Cities of the Plain — Cormac McCarthy (1998)
No spoilers here.
I experienced a reading rush rarely enjoyed since I was a kid. Late at night about 40 pages short of finishing this third book of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy” I went to bed, tired and concerned of not being awake enough to appreciate the finish. I was so riled with the set-up that I couldn’t sleep and got out of bed at 3 a.m. to finish it off.
The first two books of the trilogy are masterpieces. They are intense, vivid, violent and unsparing, with tension fueling nearly every page. Both are coming of age novels of teenage boys, already master horsemen, who ride with vague intent into Mexico where they become hardened survivors of graft and violence, while incongruously being welcomed and fed by every poor Mexican family they encounter.
All the Pretty Horses (1992), takes place a couple of years after the end of WWII when 16-year old John Grady Cole, put out of his Texas family ranch when his mother decides to sell the ranch, rides into Mexico where he impresses the rich owner of a huge hacienda with his expertise of breaking wild horses. The bottom drops out into violence and conflict when John Grady and the 16-year old daughter of the owner fall in love. The novel takes us through his travels by horse throughout northern Mexico as he attempts to connect with the girl while he is pursued by corrupt officials.
Similarly, in The Crossing (1994), teenage Billy Parham, out of New Mexico, spontaneously leaves his loving family and sets out by horse for Mexico seemingly out of a vague sense of melancholic nostalgia for the old ways. Billy doesn’t quite have the horse genius and charisma of John Grady, and during three trips throughout northern Mexico he encounters incredible violence by corrupt law enforcement and the landed elite, while at the same time being invariably helped by impoverished Mexicans. He returns with WWII underway, and he can’t pass a physical to enter military service. Even as an 18-year old, he has essentially failed at every turn in both Mexico and the States.
Both the young men return changed and hardened and alone, but still with a cowboy ethos of self-sufficiency and honor. It is strange to remember that these cowboys are riding the range with shootouts and knife fights all the while in the middle of the modern 20th century. These wild west adventures could only happen in poor rural Mexico and not in their own country. The societies divided by the Rio Grande are like different universes.
At the time I read these books in order it was curious that McCarthy considered the first two novels as parts of a trilogy, since the only similarity between the books are boys and their horses coming of age in the wild of Mexico. It is a theme, but not a relationship between character or chain of event. The final book Cities of the Plains crosses us up as it becomes satisfyingly clear early in the novel that our two protagonists John Grady and Billy Parham have come to know each while working on a cattle ranch 30 miles north of El Paso in the early 1950s. Given the cowboy code of taciturn humility neither John Grady or Billy tell each other about their experiences in Mexico except to say they had a rough go down there. They become buddies on the basis of their common values, rather than shared Mexican experience.
While the two earlier novels focus in depth on only a couple of characters as they encounter dozens of Mexicans and difficult situations during their ramblings, this third novel moves more slowly to develop a detailed picture of how a half-dozen American cowboys get along and do their work on the ranch. There is plenty of dialogue, often funny for its understated irony and wit, as they discuss wild dogs, weather, government, prostitutes and horse trading.
McCarthy is a master of dialect and dialogue and he uses the understated code of southwestern rural talk. Keep it short, keep it humble, but finish it with deflective humor. Here is the conversation when talking of using tracking dogs to find some wild dogs that had killed cattle:
Is that your best dog?
No. But he’s the dog for the job.
Why is that?
Cause he’s run dogs before.
What did he think about it?
He never said.
Because John Grady and Billy had prior similar experiences in Mexico it was difficult to distinguish their personalities for the first 100 pages or so of Cities of the Plains. Their backgrounds and sensibilities were so similar that sometimes I had to pause to trace in my mind the differences in the plot arcs of the two books. Gradually the unique past experiences became integrated with their respective characters and imbued each with a special past and personality.
The tension in this third book develops from love-at-first sight. John Grady falls hard for a young prostitute in a Juarez Mexico whorehouse. He is smitten — irrationally even he would concede — and works over the course of a year get her out of the whorehouse so they can marry. Billy is his co-worker and friend and reluctant accomplice. John Grady’s life in the first and third books is dominated by two star-crossed loves of two beautiful Mexican girls. The one is seemingly unattainable due to her rich patrician pedigree, and the other a prostitute whose life is in the hands of her cynical and violent whorehouse pimps.
The two pimps are exquisitely sinister. Tiburcio is the alcahuete with the face of a weasel who manages the floor of the upscale whorehouse. He would slip his switchblade in your ribs without hesitation. Eduardo is the mysterious whorehouse boss dressed in black with affected manner and speech who would calmly and graciously describe the manner of your death even as he killed you.
Billy is more difficult to characterize than John Grady. Billy often finds himself in harms way, not by way of intent, but more in the way of drift. While John Grady is the young master horseman and lover, Billy is the competent and often unlucky cowboy who finds himself in no-win situations while he tries to pursue an honorable path forward. It leaves him spent and broke and alone.
These books are about Mexico and the history and poverty and corruption that grind away its inhabitants. Two themes surface. The first is that landed wealth and petty local officials are a combination of cynical power that has consumed the poor population in a boundless maw for centuries. There is no redress to that power, even for wandering American cowboys, other than violence.
The second is that the powerless and landless local poor Mexicans have a pure generosity of spirit to strangers. Many times throughout all three books our American cowboys find themselves starving or injured or pursued by corrupt intent, only to be taken in by whoever lives in the next hovel the Americans stumble into. Even as complete strangers they are fed, though the family may have no food for themselves. They are nursed and hidden and protected as the family puts itself in peril. And perhaps most poignant, they share with these strange Americans their philosophies of life and death. Much of that philosophy is religious, based on the Virgin, but much of it is a hard-won stoic and articulate philosophy of the vagaries of life and death and fate, honed from generations of happenstance violence and poverty and the endless cycle of season and time.
I bring your attention to the epilogue of Cities of the Plain. We find a much older Billy Parham spending the night under an interstate overpass in Arizona. He meets an old Mexican who spins a long story of a dream that changed his life. Billy is by that time nearly entirely cynical and challenges the veracity of the dream. It is a lengthy discussion and difficult to understand, but I believe it is a novelistic way of explaining McCarthy’s view of the interaction of our long-evolved unconscious with the more recently developed unique use of language that considers itself as the mind of us humans. It is an interesting concept that suggests that the conscious mind does not understand what the unconscious biologically urges us to do. See: https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem. Perhaps the Mexican dreamer is describing the unconscious that has evolved for millions of years to enhance survival, while Billy represents human language that attempts to shout down and override the advice and instincts of the unconscious.
The trilogy examines an extinct way of American life and combines gut punches with beauty as it takes us through rural Mexico life and the 20th century American southwest.
Bob Fall 