Cormac McCarthy and Leslie Garrett: A Literary Friendship

Drawing on print and film interviews with novelist Leslie Garrett by Knoxville journalist Don Williams, this article examines McCarthy’s friendship with Garrett from the perspectives of biography and literary influence. Their relationship constitutes the only long-term literary friendship we can currently document for McCarthy, but it calls into question the cliché that McCarthy is reclusive and/or indifferent to other novelists. The two writers met in Ibiza in 1967 shortly after each had published a prize-winning first novel, and the friendship continued, with intermittent contact, for the rest of Garrett’s life. Garrett’s The Beasts (1966) won the Maxwell Perkins Award, but because of his addictions and personal problems, Garrett did not publish another novel until the year before his death in 1993. The article traces Garrett’s early life, comparing it with McCarthy’s, and contrasts their literary careers. Then it explores their mutual influence, simultaneously providing an introduction to Garrett’s novels. Traces of the Prophet from The Beasts are reinscribed in Judge Holden; the loneliness and decline into corruption of the protagonist Farley Grimm adumbrate Lester Ballard; the final scenes of Blood Meridian recall the closing of The Beasts, where Grimm is arrested and tormented by his dreams and later by the Prophet and his dwarf accomplice before a final violent confrontation; and the language and imagery of the last line of The Beasts are echoed in the prologue to Outer Dark. As a dream-narrative, The Beasts may also have influenced McCarthy’s increased emphasis on the dream-experience in works published after The Orchard Keeper. Vernon Monday in Garrett’s In the Country of Desire (1992) descends from Farley Grimm through Lester Ballard. The story of Emil, guilty of incest with his daughter Madeleine, resonates in several ways with Culla Holme’s. And Madeleine has intriguing affinities with Magdalena of Cities of the Plain, although we have insufficient information to determine the direction of influence. A chronology of Garrett’s life is appended. McCarthy, Garrett, biography, influence, dream, incest.