By Chris Wohlwend
Preparing for a recent visit to Texas I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” and its companion book, “Stella Maris”. McCarthy’s final novels seemed appropriate: My trip west from my home in Knoxville was related to the early 1980s when I worked as an editor of The Dallas Times Herald’s Sunday magazine, Westward. When we decided to add fiction to our weekly lineup, I chose our first offering, an excerpt from my fellow Knoxvillian’s soon-to-be-released novel “Blood Meridian”. A profile of the work’s demonic protagonist, Judge Holden, it was published on October 4, 1981, with an illustration by our art director, James Noel Smith, another East Tennessee native.
I had been introduced to McCarthy’s work in 1968 when I was a student at the University of Tennessee working full-time as a reporter for The Knoxville Journal. A friend from work had passed along her copy of his first book, “The Orchard Keeper”, urging me to read it.
Another literary introduction came about the same time: The work of the 17th-century English thinker Thomas Hobbes was part of assigned reading for a philosophy class I was taking.
The re-visit with “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” provided insight into the final work of the reclusive writer and its connection to the work of Hobbes.
McCarthy had returned to his East Tennessee roots as the setting for the two books, including inserting a handful of true-life characters and situations into the activities of his fictional creations, some without changing their names. The most relevant example is the pompous and erudite John Sheddan, who is involved in several important scenes with “The Passenger’s” protagonist, Bobby Western. Though I don’t remember meeting Sheddan, I was aware of his presence when I was in college. He was a regular at The Yardarm, an off-campus bar where I spent too much time in the late 1960s. Sheddan’s tall frame and booming voice dominated The Yardarm when he was present.
And Knoxville’s proximity to Oak Ridge and its role in the Manhattan Project – the World War II rush to create the atomic bomb – provided McCarthy with a plot for “The Passenger.” Oak Ridge – only about 40 miles from the Knoxville suburb where I grew up – was where the federal government had constructed three vast complexes to create fuel for the bomb. The mysterious work there was a source of civic pride, both for its job-providing economic boost and as a new home for a phalanx of hard-science thinkers. Two of my uncles – definitely not scientists – worked there in support positions.
The bomb’s development, it would turn out, would fit with Hobbes’ social-contract theories. Hobbes argued that human beings are willing to swap personal freedoms for the protection and opportunity afforded by an authoritative overseer. The Manhattan Project was, of course, the ultimate example, the protection it provided coming with the consummate cost, a process that could easily lead to humankind’s destruction.
Like his last work, McCarthy’s first book – set in the late 1940s – involved real-life East Tennessee characters, most thinly disguised but still identifiable to alert and knowledgeable readers. The characters and activities of “The Orchard Keeper” had been a personal revelation for me, bringing to life scenes that I had been exposed to in childhood. Trips from my east Knoxville neighborhood to downtown were taken by city buses that passed through black neighborhoods and shanty towns close by the Tennessee River that coursed along the southern edge of the business district. Obviously, McCarthy was intimately familiar with the Knoxville that I had observed – and that my newspaper job was revealing to me in sharply focused detail.
As I moved and worked at other newspapers, I closely followed McCarthy’s work, reviewing “Child of God” for The Miami Herald when I was working there in 1974, and the Knoxville-based “Suttree” after I had moved on to The Louisville Times in 1977. During my period working for the Bingham family in Kentucky, the patriarch, Barry Bingham Sr., sponsored a lecture by the noted sociologist Robert Coles, who had recently written a column about McCarthy’s work. After his talk, he and I briefly compared insights and opinions on McCarthy – and he told me that he was looking forward to reading McCarthy’s upcoming novel, which was set in the West.
Armed with that knowledge when I had moved to Dallas for my new job, I embarked on a search for the reclusive author’s whereabouts with the idea of excerpting it.
My Knoxville contacts provided a few tips. McCarthy’s brother Dennis and his wife lived a few blocks from my parents, but in a phone call, I was told that they didn’t know where Cormac was, suggesting I call their father, then living in the Washington, D.C. area. But he professed ignorance as well, telling me that the last time he had talked with him, his son was living near Franklin in middle Tennessee. But, he added, that contact had been a couple of years earlier.
Jim Dykes, an irascible and talented columnist for my old employer, The Journal, knew that Cormac was living in El Paso but refused to help – until I called in a favor coupled with hints of blackmail concerning decades-old escapades. He gave me the name of a north Georgia farmer and dog breeder. And, thanks to Gene White, I soon had Cormac on the phone, explaining who I was and why I was calling.
Cormac told me that a section of “Blood Meridian” had recently been rejected by a “small literary magazine” and, in a self-effacing way, thought it “might” work. Soon, I was reading a copy of the chapter describing the novel’s Judge Holden.
When I told Cormac that the Judge would make a great subject for Westward, and that we would pay him $750 for the privilege of using it, we had a deal. After a couple of back-and-forth notes that resulted in me agreeing to forgo the use of most punctuation, James Noel Smith began working on the illustration. Dressed in a borrowed long coat, I posed for the photo that James would use as the model for his painting of the Judge. But, thanks to our long lead time, by the time the excerpt was published, I had accepted a position with another Dallas publication, and had been replaced by an incompetent editor whose background was southern-California glitz.
A couple of weeks after Westward had published “The Judge,” I got a call from my replacement. He was getting ready to submit expenses to the Times Herald’s high sheriffs and had a question about what Cormac was to be paid. “The agreement was for $1,000, right?” he asked. “That’s correct,” I answered. A few days later I got a note from Cormac thanking me for the raise. One of his earlier notes (wondering if we would be able to “say piss” in the newspaper) was written on a cover-sheet from a package of paper, featuring the manufacturer's logo. "This rather nice stationery came with the typing paper,” he wrote.
