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The long awaited new novel by McCarthy was published simultaneously in the United States and England by Picador. 

The idea of a novel set in New Orleans had been developing for sixty years:

“Little is known about McCarthy’s life in Chicago, but in January 1980 he wrote to Robert Coles revealing the genesis there of a novel that would occupy him for the rest of his writing career. He wrote that in a Chicago bar he had often heard a friend recite an unpublished poem by Louis Diehl who had been a member of the International Workers of the World movement in the 1930s. The poem was about innovative New Orleans jazz clarinetist Leon Roppolo and the legend that he threw his clarinet into Lake Pontchartrain in a fit of despondency and self-destructiveness. McCarthy confided to Coles that the poem had given him the idea for a novel set in New Orleans, although the narrative would not be about Roppolo himself. There is no solid evidence that McCarthy began drafting such a novel in 1960s, but by August 1980 he wrote to Deaderick Montague that he thought the New Orleans novel would be his next after the publication of Blood Meridian. What is clear, then, is that McCarthy partially conceived his long-awaited work The Passenger before May, 1962 and that he was mulling the project intermittently while finishing The Orchard Keeper and drafting Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree” (Luce, pp.13-14).

The Passenger takes on a peculiar interest for the biographers, as many of its characters are real-life friends of McCarthy, from John Sheddan to Cynthia Farah.

RECIPIENT: Lanelle Whitley Holley is a longtime friend of McCarthy. Her husband, John Holley was a McCarthy friend since they were young, well before he knew and married Lanelle on October 19, 1963. In a phone interview on February 10, 2024 she recalled that they used used to spend time with Cormac, John Sheddan and Gary Goodman and that they were so close that her future husband was with Cormac the night he proposed.

Soon after the marriage the couple moved to Asheville, North Carolina. Lanelle told Liz Kellar: 

“[Cormac] was living in Wears Valley and we were just sitting there on Christmas Eve about 11 o’clock and John said, ‘I wonder what Cormac is doing for Christmas. So we left North Carolina and drove across the mountains with snow over the side of the car. We got there, oh, sometime around two-ish, I guess, and he was up. We picked him up and brought him back home” (Liz Kellar, What Cormac McCarthy’s letters to Knoxville couple say about the famously private author”, Knoxville New Sentinel, April 15, 2024).

McCarthy was supposed to stay with the Holleys for a few days at the beginning of 1964 but he ended up staying longer, eventually moving to the apartment of Gary Goodman who also lived in Asheville at the time.

Lanelle told the bookseller Amir Naghib:

“McCarthy was very much unlike his writing, “which can be so dark. It was amazing that he could conjure that, but he wasn’t like that at all. He was just the most wonderful man who had the most wonderful laugh. He was a wonderful friend”.

John was an expert in and lover of horses, serving for some time as President of the East Tennessee Quarter Horse Association. The Quarter horses, a breed created by crossing English thoroughbred with other American-grown horses, was bred with Mustangs from the western planes. Pioneers found that the new crossbreed had an innate “cow sense,” a natural instinct for working with cattle, making it the quintessential cowboy’s horse. So, in the late 1980s or early 1990s, McCarthy called John for help accurately describing horses in his forthcoming novel All the Pretty Horses.

“McCarthy always wanted to make things as accurate as absolutely possible. My husband used to be in rodeos and just knew what could and couldn’t be done. So those three books [All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain] Cormac either sent him a copy or a manuscript and he would say, ‘read this for me and tell me if all this is feasible’. And so he would read it and would circle things that couldn’t be done and say, you know, you wouldn’t do this” (Lanelle Holley to Kellar, op. cit.)

When John passed away in 2015, McCarthy called Lanelle many times. In late 2022 she reached out to ask if she could send two copies of his new books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, to be inscribed. McCarthy agreed, inscribed the books, and sent them back.

The long friendship between McCarthy and the Holleys remained largely unknown until the collection of books by McCarthy inscribed to them went at auction at Case Antiques in Knoxville on January 27, 2024. It included inscribed copies of nearly all his novels, from The Orchard Keeper to Stella Maris, except for Child of God and, as always, The Road. Other valuable materials were not auctioned at Case: some letters and postcard went to the Wittliff Collection held at Texas State University in San Marcos; three early typescripts of The Gardener’s Son, Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men were sold by the dealer Stuart Lutz.

NOTABLE COPIES:

– GONZALES COPY. A fine copy, inscribed to McCarthy’s friend and biographer Laurence Gonzales and housed in his private collection.

COLLECTING TOPICS: unsigned copies in collector condition are common given the huge first print run. Signed or inscribed copies are, however, quite scarce, possibly rare, as McCarthy passed away just seven months after the book publication. This is the only copy I have seen to date aside from the one in the Gonzales collection.