‘The Gardener’s Son’ puts class division and social injustice into perspective
There’s more to Cormac McCarthy’s searing vision of the American West than Blood Meridian
Bleak and unrelenting-yet singularly moving.
This is what echoed through my mind after turning the last page of The Road. The 2006 Pulitzer prize winning novel is a post-apocalyptic classic that follows an unnamed narrator and his son as they trek their way through the wilderness of what was once America. Considered his most accessible work (Suttree readers, hats off to you!), the journey through the wild is rendered touching by the fierce strain of love that both father and son share for each other. The one surety in an uncertain life that involves encounters with cannibals and marauders, their bond appears even more visceral on account of the pared down, sparse prose McCarthy employs. (I surprised myself by crying after finishing the story, an occurrence so rare, I can count the number of times it happened on one hand.)
One of the American Greats, McCarthy towered over the literary landscape. Heir to both Melville and Faulkner, he told morally harrowing stories about people living on the fringe, stories that delve into the deepest, darkest parts of the human soul.
Reading his fiction can prove a visionary experience yet the casual reader may be put off by descriptions of scalpings, beheadings, rapes, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. Anyone wanting to indulge in what Stephen King called the author’s ‘biblical prose’ as well as experience his vivid world-building without generous helpings of escalating violence should try The Gardener’s Son.
Though the star-studded adaptations produced on the basis of his screenplays have often been hit and miss affairs, the greatness of McCarthy’s writing remains undisputed. (This much was also conceded by a reviewer in a retrospective piece for GQ, one who had formerly disparaged The Collector, a film based on one of the author’s screenplays.)
The Gardener’s Son, conceived for the making of a 1977 PBS historical crime drama, concerns 17-year-old Robert McEvoy, a mill worker living in Granitville, South Carolina in 1876. Embittered and disillusioned by the loss of his leg- an accident rumoured to have been caused by mill owner James Gregg- Robert kills the self-same, leading to a farce of a trial reminiscent to those found in great southern novels such as To Kill A Mockingbird.
A straightforward story yet one that fascinates due to its ambiguity.
Did James Gregg have something to do with Robert McEvoy’s accident? It’s put down as a rumour yet the reader learns how the 30-year-old attempts to ‘buy’ Martha, Robert’s 14-year-old sister, an actual fact that never becomes public. How does Martha feel about the affair? She tells Robert that she would have perjured herself for him if it had helped his case in any way,but, as an elderly woman, betrays both lingering resentment for her dead brother as well as surprising admiration for the philanthropic actions of her would-be rapist’s mother.
In roughly hundred pages, McCarthy takes a stab at unveiling the contradictions inherent in human nature. The typical issues he centres-such as the meaninglessness of discovering a why or wherefore in life-are tantalising enough to make one stop mid-read to contemplate a character’s motivations and actions.
‘You don’t know how I am. You don’t know me’
Robert McEvoy stands in as the primary enigmatic character.
It’s easy to consider him a hot-headed teenager, resentful of his lot in life. Blowing up one day, taking a preemptive strike against the world and his perceived prospects in life . A moment’s rash decision, to be expected of someone young and troubled. Yet that reading is contradicted by the text.
Prior to the shooting, Robert’s father mentions at the dinner table that he finds something to be off about his son. A conversation he relates involves Robert as well as his younger daughter, wherein the latter expresses a wish to live in a better house to which Robert responds: ‘That wouldn’t make you no better from what you are’.
Much later, at the onset of the confrontation with James Gregg, there is also this little nugget:
‘Your father.’
‘He was the gardener.’
‘I know who he was.’
‘No you don’t’
‘What do you mean I don’t’
‘You might know his name is all’
It’s a surprisingly astute observation in someone so young. The dispute that would brand him as a murderer in this light appears like a misjudged attempt to defend not only his choices but his right towards existence. Offhandedly dismissed by his former employer for apparently being a lazy bum who was let go by the mill on account of being a thief, Robert says ‘You think you can say anything you want about people and they just have to put up with it’. (It’s important to note that he never stole anything, his only ‘crime’ up to that point consisting of leaving his place of employment without giving any notice). James Gregg’s insistence on his own narrative of a scrounger looking to stir up trouble, is, ironically, what ultimately seals his fate.
One can’t but feel for Robert when he plaintively says :’They lied to me. They all said I’d…I was never born to be hung. I could of been somebody’.
‘Being somebody’ affords blanket protection, The Gardener’s Son teaches us. How else could it be that James Gregg, a paedophile who sexually coerces his female workers, gets a monument in town? While Robert McEvoy gets hanged at the age of 17, the promise of being sent to a penitentiary in return for his silence proving a sham.
