Does Knoxville produce crazy people or does it just attract them?
Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.
–The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
Over the past year, I’ve read McCarthy’s last two novels – The Passenger and Stella Maris – but they were …so much…I could never get around to writing about them. So much. Perhaps this will push me to revisit the effort.
McCarthy died yesterday, and yes, I’ll highlight the Catholic angle, which is ably outlined in an article from the East Tennessee Catholic.
(In case you haven’t heard me mention it before, not that it matters, but I’m also a KCHS graduate – much later – 1978 – and also attended Immaculate Conception. If you’ve ever been to downtown Knoxville, IC is the Gothic church high on a hill.)
Mr. McCarthy attended St. Mary School in downtown Knoxville and Knoxville Catholic High School on Magnolia Avenue. He also was an altar boy at Immaculate Conception Church. He began attending the University of Tennessee in 1951, where he studied physics and engineering, but he began pursuing an interest in writing at the same time…
…
In 2014, KCHS recognized Mr. McCarthy with a charcoal drawing of the author as he appeared in his senior picture. The school also unveiled a plaque honoring the writer for his literary accomplishments.
KCHS students formed a Cormac McCarthy Club that focuses on literary interests and the works of Mr. McCarthy.
The plaque reads:
In honor of KCHS alumnus
Charles “Cormac” McCarthy
Class of 1951
Novelist, screenwriter, playwright. One of the greatest authors in the history of American literature. May his genius and his legacy inspire us to pursue excellence whilst living humbly and deliberately.
To know what will come is the same as to make it so.
–Suttree, 1979
Cormac McCarthy Club 2010-2011 Artwork by Eric Theodore ’11At the time, among those on hand for the portrait unveiling was Carolyn Sue (Wright) Huber, who also was in the class of 1951. Mrs. Huber, who was an All Saints Church member when she passed away in 2018, said at the time that she was in school with Mr. McCarthy for most of the 12 years they attended St. Mary School at Immaculate Conception Church and KCHS in the 1940s and early ’50s. She described him as a “delightful person.”
“Everybody liked Charlie. He was a nice, polite gentleman who liked to daydream, but he was always listening so he would have something to write about. He was very bright,” she said.
More Knoxville remembrances – the bars:
Just around the corner at 409 S. Gay St., Suttree’s High Gravity Tavern keeps the novel and its exiled protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, alive in its name. The bar is adjoined by Harrogate’s Lounge, a bar and arcade also named for one of the semi-autobiographical novel’s more unique characters (that’s putting it lightly).
In this novel, what’s now widely known as the Corner Lounge serves a gathering place for an eccentric cast of misfits.
A local attorney and old friend of McCarthy’s:
About that first meeting in 1971…let Francis tell the story.
It was about 11 a.m., perfect for a beer breakfast. McCarthy and a longtime friend — “those two morons” — came in looking for the bar’s owner, Francis said.
“So they start playing, you know, who knows who and who knows what and trivia about authors,” Francis said. “I’m sitting there, my feet up on the beer cooler, trying to figure out how I can make a dollar for the day. And all of a sudden, they get a beer, they go in to get a toast.
“And the toast is pretty simple. It’s from (American-Irish author) J.P. Donleavy’s book, ‘The Ginger Man.’
” ‘God’s mercy,’ I chimed in, ‘on the wild Ginger Man.’ And Cormac looked at me, and he goes, ‘My life is complete, I’ve met a literate bartender.’
“Needless to say it turned into an all-day debacle, and fortunately it had snowed so nobody was out and about.”
Francis concluded his recollections of McCarthy on Tuesday afternoon with another toast to the old writer, again recalling the closing words of Donleavy’s 1955 novel.
“God’s mercy, on the wild Ginger Man,” he said.
“Because he (McCarthy) was the wild Ginger Man.”
A passage from The Passenger. The speaker is, as it happens, a trans-identifying man, an old friend of the protagonist’s from Knoxville.
Of course by then I’d started drinking and that almost finished me off. I was a born alcoholic. Luckily I met someone. Sheer blind luck. He got me into AA. I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do. And then I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was lying there and I thought: If there is no higher power then I’m it. And that just scared the shit out of me. There is no God and I am she. So I began to really work on that. I’m still working on it. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But I’ve made some progress. I was mad at him for screwing me up the way he did but maybe he’s not as perfect as people like to think. He’s got a lot on his plate and he has to do it all himself. No help.
Do you believe in God?
The truth?
Sure. I dont know who God is or what he is. But I dont believe all this stuff got here by itself. Including me. Maybe everything evolves just like they say it does. But if you sound it to its source you have to come ultimately to an intention.
Sound it to its source?
You like that? Pascal. About a year after this I woke up again and it was like I had heard this voice in my sleep and I could still hear the echo of it and it said: If something did not love you you would not be here. And I said okay. That’s it. Plain enough. Maybe it doesnt sound like much. But it was to me.