The Art of Manliness - Cormac McCarthy, The Road, and Carrying the Fire

00:00:00.000 Cormac McCarthy died last week at the age of 89.

00:00:03.280 To commemorate his passing, we're rebroadcasting one of my favorite episodes about one of my favorite books, The Road.

00:00:08.900 Please enjoy.

00:00:17.160 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:20.840 Now once a year, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

00:00:23.900 It's become this cathartic annual ritual for me.

00:00:26.060 What is it about this novel that has such an impact on my soul and those of other readers?

00:00:30.200 Who is the man who wrote it?

00:00:31.240 And what was he trying to do with the story of a father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape?

00:00:36.700 For answers to these questions, I decided to talk to a foremost expert on McCarthy's work,

00:00:40.540 as well as the literature of the American West in general.

00:00:43.000 His name is Stephen Fry.

00:00:44.140 He's a professor of English and novelist in his own right,

00:00:46.440 and the author and editor of several books about the reclusive, philosophical author,

00:00:50.040 including Understanding Cormac McCarthy.

00:00:51.720 We begin our conversation with some background on McCarthy

00:00:54.120 and a discussion of his distinctive style and themes

00:00:56.440 and why he avoids the limelight and prefers to hang out with scientists over fellow artists.

00:01:00.660 We then dive into The Road, and Stephen packs what inspired it,

00:01:03.700 as well as the authors and books that influenced it.

00:01:05.720 We then dig into the big themes of The Road

00:01:07.780 and how it can be read as a biblical allegory that wrestles with the existence of God.

00:01:11.940 We delve into the tension which exists between the father and son in the book

00:01:14.780 and what it means to carry the fire.

00:01:17.060 And we're in a conversation with why reading The Road makes you feel both depressed

00:01:20.180 and hopeful at the same time.

00:01:22.360 And a spoiler alert here, if you haven't read The Road yet,

00:01:25.340 we do reveal some of the plot points in this discussion.

00:01:27.920 Also, why haven't you read The Road yet?

00:01:29.700 Go out, pick up a copy today, read it.

00:01:31.800 You won't regret it.

00:01:32.740 Then come back and listen to this episode.

00:01:34.400 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash The Road.

00:01:37.720 All right.

00:01:53.620 Steve Fry, welcome to the show.

00:01:55.920 Thanks for having me, Brett.

00:01:57.140 So you are a professor of American literature,

00:01:59.780 and you spent a lot of your career thinking about and writing about

00:02:03.860 the works of Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite writers.

00:02:06.880 How did you end up writing about Cormac McCarthy?

00:02:10.420 Well, you know, like a lot of folks, I encountered McCarthy first in 1992

00:02:14.460 with what most of us consider his breakout novel.

00:02:18.580 That is, All the Pretty Horses.

00:02:20.100 He won the National Book Award for that one.

00:02:22.420 And at the time, I was in graduate school, finishing up my doctorate.

00:02:27.000 And what I was studying in graduate school was the 19th century,

00:02:30.700 the frontier novel of the 19th century.

00:02:32.800 But I was also pretty heavily involved in studying Melville and Moby Dick.

00:02:37.800 And I had a parallel interest in the literature of the American West

00:02:40.620 because I'm from the West.

00:02:42.440 And a friend of mine just said, hey, you know, you should read this author,

00:02:45.620 Cormac McCarthy, who just won the National Book Award.

00:02:47.780 So I did.

00:02:48.480 I read All the Pretty Horses.

00:02:51.120 And boy, I was just enraptured, certainly with the language,

00:02:54.520 but also with the kind of philosophical portent and, you know,

00:02:57.760 the themes that were sort of jumping out at me.

00:02:59.700 And so I moved back immediately and read Blood Meridian,

00:03:04.640 had a similar response.

00:03:06.740 It's a different book, a different response,

00:03:08.640 but still I was enraptured with it.

00:03:10.840 And then I kind of continued on, finished my doctoral program,

00:03:14.320 became a professor and was doing most of my work in the 19th century.

00:03:18.120 And I just followed McCarthy through as the Border Trilogy came out.

00:03:22.120 And just kind of a slow burn, just enjoying it,

00:03:24.920 wasn't what I was necessarily specializing in.

00:03:27.060 But in sort of the late 90s, I went to a Cormac McCarthy panel.

00:03:33.820 I presented on a Cormac McCarthy panel at the American Literature Association

00:03:37.360 and met with some of the founders of the organization

00:03:41.200 and sort of got involved with that group of folks

00:03:45.140 and went back and read everything.

00:03:47.860 And there's a real connection between McCarthy as a 20th century writer

00:03:52.040 and the 19th century, of course, is famous in his first major interview

00:03:57.200 with Richard Woodward in 1992.

00:04:00.680 He said quite openly that his favorite book was Moby Dick.

00:04:06.400 So I hooked into it at that point, and it's been almost 30 years now.

00:04:12.680 So today I'd like to focus in on one novel, The Road.

00:04:15.300 But before we do, let's talk about some background on McCarthy

00:04:19.180 and what he was like as a child, as a young man,

00:04:22.500 and kind of his themes and his style of writing.

00:04:24.640 So let's start with his childhood.

00:04:26.540 Where did McCarthy grow up?

00:04:27.900 What was his childhood like?

00:04:29.140 Were there any signs as a young man that he'd become

00:04:31.660 one of the greatest living American novelists ever?

00:04:35.840 Well, you know, there were, but not particularly the signs

00:04:38.280 that you might expect of a writer.

00:04:40.540 He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee

00:04:46.660 when he was four years old.

00:04:47.860 His father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

00:04:52.020 And of course, that was Roosevelt's project to modernize the region

00:04:55.420 down in the south.

00:04:56.560 This is eastern Tennessee.

00:04:58.320 He grew up in an upper middle class family, went to parochial school.

00:05:02.020 And there's no real evidence that he was all that involved in reading.

00:05:05.140 But he is quoted as saying that nobody in school really had that many hobbies,

00:05:11.940 but he had all the hobbies that you could even name.

00:05:16.400 And so there was this innate curiosity that if we look in retrospect,

00:05:21.540 you know, could manifest itself in all kinds of different vocations.

00:05:25.340 But for McCarthy, that curiosity led him to reading a lot

00:05:29.680 and then sort of incorporating and considering all that he's encountering

00:05:34.660 as he reads in the things he writes about, particularly philosophy, theology,

00:05:39.360 science, all these varied subjects.

