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The final passage, describing a character’s dreams about his father, from Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men.” The acclaimed book was developed into a screenplay that ultimately won an Oscar for best picture. Thomas Fraser/Hellbender Press

‘A malign star kept him:’ McCarthy offered a fever-dream toast to Knoxville’s frontier river town roots

KNOXVILLE — Cormac McCarthy, the onetime Knoxvillian who rose from obscurity to the heights of fame by penning some of the most violent works in the Western literary canon, died Tuesday, June 13 at his home in New Mexico. 

McCarthy was considered by some critics to be America’s greatest living author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 novel “The Road.” Another novel, “All The Pretty Horses,” won the National Book Award in 1992 and a movie made from his book “No Country For Old Men” won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Picture.

The novelist studied at the University of Tennessee and became an infamous recluse who lived at points in a dairy barn and an RV. He rarely gave interviews, and was known to prefer the company of scientists to that of other writers.

McCarthy admired the works of Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky and William Faulkner, and he is the only Knoxvillian to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction other than James Agee. His work was often divisive, however, as his relentlessly masculine and unsentimental outlook led him to plumb the depths of human desperation and depravity through characters such as cannibals, necrophiliacs and mass murderers.

His literary vision focused on humankind’s cosmic insignificance by pitting rough-hewn men against primordial nature on a succession of vividly realized stages carved from history and myth. Faulkner might have said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself, but McCarthy opined that serious authors should focus on the struggle of life against death. 

According to Knoxville historian Jack Neely, McCarthy drew heavily from his surroundings, especially in the vivid depictions of Knoxville contained in “Suttree.”

“The descriptions of Market Square, in both “Suttree” and his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” are dense, accurate, unsparing and poetic,” Neely said. “I quoted them in my Market Square book, and a passage from ‘Suttree’ is engraved in marble in the middle of the square.

“One, from Suttree, ostensibly from a day in 1951, could have described a scene I witnessed there last week: ‘He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with a vigor unknown to the sane.’”

Neely also singled out another passage that comes just paragraphs later, where McCarthy describes the old Market House: “Where brick the color of dried blood rose turreted and cupolaed and crazed into the heat of the day form on form in demented accretion without precedent or counterpart in the annals of architecture.”

A wharf seen along the Tennessee River in Knoxville in the late 1800s or later. Knoxville History Project via Hard Knox Wire

Q&A with Knoxville historian illustrates the importance of the Tennessee River to nascent Knoxville

Rivers didn't need early American cities, but the cities certainly needed rivers.

Knoxville historian Jack Neely and Hard Knox Wire editor J.J. Stambaugh lay out a fascinating history of the Tennessee River through Knoxville in their latest collaboration. And yes. It has several references to “Suttree” by Cormac McCarthy. Of course.

“Beyond in the dark the river flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas…. afreight with the past, dreams dispersed in the water someway, nothing ever lost.” — Cormac McCarthy, “Suttree”.

The Tennessee River doesn’t loom large in the daily lives of most contemporary Knoxville residents, but two centuries ago it was literally why there was a city here in the first place.

In fact, it’s impossible to discuss Knoxville’s history for long without the river cropping up in one way or another. In the earliest days of the community’s existence, settlers drew water from and washed in the creeks that fed the Tennessee; the river itself carried boats laden with goods hundreds of miles before ending up in New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

Since then, the city’s relationship with the river has evolved steadily. It was an economic lifeline for generations, but railroads and automobiles eventually cornered the market when it came to shipping both cargo and passengers. Today, it’s a safe bet that when most people think of the “Riverfront” they’re thinking of restaurants or maybe a fireworks display; for the lucky few who can afford to belong to the yacht club, they’re maybe thinking about Labor Day weekends spent sailing with the Vol Navy.

In the latest edition of Hard Knox Histories, local historian and journalist Jack Neely discusses the ebbs and flows of Knoxville’s connection to the river with HKW’s editor, J.J. Stambaugh.

J.J.: When the first settlers arrived at the site that would be Knoxville, what role did geography — especially the Tennessee River — play in their decision to settle here? How important was the river commercially in the early days? The river, of course, was fed by numerous tributaries and creeks. How important were relatively small waterways like First Creek to the early city’s growth?

JACK: The river was elemental. It was hard to start a city without one. It was transportation, it was water for drinking and cooling, it was waste disposal. And, of course, the Tennessee reached from here into Cherokee territory, beyond into Alabama, then through West Tennessee into Kentucky, and all the way to the Ohio and the Mississippi.

When it came to locating a city, First Creek was probably as important as the Tennessee because it provided mill power. There were several mills up and down First Creek, as well as Second Creek. The two downtown creeks were the eastern and western boundaries of the city for its first 70 years or so.

The river was extremely important commercially, even though it was a mostly one-way thing. In the early days, when Knoxville was a territorial and state capital, there was a demand for liquor here, and folks apparently got so good at producing cheap whisky and brandy that they loaded flatboats with it and floated them downriver, all the way to New Orleans, where it could be sold for several times the cost. I love the fact that riverboat crewmen would bust up their rafts and sell them for hardwood in a city where there wasn’t much of it. A lot of the wooden buildings in the French Quarter, especially in the interiors, show traces of the rope holes and grooves characteristic of flatboats.

Go to Hard Knox Wire for the rest of this fascinating story.