Canyonlands National Park, Utah, 103ºF under a cloudless summer sky. I’d call the canyon floor below “bone-white,” if it looked like anything had ever lived there long enough to leave its bones behind. This is the part of the world where Edward Abbey (in his 1968 Desert Solitaire) said he came “to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian.” And something like what Thoreau had in mind when he talked about “Earth … made out of Chaos and Old Night … no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe.”
If you’d told me a month earlier that when I reached southern Utah humanity would soon start feeling like an irrelevancy—even a kind of irreverence—I would barely have looked up from my latte and iPhone long enough to chuckle. Still, it happened. I had a glimpse of “Matter, vast, terrific” (Thoreau again) and a sense of what a juniper tree or a piece of quartz might be up to … without me. I don’t know if the feeling was anti-Kantian, but it sure was memorable.
Yet as I struggled with the arid skeleton-scape of Canyonlands, my best guidance came from a book deeply skeptical about the redemptive power of that kind of inhuman emptiness. The way John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960) tells it, the idea of embracing Nature’s inhumanity is not only naive, it’s downright destructive. Thoreau’s dreams of “Contact! Contact!” do not solve humanity’s rapacious relationship with Nature—they are simply another incarnation of that rapacity. An opening epigraph from Melville sets the novel’s uneasy, almost sinister tone: “Aye, and poets send out the sick spirits to green pasture, like lame horses.… Poets have it that for sore hearts … nature is the grand cure. But who froze to death my teamster on the prairie?”
Critics have singled out movies of the early 1970s (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Outlaw Josey Wales, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Jeremiah Johnson) and some novels of the early 1980s (especially Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) as the first wave of “revisionist westerns.” But back in 1960, without McCarthy’s lurid baroque extravagances, without any cool Hollywood soundtrack, John Williams wrote what may be the perfect anti-western. Butcher’s Crossing is a novel that turns upside down the expectations of the genre—and goes to war with a century of American triumphalism, a century of regeneration through violence, a century of senseless slaughter. To say it’s an attack on Eisenhower’s America is right enough; only we shouldn’t be so sure that it doesn’t also apply to Kennedy’s New Frontier and to a half-century of triumphalism and exceptionalism since, under Republicans and Democrats alike.
In recent years scholars and readers have rediscovered Stoner, John Williams’s 1965 campus novel about a farmer’s boy turned unhappy and ultimately unsuccessful professor. Its Hollywood pitch might be “Jude the Obscure meets The Professor’s House”—can’t you hear producers rushing to acquire the rights? About Williams’s 1948 first novel, Nothing but the Night, the only good thing to be said is that he quickly disowned it. Williams’s austere, meditative Augustus (a National Book Award winner in 1973) may not rival Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, but it offers a very touching portrait of ancient Stoicism, a doomed but admirable effort to preserve one’s private dignity in the face of public horror.
Butcher’s Crossing is in a different league from these other works. The novel is about a buffalo hunt in the late 1870s, just before the coming of the trains finished carving up buffalo country and the European market for buffalo robes collapsed: the bursting of the Buffalo Bubble. The novel chronicles a hunting party that heads out from Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, into the Front Range of the Rockies. They’re searching for a valley hunters haven’t yet emptied of its buffalo herd—one of those herds that stretches far as the eye can see. The wealthy Bostonian Will Andrews, an Emerson- and Thoreau-quoting preacher’s son, hires the hardened mountain man Miller and a pair of his old-school associates (a skinner and a cook) in the novel’s first part. The second and longest part follows the hunt; the third details its miserable aftermath back at Butcher’s Crossing.
Early on, Miller comes across as positively satanic. The one appearance Native Americans make in the novel is in a remark he tosses off en route to the killing valley: “River Indians … they ain’t worth shooting anymore.” When Andrews witnesses Miller becoming a killing machine, no reader can doubt where the true evil resides:
During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller’s destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him—he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself.
In an idyllic valley tucked between towering peaks, straight out of Zane Grey, Miller mills buffaloes into salable piles of hides.
We know how to read this: a clash between young civility and bloodthirsty evil. In Heart of Darkness terms, Andrews is the novel’s Marlow, its callow, suffering storyteller, and Miller its demoniacal Kurtz. Yet Andrews bought the guns, the wagons, even the lead they melt for Miller’s bullets.
So what does Williams want his readers to make of Andrews’s Emersonian optimism and Miller’s pragmatic murderousness? After the failure of the hunt, Andrews and Miller come back home to meet the embittered hides dealer McDonald, who has been bankrupted by shifting fashions back in Europe and is now surrounded by worthless piles of buffalo hides. He offers the novel’s bleakest diagnosis. “You’re no better than the things you kill,” he informs Andrews, then goes on to tell him why “young people … always think there’s something to find out,” when really: “There’s nothing.… You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”
Rather than leaving us with this piece of late Mark Twain darkness, however, Williams ends the novel by following Andrews back to Butchers Crossing for a week of thoughtless beauty and pleasure with the one substantial female character, Francine; together, they carve out a space apart from the world.
Butcher’s Crossing also follows him when he breaks trust with her and sneaks away, leaving the money she had pointedly refused to accept from him; money that reduces their week together to another salable commodity. That moment helps readers to link the pointless slaughter of unsalable buffaloes to the spooky absence of Native Americans from this whitened West. The pattern can, and is meant to, spiral outward, encompassing also the destructive zeal of Cold War America, reaching out eagerly, with Emersonian zeal, to the east, west, north, and south. In 1960 Louis L’Amour ruled the western novel, and Hollywood featured leather-skinned John Wayne’s machismo and the liberal piety of Gary Cooper’s High Noon. Is it surprising there was so little space for Williams’s pessimism?
Butcher’s Crossing ends with the reader certain, dead certain, that the destruction of the past cannot be undone. Yet there’s a hint of hope: the novel takes seriously both the cost and the appeal of what it calls “vitality.” When Andrews feels it moving through him during a river crossing late in the book, that is both promise and threat.
As the animal stepped slowly forward, Andrews felt for brief instants the sickening sensation of weightlessness as he and the horse were buoyed and pushed aside by the swift current. The roaring was intense and hollow in his ears; he looked down from the point of land that dipped and swayed in his sight, and saw the water. It was a deep but transparent greenish brown, and it flowed past him in thick ropes and sheeted wedges, in shapes that changed with an incredible complexity before his gaze.
Five minutes later the river sends a log crashing into Andrews’s partner Schneider—a log that kills horse and rider both, then casually tips their winter’s worth of buffalo hides into the flood. But those “thick ropes and sheeted wedges” are still there, still haunting. They even hover below the surface in the novel’s final line: “he rode forward without hurry, and felt behind him the sun slowly rise and harden the air.” Go west, not-quite-so-young man.
There is no reason we should congratulate ourselves for being among the living: “vitality” is not a virtue, just a fact of life. Still, we make sense of Nature by being buoyed and pushed aside by it. Thoreau craves “Contact! Contact!” with Nature in its unapproachable inhumanity. Williams does not aim to show us Nature as it is when we are not around. Instead, he details what it feels like when it tugs at us, makes us respond to its lineaments and its power.