00:05:42.260 So no, there wasn't the standard, you know, ambition to write when he was a young boy,

00:05:47.940 but an innate curiosity that he, I think, just, you know, has existed throughout his life.

00:05:54.260 So as a young boy, wasn't much of a writer, wasn't much a reader.

00:05:58.020 He gets into college, it seems like he started just reading a ton.

00:06:01.400 And that's when he started to write.

00:06:02.680 What was his first works like?

00:06:04.760 Well, you know, they bear the marks of his later works.

00:06:08.920 You know, I've heard that he, you know, he doesn't like the idea that people dig them out and read them.

00:06:13.840 But he has two short stories that he published in the Phoenix,

00:06:17.880 which was a school newspaper there at the University of Tennessee.

00:06:20.960 That's where he went to school in two different stints.

00:06:23.420 Actually, I should say that he went for a while to the University of Tennessee.

00:06:29.080 Then he left and went into the Air Force and came back.

00:06:32.540 And it's when he came back that he began writing.

00:06:35.520 He wrote a short story called Wake for Susan,

00:06:39.000 another short story called A Drowning Incident.

00:06:42.300 And he won an award, a campus award for that.

00:06:45.540 And that seems to have kind of got him going with writing.

00:06:48.260 They have the same kind of rural settings, same preoccupation with the grotesque,

00:06:54.000 with violence, with intense human emotion, abnormal kind of responses to circumstances,

00:07:01.280 and also the same kind of lyricism and focus on language that we would associate with really all of his works.

00:07:10.700 And when did he start experiencing popular and critical success as a writer?

00:07:13.680 Well, really, he didn't experience popular success until 1992 with All the Pretty Horses.

00:07:20.980 But he experienced critical success really in 1965 with The Orchard Keeper.

00:07:26.760 His first editor was Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's former editor.

00:07:32.780 And he got all kinds of or at least a number of grants and scholarships and funding from the Guggenheim and the Faulkner Foundation.

00:07:41.040 It was in 1982, in fact, that he won a MacArthur Genius Grant, which is, you know, pretty big.

00:07:48.520 You know, I mean, you don't get much bigger than that.

00:07:50.680 And yet his novels did not sell up until, I believe it was All the Pretty Horses.

00:07:58.060 None of his novels sold more than 5,000 copies in hardback.

00:08:01.280 So he was critically very accepted and very lauded, but not popular until All the Pretty Horses.

00:08:09.760 So one thing that if someone who reads a Cormac McCarthy novel will notice that his writing style is very distinct, it's very different.

00:08:18.280 For example, The Road has no quotation marks.

00:08:21.460 So the dialogue is, you're just reading it, but it's kind of jarring at first, but then it just, it feels normal and natural.

00:08:28.320 Beyond that, like not using quotation marks, is there something distinct about McCarthy's writing style that you see in all of his works?

00:08:33.720 And how do you think you developed that?

00:08:34.940 Well, I think he developed it by reading a lot and writing a lot.

00:08:39.840 That sounds glib and silly, but the fact is that's how you do it.

00:08:43.720 And you said distinctive, that's, it's utterly distinctive.

00:08:47.620 And what characterizes it is, first of all, sometimes he's a minimalist.

00:08:54.000 Sometimes his style becomes ornate.

00:08:56.780 He does not use a lot of subordination.

00:08:59.920 He uses a heck of a lot of parallelisms, polycyndeton, which is the linking together of independent clauses with a conjunction and.

00:09:09.780 I think he derives that a lot from Hemingway and Faulkner.

00:09:13.120 They both use that technique.

00:09:15.480 So I think he developed it, again, by reading it, maybe even a kind of unconscious level, reading some of his favorite authors.

00:09:22.520 But at the same time, his blending of this minimalism with very, very sometimes ornate and sometimes even obtuse language, I think is very self-conscious.

00:09:36.800 He uses sometimes a very archaic vocabulary, a specialized vocabulary.

00:09:42.540 And I frankly don't think he intends us necessarily to be sitting there with a dictionary.

00:09:47.160 I think one of the reasons why he might, if you don't mind, what I want to do is, if I could, I'd like to read a passage to explain.

00:09:54.780 Yeah, that'd be great.

00:09:55.540 Perfect.

00:09:56.000 Okay, good.

00:09:56.860 This one, this passage comes from his second novel, which is The Orchard Keeper.

00:10:02.540 And in this novel, an infant child has been left in the woods to die.

00:10:08.560 And the narrator describes the child in this way, as it's laying there.

00:10:14.600 It says,

00:10:15.040 It howled execration upon the dim Camerine world of its nativity, wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jaw hasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete, beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.

00:10:32.300 Now, that ornateness and that kind of language, I'm actually teaching that novel or finished teaching that novel to a group of graduate students.

00:10:43.440 And one student called out that very passage, a very famous passage in McCarthy, and very politely but reasonably asked, why not say it a different way?

00:10:52.140 I don't entirely understand what he's doing.

00:10:54.920 And so what I had the students do is I said, all right, let's do an experiment, a thought experiment.

00:10:59.040 Why don't we try to translate that into a more understandable language?

00:11:05.600 And so I had the students do that, and they're great students, but they were really reluctant to share their translations because they all intuited the fact that you can't take a phrase or a term like witless paraclete.

00:11:17.540 How do you translate that?

00:11:19.380 Do you say unintelligent Holy Spirit?

00:11:24.560 Because that's what it means, right?

00:11:27.020 And yet that term, witless paraclete, really evokes a sense of mystery, strangeness, and a kind of metaphysical dread.

00:11:36.160 He's untranslatable, and I think he tries to be. 1.00

00:11:39.720 And part of it is to sort of evoke this sense of mystery and the strange.

00:11:44.720 Okay, so his writing style, it's varied.

00:11:46.600 It can be mysterious.

00:11:48.120 It can be a mixture of plain spokenness with kind of an archaic language.

00:11:53.340 That's his writing style.

00:11:54.420 Let's talk about themes.

00:11:55.200 You mentioned some of his themes earlier on, dealing with the grotesque, with violence.

00:11:59.640 What are some of the other themes you see pop up over and over again in McCarthy's works?

00:12:04.180 Well, I mean, one of the things I would say about McCarthy is that he is a philosophical novelist.

00:12:09.540 And not all novelist, not all serious novelist, what I call a philosophical novelist.

