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Cormac McCarthy and the Craftsman Hero

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Stonemason, the stonemason apprentice Ben tells his wife Maven that “you cant separate wisdom from the common experience and the common experience is just what the worker has in great plenty.” When Maven asks why, then, more workers aren’t wise, Ben answers: “I guess for the same reason that more college professors arent wise. Thinking’s rare among all classes. But a laborer who thinks, well, his thought seems more likely to be tempered with humanity. He’s more inclined to tolerance. He knows that what is valuable in life is life.” College professors, he adds, are “more apt to just be dangerous. Marx never worked a day in his life” (38).

Ben’s words here point to a central idea running through much of McCarthy’s work: that to engage in meaningful work, what I am designating as craft (following Edward-Lucie Smith’s definition that craft is a calling demanding special skill and knowledge), involves the simultaneous engagement of thinking and making, a conjoining of mind and body, of head and hand. Unlike Hannah Arendt, who argues that intellectual engagement comes only after manual labor is completed, McCarthy suggests that, in the words of Richard Sennett, “every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding” (9).

Craftsmanship in McCarthy’s world also suggests groundedness, being rooted in a particular place and living by a daily rhythm, even if the demands of work sometimes mean journeying away from home—being, literally, a journeyman. As Ben, returning to The Stonemason, underscores, the life of a journeyman is not one of ceaseless movement and continuous adaptation, but rather a life in which one never travels far, either from home or from one’s daily rhythms. The word journeyman, Ben notes, “comes from the word for day, and a journey was originally a day’s travel” (96); and he adds that the primary rule of the journeyman is always to quit at quitting time, to put in a day’s work, nothing more, nothing less. “In the concept of a day’s work is rhythm and pace and wholeness,” Ben says. “And truth and justice and peace of mind” (96).

As Ben’s words here suggest, the rituals of work and craft are as much about constructing the craftsman’s life (and more generally, his or her social world) as they are about constructing an artifact; and in fact, both are integrally connected, the structure of one process mirroring the other. In fact, in McCarthy’s world, craftsmanship does not necessarily involve literally creating an artifact. Craftsmen are simply those who do the best job they can, devoted to the demands and rituals of their professions. In a world otherwise given to violence and mayhem, craftsmen embody, returning to Ben’s words, “truth and justice and peace of mind.”

Two of McCarthy’s craftsmen who perform tasks rather than create artifacts are the doctor who tends to Boyd Parham in The Crossing and the judge who hears the case against John Grady Cole near the end of All the Pretty Horses. The doctor’s professionalism, his commitment to his craft, is everywhere apparent: he voices no complaint at being awoken in the night to tend to a stranger who lies far away; he accepts no compensation for his services; he works meticulously and masterfully on the gravely-injured Boyd. McCarthy’s exacting description of the doctor’s work—the scene stretches for over 10 pages—underscores not only the doctor’s skill but also the moral dimension of that skill, the humanity of the doctor and the humaneness of his work. When the doctor begins examining Boyd, the light from a lamp is reflected in his eyeglasses, “very small, very steadfast. Like the light of holy inquiry burning in his aging eyes” (306).

If less exactingly described than the doctor’s, the judge’s professional craftsmanship is nonetheless just as noteworthy. Not only does the judge skillfully oversee the wrongful case brought against John Grady, but he also later (in another late-night visitation, John Grady showing up at the judge’s door) patiently listens to and wisely counsels John Grady on his lingering guilt about his killing of an assailant in the Mexican penitentiary. The judge drives home the simple point that sometimes a person has no choice in what he does—John Grady would have been killed if he hadn’t fought back—and he suggests that he himself had had no choice in becoming a judge. “I didnt want to be a judge,” he says, and goes on to explain: “I just saw a lot of injustice in the court system and I saw people my own age in positions of authority that I had grown up with and knew for a calcified fact didnt have one damn lick of sense. I think I just didnt have any choice” (292). Despite being haunted by the execution of a man he had sentenced (his guilt paralleling John Grady’s), the judge has remained steadfastly committed to his calling.