Though I later tried to get in touch with Cormac when the first volume of his Western-border trilogy, “All the Pretty Horses,” was published, he had re-assumed his old habits and did not return my calls. Despite his unavailability for promotional duty, that novel and its two successors led to McCarthy’s reputation emerging from academic obscurity – his work was being discussed in mass-market publications. Sales of movie rights soon followed.
Retiring from my final salaried newspaper job in 1994, I had returned to Knoxville, where I was introduced to Cormac’s brother Dennis and his wife, Judy. The pair, it turned out, knew my parents through their dealings with the antiques business my mom and dad had started with friends. And, Dennis confessed, his brother had been staying with them when I had called during my 1981 search. Dennis and Judy and I had several mutual friends, and soon we were frequently sharing tales of our Knoxville experiences.
My return to Knoxville had also renewed my interest in Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project. Local media assigned reporters to the project, now being called Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and activity at the three sprawling facilities – K-25, Y-12, and X-10 – was still making the news. At K-25, a flock of Canada geese had managed to get into a pond though it had been covered with chicken wire in efforts to keep out wildfowl. The geese, unsurprisingly, tested “hot” – they were radioactive. They were destroyed and the pond cover was repaired.
And another ORNL story – this time involving Knoxville – soon was getting media attention. The site of a waste-metal facility, long defunct, was declared a federal Super Fund location. A tall fence, topped with razor wire, soon surrounded it. The facility’s history included the acceptance of barrels of Manhattan Project waste during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a period when the dangers of such material was little understood.
Most work at the vast K-25 facility – site of the gaseous-infusion process used to manufacture nuclear-bomb fuel – had ceased in 1985, but clean-up activity would continue for another three decades. The bomb-fuel process’s demands for water meant that the work of the area’s other major federal employer, the Tennessee Valley Authority, was intertwined with Oak Ridge’s endeavors. And a couple of my journalism friends had put in stints working for the TVA.
A key part of the TVA system is the Watts Bar embayment of the Tennessee River, just downstream from K-25. TVA also had a connection to McCarthy. His father, a lawyer, had taken an administrative position with TVA and moved his family from Rhode Island in the late 1930s, when Cormac was a toddler.
Jim Dykes, my old Journal companion, had spent several years writing for TVA, traveling to facilities throughout the area for stories. An avid outdoorsman, he frequently joked that his strict “catch and release” policy as to the fish caught in Watts Bar was the result of what he knew about the contents of the water. “Only a fool would eat fish from any of the downstream lakes,” he would add.
In 2016 I was contacted by another old friend, Alan Carmichael, a veteran of The Nashville Tennessean and TVA’s communications wing who was now co-chief of Moxley Carmichael, a public relations firm. The last of K-25’s facilities still in use was to be dismantled and ORNL had decided that the event warranted media coverage. And I was invited.
As Cormac was well-aware, the K-25 facility sprawls across Roane County. He had placed Bobby and Alicia Western, his fictional lead characters of “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” in the adjoining Morgan County on their grandparents’ farm near the county seat, Wartburg. The county’s proximity, of course, meant that many of the actual K-25 employees lived in Morgan so it made sense to place Bobby Western’s family near Wartburg.
A couple of weeks after the K-25 event, I told another of my Journalchums about the experience. Grady Amann, like me, had grown up in Knoxville, but his path to the newspaper business was more direct than mine – his father, Walter Amann, was the long-time outdoors writer for the Journal. And when I brought up the K-25 tear-down Grady was quick to tell me about an encounter his father had with federal government “suits.” The incident happened in the early 1950s, when Grady was about 10 years old.
“One of Dad’s fishing buddies was an employee of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency,” Grady told me. “He had been directed to do some water tests on Watts Bar and asked if Dad wanted to go with him. Dad, sensing an easy column and a chance to fish on the state’s nickel, said ‘sure’. And they spent several hours the following Saturday on the lake downstream from Oak Ridge.”
The assignment, he explained, involved pulling water samples from various depths, testing the contents and noting the results. “Dad, of course, was mostly fishing, but when they finished up, he copied his friend’s notes and saw that he could easily get a column from the info. The water – unsurprisingly – had some serious issues.”
So early on Monday morning, Grady’s mom answered a knock at their north Knoxville home and found two “suits” seeking her husband. “They were quick with their FBI badges,” Grady said, “and Dad was quick to join Mom as she invited them in.
“They wanted to confirm that he had been with the TWRA agent on Saturday. And they wanted to know if he had written anything.
“Dad’s column, which he had completed the day before, was taken along with all his notes, and then they demanded his typewriter, too, I guess because of what the ribbon might reveal.”
After their departure, Walter called his TWRA friend and found that his water-sampling equipment and notes had been taken, too – and that his bosses in Nashville had told him to give them everything. “It took several weeks before Dad was able to get his typewriter back,” Grady added. “And he found that his TWRA contacts claimed they knew nothing about studies of the water from Watts Bar.”
“But,” Grady added, “from then on whatever fish we caught downstream of Oak Ridge was thrown back.”
So Grady’s memory reinforces McCarthy’s fictional story, providing a non-fictional account similar to “The Passenger” plot line.
And explains Bobby Western’s reading choice when he arranges an identity change and makes his final departure from the U.S. in “The Passenger”. He takes only one book – a copy of Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, which spells out the social-contract theory.