Vocabulary Lesson

I made the mistake of loudly smacking my lips and licking my fingers as I devoured Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel The Road, last spring.
I’ve always told friends and family ‘you can’t afford what I want’, when they query me on my Christmas wish list. So last year they were able to take a kind of revenge, confidently gifting me with almost everything written by that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
I am only now beginning to dig myself out of this self-imposed prison of words.
Most recently I finished McCarthy’s 1979 opus, Suttree, the story of a debauched, usually drunken, mystical apologist for the South-that-never-was.
It is not an easy read. The novel begins with a kind of bio-sociological incantation, and ends with an amusing near-death experience. In between there are drownings, murders, the accidental death of children, police beatings, bewitchments, a great deal of sewerage, and characters who if not fully etched, are completely wretched.
If pressed I would have to say I was disappointed: it was not as satisfying a read as The Road, written twenty years after Suttree.
But on another level, it was magnificent. I have never read a book that had more words that I didn’t understand or couldn’t immediately suss out from the context. It was two books in one: the novel and the vocabulary lesson.

Gout, from the archaic ‘gutta’, meaning drops but in modern usage specifically crystals: crystals of uric acid in the blood that lead to painful swelling of the extremities, the knees, the elbows. We hear ‘gout’ and we think of wigged men in satin knickers mincing about to baroque music while, unbeknownst to them, their hostess with the hair piled high has ducked out for a rendezvous with Errol Flynn.
In Suttree though, it is apparently gout in that first, archaic sense, of a drop, or a droplet, of a spray of rain and blood and other biological fluids and even – on page 27, spiked clumps of sawdust bursting through the torn stitches in the belly of a stuffed lynx.
Sere. Where withered might have done admirably, perhaps substituted by McCarthy because of its homonymic association with seer - someone who prophesies, foreshadowing Suttree’s failed attempts to establish any kind of life. He is a failed fisherman, husband, father, son, friend, lover, pimp, Catholic, and auto enthusiast. He fails at everything.
At first I failed as well, to find a ‘sere’ in my Oxford Annotated. But then I looked under ‘sear’ – to burn into, and found the archaic spelling and secondary definition that McCarthy uses to describe bones, claws, flowers, foliage, hopes, and lives, all withering or dead on the vine.
Knacker: a slaughterer of spent or sickly animals. A writer might be said to be a kind of knacker: a re-processor of useless ideas, unusual words. The Knoxville that McCarthy depicts is certainly a slaughterhouse, and the characters that McCarthy invents create what lives they have, out of the waste. Most have built their homes from flotsam and jetsam. There, along the river, under the bridges, in the caves, they sleep in abandoned vehicles, in cast off rail cars, in boats made of old signage. They are the wretched refuse, washed upon the shore. Suttree is a knacker’s dream: literally crammed with the abandoned, the maimed, the mad, and the delusional. On page 457, in the last fits and fantasies of a typhoid coma, Suttree’s alter ego reads from an imagined indictment in which he accuses himself of consorting with..

“thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spallpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes and other associated felonious debauchees.”

Tellurian. You and I, as it turns out, are Tellurians, which simply means ‘of the earth’. There is though, a hint in its root, which suggests that McCarthy meant to imply someone not simply of this earth, but bounded by it, restricted to it, even imprisoned within it. For the root word is ‘telo’, meaning flat. Flat earth?
The list – kept in my everyday journal, went on and on: Concatenate, talus, warfarined (poisoned by a water soluble rat poison), dishabille, sacerdotal (the Jesuit schooled boy must have slept late that morning), cataphracted, crepuscular, spalls (just chips), purlieu, quoits, ‘breeks of kingscord’ (corduroy pants!), and triturations.
At first I just wrote down these mysterious words. Then, when the definition was not immediately available, or did nothing to help me understand usage, I began to write down the page number. Then I included the sentence in which the word was found. In most cases I had to have my Oxford annotated open on my lap, the novel in my hand, and my notebook at the ready, before I was satisfied I had a reasonable understanding of what the author intended.
Soricine. In the context in which I found this word - within a description of a wizened black Geechee witch preparing and administering a potion, I assumed it was a variation on sorcerer, or sorceress. But still unsure, I noted it in my journal. That evening I quickly found that soricine simply meant ‘shrew-like’. I thought back to the many instances in which McCarthy describes the reliance of those living in and along the river – the lower reaches of Knoxville, on the animals and fishes at the lower end of the chain. They ate roots, rabbits, rodents, bats, pigeons, turtles, shellfish, and often resembled the same.
Spelaean. I dug deep for this one and came up – if not empty handed, unsure of what I may have grasped in the darkness. I came up with ‘spae’, a wonderful Scottish word with Norse roots, which may be the root of our own word ‘spy’. A spae-wife is, in Scottish, a sorceress, or fortune teller, and I suppose I wanted this to be the correct inference. The reference itself in the book is to a ‘spelaen darkness’ which could – in the context of this novel, fit. But in the light of day I saw the root I was digging for was not ‘spae’, but rather spelae. So down I went again, and after a while uncovered ‘spalax’, which is the Latin term for a mole rat. As the chapter concerned a certain rat-like character spelunking beneath Knoxville, this seemed a quite plausible solution.
Perhaps ‘spelaen’ might also describe the process of reading: that is, a burrowing through the darkness and a grasping for meaning.
I can’t think of a better way to spend these last drab days of winter, than burrowing through this spelaean darkness. But then, that’s just me.