Lee Holleman’s first impression of the campus left her flat. It looked undernourished, somehow: a sense of architectural scrawniness. They seemed to adapt extremely fast while I…struggle[d].” She had traveled from Wynne, Arkansas, to major in the liberal arts.
On October 2, 1957, The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported, “C. McCarthy Jr. accidentally shot.” The facts, as portrayed in the News-Sentinel and The Knoxville Journal, were wildly inconsistent, one reporting that he underwent leg surgery, the other that he’d shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle during target practice and that the wound was not serious: The bullet lodged just below the surface of the skin. His mother said he wasn’t carrying a rifle at all at the time.
He was “returning [a] pistol to its holster and the trigger accidentally caught on the holster causing the weapon to discharge,” Gladys said—sounding strangely official. Whether drinking was a factor in the incident, no one was saying. The answer lay not in modern industrialism, they said, but in Southern agrarian traditions, family farming, which imparted the wisdom of self-sacrifice, a spiritual focus, and a commitment to community.
After his discharge from the air force, Cormac McCarthy had hitchhiked around the country for a few months. In the fall of 1957, he was back in Tennessee. He re-enrolled in the university because the GI Bill provided support and he didn’t want to work.
He signed up to study physics and engineering, but he also took Expository Writing: Modern Essays and Composition and Writing of Fiction from an instructor named Robert Woodham Daniel. Daniel also sat on the advisory board for the student literary publication the Phoenix. McCarthy had little patience for literary theory (though later he’d become fascinated with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations of language and language’s relationship to the unconscious).
Rather than theory, he was after pragmatic components of writing, but in classrooms he naturally absorbed scraps of academic ideology. In the 1970s, he’d tell a student of psychiatrist Robert Coles, “An intellectual is a person who feels that his learning—and it may be pitifully little—entitles him to status. People who really do know are inevitably returned to the common ground of man.” His insistence that the goal of knowledge was to understand the “common ground of man” shows how thoroughly the thinking of the Southern Agrarians entered him on his brief return to school.
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