The McCarthy voice was timeless-not in the pedestrian sense of “will be read for generations,” but in the unsettling, cosmological sense that one could not tell whether the voice was ancient or from the distant future. (My copy of Blood Meridian has a slip of paper in it, with a list of words I had to look up and have never used since: weskit, anchorite, thrapple.) Like Joyce, he used such words, especially Germanic ones, without inhibition, although the effect was totally different. He was Joycean, by way of Faulkner, in his total unwillingness to spare the reader looking up an obscure word. Had he taken Wolcott’s proposed form of literary early retirement, we would have been deprived of two great books- The Passenger and Stella Maris-and gotten essentially zilch in return, so arid and gnomic were his few public utterances.
I have wondered where on this spectrum of hospitality one might find Cormac McCarthy, who died yesterday at 89. By contrast, Amis said, reading James Joyce’s work, with puns whose appreciation requires a knowledge of Old Norse and the names of minor Irish rivers, was like arriving at an entryway rigged for pratfalls, with mousetraps snapping at your feet as you struggled to find the light switch, only to discover that no one was home. In one of these conversations, Amis explained that Vladimir Nabokov was the most hospitable of novelists, always offering you a nice drink and his finest chair. I’d happily trade in Lionel Asbo for a dozen more Amis interviews. About 10 years ago, the critic James Wolcott suggested that Martin Amis (who died last month at 73) retire from writing novels and instead commit himself full-time to giving interviews-which were always funny, and crackling with insight and pleasure, even when the book he was selling was a bit of a stinker.
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