00:12:15.300 And what I mean by that is that he deliberately engages existing philosophical systems, cosmological systems, places them in the context of a narrative, and sort of sees how they play out.

00:12:28.560 And, of course, one of the biggest issues we confront in philosophy is metaphysics and the question of, you know, does God exist?

00:12:39.220 But more than that, I mean, not only does God exist, but what is God's nature?

00:12:45.080 Does God care for us?

00:12:46.920 Is God in any way anthropomorphic in his emotions?

00:12:49.900 Is God just a cosmic joker, as Melville pondered?

00:12:55.460 So, metaphysics and the question of our relationship to the divine or lack thereof is central to his works.

00:13:05.100 Epistemology, right, the question of knowledge.

00:13:07.180 So, he will say over and over and over again, he refers to people's minds as things in and of themselves.

00:13:15.600 So, the question is, as a thing out there in nature, can the mind know all that there is to know about the very universe that the mind exists within?

00:13:25.120 And that's a question that he seeks to answer without ever, you know, fully answering it.

00:13:31.960 And all of this is not abstract in McCarthy because these questions, I mean, I like to think of it this way.

00:13:39.880 When I was a small child, I had a nightmare at some point in time.

00:13:45.240 And my Missouri grandmother, who had a third grade education, said something like, I don't know, something like,

00:13:51.700 Steve, remember the lilies of the field.

00:13:53.860 God's there to protect you.

00:13:55.380 He'll take care of you.

00:13:56.540 And I've thought about that.

00:13:59.140 And it seems like a cliche, but my grandmother, with her third grade education, was a philosopher.

00:14:05.260 She had a worldview.

00:14:06.940 And she thought about that worldview.

00:14:09.640 And that worldview was conditioned by the fact that she lost a child.

00:14:14.480 It was part of how she coped with that.

00:14:16.240 That's what McCarthy's about.

00:14:17.280 It's about taking philosophical ideas, placing them in narrative, and in doing so, seeing how those ideas shake out in the lives of people.

00:14:28.240 And so, metaphysics and epistemology, but then he confronts us with something fundamental.

00:14:35.440 And that is that we exist in a violent world.

00:14:38.180 How does that experience, how should that experience condition how we think about meaning, purpose, and value?

00:14:48.000 And in the midst of all of that, we see this especially in the road, there's this emphasis on human community and brotherhood and paternal love, those kinds of things.

00:14:59.100 Well, going back to this idea of the exploration of violence, one of the things that always strikes me about McCarthy and his treatment of violence,

00:15:05.140 you read it, and it's very jarring.

00:15:07.880 But at the same time, you're reading it, you're like, well, there's nothing, he's not really grotesque about it.

00:15:11.960 But for some, the way he's able to use language, you just, you feel, like in the road, he doesn't get really detailed in the gory details too much.

00:15:21.380 But you're left with the impression, you also see this in No Country for Old Men, you're left with this impression, like, boy, something really bad just happened.

00:15:29.220 And you kind of, you feel it viscerally.

00:15:32.500 Oh, yeah, that's true.

00:15:34.200 I think, I've listened a number of times too, he's got an interviewer, he does a three-way interview with Werner Herzog and another scientist, I don't remember the scientist's name.

00:15:44.580 Herzog was very, you know, very complimentary of McCarthy, almost to the point where he seemed, you know, politely embarrassed.

00:15:52.040 But, you know, Herzog said that he, something like he, by his strange, unique, and totally distinctive use of language, he sort of ascribes a world into being.

00:16:02.460 So, it, on the one hand, you look at it and you think, well, this is not, you know, in scare quotes, realistic particularly.

00:16:12.060 But in a sense, it's not objectively realistic, it's not how we necessarily sort of see the world.

00:16:19.120 But I think McCarthy starts to capture in these moments of violence, intense violence, how we might feel the world, right?

00:16:27.900 How we might fully experience that moment beyond simple sight and smell or taste, but the sort of extrasensory psychological perceptions.

00:16:41.660 I think that's what he's about, is sort of creating a sense of the horrific that is not simply sensory, but psychological.

00:16:51.040 So, you mentioned his interest in epistemology and metaphysics.

00:16:53.660 This, some people don't know this about McCarthy.

00:16:55.820 He's like a, he works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is sort of like the science institute.

00:17:01.100 What's a novelist doing at the Santa Fe Institute where they're exploring issues of science?

00:17:05.480 Well, I think there was some serendipity.

00:17:07.900 One, McCarthy's known for not really liking to hang out with artists or writers.

00:17:12.240 He much prefers to hang out with scientists.

00:17:16.480 When he won the MacArthur Genius Grant, he met Murray Gellman, who was a founder of the Santa Fe Institute, and they became friends.

00:17:26.500 And Murray Gellman is a Nobel Prize winning physicist.

00:17:29.500 So, it's through that relationship that he got involved with the Santa Fe Institute, was already living in the Southwest.

00:17:38.100 And he became involved there probably for the same reason that when he was a small child, he had more hobbies than anybody else.

00:17:45.660 And that science and all of these questions became just central to what he wanted to inquire into.

00:17:53.780 And so, he's a fellow there, he writes there, or has for a number of years, helps people edit their work.

00:18:03.120 He's done that a bit.

00:18:04.740 And also, the Santa Fe Institute itself is a sort of cutting-edge institute that's dedicated to complexity science.

00:18:13.280 That is, complex systems theory in a multidisciplinary kind of, taking a kind of multidisciplinary approach.

00:18:20.800 So, this idea, what they used to call chaos theory, now they tend to call it complex adaptive systems, that really is a science.

00:18:30.100 But it also has these pretty powerful implications when it comes to questions of determinism versus free will, which are themes that have preoccupied him.

00:18:40.380 So, he's interested, I think, in seeing how that stuff plays out, right, in the physical world and in the scientific realm.

00:18:46.360 I think it comforts him a bit because science offers at least a limited kind of certitude.

00:18:53.100 And he said that, that, you know, he likes that some things you can boil down to facts.

00:18:58.360 Okay.

00:18:58.920 You mentioned that he doesn't like to hang out with other writers and artists.

00:19:01.720 He generally, he's reclusive.

00:19:03.660 He avoids the spotlight.

00:19:04.720 He's done very few interviews.

00:19:06.620 Why is that?

00:19:07.180 Is there just something about his personality that just doesn't like the spotlight?

