On Cormac McCarthy's last two books by his publisher...

[Corbeau Castrum]

Thanks for sending Mark.

Some lines from that NYT Mag article that stuck out to me as being particularly foolish:  
"In the photos, McCarthy is shown in conversation, smiling as he talks; sitting soberly at his writing desk; beaming at his wife as she serves him tea. He agreed to two major profiles — in The New Yorker and Esquire — to be timed to the appearance of his fourth novel, “Suttree.” Neither made it into print. All show McCarthy’s willingness to do press when it might serve him."
Surely the only reason people do press is in order to serve themselves, whether for professional or more ego-related reasons?

"McCarthy seems to have looked at everything, less a polymath than a man entranced by the world’s variety."
I struggle to see the difference here, unless someone entranced by the world's variety is supposed to be less intelligent than a polymath.

The main premise of the piece gives away the game, that a literary biography should make you "feel that the work in its immensity exceeds the little life that made it" and should "unearth the story of how the art escaped the confines of the flawed life that yielded it."

Pynchon writes in the Slow Learner introduction: "Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live" (21).

I personally feel like the author of the piece, Wyatt Mason, is very disappointed that McCarthy was not a very nice man to the women in his life, and that the violence expressed/described in his writing indeed reflects the violence of his life (whether experienced or meted out).

As this Telegraph piece relates, (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/cormac-mccarthy-biography-tracy-daugherty-review/), and which goes completely unmentioned by Mason:
"As Tracy Daugherty tells it in Cormac McCarthy: A Life Revisited, McCarthy’s relationship with Charles Sr was critical to understanding both the man and his writing. McCarthy’s books are well known for their baroque language, pastiche portrayals of women and unrelenting acts of violence. But they’re occupied, too, with fatherless young men on the outskirts of society. McCarthy often preferred to tell the “Irish truth” about himself.

Still, one wonders if he was quite so peculiar as to wholly fabricate, for friends and family, such harrowing tales of paternal abuse as this. McCarthy told John Hillcoat, a filmmaker, that his father “used to beat him so savagely” – starting when he was three years old – “that [Charles Sr’s] hands would be skinned raw, dripping... blood”.

“He told me numerous stories about the beatings,” said John Francis, McCarthy’s son. “If he made a joke at the dinner table, or was so bold as to say he was full before his plate was empty, [Charles Sr] would leap from the table, grab young Cormac, slam him into the ground and pummel him mercilessly until he wore himself out. Then, while Cormac lay there bleeding, [Charles Sr] would return to the table and ask for the butter to be passed.”"

On Friday, October 9th, 2026 at 12:10, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://x.com/adrianmckinty/status/2108300136170578214?s=20
> 
> I once went to a pub party thrown by "Binky" Urban....
> 
> On Fri, Oct 9, 2026 at 6:07 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > https://x.com/AAKnopf/status/2108271918772047974?s=20
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>