In their committed, meaningful lives, the doctor and the judge stand as models for the two young drifters, Billy and John Grady. Both Billy and John Grady share much with their guiding figures, as both young men are themselves as skilled (or at least have the potential to be as skilled) in their craft as the older men. Billy’s tracking and trapping of the wolf, described in detail as exacting as that of the doctor’s operations, together with his later intimate connection with the captured wolf, suggest his rigorous habits of work, together with his fundamental goodness. John Grady, as a horseman, appears even more skilled. His knowledge of and expertise with horses derive from both long hours of training and a profound connection with them. Early in All the Pretty Horses, John Grady is described sitting on “a horse not only as if had he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been” (23). John Grady repeatedly exhibits his great skill with horses, most impressively when he breaks the wild horses at the hacienda, described in another of McCarthy’s extended celebratory passages on the beauty of masterful work.

In choosing the life of the road, however, Billy and John Grady lose the focus and grounding needed for them to grow fully into the sort of craftsmen exemplified by the doctor and the judge, men who use their skills for the good of their communities and of others. Billy’s and John Grady’s wanderings—seeking adventure, revenge, stolen goods—are not the travels of journeymen craftsmen. Ben in The Stonemason says that in building with stones he “begin[s] to live in the world” (96), but Billy and John Grady use their skills primarily to escape from the world and their responsibilities in it. Being grounded is at the heart of the advice of an old man who tells Billy in The Crossing that “he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself” (134). Indeed, wandering in McCarthy’s world always threatens to devolve into violence and mayhem, underscored so brutally in Blood Meridian, wherein the scalphunters ride ceaselessly, without direction and destination, slaughtering all whom they meet.

Perhaps the starkest contrast in McCarthy’s fiction between the knowledge of the craftsman and the mindlessness of the wanderer comes in A Child of God, when Lester Ballard takes an axe to a blacksmith for re-sharpening. Having lost his farm because of unpaid taxes, the displaced Ballard is on a downward spiral toward losing his humanity and becoming both a literal and a figurative caveman. Highlighting Ballard’s descent is the competence and goodness of the smith. After examining the axe, the smith ends up redressing it, explaining to Ballard lovingly and in detail each step of the complicated processes of firing, cooling, and hammering. “It’s like a lot of things,” the smith says. “Do the least part of it wrong and ye’d just as well to do it all wrong.” “Reckon you could do it now from watchin?” the smith then asks, to which the utterly oblivious Ballard, who has missed everything the smith has said and done, responds inanely, “Do what” (74).

While the basic opposition between craftsman and wanderer works consistently throughout McCarthy’s fiction, there are twists and complications. Most significant is the fact that craftsmanship by itself is not necessarily affirming; merely being skilled at a particular task does not guarantee that a person is filled with sweetness and light. Craftsmanship may foster charity and hope, but only if a person is open to such fostering; and there is always the danger that commitment to one’s craft will become so all-consuming that its life-affirming drive becomes just the opposite, a denial of all things human in the face of the demands of craft. Lester Ballard, for all his failings, for example, is something of a marksman, but he uses that skill only selfishly to win stuffed animals at a carnival sideshow and to add to his collection of dead people. Even those skilled workers who, unlike Ballard, do not wander but remain fixed in their communities, are not necessarily beneficent, as McCarthy suggests in his detailed description of the medical students’ dissection of Ballard’s corpse near the end of the novel: “He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. At the end of three months when the class was closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interred” (194).

