ABSTRACT
Wake For Susan is McCarthy’s first known published work. It appeared in the October 1959 edition of The Phoenix, the literary supplement of Orange and White, the magazine published by the University of Tennessee. Not surprisingly it has received very little critical consideration. It is not commercially available¹ and most critics tend to assume that it will be little more than typical undergraduate juvenilia. I have found only two who have paid it serious attention. Rick Wallach and Dianne Luce both deal with it in essays contributed to Myth, Legend, Dust. Wallach is rather dismissive of the story, finding that it “blurs the line between nostalgia and sentimentality on several occasions.”² In my view it is the protagonist, Wes, who displays sentimentality; the complexity of “voice” in the story, clearly identified by Luce, enables us to “read” McCarthy rather differently from Wes. Luce is generally more appreciative of the story and sees it as a metaphor for “the artist’s creative awakening.”³
In fact McCarthy was 26 when the story was published, and had spent the previous four years in the USAF, during which time he had embarked on that process of self-education that was to make him familiar with an extraordinarily wide range of literature and ideas. In my view the story is cleverly conceived and uses language and metaphor in ways that are both vivid and economical. It also contains themes that are to appear in McCarthy’s more extended texts and which, indeed, run through his work as a whole. I
therefore consider it worth while devoting attention to this story and to its companion of the following year.
