too many Daves

I’m puzzling over something I read via carpentrix today. It’s a quote from a Wall Street Journal interview with Cormac McCarthy: “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

This seems like a straightforward slam on all short fiction. I don’t want to believe that McCarthy could really think that “hardly seems worth doing” describes the work of anyone from Anton Chekhov to Alice Munro. So I’m looking for ways that McCarthy may have meant something other than what he said.

To begin this exercise in denial, let’s look at context. This was an interview. McCarthy wasn’t just talking; he was answering questions. Here’s the aging-and-death-themed question that triggered his “not interested in writing short stories” answer: “How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?”

So maybe McCarthy just got sloppy with his words. He said “I” in one sentence and “your” and “you” in the next. A consistent “I” and “my” and “me” would have seemed like a vehement personal preference instead of a slur against a whole form. Here. Try it out: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of my life and drive me to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

But that’s not what he said.

If denial reaches for context, then flailing denial reaches for even broader context. Let’s look dig up his previous answer. It was also about mortality. McCarthy said:

Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Now, you could wring a “Cormac McCarthy Opposes Travel” headline out of that. But, as I hope McCarthy intended with short stories, it seems more likely that the statement is about him choosing to stay home and not about him demanding that you cancel your big trip to Altoona.

Finally, it’s worth noting that McCarthy seems to believe that long fiction is mostly doomed, too:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

My mind, naturally, turns to the un-short Infinite Jest and to the post-reading Q&A in which David Foster Wallace named McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, and Don DeLillo as his “holy trinity of American writers.” Of course, being admired by Wallace doesn’t preclude McCarthy from believing nobody will read Infinite Jest. So my denial is still getting me nowhere definitive.

I e-mailed the journalist who interviewed McCarthy for the WSJ. I will post something new if he replies with anything that helps confirm or debunk the idea that McCarthy has a baffling prejudice against some of our greatest literature.

====================

UPDATE: Three cheers for the Internet. No, make it four. At least four.

Just minutes after I posted this, I got a reply from the WSJ’s John Jurgensen. He’s quite clear that he can’t speak for McCarthy, but his e-mail gives us a bit more to think about. Here it is:

David,

I have gotten a lot of questions about that interview, mostly from people hoping that McCarthy offered some illuminating specifics about the calamity that scorched the world of “The Road.” (He did not.) As for the part you’re interested in, I don’t mind you quoting me, but I doubt I can be of much help—we had no follow up conversations of length and I’m reluctant to speculate on any deeper meanings of his words.  That said, as the listener, I took that answer at face value to mean that short fiction held no interest for him personally as a writer. I have no idea if he reads short stories or what he thinks of the form. But in general he struck me as a pretty laissez-faire fellow. With nice taste in boots.

All the best,

John

UPDATE #2 (2/13/11): Five cheers for the Internet. After hearing back from the WSJ’s John Jurgensen, I e-mailed Cormac McCarthy’s literary agent, Amanda Urban. I asked her about Jurgensen’s sense that McCarthy “struck me as a pretty laissez-faire fellow” and that he probably only meant “that short fiction held no interest for him personally as a writer.”

She replied Sunday morning:

Mr Jurgensen is correct in his impression.

AU

If seven words signed with initials seems overly concise, let me just offer my opinion that a seven-word reply is seven or eight more words than a random blogger should expect when he e-mails an agent who, according to this, “has repped a long list of fiction writers that include Richard Ford, E.L. Doctorow, Anna Quindlen, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Toni Morrison, David and Nic Sheff, E.B. White and Haruki Murakami.”

Her seven words tell us plenty. Short of Cormac McCarthy friending me on Facebook, her words are as close as we’re going to get to the truth of how McCarthy feels about short stories.

Bottom line: If you’re a short-story writer who admires McCarthy and you’re about to set fire to your manuscripts on McCarthy’s account, I think it’s now safe to say that McCarthy would want you to blow out the match.