00:19:10.620 Well, anything I would say about that would be pretty speculative because, you know, we don't, there is no biography on him.

00:19:18.480 And what we know, we have to sort of extrapolate a little bit from the few interviews that he's given.

00:19:24.980 My sense of it, though, is that it's an aspect of personality.

00:19:32.040 You know, some people just don't like the spotlight.

00:19:34.820 Some people don't like to speak publicly.

00:19:37.640 Some people just revel in that.

00:19:39.400 And there's a sense that he doesn't care for that kind of celebrity.

00:19:44.080 But I also think that there's a strong sense that too much celebrity and too much engagement with other people who are commenting on your work can have a corrosive effect upon the work itself.

00:19:59.620 And I think my sense is that he is a consummate artist.

00:20:03.740 As much as he doesn't necessarily want to hang out with other ones, he's utterly uncompromising in his commitment to his art and was, you know, again, he was in his 60s before he really started, you know, making any real money at it and yet maintained that commitment.

00:20:21.620 So, yeah, I do think that it's both.

00:20:24.500 I think it's an aspect of personality.

00:20:26.040 But I also think that there's a sense that almost, well, a very practical sense that it could compromise what you're trying to do with yourself as an artist.

00:20:36.580 No, that makes sense.

00:20:37.280 I've noticed my favorite writers, so McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, they all are kind of, they don't get out in the spotlight very much.

00:20:45.860 And I wonder if, I'm sure it's personality, but I think, I wonder if also for McMurtry, if, you know, he just passed away this past year.

00:20:52.420 Right.

00:20:52.760 If it was for him the same sort of thing, it would, he didn't want it to corrupt his work in a way.

00:20:57.720 Yeah.

00:20:58.940 McMurtry just wanted to own a bookstore.

00:21:00.660 Yeah.

00:21:01.180 Right.

00:21:01.700 You know, in two places.

00:21:03.500 And he, you know, he, you know, he was, you know, very popular in terms of having his novels adapted into cinema and really fine, fine films that came out of McMurtry's work.

00:21:13.920 But still, I think there was kind of the same thing with McCarthy, a sense of, of, of, I'm doing something that I, I, I know what I'm doing and I, I should not compromise it by too much chatter.

00:21:25.960 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:21:29.840 And now back to the show.

00:21:32.020 All right.

00:21:32.460 So let's dig into the road because this is my favorite novel.

00:21:34.740 And I think it's a great, if you've never read Cormac McCarthy, it's a great one to start out with.

00:21:38.660 It's, um, it made, it was turned into a movie.

00:21:41.720 It came out in 2006 general plot is that it's, there's a nameless father and a nameless son traveling through a post apocalyptic landscape in America, somewhere in the Southeast.

00:21:53.300 And they're just trying to survive.

00:21:55.340 Do we know what inspired McCarthy to write the road?

00:21:58.200 Was there something that happened to him?

00:21:59.280 Well, he tells us actually in his one TV interview, and if I'm recalling it, I think I'll get the outlines of it pretty, pretty correct, uh, that he was with his, his young son at the time.

00:22:09.360 He had a son late, John Francis, who was probably eight or 10 years old at the time.

00:22:15.200 And he was in a hotel with his son who was sleeping on the bed.

00:22:19.920 And McCarthy says he was looking out the window late at night.

00:22:22.980 And he imagined what the world might look like 50 or a hundred years from at that moment.

00:22:30.100 And, uh, that, I, I think, you know, standing between his son and that idea inspired the road, which he wrote fairly quickly.

00:22:40.260 I didn't take him that long.

00:22:42.340 So that moment is part of what inspired him.

00:22:46.080 But I think clearly what, what inspired him at, at a deeper level is, is having his second son at that age in a time when it seemed to have a pretty, pretty profound impact on him.

00:22:59.340 And, and how's the road similar to McCarthy's previous works and how is it different?

00:23:04.580 Well, stylistically, it's somewhat different.

00:23:07.380 I think that McCarthy's associated with a kind of ornate style, or at least that's what people comment on when they look at his earlier works.

00:23:15.480 If you look at those works, you see a kind of minimalism there too, in different places.

00:23:20.560 But the road is much more overtly minimalist and much more conscious of the legacy of Hemingway.

00:23:29.340 There's even a couple of places in the road, one where the father recalls a time where a cat is sheltering under a table or something.

00:23:40.380 And that recalls Hemingway's cat in the rain.

00:23:43.000 He, the father recalls a moment when the boy is being born and the narrator in, in the thoughts of the man says,

00:23:51.040 her screams don't matter or something to that effect. 0.53

00:23:54.900 And that is a direct reference to Hemingway's Indian camp.

00:23:59.460 So you have this minimalist style.

00:24:02.700 And I, I think the, the more ornate, more, I suppose, the more archaic style is a smaller percentage of the road.

00:24:13.660 Uh, so stylistically it's actually very different, but I, I think in so many ways, the road is a culmination of the kinds of things that he's been thinking about all the way since 1965.

00:24:28.940 And the kind of things that many or most of us think about as we sort of go through a life, you know?

00:24:35.200 Yeah.

00:24:35.400 So you mentioned, uh, the, the influence of Hemingway McCarthy famously said books are made of books besides Hemingway.

00:24:41.300 Were there any other authors of books that influenced the road?

00:24:44.680 Well, of course McCarthy in general, his favorite book is, is Moby Dick, which he reads quite consciously, uh, or, or I think quite often.

00:24:52.520 But I think, and, and many folks haven't talked about this, McCarthy mentions his admiration for Dostoevsky.

00:25:00.840 And we have to remember that the road was written roughly at the same time that McCarthy wrote the Sunset Limited.

00:25:08.360 That is his play.

00:25:10.380 And Dostoevsky, of course, was a, an Orthodox Christian writer, but coming out of an existential tradition.

00:25:18.020 And I think that the brothers Karamazov is a pretty direct influence on the road.

00:25:25.720 And in the brothers Karamazov, you have two brothers that, that debate the existence and the nature of God.

00:25:32.200 Ivan, the atheist says he will not believe as long as one child suffers.

00:25:38.820 And Alyosha really doesn't have a response to that except to try to live a good life. 1.00

00:25:43.280 And I think that basic question, that basic dynamic and concern is at the center of this novel, which is very much about a child who is suffering.

00:25:55.680 So yeah, Dostoevsky and the brothers Karamazov, I think in particular.

00:26:00.460 So let's talk about themes.

