On watermelons – Dwight Garner in NYT:

‘Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”’

(…)

‘These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”’

(…)

‘About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”’

(…)

‘Mr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.’

Read the article here.

I never read ‘Sutrree’ but I immediately purchased it. I would like to know more about fornication and the watermelon, especially when there are no Jews involved.

The story about the Olivettti is delightful as well. Perhaps that’s the economic future of the novelist, we don’t depend on the sales of our books anymore, but on the sales of our artifacts, our trinkets, our garbage, maybe our hair, our kidneys if worse comes to worse.

And yes, the conviction that moral improvement is possible will always lead to hatred, oppression and persecution.

We leave Proust for what it is. I can see that McCarthy and Proust don’t go well together.