Two hours before a 2006 performance at Steppenwolf Theatre, writer Cormac McCarthy asked actor Austin Pendleton an unexpected question.
Pendleton, speaking recently by phone about that moment, said he needed to walk the streets of Lincoln Park to get his head around it.
“Can you do me a favor,” Pendleton recalled McCarthy asking, “At tonight’s performance, could you play the whole play the way you play page 82?”
Pendleton was, briefly, incredulous. But when he returned from the walk, he knew what he had to do. It was the “thoughtful” way McCarthy asked him to play the suicidal character, White, in “The Sunset Limited” that helped him deliver his lauded performance in the existentially fraught play, which premiered on Steppenwolf’s Garage stage and went on to New York.
McCarthy “wanted me to play it calmly — not turbulently,” Pendleton said. “It changed my whole performance.”
Pendleton’s experience is one of many in the lesser-known story of McCarthy’s past.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who died in June 2023 at age 89, was acclaimed for his sparse prose conjuring blood-drenched nomads and articulating the painful beauty of the human condition in books such as “All the Pretty Horses” (1992), “No Country for Old Men” (2005) and “The Road” (2006). But he gave few interviews and famously avoided discussing his work.
“He never talked about anything except the play,” Pendleton said. “He obviously had demons in him — he wrote that play. … It makes ‘King Lear’ look like ‘As You Like It.’”
Born in 1933 in Rhode Island, McCarthy grew up in Tennessee and later lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On the one-year anniversary of his death, parting through the tangled thickets and craggy, barren landscapes of Appalachia, the Old West and the apocalypses that dominate his work, another influence on the author has often gone unnoticed:
Chicago.
McCarthy’s legend lingers here. A job in a Southwest Side auto-parts warehouse, the University of Chicago, Steppenwolf, even Oprah Winfrey — all are connected to the prolific writer’s body of work in some way.
Pendleton hadn’t met McCarthy before joining “The Sunset Limited,” a story about a Black man stopping a white man from throwing himself in front of a train, but he thought highly of his work. When he got the call from Chicago asking if he would read for McCarthy’s play, his response was succinct.
“You don’t have to send it, I’ll do it,” Pendleton recalled saying. “It was a glowing experience in my life.”
McCarthy came to Chicago in 1960 after stints at the University of Tennessee and in the United States Air Force. The former auto-parts warehouse where he worked was likely in the city’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood. “The Orchard Keeper,” McCarthy’s debut novel, was primarily written while he worked there.
He moved back to Tennessee with his first wife and started a family, divorcing shortly thereafter. Chicago called on McCarthy again by way of a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the Chicago-based organization awarded McCarthy his grant in 1981 while he was living in a Knoxville motel.
“I never had any doubts about my abilities,” he told the New York Times in 1992. “I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.”
Dianne Luce, a co-founder and former president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, has written several books on the author. While in graduate school, she read “Child of God” — a macabre meditation told through the odyssey of a murderous subterranean necrophiliac.
“I was absolutely blown away,” Luce said in a phone interview. “And I thought — if he can take on a subject like this and make it work in such beautiful prose — this is somebody I have to keep reading.”
There is still much unknown about McCarthy’s time in Chicago, Luce says, but he did return over the years for MacArthur Fellow gatherings. The late Larry Levine, a Stanford University scholar, befriended McCarthy through the foundation, Luce said. The pair visited the Art Institute together.
“(Levine) was struck with how much time (McCarthy) spent with the different paintings and how observant he was — and the quality of his observations,” Luce said.
McCarthy also met Murray Gell-Mann, a MacArthur board member and Nobel Prize winner, among other scientists who piqued his intellectual interests. It was in Chicago, Luce said, that the connections were forged that landed McCarthy as writer in residence at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific think tank co-founded by Gell-Mann.
Laurance Gonzales, the Evanston-based author and former Playboy editor, met McCarthy through the Santa Fe Institute.
“As a writer I had always been interested in (McCarthy), but I didn’t know any way to meet him,” Gonzales said.
That changed when Gonzales was invited to visit the Santa Fe Institute by its board chairman in 2006. “That’s when I met (McCarthy) the first time and we became friends,” he said.
Gonzales would later become a resident scholar in 2016 alongside McCarthy at the nonprofit. They would be friends for nearly two decades until the end of McCarthy’s life, he said. Gonzales said he is currently writing McCarthy’s biography and noted the wide array of interests the writer had.
“(McCarthy) was interested in all sorts of craftsmanship things,” he said. “But in particular he was interested in the violin.”
In a mystery befitting McCarthy’s often enigmatic stylings; Bein & Fushi, a rare violin shop in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, is a setting in both McCarthy’s “Stella Maris” and “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” by his MacArthur colleague Saul Bellow.
In “Stella Maris,” Alicia Western, a math prodigy with schizophrenia at the University of Chicago, takes a shopping bag full of cash to Bein & Fushi where she buys an Amati violin for $230,000.
“Nothing smells like a 300-year-old violin,” McCarthy writes in the novel.
Hanging in the shop, in real life Chicago, is a framed picture of Bellow with a quote from his 1984 story: “She has me carry her violin to Chicago for repairs,” it reads in part. “It’s a valuable instrument, and I have to bring it to Bein & Fushi in the Fine Arts Building.”
The connection prompts the question — did McCarthy ever set foot in the shop, or was the “Stella Maris” reference simply an homage to Bellow?
Shop owner Gabriel Ben-Dashan mulled the mystery and said he has spent some time reviewing the shop’s customer database for McCarthy’s name, without success so far.
Shortly after it was published, before Ben-Dashan had heard of the book he was on a business trip with his colleague on a flight between Chicago and San Francisco.
“Somebody saw the (Amadi) case and came up to us and said ‘I’m reading this book and it has this violin in it,’” he recalled. “They said ‘They mention this shop in Chicago called Bein and Fushi,’ and we said ‘We’re Bein and Fushi.’”
Gonzales, who’s pondered the Bein & Fushi connection since “Stella Maris” came out, believes McCarthy had been there — noting the author “wouldn’t write about something unless he knew it personally.”
But the Amati isn’t the only instrument tying McCarthy to Chicago. According to Luce, McCarthy heard an oral poem in a Chicago bar about New Orleans musician Leon Roppolo, who threw his clarinet into Lake Pontchartrain, “in an act of artistic suicide.” McCarthy wrote in 1980 that the poem was the inspiration for his novel “The Passenger” which would be published decades later. The book’s opening scene was originally at the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, according to Luce, citing McCarthy’s correspondence.
“‘The Passenger,’ like the poem, deals with people of great promise who aren’t able to fulfill that promise,” she said.
And famously, McCarthy reluctantly accepted a place in Chicago media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s book club. He granted his first-ever television interview to Winfrey in 2008 after the success of “The Road” — a bleak tale of father and son traversing a wasteland of tribal marauders and emaciated cannibals.
Asked by Winfrey why he was so averse to interviews, McCarthy was candid.
“I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he said. “If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it, you should be doing it.”
To this day there are still only glimpses available into McCarthy’s private life. And while his time in Chicago still may be partially shrouded — not unlike the menacingly beautiful and tattered worlds his characters inhabit — McCarthy has left an indelible imprint on the literary world.
“He is an American great, he is absolutely the real deal, I think he is going to be considered one of our best writers for a long, long time,” Luce said. “I don’t think his star is going to fade and so I think people should read him, not just because he has the Chicago connection, but because he’s a great writer.”
Richard Ray is a freelance writer.