00:26:01.860 What do you think are the big themes in the road?

00:26:03.240 Well, I think it's a book about, that's asking that fundamental question, does God exist?

00:26:10.680 If God exists, what is my relationship to him?

00:26:15.620 I think, and I should credit a friend of mine and a fellow scholar, Alan Josephs, who wrote an article called The Quest for God in the Road.

00:26:23.260 And he published it in a collection of essays that I edited, The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy.

00:26:29.000 And he actually teases out all of the references to God and to godlessness and demonstrates through this detailed textual analysis that the novel weighs, in a way that other McCarthy works don't,

00:26:43.440 weighs in the direction of a belief in not only God, but something on the order of a Christian God that is beneficent.

00:26:54.140 And I think struggling with that question and tentatively resolving that question, very tentatively, is, I think, the central theme that it is about.

00:27:06.340 And the thing of it is that McCarthy's unsentimental about the question.

00:27:11.680 And when I say that, I mean that oftentimes when people grapple with or veer toward belief, they veer in the direction of a kind of sentimental conception of the divine.

00:27:25.960 And that's not McCarthy.

00:27:27.800 I think these questions, can we find hope in a world that all we have to do is look at CNN to see McCarthy's world, right? 0.62

00:27:34.520 We see violence everywhere.

00:27:35.520 And in the context of that, is it reasonable to be hopeful about human existence and the human experience?

00:27:42.880 And I think McCarthy wants to ask that question in this novel, but he says, you know, if you're going to find hope, and I think he does, you have to find it after you have immersed yourself in an abyss.

00:27:54.060 And if you find hope there, then it's a stalwart hope indeed.

00:27:58.560 And that ultimately is, I think, how the novel plays out, again, tentatively.

00:28:03.240 And some disagree with me, and there's different ways to read it.

00:28:06.960 But that's how I read it, moving in the direction of a kind of Christian existentialism, in a way.

00:28:12.220 It's kind of Kierkegaardian, in a way.

00:28:13.900 Yes, exactly.

00:28:15.360 Exactly.

00:28:16.260 Oftentimes, the road has been compared to a biblical allegory.

00:28:18.700 But biblical in that tradition of biblical, it's exploring these big questions of existence, human existence, whether God exists, but it's also there's violence mixed in with it.

00:28:30.000 Maybe, off the top of your head, what are some examples, like very obvious examples of biblical references that we see pop up in the road?

00:28:38.280 Well, with reference to the boy, he's quite, you know, clearly configured as a Christ figure.

00:28:44.600 He's associated, again, with the word of God.

00:28:47.140 The man describes him as a golden chalice.

00:28:50.260 That is, you know, a liturgical, you know, image.

00:28:54.320 The father refers to him directly when he's talking to the old man, Eli.

00:28:59.140 He calls, he says, you know, what if I said he is a God?

00:29:02.680 So, there's references to the boy as a Christ figure.

00:29:06.240 And he also says that the sacred idiom is shorn of all reference, right?

00:29:13.280 And so, you might imagine that he's just using images of the divine as a figure of speech.

00:29:21.040 But the boy, if you think about childhood, my experience with children when I was a child is they can be pretty brutal.

00:29:29.020 They can be kind of nasty.

00:29:30.200 The adults in my life have been much kinder to me than the kids were when I was a kid.

00:29:35.240 But this child is kind.

00:29:38.520 That's the essence of his being in an environment where it compromises his own security and survival to be that way.

00:29:45.700 So, he's configured as a Christ figure.

00:29:48.060 That's a reference.

00:29:49.420 The larger reference is the motif of the wilderness.

00:29:53.320 Some folks have read the landscape itself as a kind of simple metaphor for a kind of cosmological void.

00:30:03.640 And their reading is kind of a sort of happy atheist reading.

00:30:07.040 The idea is that, you know, okay, the world ends.

00:30:10.340 We exist in a meaningless universe, but we can have a experience, a kind of contingent meaning in the relationships we have with people.

00:30:17.920 And, you know, I don't want to just absolutely dismiss that reading.

00:30:21.640 I think it's there, but I do think that you shouldn't read the landscape as a simple metaphor.

00:30:26.680 He's reading it typologically.

00:30:29.180 It is the same kind of wilderness that you find in the Old Testament where the Israelites are tested by God in a desert before they're delivered ultimately to their mission and to their understanding of their role in the world.

00:30:44.680 And the same thing that Christ experiences in the wilderness when he goes for 40 days and 40 nights where he's quite literally tempted by Satan.

00:30:54.040 Here you have the man being tempted by this character, Eli, who tries to tempt him into hopelessness, a kind of Satan figure.

00:31:03.360 So, the boy is Christ figure, all of this kind of liturgical and Eucharistic imagery, and also this broad leot motif of the wilderness that I think should be read typologically.

00:31:16.020 No, there's a great example of the boy being a Christ figure.

00:31:19.620 So, there's this scene.

00:31:20.720 I'm going to, I'll read the dialogue here.

00:31:22.200 Where it's the father's talking to the boy.

00:31:24.540 It says, the man squatted and looked at him.

00:31:26.700 I'm scared, he said.

00:31:27.580 Do you understand?

00:31:28.240 I'm scared.

00:31:29.080 The boy didn't answer.

00:31:30.160 He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

00:31:32.560 You're not the one who has to worry about everything.

00:31:34.860 The boy said something, but he couldn't understand him.

00:31:37.160 What, he said.

00:31:38.200 He looked up, his wet and grimy face.

00:31:40.960 Yes, I am, he said.

00:31:42.080 I am the one.

00:31:44.240 The I am the one is the Christ reference.

00:31:46.800 Well, you understand that, Brett, because you read it precisely as it needs to be read, okay?

00:31:53.880 And that is the emphasis on the final statement, I am the one, right?

00:31:59.340 You placed a real emphasis on that.

00:32:02.240 And I suppose you don't have to do that.

00:32:05.380 But, for example, you know, I like some things about the cinematic adaptation, but there's things I don't like about it.

00:32:10.900 And in that adaptation, Hillcoat had the boy say, I am the one, okay?

00:32:17.800 Instead of the more portentous, I am the one, right?

00:32:22.720 Ending on one is, you're right about that.

00:32:26.520 That's a point where he's, you know, announcing himself, not in an arrogant way, not even in a fully aware way.

00:32:35.500 He's not saying I'm God, but he is saying I'm playing the role of a kind of Christ in a decimated world.

