libraries and the graduate English programs that find in them a framework for a textually oriented training. Has this be
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Daniel Robert King, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016), 232 pp. Reviewed by William Marling, Case Western Reserve University There is an important question that arises after finishing Daniel Robert King’s valuable new study of Cormac McCarthy: What is the future of “archive studies”? King’s insights on McCarthy’s novels, from The Orchard Keeper through The Road, are gleaned from university library archives, the kind that have been closely allied with major university libraries and the graduate English programs that find in them a framework for a textually oriented training. Has this been for the best? Is it coming to an end? Were there missed opportunities? To be sure, King’s study, a revised doctoral dissertation, shows that work in an archive is valuable training. No overstatement or unmoored theorizing here. But little theorizing of any sort either. That led this reader to wonder if, after the McCarthy/ Auster/ DeLillo generation of typewriter-using authors passes from the scene, there will be electronic archives to examine. Will we be able to discern who pushed “accept” in Word’s “Review” mode? Will such archives be tamper-proof? And will they be worth the sums that Yale, Texas, and in this case San Marcos State University laid out to purchase them, nifty latecareer bonuses to mature authors ($2 million in McCarthy’s case)? King’s title—the “editors, agents, and crafting” parts—promises a more comprehensive overview of the writer than King finally provides. However, he succeeds in “dispelling the myth of McCarthy as the reclusive genius who works alone on his novels” (16). There is an end-to-end review of McCarthy’s manuscripts from the rough drafts of The Orchard Keeper (1965) to The Road (2006). A chapter is devoted to each of the novels and two to the screenplays of The Border Trilogy and No Country for Old Men. Small insights and interesting nuggets abound, such as the origin of the latter as a film script. Quotations from the editors of Harper’s and Playboy, explaining why they were rejecting McCarthy’s stories, reveal how conservative the major magazines were with regard to literature in the supposedly racy 1970s. In his Sutteree or Knoxville period, we learn, McCarthy wrote some frankly bad and pretentious first drafts. He had no sense of titles at all and missed deadlines by months. He quibbled over apostrophes and commas. King’s major revelation: not only was McCarthy not a recluse of the mythic genius sort, but, instead, owed an extraordinary debt to Albert Erskine, his editor. Erskine, who had been Faulkner’s editor, nurtured McCarthy through literary adolescence and taught him how to be an adult writer. There were moments when I wanted this study to be entirely about Erskine, who is given a tantalizing biographical callout in chapter 1. Early on he sized up McCarthy’s raw talent as possibly more than a one-book phenom. Erskine
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found grants for McCarthy, kept him in print when his books were not selling, promoted excerpts through his personal contacts at magazines, and patiently edited his prose lineby-line to make it clearer, smoother reading experience. To be fair, Erskine leads McCarthy only to the place that his initial line editor, Joseph Bensky, had suggested much more abruptly. The latter is cast throughout this study as a villain, in contrast to all subsequent editors, and that seems unfair. The discoveries made through such archival research are small but significant. McCarthy was terrible at titles. He suggested “And I Wouldnt Care for No Man” and “Yep, That’s my Name” as possible titles for his first book The Orchard Keeper (60). His first title for Suttree was “Harrogate and the Flittermouses” (68). He wrote dialogue so long and repetitious that his editor began one letter by quoting Coleridge: “It is not possible to imitate a dull and garrulous discourser without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity” (68). He learns about the OED after Erskine proves to him that no one in the southwestern US could possibly have used the word “fucking” in the 1880s (89). Thus, he learns to do actual historic research on his own, making his imagined scenes both geographically and medically correct as well as more linguistically plausible. What King shows us about McCarthy is, finally, that writers do grow up. They learn from editors. McCarthy learns what is expected of a professional, and later in his career he is able to supply it, to other writers and, interestingly, to associates at the Santa Fe Institute. We may have lost the myth of the lonely genius, but we have gained yet another confirmation that most contemporary writers work closely with editors and agents to supply what publishers and markets want. They are profoundly social creatures. If that is true, it means something for archive studies. The field cannot continue to simply pile up all the manuscripts, letters, advertising, journals, and other cultural mulch that surrounds an author, a practice that vast digital memories have encouraged, while pretending that researchers may make of this material what they will. Nor can archive studies engage in the facile, old-fashioned myth- and symbol-hunting that is unfortunately easy when dealing with texts alone. King succumbs to this temptation late in his book in a five-page digression on the grail tales and The Grapes of Wrath as antecedents to The Road. Nor do gestures toward ecocriticism (150) or ethical criticism (156) seem apt. The corpus does not point that way. What it does point toward is the “new sociology of literature” practiced by James English, Mark McGurl, Loren Glass, and others who operate under the long shadow of Pierre Bourdieu in the US. These scholars and others (I think of Abel Debritto’s archival discoveries on Charles Bukowski) have used the archive to explain the contexts of publication and development. Despite King’s title, he does little to explain McCarthy’s “evolution.” Evolution is competitive, and where King could have probed McCarthy’s
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relation to modern Western writers such as Larry McMurtry or Edward Abbey (mentioned but not indexed), he lets McCarthy’s staking of a position on the “fields” of both genre and geography pass unexplored. It’s as though the writer had no peer group. The same with agents: McCarthy signs with Amanda Urban, and she assumes duties formerly performed by Erskine. Indeed, there is a whole sociology here, because at this point his editor becomes Gary Fisketjon at Knopf/Random House, a vice president whose “impressive back catalogue of authors includes Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, and Raymond Carver” (103). Those last two names should have sent up flares, since Fisketjon’s stewardship of Murakami includes a translation scandal while Gordon Lish’s editing of Carver was Svengalian. This is exactly the corporatization of publishing that André Shiffrin and John Thompson, along with James English, underline as the major structural change of the second half of the twentieth century. McCarthy is a writer who adapted to this new environment, who changed as the field of possibilities changed. One of the major changes was money. Since most major archives contain many checks, many royalty statements, and many letters about contracts., it’s possible to assemble a rudimentary picture of the author’s financial tensions, of how s/he was supported. But aside from a few pages on grants from the MacArthur and Merrill-Ingram Foundations (which McCarthy used to sport about on Ibiza), there is not much on the writer’s financial life until we get to that whopping San Marcos State payoff. That McCarthy was collecting a corpus for such a payout should not surprise us; we just need to be told that he is as “unapologetic” as superagent Andrew Wylie was “when it came to advances” (109). What cemented my focus on the state of archive studies were two minor notes in King’s book. One describes a penultimate draft of The Road that was marked “SHRED”; the other describes “a printed email” attached to a letter sent to McCarthy. These are harbingers of a future that I noted at the outset. Will Pound’s edits of some future Eliot be in any future archive? These are perhaps small quibbles about a first book. Although it needed closer editing for grammar, it performs a valuable service beyond existing studies of McCarty in positioning the author so clearly in the context of “archive studies.” The field has to take an inflection, not just go on piling up data, because the genuine data of interest is coming to an end, and the data of the future is likely too fungible.
