- Here Was One
- Posts
- Here Was One
Here Was One
No. 3
Grant Hodges
June 25, 2023
All the Pretty Horses
Dear Reader,
Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) died last week. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, he wrote a number of critically acclaimed novels, including No Country for Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian. He also had a distinctive style, employing spare language and eschewing punctuation and quotation marks. Here’s a sample from No Country for Old Men:
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?
McCarthy’s novels are bleak and filled with violence and death. They also contain extraordinary prose and are, in their own way, quite beautiful. For this week’s piece, I wanted to pull an excerpt from his 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses:
From All the Pretty Horses
By Cormac McCarthy
That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.
Background
The first novel in McCarthy’s so-called “Border Trilogy,” All the Pretty Horses follows the story of John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old Texan boy who chooses to run away to Mexico with his best friend—Lacey Rawlins—after he learns that his family’s ranch will be sold following his grandfather’s death. John Grady and Rawlins intend to find work as cowboys, but instead they encounter violence, injustice, and tragedy. A young acquaintance named Jimmy Blevins, whom the boys befriend, is killed by corrupt Mexican police officers. Rawlins is stabbed, nearly dies, and flees to the United States. And John Grady is also stabbed and later shot. Eventually, he is forced to return to Texas as well.
The only real peace that John Grady and Rawlins get in Mexico is during a short-lived stay at a large ranch in Coahuila, where they find work as ranch hands and where John Grady falls in love with the ranch owner’s daughter, Alejandra. Without giving too much away, fate intervenes and the love affair is cut short, but the intensity of their feelings and their struggle to stay together is a particularly moving part of the novel.
All the Pretty Horses ends with John Grady riding off West, alone, but his story is taken up again in McCarthy’s 1998 book, Cities of the Plain (the last installment of the Border Trilogy).
What It Offers
Recent appraisals of McCarthy have focused on The Road and Blood Meridian. The latter is considered his masterpiece. But I don’t think either comes close to All the Pretty Horses in terms of grappling with a major idea that permeates all of McCarthy’s work: the ubiquity of suffering and violence in the world, as contrasted with the immanent beauty of that same world.
In the passage above, John Grady dreams of horses while wrongly incarcerated by the Mexican police. He awakens immediately after to find Rawlins being led out of their cell to an uncertain fate. That juxtaposition—of a beautiful scene and a terrible one—occurs throughout the novel. John Grady even considers the relationship directly:
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
McCarthy, as I mentioned, can be quite bleak. But I think that his willingness to engage with the worst parts of humanity—and existence more broadly—reflects a real commitment to Truth. McCarthy doesn’t let us look away. He moves through the terrible to the beautiful; and in doing so, he establishes himself as an artist in the tradition of a number of tremendous writers, from Wallace Stevens, who wrote that “Death is the mother of beauty,” to John Keats, who famously ended one of his immortal odes with the adage: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty . . . .“
In a way, McCarthy wrote like his horses run in the passage above—unafraid and “in that resonance which is the world itself[.]” His authoritative voice and unflinching perspective will be sorely missed.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.