00:32:43.120 And that is, I'm trying to bring peace to it and benevolence.

00:32:48.420 Well, after you finish the road, have you been able to figure out, you know, McCarthy's view on God?

00:32:53.780 Well, I take him at his own word.

00:32:56.500 In other words, McCarthy said when he was interviewed about the road, he said, you know, when he was asked, you know, have you got the whole God thing figured out?

00:33:04.060 He said, well, it depends upon what day you ask me.

00:33:07.440 He said, I think it's good to pray.

00:33:10.100 You don't have to have a clear idea of who or what God is to pray.

00:33:15.760 You might even be quite doubtful about the whole business.

00:33:19.300 I think that McCarthy's content to be doubtful.

00:33:21.800 He says in a later interview, he said that he has a great admiration for the spiritual view of life.

00:33:28.480 He said, he's asked, is the God in the road, the God you encountered when you were in Catholic school?

00:33:36.140 And McCarthy said it may be, but he associates spirituality with being decent and with being ethical.

00:33:45.200 And he says that in the same interview.

00:33:46.960 He wants to be a more spiritual person in order to be a better person.

00:33:51.640 So I do think McCarthy's content to sort of embrace what is genuinely our ethical, our existential condition, which is we simply don't know the answer to that question in any kind of a solid or empirical way.

00:34:05.000 We can take various leaps of faith, but ultimately they are leaps.

00:34:09.480 And he's content to rest in that uncertainty, but he has a real sympathy for a theistic view of the world.

00:34:20.100 Now, again, he experiments with ideas, and I think he's experimenting with a kind of Christian existentialism in the road.

00:34:28.320 But he's experimenting with Gnosticism in Blood Meridian and other things and in other books.

00:34:33.480 So what I would say is I would attach the term heterodox to McCarthy with respect to the God question.

00:34:42.660 Well, and it seems to something he does with this book is that he finds the divine in the relationship between the father and the son.

00:34:49.980 It's almost this relationship between the father and son.

00:34:52.060 It's almost a materialist spirituality.

00:34:54.780 You know, because it's just you see over and over again the father, you know, holding the boy, wiping blood off and gore off the boy's head, the boy pleading out for the father.

00:35:06.640 And so it is a very, it's a very visceral, very grounded in nature thing that's going on.

00:35:12.680 But there's also like it's tinged with spirituality at the same time.

00:35:16.340 Well, no, you're totally right.

00:35:17.500 I mean, that's, that is, that comes, I think, pretty clear toward the end of the book.

00:35:22.920 Remember in the book when the man is dying and he's talking to the boy and he says to the boy, he says, you know what, you're going to be okay.

00:35:31.600 And it's pretty clear that the man is confident that the boy will be, in quotes, lucky, will be okay, and that goodness will find him.

00:35:40.320 But what the man says, too, is he says, look, you have to talk to me.

00:35:45.660 And if you make it like talk, you will hear me respond to you.

00:35:50.220 I will talk back to you.

00:35:52.820 And the boy says, okay.

00:35:54.860 He's, of course, discovered by the family.

00:35:57.180 And he encounters a woman.

00:35:58.720 And I'll go ahead and read what the woman says, if you don't mind.

00:36:01.280 Sure.

00:36:01.680 And she says, he, first of all, the boy is, is, well, here's what the woman says.

00:36:07.120 She says, she would talk to him sometimes about God.

00:36:10.600 He tried to talk to God, but the best thing was to talk to his father.

00:36:14.260 And he did talk to him and he didn't forget.

00:36:17.660 The woman said that was all right.

00:36:20.040 She said the breath of God was his breath yet, though it passed from man to man through all of time.

00:36:26.320 And that is the end of the plotted novel before the mysterious kind of epilogue.

00:36:31.060 The idea there is not, you could imagine someone who is from a more maybe traditional Christian perspective saying, well, okay, you can go ahead and talk to your father, but keep trying to talk to God too.

00:36:43.420 That's not what the woman says. 0.92

00:36:44.960 What the woman says is, or essentially what she implies is that as you talk to your father, you are talking to God.

00:36:52.800 Because God was physically and in a very real way manifest in the relationship you had with your father and the love that bound you together.

00:37:04.820 So God is not in some abstract other place.

00:37:09.120 He's right there wherever we find ourselves bound to each other by love.

00:37:13.500 And when I use the term love, I mean it, I don't think this is a, this is for McCarthy, this is not a kind of, a kind of, you know, give me a hug love.

00:37:24.180 It's not sentimental.

00:37:25.400 No, it's not sentimental at all. 1.00

00:37:27.060 It's, I will kill anyone who touches you love. 0.60

00:37:29.480 And, and that kind of conception of, of the divine and of mercy is all over Flannery O'Connor, all over any number of other authors who are, who are grappling with this kind of Christian existentialism. 0.67

00:37:43.360 So yeah, you're absolutely right.

00:37:44.520 It's a material manifestation of the divine.

00:37:47.200 It doesn't mean that the divine isn't out there somewhere else, but it is here.

00:37:51.540 And now do we see God every time we see each other would be the claim from this worldview.

00:37:59.480 Um, and again, it's obviously very conjectural and I don't know that McCarthy, uh, believes it at every moment in his life, but he put it in play in this novel.

00:38:09.740 So there's this deep and abiding love between father and son, but throughout the novel, you see a tension between them as well.

00:38:16.640 Um, they kind of get in these very tense, like they don't yell at each other very often, but there's definitely a tension.

00:38:23.480 Like what is the source of the tension?

00:38:25.080 Well, I, you know, that's a tough one to, I, it's not really much more complex than the fact that the father feels like he's the one that has to handle things.

00:38:39.660 Nothing will get done and their fate is in his hands.

00:38:44.240 The father's trajectory toward this kind of moment at the end where there's this sort of guarded, but powerful kind of belief, uh, is not a thing that the father has early on.

00:38:56.940 He believes that what's going to happen is going to happen because he does it.

00:39:00.160 The boy believes that they have a deeper and greater responsibility to do what's right outside of the survival impulse.

00:39:11.320 And that's, you know, that's part of McCarthy's sort of grappling with post Darwinian things.

00:39:15.560 You know, what kind of responsibility do we have when all the strictures of civilization are stripped away?

00:39:21.580 Does that responsibility remain?

00:39:23.980 And for the boy, it does.