Here, McCarthy indicates that at a fundamental level of practice there’s little difference between the sanctioned violence of the medical students and the illicit violence of Lester Ballard. The parallels between Ballard’s and the students’ handling of bodies are striking: both work underground, both lay out their bodies on pallets, and both follow strict rules of conduct. In all this, McCarthy implicitly suggests that the medical students, for all their intelligence and skill, are enmeshed in a social system that legitimizes its own injustices, a system not unlike that of the Mexican prison in All the Pretty Horses: “Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill” (182). These doctors in training are of course not literally killing people, but figuratively they are doing just that, taking bodies apart, unmaking them rather than making them. Returning to Ben’s words on college professors that I began with, we could say that with the medical students as of yet there is no thinking, no dialogue between head and hand. Perhaps one day these students will embrace the charity of caregiving as skilled physicians, like the doctor who tends to Boyd in The Crossing, but for now all they are creating are bags of slushy remains, detritus to be buried and forgotten. Even Lester Ballard treated his victims with more respect and love.

The medical students’ dismantling of Lester’s body in Child of God points to an idea that McCarthy would fully develop in his Western fiction: that standing fundamentally opposed to the makers, the craftsmen whose work and lives embody hope, charity, and goodness, are the unmakers, those who annihilate everything that stands in their way, not only people but also the principles of order and belief by which people and communities traditionally live. The two most powerful of these destructive unmakers are the judge in Blood Meridian and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

Throughout Blood Meridian, the judge is a prophet—and a craftsman—of war, preaching and wreaking destruction. As a craftsman, he creates weapons for efficient killing, at one point carefully concocting gunpowder from a mixture of bat guano, charcoal, brimstone, and urine. The band of scalp hunters itself is a powerful weapon largely of the judge’s making: though not mustered by the judge, his leadership and guidance mold it into a cohesive, efficient killing machine. Once a rag-tag group of marauders, the raiders under the judge’s sway are soon riding out “like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions of old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds” (152). Waste, destruction, and blood lie in their wake. Using the language of the stonemason (his mirrored opposite), the judge later characterizes the group’s bonding by observing, “Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?” (329). This is not the blood of kinship but the blood of slaughter.

Much of what the judge preaches to the scalp hunters focuses on war, the ultimate act of destruction and unmaking. Significantly, the judge often speaks of war in terms of stone, suggesting that war is the reverse image of masonry, a demonic making that unmakes the world of God’s—and man’s—creation. Masonry’s connection with the divine gets its fullest expression in The Stonemason, when Ben observes that “true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God” (9-10). Ben goes on to observe that “according to the gospel of the true mason God has laid the stones in the earth for men to use and he has laid them in their bedding planes to show the mason how his own work must go. A wall is made the same way the world is made. A house, a temple. This gospel must accommodate every inquiry. The structure of the world is such as to favor the prosperity of men. Without this belief nothing is possible. What we are at arms against are those philosophies that claim the fortuitous in mens’ inventions. For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand” (10).

It is against this type of thinking that the judge rages, for to him any order ascribed to the universe is purely imaginary. “Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it,” he says, “and the order in creation which you see is that which you put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way” (245). In the judge’s eyes, the only absolute for measuring human endeavor is simple: how long an entity—be it an individual, a group, or a civilization—lives in the war for survival, since survival in the end is all that existence amounts to. All efforts at making—other than those involving war—are thus finally meaningless and misguided, since nothing lasts before the ravages of time. Underscoring the judge’s perspective are the novel’s repeated descriptions of evidence of human presence being quickly erased by the punishing desert environment. After one of the many slaughters, McCarthy writes that “in the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died” (174).

The only things that endure, at least from the judge’s perspective, are war and stone. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” the judge says at one point. “War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way” (248). The judge’s characterization of war as a “trade” suggests that he sees it in terms of craft (in The Stonemason, Papaw identifies his work with stone as his trade), the ultimate and only craft. It is the endurance of stone that makes the judge so threatened by those who work with stone, because their efforts at constructing lasting things, embodying creative forces of making, stand fundamentally opposed to his ideology of war, destruction, and domination.

