Cormac McCarthy Did Not Talk Craft, With One Surprising Exception

By the time the marine biologist Roger Payne won the MacArthur genius grant in 1984, his fame was well-established: Credited with helping discover the song structure of humpback whales, he had popularized their mysterious groans and creaks with a series of field-recorded LPs that fueled the marine conservation movement.

By the 1990s, as part of a pop-science turn that would deliver to millions of viewers an infectious sense of awe for sea mammals, Payne was giving interviews, directing an IMAX film and narrating television documentaries in a patrician New England accent that made clear “whale” is spelled with an “h.”

He had also begun drafting a book. Part memoir, history and activism, “Among Whales” was designed to maximize concern for increasingly polluted oceans and reverence for their endangered giants. It was his first, and as he wrote, he sought editing help from a new friend, a writer he had met at a reunion for the MacArthur Fellowship: Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy had won the inaugural MacArthur in 1981, when he was an obscure but revered writer at work on “Blood Meridian.” After that, he said, he went to every MacArthur reunion. He studiously avoided other writers at these events, but when he met Payne, the two became “joined at the hip,” Payne’s widow, Lisa Harrow, recalled after his death. By 1986, they were traveling to Argentina to watch whales together.

Payne died on June 10, 2023, leaving boxes of uncataloged papers that document his combative, creative, decades-long friendship with McCarthy, who survived him by three days.

During his long career, McCarthy sat for very few interviews and kept notoriously silent about his creative process and his approach to craft. In early drafts of “Among Whales,” which are among the documents left by Payne now being prepared for accession by a research institution, he revealed his views.