00:39:25.620 And that's, I think the source of their tension.

00:39:27.480 And there's also an alienation.

00:39:29.880 There's like this scene where the father's looking at the boy and the father realizes I'm pretty much an alien to my son.

00:39:37.440 Like he, I'm from a completely different planet.

00:39:39.620 Cause I knew the, I knew the world before this gray hellscape has descended.

00:39:44.700 And so there's going to be a, there's going to be a gap from us like all the time.

00:39:49.160 I felt like that with my own kids.

00:39:51.420 Like there'll be moments where I'll look at them and I'm like, they don't know.

00:39:54.720 Like there is, it's like, they don't, I, they don't know the world that I know.

00:39:59.560 Like, I don't think we'll ever be able to close that gap completely.

00:40:02.400 No, no.

00:40:03.920 And, and I think that that's part of the, of the, the blend of, of philosophical and psychological questions.

00:40:11.920 Because I think what there's something that's very almost allegorical about their relationship as real as it, as it comes, comes to us in, in their various expressions to one another.

00:40:21.900 Or, I mean, right, you know, I, I would say you're putting it well.

00:40:25.320 In other words, that is our condition, right?

00:40:27.260 You can never, I have, I have two grown children.

00:40:29.540 I love them deeply.

00:40:30.740 I actually first read this novel when my son was almost exactly the same age.

00:40:35.900 So pretty much floored me in that context.

00:40:39.240 But at the same time, the idea is we can never enter into another consciousness.

00:40:44.340 That's an existential condition as well, right?

00:40:46.200 I mean, we're always alienated from each other.

00:40:48.380 No one knows what we're feeling, perceiving, or even if we're perceiving in the same way.

00:40:53.780 And I think that's a part of the philosophical underpinnings of the novel.

00:40:58.260 Right.

00:40:58.340 It goes to that epistemology question that McCarthy has explored.

00:41:02.800 And the question of subjective versus objective knowledge.

00:41:05.540 You know, we can, we can both, you know, pick up the modem that's in front of me and, and, and say it's a modem.

00:41:10.620 But, but the deeper things that go to the question of what it means to, to know something at a subjective level, to, to feel something and experience something is an entirely different thing.

00:41:22.140 So let's talk about the most famous line from the road.

00:41:24.520 That's a carry the fire.

00:41:25.980 It's something the father and the son tell each other that they're doing, that they're carrying this fire.

00:41:30.700 What is the fire?

00:41:31.600 Did McCarthy, did he, you know, tip his hand and like lay his cards out?

00:41:34.860 This is what the fire is.

00:41:35.580 Or do you, can you just sort of suss that out from reading the book?

00:41:39.760 Sure, sure.

00:41:40.980 You know, I think he wants it to be an evocative image of, of, of divinity at one level, but how that divinity is, is fully defined.

00:41:51.540 It's, it's an obtuse and strange enough image that allows for us to read it in different ways.

00:41:57.680 What's interesting is that McCarthy's been toying with that image for decades.

00:42:05.580 It appears all the way back in some of his earliest novels, but it really appears, and there's a kind of a through line that appears with the epilogue to Blood Meridian.

00:42:17.040 And after a bunch of horrific stuff has happened, you have this epilogue that's outside the plotted novel, and you've got this group of figures that are walking through a nighttime desert landscape, and they're using some kind of implement to strike the ground and release the fire that, quote, God has put there.

00:42:36.360 And then, and then, and then the epilogue just ends, but it's a fire that God has put there.

00:42:42.380 And then at the end of No Country for Old Men, Ed Tom Bell has a dream about his father, and they're riding out in the wilderness, and the father rides past him with a gourd that has fire in it.

00:42:55.380 And the father passes him, and it becomes dark again, but he has this strange kind of faith that the father will be waiting for him in all that cold and all that dark.

00:43:07.700 So, again, with all the sort of God stuff that is playing out in these later novels, I think the idea of embodying it in an image that is both simultaneously evocative and mysterious, remember that the final word of the novel, and I think the final word that might be on McCarthy, is mystery related to this metaphysical question.

00:43:35.880 But at the same time, I think it is an evocative image of at least a potential divinity.

00:43:42.220 Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

00:43:44.440 And for me, I also see carrying the fire as maintaining goodness.

00:43:48.960 It's doing the right thing, even in really dark times.

00:43:54.280 Because, you know, in the novel, you know, some people, they use the societal collapse as an excuse to give in to their worst impulses.

00:44:02.900 I mean, there's these gangs of baby-eating barbarians going around. 0.99

00:44:07.840 And the boy and the father, they're trying not to give in to that.

00:44:12.300 They're trying to be what they call the good guys.

00:44:14.760 So, throughout the novel, you hear them encouraging each other, saying, you know, we're the good guys.

00:44:18.640 The son's always asking, we're the good guys, right?

00:44:20.960 So, they're trying to maintain goodness, keeping the flame of it alive, and the father's trying to pass that down to his son.

00:44:28.280 So, it's that.

00:44:29.500 I mean, and to me, every time I read about carrying the fire, it's, I see hope.

00:44:34.680 It's hope.

00:44:35.420 It's hope when everything seems hopeless.

00:44:37.340 That's the fire.

00:44:38.900 And the guy wearing the parka at the end, oddly enough, seems to know what he means.

00:44:45.160 Finally, he says, yeah, we're carrying the fire.

00:44:47.800 Yeah, they're one of the good guys.

00:44:49.380 Yeah, they're one of the good guys.

00:44:50.620 That's right.

00:44:50.880 Well, I'd like to read, it's my favorite scene, and every time, I probably will start bawling like a baby after I read this, but it really sums it up.

00:44:59.600 It's at the very end.

00:45:00.460 The father's dying.

00:45:01.580 He's got, it sounds like tuberculosis, some kind of lung problem, and he's talking to his son, and the son says, I want to be with you.

00:45:09.880 You can't.

00:45:11.040 Please.

00:45:11.820 You can't.

00:45:12.620 You have to carry the fire.

00:45:14.020 I don't know how to.

00:45:15.580 Yes, you do.

00:45:16.680 Is it real, the fire?

00:45:18.840 Yes, it is.

00:45:19.960 Where is it?

00:45:20.620 I don't know where it is.

00:45:22.420 Yes, you do.

00:45:23.700 Sorry.

00:45:25.060 It's inside you.

00:45:25.920 It's always been there.

00:45:26.900 I can see it.