The judge’s desire to dominate—to be, as he says, suzerain of the world—is seen not only in his exploits with the scalp hunters, but also with his efforts to keep a ledger of all existence, to catalogue everything as a means of control. “Only nature can enslave man,” he explains, “and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (198). “This is my claim,” the judge says moments later, putting his hands on the ground to indicate that he means the entire world, and then continues: “And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my disposition” (199). To crush all autonomous life explains the judge’s later pursuit of the kid (who amidst the gang’s slaughter has maintained a sliver of humanity, failing to give himself entirely over to the judge’s control) and also his antipathy for workers in stone. Stonemasons defy the judge’s dictatorial imperative, defiantly (at least by the judge’s thinking) recreating the world through their work, guided by their humanity rather than by the judge’s orders. He “who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe,” the judge observes gazing over the ruins of the Anasazi, “and so it was with these masons however primitive their work may seem to us” (146). “Their spirit is entombed in the stone,” he says of the Anasazi, and the judge wants to keep their spirit, and indeed that of all stoneworkers, buried. When he later finds ancient etchings on a rock wall, the judge first copies many of them into his ledger and then, finding one etching of particular significance, scrapes the design away with a broken chert, “leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been” (173).

Blood Meridian ends with the judge in a bacchanal victory dance, calling out that he will never die, a declaration suggesting (assuming that he is not really the devil and thus eternal) that his ideology of war and domination will persist as long as humans exist. The novel’s epilogue, describing a man digging postholes in a bone-strewn plain, points to that ideology’s continuation far into the twentieth century and beyond. The posthole digger is a very different kind of stoneworker than the mason. Rather than building with stone, the digger strikes the stone, working mechanically and automatically, digging a line of holes “which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before.” As he works, he “enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there” (337). The posthole digger’s line of holes, marking a presumed line of progress, looks forward to a dystopian future shaped by the judge’s ideology of domination, underscored by the mass of people who move like mindless automatons all about the digger. These people step “haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality” (337). Moreover, the posthole digger’s enkindling of fire in the stone looks forward to the cracking of the atom and the ultimate destructive weapon, the nuclear bomb. The bone-strewn plain in which he works is a killing field, suggestive of both the slaughters that have already occurred with the opening of the West and the coming conflagrations in the twentieth century (and beyond).

An explicit twentieth-century manifestation of the judge’s ideology of unmaking can be seen in McCarthy’s other grand prophet of destruction, Chigurh (whose very name is a slurred form of “the judge”) from No Country for Old Men. Like the judge, Chigurh is immensely skilled in his murderous craft. When we first see him, the manacled Chigurh performs a skillful and well-practiced maneuver to get his hands from behind his back in order to kill a deputy: “Chigurh squatted and scooted his manacled hands beneath him to the back of his knees. In the same motion he sat and rocked backward and passed the chain under his feet and then stood instantly and effortlessly. If it looked like a thing he’d practiced many times it was” (5). As master craftsman of destruction, Chigurh is skilled at every aspect of his work: at tracking; at breaking into buildings; at killing; at escaping detection; at treating his injuries. In a passage echoing that of the doctor’s treatment of Boyd’s gunshot wound in The Crossing, McCarthy painstakingly describes the expert and careful steps of Chigurh’s treatment of his shot-up leg (163-65). As Chigurh himself underscores several times, not greed but devotion to the principles and codes of his craft is what motivates him. In the words of Carson Wells, his rival, Chigurh “is a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that” (153). Indeed, Chigurh is nothing if not a man of his word, and whatever he says he will do, he does. No scores remain unsettled. Before shooting Moss’s wife (he told Moss he would kill her if he didn’t return the money and so must carry it out), Chigurh replies to her plea that he doesn’t have to shoot her: “You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases” (259).

