Soul Shelter

The latest Pulitzer Prize in fiction was awarded to Cormac McCarthy for his newest novel, The Road. This 75-year-old author is a fascinating example of one to whom worldly success and renown have come very late, yet whose career has been marked by consistent excellence, and–apparently–consistent personal fulfillment. Never once in the course of his life as an author has McCarthy sought public attention. The work itself–of writing and publishing–seems to have remained reward enough for him.

McCarthy has been publishing books since 1965 (The Road is his tenth). For nearly thirty years he labored in obscurity, publishing five magnificent novels, none of which sold more than 2,500 copies, though all were critically acclaimed, and one, Blood Meridian (1985), would eventually be named by Time Magazine in a list of the ‘Top 100 Books of All Time.’

It was McCarthy’s sixth book, All the Pretty Horses (1992), that finally brought him a deservedly wide audience (though still McCarthy avoided the limelight, remaining his quiet, hardworking self). Late last year, his ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, was brought to the screen by filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. The film recently netted a heap of Oscar nominations.

A famously private person, McCarthy granted his first television interview last June to Oprah Winfrey, who had selected The Road for her TV book club. During the discussion, the author made a number of fascinating statements on the subjects of following one’s passion, pursuing excellence, avoiding employment, enduring poverty, living and working with dedication, and having the faith to let go of material concerns.

In my own experience as an author, I’ve never faced the kind of material squalor that McCarthy did in his earlier years (and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to), but though his lifestyle offers a rather extreme example of sacrifice, I find a great deal of wisdom in his words. As I see it, something beautiful comes through in his account of a life lived in total, humble dedication to his artistic pursuit–and the mysterious blessings that came of that dedication. Call it ‘the beauty of letting go.’

-McCarthy: …You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve … this interior image that is something that’s absolutely perfect, and that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it, you’ll never get anywhere …. You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done [laughs] … How’s that for hubris?

-Oprah: …You were so poor at times, there was absolutely no money. And people would call and say, ‘Come and speak to us, we’ll pay you two thousand dollars’ or whatever, and you’d say, ‘No, everything I know is already on the page.’

-McCarthy: Well, I was busy. I had other things to do.

-Oprah: Are you just not interested in material [things]?

-McCarthy: I’m really not. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like things. Some things are really nice, but they certainly take a distant second place to being able to live your life and do what you want to do. And I always knew that I didn’t want to work.

-Oprah: How did you manage that? Most people want to know how to do that.

-McCarthy: Well, you have to be dedicated. But it was my Number One priority.

-Oprah: That you didn’t want to have a nine-to-five job?

-McCarthy: Yeah. I thought, ‘You’re just here once, life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.’ And I don’t have any advice for anybody on how to go about that, except that if you’re really dedicated you can probably do it.

-Oprah: So you worked at not working.

-McCarthy: Absolutely. Yeah, it was the Number One priority.

-Oprah: Was it true you were so poor you got put out of a $40 a month hotel or someplace?

-McCarthy: I did.

-Oprah: [Laughs] That is poor.

-McCarthy: It was in New Orleans, it was a little room … I was very naive….

-Oprah: And wasn’t there another time that you were so poor you didn’t even have toothpaste?

-McCarthy: Yeah, I was living in a shack in Tennessee, and I ran out of toothpaste, and I went down to the mailbox one morning to see if there might be anything there, and in the mailbox there was a tube of toothpaste.

-Oprah: A free sample?

-McCarthy: Yeah, a free sample. But my life, you know, there’s hundreds of anecdotes like that. That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen.

I love this notion. McCarthy’s personal story seems to suggest that once he’d devoted himself wholly to the enterprise of writing, and made the material sacrifices necessary to allow him to do excellent work, he created circumstances in which other concerns took care of themselves–not because he was favored by some quasi-supernatural agency, but because he stuck resolutely to his vision, and apparently did so even in bleak circumstances. This same idea is explored at length in our book The Prosperous Peasant, though we chose to phrase the principle this way: “Gratitude Attracts Luck.”