The scenario is reminiscent of the story that propelled Arundhati Roy to Booker Prize fame in 1994 with The God of Small Things. Transposed to the southern Indian state of Kerala, James Gregg could be substituted for Chacko, the heir of a local pickle factory, who similarly sleeps with his female workers, his own mother slipping them money to keep them content in an exhortation of pride and fury that reflects Mrs. Gregg’s own self-righteous conduct towards Martha. The scapegoat of this story, a low caste labourer named Velutha, gets lynched by his community, the police and his former employers being complicit in the affair, similar to how Robert is betrayed by the supposedly impartial judicial system.
Prescience and Prophecy
The Gardener’s Son is a Greek tragedy in the making, with ample moments of foreshadowing. In this sense, Robert tells his sister after returning home for the first time in two years that ‘when trouble once finds a house, it stays on. You cannot get shed of it’. The conversation he shares with Mrs. Gregg’s carriage driver about the nature of death can even feel like a premonition of sorts.
Just consider these lines:
‘Death. I seen his face. I know where he uses. How he loves the unready’
‘He loves us all’
The moral injustice of the trial may not be of the hand-wringing, searing quality of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, a work that sees a Russian nobleman disavow both his own life as well as society after witnessing what counts for law and justice among the disenfranchised, but it is still affecting.
Robert McEvoy seems Christ-like-for all his guilt, it’s hard not to remember that he is not afforded a defence ‘because people don’t want to see the Gregg name blackened’. This is why no female witnesses are called to his trial who could testify regarding the sexual harassment they experienced at the hands of James Gregg. It’s why the events surrounding the murder end up skewered in court, one man saying that Robert was the first to go for his gun, James acting only in self-defence. (In reality, it was the other way round.) And it’s also why the revelation that the boy tasked with delivering messages to women on behalf of his employer is illiterate does not prompt any further questions or speculation.
McCarthy’s ‘God-haunted’ Vision
Whereas some stories make a case for time healing all wounds, The Gardener’s Son provides a more complex argument. The narrative tells us that the force of past tragedies is lost because all that remains are the likes of photographs and news clippings. ‘They ain’t the thing […] You copy somethin down don’t mean you have it. Times past are fugitive. They caint be kept in no box’. The ambiguity I talked about being the primary attraction of this story is supported by the idea of a past that can never be satisfyingly parsed once the principal figures are dead and their motivations with them.
Yet for me, the beating heart of it all is the strain of dark religiosity that underpins McCarthy’s writing. Known for being critical of institutional religion, his works still brim with sacramental images such as the sharing of food. Notions of good and evil and the idea of God are equally central to his work. (In The Gardener’s Son, God is literally the first word of the screenplay.)
As someone who was raised on quotes from the Bible, the subversive spin McCarthy puts on these messages are singularly tantalising, sticking in the mind long after the plot starts to fade away.
‘They say that God sends no man a burden greater than what he can bear’
‘Ay. Nor much less, neither’
‘No man’s lot is so bad he can’t look at a neighbour’s who’s not worse’
‘Where is he? Where is that neighbour?’
This passage in The Gardener’s Son will probably be what I remember years from now.
Hope In Despair
There is a risk when it comes to reading this screenplay. Probably all of McCarthy’s work. One can come away believing that the odds stacked against humanity are too large to be overcome, that kindness is weakness and breeds no return in a bleak world. But that’s not taking the long view. Robert McEvoy kills and is then killed in return. In The Road, the father dies, leaving his son alone. Yet Robert goes on to tell his sister to live for him, a better and longer life than he will ever be warranted while in The Road, father and son, for all the atrocities they witness, never grow hardened themselves, loving and taking care of each other.
In an interview for The Harvard Gazette, Divinity School Professor Ichihashi Potts argues that, in his works, Cormac McCarthy unveils the cost of goodness. He claims that by writing characters that are unlikeable, broken and fallible and involving them in acts of depredation and violence, McCarthy’s is essentially asking ‘Is this still worth doing?’
I was raised in an environment that favoured miracles. On the way home from school, my mother once related the story of Tobit to me. The righteous man,who, despite being true to God, lost his means of supporting his family as well as his sight. There’s more to it than that but the moral of the tale seems to be that long tribulation is not in vain, the reward for faithfulness always being secure. When we grow up, however, we realise it is not always as easy as that. Just because ‘you’re good doesn’t mean the world is going to be good, just because you do the right thing doesn’t mean all is going to be OK’, as Ichihashi says.
But finding something to hold on to in the ‘long defeat’, as Tolkien would say, can make the end seem worthwhile. The Gardener’s Son says all that and more.