Poised against Chigurh is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman who strives to halt the dissolution of traditional society brought about by the murderous craft of Chigurh and similar henchmen. But he is powerless in stopping Chigurh’s murderous pursuits and the widespread dissolution of traditional society that Chigurh’s craft comes to represent. Time and again Bell complains of a world coming undone, a world where the beliefs and structures of traditional life are no longer valued and observed. Speaking of the type of criminal he now faces, Sheriff Bell responds to his listener’s question, “They dont have no respect for the law? That aint half of it. They dont even think about the law” (216). Sheriff Bell’s social commentary characteristically looks both backward to more ordered times and forward to the dark days of coming devastation. “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction” (4), Sheriff Bell says at one point, contemplating the carnage wrought by Chigurh, which has transformed the settled order of traditional society into a war zone. Violence erupts everywhere: in city streets, parking lots, highways, businesses, corporate offices, homes, cars, hotels, in the desert. The home front is the war zone. And, as Sheriff Bell comes to realize, with his world’s undoing comes his own undoing as Sheriff. At one point, catching sight of his image in a cup of coffee, the sheriff notes the dark days coming: “The face that lapped and shifted in the dark liquid in the cup seemed an omen of things to come. Things losing shape. Taking you with them” (127).

In an effort to keep his humanity intact, Sheriff Bell eventually decides to retire. Turning his back on the larger world, he will strive, in his own small domain, to live with honor and charity in an age that values neither. Besides his wife, to whom he is utterly devoted, he draws inspiration from two figures. The first is an unknown settler who, many years ago, had with hammer and chisel hewed a water trough from a large stone. Musing that it would probably last 10,000 years, the Sheriff wonders why the settler would have expended so much time and effort in making something as simple as a trough. In both admiration and wonder, he comes to this conclusion: “And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I would like most of all” (308).

Another of McCarthy’s dedicated makers, the stone hewer stands opposed to Chigurh and to McCarthy’s other architects of destruction. His work with stone contrasts sharply with that of the posthole digger in the epilogue of Blood Meridian, whose mechanical striking of rock points grimly forward to the creation of the monolithic military-industrial state and nuclear war. The stone hewer’s work, in contrast, suggests the enkindling of the artist’s creativity and humanity, the artist’s compassionate hopefulness projected into the object and passed along to others, as seen in the sheriff’s response to his creation. Perhaps this projected compassion by the craftsman is one reason McCarthy turned to a phrase from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” for his novel’s title; in this poem the poet envisions himself as “a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling” (194).

The compassionate goodness of making, amidst a dark and forbidding world, is also associated with Bell’s second inspiration, his father. At the novel’s close, Bell relates a dream presenting his father as a Promethean figure of strength and goodness. In the dream, a much younger Bell is riding alone at night through a snowy mountain pass. He sees his father ride past him, “carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there” (309). The fire carried by Bell’s father is not fire of destruction—not fire struck from stone—but the fire of creation, carried in a carved-out animal horn, a work of craft designed to nurture rather than to devastate humanity. It is, moreover, fire to be kept alive and passed along, through acts of goodness, charity, and making, an image to which McCarthy returns in The Road, wherein the father and his son repeatedly characterize those who have kept their humanity alive, amidst the post-apocalyptic carnage, as people who are “carrying the fire” (109).

“What I need most is to learn charity,” says Ben in The Stonemason, voicing the hopeful vision found in making that lurks in McCarthy’s dark and violent world. “I know that small acts of valor,” Ben continues, “may be all that is visible of great movements of courage within” (131). Small acts of valor, derived from and nurtured by a strict dedication to the rituals of work and craft, are the acts of McCarthy’s heroes, those who keep their humanity alive and pass it along to others, holding back, at least for a while, the darkness of the coming days.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf, 1992.

——. Blood Meridian. 1985. New York: Vintage International, 1992.

——. Child of God. 1973. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

——. The Crossing. New York: Knopf, 1994.

——. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005.

——. The Stonemason. 1994. New York: Vintage International, 1995.

——. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale UP, 2008.

Smith, Edward-Lucie. The Story of Craft: The Craftsman’s Role in Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Collected Poems. Rev. 2^nd ed. New York: Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996.