-Oprah: So money has never really interested you?

-McCarthy: No, not really. It’s just … I have friends that are wealthy and have spent their lives making money and they seem to be reasonably happy, but I suspect that they became rich because they were doing what they wanted to do. I think it’s hard to just set out in the world and say ‘I’m going to become rich.’ I think you have, as you said, a passion. And if you do it well then you get rich in spite of yourself.

On this subject of involuntary wealth, McCarthy speaks from first-hand experience. His magnificent work has brought him great material rewards (albeit only recently), which he never clamored for. In addition to the tremendous book sales generated by the Pulitzer and Oprah’s Book Club, last month McCarthy reportedly sold his literary papers to a Texas university for a sum of around $2 million.

-Oprah: … Was it a concern at all, not having money? You know, a lot of people … You’re a different kind of man, because a lot of people would be … would have a lot of angst, a lot of anxiety, would feel a lot of lack of self worth, because they couldn’t earn the money.

-McCarthy: … I was very naive. I always assumed that I would be taken care of in some way or other. And I was, I was always very lucky. Something always happened. Just when things were truly, truly bleak some totally unforeseen thing would occur.

-Oprah: Like …

-McCarthy: Like, I was living in Lexington, Kentucky once … A friend of mine had gotten me this job housesitting, so I had a place to live. But I didn’t have any money. I don’t mean that I didn’t have much money. I didn’t have any money. But there were still some groceries left in the house, so I ate those. And then one day someone knocked at the door, and I went to the door and there was a guy standing there and he said, ‘Are you Cormac McCarthy?’ And I thought, ‘I don’t think there are any warrants out for me.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Sign this, please.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I’m a courier.’ And he said thank you and got in his car and drove away, and I opened up the letter and there was a check in it for $20,000. … I was the first fellow of a new foundation that they had started, some people in Chattanooga, the Lyndhurst Foundation. They had some Coca-Cola money … and they were going to give these fellowships to people….

-Oprah: Wow.

-McCarthy: … And you got a [big] check every year for 3 or 4 years.

-Oprah: Do you think you were lucky? Or was there something else going on?

-McCarthy: I wouldn’t get superstitious, but you know, the laws of probability operate everywhere … You know, if you look at Barron’s and see these gurus that have done so well in the market … you’ll notice that next year it’ll be a different group of gurus. This should tell us something. … Some people, at some time in their life, are bound to be in one group [i.e. the lucky group] and not in another group [i.e. the unlucky group]. It’s simply the laws of probability. You don’t have to be superstitious about it. Anyway, it’s a long way of saying that I just think I’ve been very lucky. It could stop, certainly. I don’t think I’m blessed.

-Oprah: You don’t?

-McCarthy: Well, I am blessed because I’m one of the luckiest people I’ve ever known, so that’s certainly a blessing. But I’ve done nothing to be picked out for special … Quite the opposite. If there were justice in the world, they wouldn’t have picked me out to be particularly lucky, because I haven’t done anything to deserve it.

-Oprah: But you made a choice that you were not going to be working in your life. That you were going to do what you really loved.

-McCarthy: That’s right, and that obviously has some influence on it.

Indeed, it seems McCarthy attracted his own luck, through sacrifice, devotion to excellence, and enduring commitment. Most valuably, this enabled him to channel his energy entirely into his core passion of writing–and later earned him secondary material rewards.

To be sure, the circumstances of McCarthy’s life are extreme. Such circumstances, for instance, would likely prohibit a happy marriage and family life. But I believe the substance of his discussion here holds true. He had a vision, and then built a vocation of it by submitting himself to a path that he believed suited and sustained the vision, and now his work is destined to endure as some of the finest produced by an American author of his era.

This life path, like all, no doubt has had its share of complications, but within it there’s a main principle at work that is simple and universal: One’s pursuit of a vision demands the active qualities of dedication, sacrifice, bravery and hard work–but also a quality more mysterious, and more daunting: Faith.

In our upcoming Thursday post, Tim will explore some more formally postulated principles of excellence and success, as found in the age-old Code of Bushido.