The Devil & Cormac McCarthy
Demons in McCarthy's Personal Papers
1. “I Called it the Archatron.”
As I sorted through the latest tranche of McCarthy’s personal papers just made available by the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University, a bizarre notion presented itself. It’s a suspicion I’ve had before, but it always arrived when I was sitting in my recliner reading Blood Meridian, or Suttree, or Outer Dark. For it to wash over me while sifting through McCarthy’s private papers felt different: more powerful, more convincing. I’ve wrestled with whether or not I should write about it, and finally decided I had to.
The bizarre notion is this: Cormac McCarthy seems to have felt at various times that he was being stalked by a malevolent entity, some sinister presence. If that seems like a rather insane sentence to read, I can only say that I feel rather insane writing it.
I believe, nonetheless, my claim is accurate, though I can’t exactly prove it—not in the way I can prove that Judge Holden is a judge of counterfeits (see Episode IV of this Substack) or what the nameless man is doing in the epilogue of Blood Meridian (see Episode VIII). Nowhere in McCarthy’s private journals do we find anything so obvious as, Being stalked by demon: send help.
I’ll have to support my claim by examining the many instances in McCarthy’s fiction when his protagonists are afflicted by this belief, and by scrutinizing the drafts of these passages in McCarthy’s personal papers.
Let me say this up front: attributing the beliefs and feelings of a novelists’ characters to the novelist himself is among the most specious modes of interpretation: I've railed against this practice throughout my career. Fiction writers are ventriloquists: we like nothing better than mimicking voices that aren’t our own, the sentiments and sensations of character who don’t, in the strictest terms, exist.
But these characters are tabernacled inside the corporal bodies of all-too-human writers. To quote Alicia Western in the early drafts of Stella Maris, “Things are either beings or ideas. And if they are ideas, what are they ideas of?”
Precisely so, and in McCarthy’s final novel, Alicia tells her psychiatrist about a dark and disturbing dream:
“When I was younger—ten, eleven—I had a sort of waking dream that was frightening to me. And then I realized that it was neither waking nor a dream. It was something else. And I had no reason to believe that what I saw did not exist and that if the realm was unknown to us that didn’t make it less threatening but more. I saw through something like a judas hole into this world where there were sentinels standing at a gate and I knew that beyond the gate was something terrible and that it had power over me. A being. A presence. And that the search for shelter and for a covenant among us was simply to elude this baleful thing of which we were in endless fear and yet of which we had no knowledge. The keepers at the gate saw me and they gestured among themselves and then all of that went dark and I never saw it again. I called it the Archatron. The presence beyond the gate. I wish it were a dream and I could wake. I wish I could forget it but I can’t. I wish I could be who I was before but I will never be.” (105-106, emphasis mine)
Here is the first draft of this passage in McCarthy’s personal papers:
McCarthy decided to cut “Darkness, a vile wind. The keep of the Archatron is not even imaginable” from the finished novel. He also cut “The Archatron. That’s what I called him when I was a child. Later, The Imperator. Then nothing. Just terror.”
Imperator is a title that the Roman Republic would bestow on victorious generals. Essentially, it means commander.
But what is the Archatron a commander of? What has the Archatron been victorious over?
These are some of the questions I’d like to approach in this essay. I’ll also share passages from McCarthy’s personal papers that suggest—to me, at least—he felt the same vile wind that chilled Alicia Western, resulting in her self-commitment to an asylum, and eventually, her suicide.
