Deaths of America’s Greatest Writer and Its Premier Editor End a Golden Age

The death in a week’s span of America’s premier editor and its most indelible writer can be said to turn the page of this nation’s long 20th century of letters. The writer, Cormac McCarthy, and the editor, Robert Gottlieb, bore little in common beside genius. McCarthy was a man of the South and a bard of the West, Gottlieb a man of the Upper West Side who became a cultural maven. Yet both were giants. McCarthy was born at Rhode Island, grew up in Tennessee, and served in the Air Force, stationed in Alaska. He died at Santa Fe. His breakout novel, written in 1979, was “Suttree,” a dark and semi-autobiographical work set at the Knoxville of McCarthy’s childhood. It owes a debt to James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” McCarthy’s voice — apocalyptic, baroque, crazed by sin, and skeptical of redemption — is already audible. That voice sounds like no one else, though William Faulkner is never far. In “Suttree,” McCarthy asks, “What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.” McCarthy inherited the Mississippian’s agent, Albert Erskine, and also his penchant for sentences as long as paragraphs. The critic Harold Bloom ventured that “no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as ‘Blood Meridian,’” McCarthy’s next novel, even as he allows that “so appalling are the continuous massacres and mutilations of ‘Blood Meridian’ that one could be reading a United Nations report on the horrors of Syria in 2019.” It is, he asserts, a “universal tragedy of blood.” “Blood Meridian” tracks the journey of a protagonist in the Mexican borderlands in the middle of the 19th century, and his ultimate confrontation with Judge Holden. McCarthy proves himself a Virgil of violence, attuned to its every light and its macabre beauty. The judge is “a massive, hairless, albino man who excels in shooting, languages, horsemanship, dancing, music, drawing, diplomacy, science and anything else.” To dip into McCarthy’s language: “All the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.” In a remarkable turn, this writer who combined Faulkner’s excess, Herman Melville’s sense of the epic, and Ernest Hemingway’s flinty lack of affect became beloved of Hollywood. His “No Country for Old Men” garnered four Oscars, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Road” hit the silver screen as well. He published two novels in the past year, and, when he died, was working on a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian.” There was no retirement for McCarthy.One couldn’t find McCarthy on the lecture circuit or in the university classroom. He didn’t write for magazines, and his interviews were nearly as rare as a sighting of Pynchon. His name was not unknown to discussion of Nobel Prize odds, but it was always difficult to imagine this reclusive master in tails. He was a chronicler of America’s forgotten regions, but, nearly unthinkably, he once sat for a television interview with Oprah Winfrey. If McCarthy was a wild man, Gottlieb was a nice Jewish boy who went to the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and Columbia, and became editor of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and the New Yorker. His first discovery in publishing was Joseph Heller’s comedic masterpiece “Catch-22,” and his biggest whiff was passing on John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” a rancid romp that won a Pulitzer. Gottlieb collected plastic handbags, wrote dance criticism, penned a memoir, and starred in a documentary about his epochal working relationship with the historian Robert Caro, whom Gottlieb edited for more than a half century and whose multi-volume biography of President Johnson is incomplete, even as Gottlieb is no more. Most of all, though, Gottlieb is known for, and through, the books he brought into the world. Gottlieb’s authors included John Cheever, John le Carré, Doris Lessing, President Clinton, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, recalls that he was a “colorful but calming presence. He never went out to lunch,” and that he “padded around the place in the outfit of a Columbia undergrad of his generation.” Mr. Remnick adds that Gottlieb told Morrison to be “reckless in your imagination.” Gottlieb never edited McCarthy, but it is intriguing to imagine how a director of the New York City Ballet would have abided an author who used words like “wickiup,” “weskit,” “Anareta,” and “Tatterdemalion.” It could be imagined, though, that the editor’s groan would give way to a smile upon reading this: “They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

Deaths of America’s Greatest Writer and Its Premier Editor End a Golden Age

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