Cormac McMonthly: All the Pretty Horses (1992)
Dont step in the bucket
Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. He passed away on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one McCarthy novel each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
I was about one third of the way through All the Pretty Horses when I read the news of Cormac McCarthy’s death. These are the last words, penned by the man himself, that I read while he was still alive.
This is some country, aint it?
Yeah. It is. Go to sleep.
Bud?
Yeah.
This is how it was with the old waddies, aint it?
Yeah.
How long do you think you’d like to stay here?
About a hundred years. Go to sleep.
It’s an exchange between the protagonist, John Grady, and his friend and traveling companion, Rawlins. And it’s the conclusion of the first of the book’s four chapters.
One of the most magical things about the experience of reading a novel is the way in which the story being told interfaces with and entwines itself around the proportion of the reader’s life during which the reading is done.
I’ve given that exchange between John Grady and Rawlins a sort of outsized importance, reading and reflecting on it a disproportionate number of times, because of when I read it.
At almost the exact halfway point of this year-long project of mine, the man responsible for all of it up and left us, leaving only his legacy, which we’ll all be reckoning with for a long time.
Rawlins and John Grady are young boys, only 15 or 16. But they have a maturity and world-weariness that makes them read more like a pair of middle-aged men. Over the course of their journey from Texas to Mexico, they demonstrate a canny resilience, and a degree of emotional maturity, that I could not imagine in myself – or anyone I knew – at their age. And yet they feel genuine and believable. I don’t know what, if anything, this reveals about modern masculinity.
The above exchange is a rare glimpse of the wide-eyed wonder still present in Rawlins’s heart. The kind of spirit of adventure that had to have been present at some point, or else he wouldn’t have agreed to join John Grady. He marvels at the beauty of the spacious landscapes, and feels a thrill at following in the footsteps of the cowboys of old.
Maybe John Grady feels it too. But he tempers Rawlins’s enthusiasm. Go to sleep, he says. Don’t get too excited. I’d stay here forever if I could, he implies, but I won’t let myself get my hopes up.
The companionship between these two boys is recognizable. Reading it, you feel you’ve either experienced something very close to it, or know someone who has.
All the Pretty Horses is McCarthy’s sixth novel, but the first to evoke that feeling of familiarity. It is approachable in a way none of his prior works were. Though it still paints portraits of vistas that mock the finitude of man, it also populates its towns and cities with quiet scenes borrowed from the average reader’s life.
It is as laugh out loud funny as anything McCarthy has written up to this point. I have to remind myself, every time I write one of these things, to mention McCarthy’s comedy chops, because I fear that element of his writing – which is as crucial as any other singular element to his potent alchemy – will be lost to future scholars. Certainly, it is unsung now, in 2023.
Despite the laughs, McCarthy’s pre-Horses novels dwell in the dark and treacherous extremes of the human experience, too remote from the warm glow of the heart at the center of that experience to be touched by much of its light.
All the Pretty Horses lives right beside that heart, huddling near it for warmth and light, hoping to keep that darkness at bay. That’s why it’s the book that won McCarthy acclaim and awards, and brought thousands of new readers to his work.
But what of the horses?
McCarthy could not rely solely on human characters to portray the full extent of our emotional capacity.
Here we have a novel with a traditional narrative structure—a relative rarity for McCarthy. A boy leaves home to go on an improbable journey, faces many hardships along the way, and gains wisdom and experience. This is a story of hope, fear, love, lust, heartbreak, rage, sadness, and joy.
Yet at the center of all of it is… the horses. All the pretty horses.
I would argue that in order to begin to understand this novel, there are two things about it that you must know.
The first thing is that the word Spanish, when it appears, is capitalized. The word English is not. Both words appear numerous times. What to make of this? It’s certainly not accidental. (Interestingly, French appears both as ‘French’ and as ‘french.’ I will not be touching on that.)
I interpret this to mean that Spanish is totemic, implying something important, to be aspired to. It is historic, it is powerful and perhaps unknowable. It is separate from John Grady, from America, from the white man’s experience. Is is something to be journeyed to from afar, yet always held at a distance and admired.
On the other hand, english is merely an adjective. It is the mundane, the known, the overly and bitterly familiar.
A good portion of this novel is written in Spanish, a language in which I have only very basic literacy. Sometimes, I could catch the meaning of what was being said by the Spanish-speaking characters from context clues, but often I could not. John Grady is fluent in both languages. A whole book-length essay could be written about the roles these two languages play in the novel.
The second thing to know about All the Pretty Horses is summarized by Luis, a minor character who delivers the novel’s thesis statement:
He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were.
…
Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.
A man cannot ever truly know himself, nor can he ever truly know another human being.
The anguish John Grady feels at the inability to love and be loved by Alejandra is fueled, in part, by this desire to know and understand her, and her soul. The pain he feels when they are forced to part comes from his realization that he never understood why her eyes contained all that they did. He never knew her. He wants to think that he could have come to know her, but he knows that isn’t true.
Horses allow the men in this story to travel great distances. They provide the substance of tales of heroism, and they are objects to be prized, fought over, even killed for.
The country from which John Grady willingly escapes could not have been built if not for horses. On some level, he feels the need to leave that country because it thinks it no longer needs them.
Of course a man can never truly understand the soul of a horse any better than he can his own. But the horse’s inability to say differently – and its large, expressive eyes – invite the man to use it as his emotional canvas.
Because we must externalize. What we contain on the inside is too large and too messy not to spill out somewhere. We have always needed someone to carry us, and our baggage.
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
It’s been 10 years or more since I read this novel, but your write up brought a lot of my feelings for the story back to the surface.
Very curious how you end up seeing the trilogy as a whole. Great write up. These McCarthy reviews are some of my favourite writing on the platform.
Excellent write up.
I think this may be my favorite of his novels now that I've read it. It delivers more for the reader to hang on to while still carrying many of the McCarthy tics that make his books so distinct.
Also, I don't know that I was exactly mature when I was 16 but John Grady did remind me of myself in very particular ways. I wasn't a badass or anything like that, but there was already a weariness in me, or some emotional remove, perhaps. A suppression of feeling and emotion that allowed me to carry on with life in a way that was relatively normal, at least by outward appearances. That he, too, was bursting with passion and emotion and this was only ever revealed to Alejandra also felt very much like my own life, now twenty years gone.