(1995) The Stonemason

For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed into place by the thumb of God.

Plot Summary

The Stonemason tells the story of Ben Telfair, a grad school dropout struggling to support several generations of his family. As he battles to make ends meet, Ben immerses himself in the family trade of stonemasonry, a trade quickly becoming obsolete in 1970’s Louisville. Ben is bolstered by the love he shares with his grandfather, one of few remaining scions of a dying craft. Narrated by Ben looking backwards into his past, the play struggles to reveal the absolute truth of the world, a truth Ben thinks may only be revealed through the act of laying stone, a truth Ben needs to understand to save his family.

Critical Analysis

The Gardener’s Son and The Stonemason are Cormac McCarthy’s first published screenplay and stage play, respectively. The two genres present unique challenges and possibilities for expressing ideas. McCarthy uses these formats effectively as a new way of approaching themes familiar to readers of the author’s other works. Both The Gardener’s Son and The Stonemason address the peculiar way men recall the past as something different and something better than it ever was., However, unlike Blood Meridian, which reveals an idealized era in the nation’s collective history, these two short works deal with personal recollection. The Gardener’s Son begins and ends with a young man investigating the circumstances of his father’s murder: “It was just a family story. It was like something in a book. It didn’t seem like real people” (90). He tries to understand those involved as they were, not as they exist in family folklore. The Stonemason, too, reveals a man looking back into the past. The play consists of Ben Telfair’s recollection of his grandfather, a man he views as perfect, a man he aspires to be, but a man he can never be until he realizes every man is just a man, despite our attempts at deification. The primary action in both The Gardener’s Son and The Stonemason occurs within the framework of someone watching from the present. Though McCarthy deploys this mechanism differently in each work, both (screen)plays operate within their respective genres to grapple with the possibilities and limitations of memory and memorabilia.

The Gardener’s Son explicitlydistinguishes between the past and the present. The first and last scenes are marked as present while everything in between consists of the past. Readers, or viewers, must assume that these events and details follow the investigation of the son as he traces the circumstances of his father’s death. The initial problem of his investigation, however, is pointed out by a character known only as Timekeeper. As the son browses through a box of old photographs and documents, the Timekeeper informs him, “They aint the thing. Old papers or pitchers. Once you copy something down you don’t have it any more. You just have the record. Times past are fugitive. They caint be kept in no box” (5). Instead, one must look for memories. The truths of the past lie with those who lived them or those who loved the ones involved. The sepulturero in The Crossing seconds this notion as he consuls a girl grieving for murdered loved ones: “time heals bereavement…only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart’s memory…Seize them back…Call their names…do not let sorrow die” (288). Accordingly, the son seeks out one of the few survivors, Martha, the sister of the murderer, in order to obtain a firsthand account of events after the murder and up to the execution of the killer. However, Martha has difficulties recollecting her brother. She only has one picture of him. Yet: “Sometimes I wish I’d not even kept it… I think a person’s memory serves better. Sometimes I can almost talk to him. I caint see him no more. In my mind. I just see this old pitcher” (93). The photograph portrays her brother moments before his execution. She has no other photograph, but she grows to resent it because it does not show her brother as she wants to remember him. Her attitude towards the picture reveals the problem of recorded history. Recorded history contains only moments, and the moments only come from one perspective—like the perspective of a death row photographer. These moments become so ingrained into our understanding of the past that the truth becomes vulgar, discomforting, and even painful to those who think they know. Even worse, it has the capacity to influence how those who remember access those memories. Photographs and text books steal loved ones from the hearts and mind’s eye.

Public historical records may affect public and personal recollection of events, but personal histories can be just as deceptive. The Stonemason explores the way individuals idealize people in their past. Whereas Martha’s photo of her brother makes him less than she remembered, Ben’s idolization of his grandfather deifies him. This misremembering is just as problematic because Ben’s grandfather becomes an impossible standard for Ben to achieve in his own life. 
While the themes of The Gardener’s Son are present in The Stonemason, the latter takes a different approach to the presentation of the character’s internal struggle. Indeed, McCarthy uses the play format to show it as an internal struggle. Instead of using scenes of the present to bookend the narrative of the past in between, the narrator of the play is Ben Telfair in the present. As he speaks, the events of the past play out visibly on stage so an audience may see. The action becomes a personal meditation on the man who shaped him. When Ben returns from graduate school, he realizes the things he learns in class and the things that are true are different: “It was only when I came home…that I realized my grandfather knew things that other people did not” (11). Those things come from the intimate craft of stonemasonry: “For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity… by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself” (9-10). The craft has been passed down in the Telfair family for generations, and Ben feels he must learn to gain access to the ancient wisdom that must be hidden in the craft. He also views the craft as a means of protection against the outside world: “We knew that it was a thing that if we had it they could not take it from us and it would stand by us and not fail us. Not ever fail us” (33).

“Not fail us. Not ever fail us” is a critical utterance because Ben’s repetition of the line concludes the play. However, this time it is slightly altered, and refers not to the craft, but to the man, Papaw. Just as a photograph “aint the thing” neither is the craft. Martha loses sight of the man her brother, the true thing she wants back, because of a picture. Ben loses sight of Papaw in the same manner, but he loses him in work.  “I tried small tricks to make him appear again,” Ben says (131). Finally, one night, Ben visits Papaw at the cemetery:

He came out of the darkness and… everything seemed revealed to me… He was just a man… He smiled at me and he held out both his hands… Hands I never tired to look at. Shaped in the image of God…and I knew that he would guide me all my days and that he would not fail me, not fail me, not ever fail me. (133)

Thus, Ben begins to understand that it was not stonemasonry he needed, but the man behind the art.

Cormac McCarthy uses the media of screenplay and stage play to address the way humans remember the past, both collectively and individually. The Gardener’s Son and The Stonemason allow McCarthy to toy with narrative techniques unavailable in the novel format. Ultimately, he reveals instinctual urge to look into the past, find the moments and people who got lost somewhere along the way, and “seize them back.”