00:45:28.620 Just take me with you, please.

00:45:30.220 I can't.

00:45:30.880 Please, Papa.

00:45:31.900 I can't.

00:45:32.640 I can't hold my son dead in my arms.

00:45:34.600 I thought I could, but I can't.

00:45:36.420 You said you would never leave me.

00:45:39.720 I know.

00:45:40.380 I'm sorry.

00:45:43.520 You have my whole heart.

00:45:45.700 You always did.

00:45:47.400 You're the best guy.

00:45:48.680 You always were.

00:45:52.240 If I'm not here to talk, if I'm not here, you can still talk to me.

00:45:56.080 You can talk to me, and I'll talk to you.

00:45:57.640 You'll see.

00:45:59.220 Okay.

00:46:00.040 Sorry about that.

00:46:01.540 No apologies necessary.

00:46:02.840 You know, I've had that response a number of times myself, especially the first time that I read it.

00:46:10.260 And that is a, you know, just a, you know, it's a moment that anyone, anyone who loves anyone, whether it is a child or whoever, you know, is going to be, you know, affected by that moment.

00:46:27.060 And I think that for all of my discussion of these philosophical themes, I think the point to be made there is, is that those themes don't mean anything to us or don't mean as much to us until we live a life.

00:46:47.100 Until we encounter other human beings, then all these metaphysical and epistemological questions become real in a very intimate way.

00:46:58.660 And I think that's McCarthy's purpose.

00:47:01.660 He doesn't see philosophy as an obtuse thing for long-bearded men.

00:47:05.980 He sees it as a thing that, you know, 65-year-old third-grade educated women from Missouri experience, right, when they're talking to their grandson.

00:47:19.680 That's what it means to be human.

00:47:21.080 We ask these questions.

00:47:22.460 We can't help it.

00:47:23.680 And we have these kinds of experiences, right?

00:47:26.780 So, yeah, that's a very human moment.

00:47:28.500 No apologies necessary.

00:47:29.760 No, yeah, you're the best guy.

00:47:31.480 That's the part that just, because that's what I call my son.

00:47:33.880 It's my little guy.

00:47:34.440 Yeah.

00:47:34.700 So what is it about the, I read this probably once a year.

00:47:37.720 I, every time I read it, I bawl at that part.

00:47:40.720 I started crying.

00:47:41.600 I feel depressed, but at the same time, I feel really hopeful after I finish it.

00:47:46.280 What do you think is going on there?

00:47:47.760 What do you think McCarthy's ultimate message is with this book?

00:47:50.740 Well, I think that you're feeling depressed, I think, for reasons that are, that are, are in some sense common to everyone.

00:48:00.920 And that is that McCarthy creates a world that very well could come into being.

00:48:05.720 And it could come into being because we're struck by a meteor.

00:48:08.880 It could come into being because we don't take care of the world ourselves.

00:48:12.940 We don't know what caused the cataclysm.

00:48:15.400 But it's a, it's a potentiality that is there.

00:48:19.140 And that's, that makes us sad.

00:48:21.620 That makes us depressed.

00:48:22.760 But what's hopeful, I think, in it and why I consider a tremendously, well, not tremendously hopeful book, but a hopeful book.

00:48:32.280 There's a kind of circumscribed hope is that we all carry the fire.

00:48:37.320 We all care for one another.

00:48:38.860 We all are capable of committing to one another.

00:48:41.500 We're all capable of, of going on, even when it absolutely makes no sense to, in this particular, you know, situation.

00:48:55.280 McCarthy himself said, what he wants us to take away from this novel is that we should be grateful for what we have.

00:49:01.940 And I think you might feel positive when you read that book, because you probably almost immediately look around at the things that you have, and you say, thank whatever.

00:49:15.380 Maybe God, maybe circumstance, but I'm grateful.

00:49:19.620 And what it's a, it's a gratitude that's not abstract.

00:49:22.300 It's a very visceral gratitude.

00:49:23.680 And I think, again, that goes back to McCarthy's materialist, I guess, framework that he might have.

00:49:30.080 Sure, sure.

00:49:30.780 Yeah, absolutely.

00:49:32.160 It's not, and that's his point, is to take ideas that articulated by philosophers remain abstract and to put them into play in human lives.

00:49:40.740 Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation.

00:49:43.360 Thanks for listening to me blubber like a baby.

00:49:45.300 That's okay.

00:49:46.900 But where can people go to learn more about the book and your work, or just what your work in general?

00:49:52.180 I work in general.

00:49:52.880 Well, I have a website, stephenfry.org, with a V, not to be confused with the British comedian.

00:49:58.440 I have, so, you know, I invite folks to visit that, where most of what I've done in book link form is there.

00:50:05.700 I have a couple other books on McCarthy, edited collections.

00:50:09.520 One is The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy.

00:50:12.560 The other is Cormac McCarthy in Context, again, both by Cambridge University Press.

00:50:18.060 I also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West.

00:50:22.940 And recently, I've also published a novel called Dogwood Crossing.

00:50:27.600 It's a frontier novel and a family saga set in 1798, just before the Louisiana Purchase.

00:50:35.820 It's about a family that travels from North Carolina to Missouri and all that that entails.

00:50:41.740 Kirk has called it, Kirk's reviews called it Engaging, Melancholy, and Chilling.

00:50:47.360 So if that appeals to folks, I encourage them to give it a look.

00:50:50.380 If you like McCarthy, then you'll like Dogwood Crossing.

00:50:55.400 Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation.

00:50:57.120 Thanks so much for your time.

00:50:57.700 It's been a pleasure.

00:50:58.840 Thank you very much, Brad.

00:50:59.980 I appreciate it.

00:51:01.420 My guest today was Stephen Fry.

00:51:02.620 He's the author of several books about the works of Cormac McCarthy, including Understanding

00:51:06.760 Cormac McCarthy.

00:51:07.740 He's also got a novel out, Dogwood Crossing, all available on amazon.com.

00:51:11.500 Check that out.

00:51:12.120 Also, you can learn more information about his work at his website, stephenfry.org.

00:51:16.160 And check out our show notes at awem.is slash the road, where you find links to resources

00:51:19.860 where you delve deeper into this topic.

00:51:21.180 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:51:31.100 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well

00:51:34.760 as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think

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00:52:02.800 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

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The Art of Manliness - December 01, 2021

Cormac McCarthy, The Road, and Carrying the Fire

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