The Volunteer, 1958
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1958
Yearbook of the University of Tennessee for the year 1958. First edition, only printing. Hardcover without dust jacket as issued, approximately 31 x 24 cm, 332 pages of which only the following are numbered: pages 33-61, 65-66, 69-70, 72, 76, 79-87, 89-90, 96-99, 118, 133, 141, 144, 147, 155, 161, 165, 172-173, 181, 184-185, 187, 212-215, 218-229.
Publisher’s gold boards with “THE VOLUNTEER 1958” and the drawing of a torch-bearer printed in blue and in relief on the front panel. “UT NINETEEN FIFTY EIGHT” is printed in gold-on-gold, also in relief, on the spine.
CONDITION: a good only copy.
PROVENANCE: purchased from the American collector Paul Ford.
This is the University of Tennessee’s yearbook for one of the years in which McCarthy attended before dropping out to start his career as a writer.
McCarthy’s photo does not appear in the typical class photos for students. His scarce commitment to college life is shown by the fact that, as far as I could see, neither his name nor his photo appears in any of the student associations, activities, or societies recorded in the book. However, the so-called “descriptive bibliography” by Stephen Pastore features a photo of a young man laying on a bed and reading, drawn from this volume of Volunteer (page 10, unnumbered). The bibliography identifies him as McCarthy (“Cormac McCarthy: A Descriptive Bibliography. Volume I. First Editions &Autographs”, n.p., American Bibliographical Press, 2014, p.8). The same student is pictured in another photo on page 112 of the yearbook, reading a copy of Mad, along with two other young men.
Actually, there are serious doubts about whether he is McCarthy. Wesley Morgan, author of a pioneering essay on McCarthy’s high school years, does not recognize the future author of Blood Meridian in those photos. Dianne Luce, one of the most authoritative McCarthy scholars, agrees. Morgan adds that he does not believe that “Cormac lived in campus housing during any of the years that he attended the University”, even if he couldn’t say so definitively. He also reports that “Charles McCarthy … Knoxville, Tennessee” was listed but not pictured in The Volunteer, 1952, among the members of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, on page 196.
However, Morgan’s research led him to uncover other early photos of McCarthy dating back to his years at Knoxville Catholic High School. Two of them were published in the May 25, 1951, issue of Gold and Blue, the school newspaper. The first one, featured on page 3, is a group photo of the 1951 senior class, taken at the Queen of May ceremony. McCarthy is the boy with the flashy necktie.
The second picture, reproduced on page 4, is in a square format and shows “Charlie McCarthy” in a jacket and tie. The accompanying entries mention his hopes to be a good shortstop and “to become rich” (for an extensive discussion of these entries see Dianne C. Luce, Cormac McCarthy in High School: 1951, in The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Volume 7, 2009).
The last photo is a composite portrait of all the 1951 senior class members. It includes the previously mentioned photo in an oval format and captioned “Charles McCarthy”, along with individual photos of the other class members. The composite photo was later reproduced in “The First Fifty Years / Knoxville Catholic High School / 1932-1982”, page 81. Wesley Morgan reports that Tom Clancy, one of the class members later depicted in Suttree as one of the Clancy brothers, owned a copy of this, signed on the back by each of the class members. It is now in the possession of his brother, Walt.
COLLECTING TOPICS: copies of this yearbook should be around. However, this is the only one I have come across in fifteen years. Scarce.
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