is a nod to the avenging “Mother” of Psycho, while Farley’s is emasculating and passive. I have discussed the intertextual relationships between Child of God and Psycho in a paper presented to the Cormac McCarthy Society in 1998: “Voyeur, Necrophile, Psycho: the Homicides behind the Scenes of Child of God.”
24 Cf. the kid’s dream of the coldforger or “false moneyer”, who “seeks favor with the judge” in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (310). For an excellent brief explication of this dream, its sources and implications, see Arnold, “Dreams” 47-49.
25 Late in his life, Garrett explained the psychological basis of his recurrent evocation of deformity in his works: “In my beginning years as a writer, I was obsessed with grotesques.... You can see that in The Beasts. I understand now that it was an obsession with my own self-destructiveness. I wanted, through guilt, to become one of the deformed of the earth, and so kept creating that metaphor for my own self-loathing. It was, unknown to me then, a repetition, a variation, on my death wish. The ultimate deformity is death” (Williams, “Interview” 49).
26 Garrett himself was jailed for shoplifting in New Orleans (Williams, “Nationally Lauded”).
27 Mock-preachers figure significantly in McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark (1968), which he finished during the time he knew Garrett on Ibiza (Anon., “Author Lives in Blount”).
28 For further discussion of the narrative frames of these two works, as well as the unfilmed frame in McCarthy’s script for the film The Gardener’s Son, see my “‘They aint the thing’: Artifact and Hallucinated Recollection in Cormac McCarthy’s Early Frame-Works” in Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 21-36.
29 Garrett mentions several unpublished works in his interviews with Don Williams, and in the video Passions Awry he reads from The Book of Little Crucifixions. Garrett named Don Williams his literary executor, and some of his unpublished work remains in Williams’ keeping.
30 Garrett once expressed admiration for McCarthy’s Child of God in ways that reflect his own accomplishment in In the Country of Desire. He told Don Williams, “Lester Ballard... is one of the most contemptible human beings in all of American literature. What a remarkable thing. This man is detestable and yet he is a child of God and therefore the more to be pitied. When it comes to the truth about our place on earth and who we are and what we are, I would look to Cormac before I would, say, Rod McKuen. The fact that his vision is dark, so what? Life isn’t a picnic” ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 22; also “Cormac” E1). In 1992, when All the Pretty Horses was nominated for the National Book Award, Garrett remarked to a Knoxville journalist, “It’s pay-back time.... In my opinion, he should have won it for ‘Child of God’ and ‘Suttree’ at least, maybe even ‘The Orchard Keeper’” (Anon., “McCarthy among”).
31 I have not been able to verify the existence of a Miller’s Discount Department Store in Philadelphia, the city in which In the Country of Desire seems to be set, but there were a Miller’s Department Store and a separate Miller’s Bargain Annex in Knoxville at the time that Garrett was living there in the 1980s. Miller’s is mentioned several times in McCarthy’s Suttree (1979).
32 The little cabin John Grady prepares for his bride is painted blue, and when she dresses to elope with him she chooses a navy blue dress (Cities 219). In the script of “Cities of the Plain”, Magdalena wears “a gauzy white negligee” (93) in a nightmarish theatrical production which corresponds to John Grady’s similar dream of a sacrificial young girl in a “white gauze dress” in the novel (Cities 103-04). Later Magdalena will escape from the hospital and return to the White Lake brothel dressed in a “white hospital shift” (script 128; cf. Cities 208). Magdalena’s gauzy negligée is a foretaste of the one Emil will buy for Madeleine in Garrett’s In the Country of Desire.
33 Garrett told Williams that he had a mild form of epilepsy, and commented: “Dostoyevsky said his five great novels all came to him already written within those periods when he had epileptic seizures. I’m not that kind of epileptic.... ( “Interview” 51)
34 McCarthy has read other manuscripts for fellow writers in recent years. He is acknowledged as a reader in both Murray Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar (1994) and Roger Payne’s Among Whales (1999). Novelist Madison Smartt Bell has told Edwin Arnold that McCarthy read the manuscript of William Gay’s The Long Home (1999). And Garry Wallace has reported the trip he and Betty Carey made to El Paso in 1989 to consult with McCarthy about her planned book on professional gambling in “Meeting McCarthy,” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 134-39.
35 In the script of “Cities of the Plain,” Magdalena is introduced as “a young girl... of a fragile and unearthly beauty” (4).
36 Mary’s loyal long-time accomplice is a tall lesbian named Josephine; in Cities of the Plain, the old criada, mother to Eduardo’s henchman, the “invert” Tiburcio ( “Cities” script 52), is named Josefina.
37 Garrett’s meditations on his relationship with McCarthy may be reflected almost allegorically in the two dancers, partners and jealous competitors, in his late story, “Choo Choo and the Last Dance,” published posthumously in Voices from the Valley: An Anthology of Knoxville Writers, ed. Jeanne McDonald (Knoxville: Knoxville Writers’ Guild, 1994), 224-39.
38 Fisketjon became McCarthy’s editor at Knopf after the death of Albert Erskine. He played a role in coordinating Knopf ’s extensive campaign to get notice of All the Pretty Horses, recognizing that it represented McCarthy’s best chance at wider recognition than achieved by his difficult novels that preceded or followed it.
39 The same letter is paraphrased slightly differently in another of Williams’ articles: “He was in Spain when the National Book Award banquet was held in 1993. He really didn’t care for such notoriety, he wrote to Leslie Garrett, literally on his death bed at the time. It should have happened to you, the letter implied” ( “Cormac McCarthy Rides” 15).
Auteur
-
Dianne Cormac Luce
Midlands Technical College, Columbia, SC.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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