A problem with the bomb

Tracy Daugherty’s new biography Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited opens with a striking line from McCarthy’s penultimate novel, The Passenger: “I didn’t have a problem with my father. And I didn’t have a problem with the bomb.”

The bomb being the atomic bomb, narrator Bobby Western’s father having worked for the Manhattan Project. This sets up a surprising dual focus: family and science. Family makes sense in a biography—already in the first two chapters McCarthy’s parents, especially his TVA lawyer father, and younger brother feature in ways that suggest their significance for the rest of the story—but science is the surprise in a biography about a novelist. It shouldn’t be, given McCarthy’s widely reported love of science and preference for scientific rather than literary company late in life, but it is a striking note upon which to begin.

McCarthy was born in Rhode Island but spent most of his childhood and youth in East Tennessee, in rural neighborhoods outside Knoxville where he could still explore the woods, trap muskrats, and wander alone. But as a six-year old he was shown glimpses of a proposed future:

Reluctantly, he was occasionally forced into crowds: in Providence, Washington-and in New York in 1939, when his parents took him to the World's Fair. He was just six years old then but remembered it “vividly.” He recalled that in one pavilion “were . . . freeways, only the cars were automated. Nobody walked. Robots did all the work, and everybody had helicopters. And that’s what people thought of the future.” To him, it was unappealing and he couldn't understand the optimistic mood of the crowd. (30-1)

Automation, industry, machinery, urbanism. McCarthy’s bewilderment at why anyone one want this is powerfully suggestive. Daugherty leaps ahead to a postwar visit to New York that appalled McCarthy because he envisioned what could happen to it in the age of the bomb:

The futuristic New York of freeways and automated cars had given way to a rain of ash, and the contrast always made McCarthy long to flee the crowds and return to the forest . . . McCarthy loved the lore of hunting—the isolation, the concentration—and later compared the activity to writing, another discipline requiring focus and time away from others. Above all, it called for trusting one’s instincts. He once told the literary scholar John Sepich a story about a dove hunter. The hunter “could hit any bird that flew.” One day, “a farmer, on whose land he was hunting, stopped him and asked did he keep his left eye open when he shot, or did he hold it closed? And [the hunter] said he didn’t know, but he’d think about it. And McCarthy said the man never hit another dove again.” (31)

The story about the dove hunter is suggestive. Picking something apart, making the artful and intuitive the object of scrutiny, risks destroying the thing to find out how it works.

McCarthy was by no means hostile to science, but recognized limits to its reach and application. According to Daugherty, McCarthy early developed a sense of guilt about his father’s role in modernizing Appalachia through eviction, eminent domain, damming, and flooding, and his rejection of a techno-optimist vision of a fully-automated robotic future is of a piece with that. And it feels familiar. ChatGPT had been available to the public for just over seven months when McCarthy died. One wonders what he would have made of it had he had time to observe its rise and spread.

And what would we sacrifice when we destroy things in favor of the automated and robotic? Daugherty:

He spent much of his early childhood sleeping on a screened-in porch, feeling the cool mist on his face, listening to cricket song, away from the rest of the family. At night he’d sneak through a second-story window to explore the woods, where, just south of the house, down a dirt road, an abandoned peach orchard dropped its skinny leaves[.] (30)

As it happens, a screened porch, the cool mist (of a creek, in my case), and the sound of crickets is a good description of some of the most important—and most missed—parts of my own childhood. McCarthy could sense not only the environmental threat but also the dehumanizing tendency of technocracy even as a boy. Daugherty concludes this memory with the pregnant detail that the peach orchard abutted “some fenced-off TVA property, frustrating his freedom to roam.”