He believed – and had believed for a long time – that there was a subtle magnetism in nature; which if he unconsciously yielded to it, would direct him aright, not indifferent to the way he walked. But he felt that only during the few days that he had been in Butcher’s Crossing had nature been so purely presented to him that its power of compulsion was sufficiently strong to strike through his will, his habit, and his idea. He turned west, his back toward Butcher’s Crossing and the town and cities that lay eastward beyond it; he walked past the clump of cottonwoods toward the river he had not seen but which had assumed in his mind the proportions of a vast boundary that lay between himself and the wildness and freedom that his instinct sought.
Alas, I have now read the last of John Williams' three profoundly perfect and completely different novels – Stoner, Augustus, and now Butcher's Crossing – and I'd say that if they have anything in common it would be a quest to know one's self and one's connection to the rest of humanity (and is there any topic more appropriate or even vital for fiction to explore?) In the current case, Williams (as it states in the introduction to Butcher's Crossing) uses the tropes of a western – “an excavation of cliche and not a participation in cliche” – in order to explore one young man's coming of age, set against the backdrop of America's coming of age. In each case – whether confronting the truth at the heart of a man or of a country – there are lies and myths and misunderstanding to be overcome before the future may be met with integrity. Coming as it did in 1960 – when the movies still portrayed the Plains-clearing cowboys as the good guys, when the Greatest Generation went from World War to Cold War, when an American president could extend his country's claims of manifest destiny out into space – this questioning of American exceptionalism must have come as quite a shock. Reading it today, the specific material isn't so paradigm-challenging, but as it deals with perpetual truths and the search for meaning and authenticity, Butcher's Crossing is still important, engaging, and enduring. (Spoilerish for the uninitiated.)
A phrase from a lecture from Mr. Emerson that he had attended came to him: I become a transparent eyeball. Gathered in by field and wood, he was nothing; he saw all; the current of some nameless force circulated through him. And in a way that he could not feel in King's Chapel, in the college rooms, or on the Cambridge streets, he was a part and parcel of God, free and uncontained. Through the trees and across the rolling landscape, he had been able to see a hint of the distant horizon to the west; and there, for an instant, he had beheld somewhat as beautiful as his own undiscovered nature.Although the son of a Unitarian lay minister, Will Andrews was raised more on the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson than those in the Bible, and so when he found himself the recipient of a decent inheritance at twenty-three, Andrews left his third year of studies at Harvard in order to “find himself in the great West”. Winding up in the small town of Butcher's Crossing, Kansas – led there by a letter of introduction written by Andrews' father to a Mr. McDonald; a hide broker and the only family acquaintance out west – Andrews is quickly directed to a Mr. Miller: a hunter and rugged mountain man who says that although the local Plains had been nearly depleted of buffalo, he knew of the location of the last great herd up in the Colorado mountains, and if a man were to back an expedition to hunt them, that man would make his fortune. Andrews seems more interested in experiencing the authentic West than in actually participating in a buffalo hunt or making money (McDonald offered him safe opportunities for each), and as both Miller and his grizzled, one-armed sidekick seem to represent some kind of Emersonian ideal, Andrews quickly lays down the money for the expedition.
As the party (these three men plus a skilled skinner named Schneider, along with a wagon, ox team, and horses) head for the Colorado Territory, Miller begins to exhibit a kind of crazed single-mindedness for his mythologised buffalo herd that seems to telegraph tragedy: this is the old man determined to bring back the massive marlin without regard to his own safety; this is Captain Ahab pursuing the great white whale no matter how many lives are lost. As the party soon crosses a great wasteland – going forward without water at Miller's insistence while there would still have been a slim chance for survival if they turned back towards the river a day's walk behind them – the reader recognises this as hubris and can only wait for divine punishment; even at this point I knew that there must be losses and I constantly mused to myself what might be appropriate – to Williams' credit, it all plays out with perfect justness.
Although there may be some question about the existence of the buffalo herd on the journey out – it had, after all, been nearly a decade since Miller last saw it; could he even find the remote valley after so long? – the party eventually does come upon the buffalo in their milling thousands; a scene straight from the early, untouched days of the American West. The beauty and timelessness of the valley is both Biblical and Emersonian in its remove from ordinary experience; but if Andrews had hoped to meet himself upon such terms, what he discovers is something else as the slaughter begins:
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. And he looked upon himself, crawling dumbly after Miller upon the flat bed of the valley, picking up the empty cartridges that he spent, tugging the water keg, husbanding the rifle, cleaning it, offering it to Miller when he needed it – he looked upon himself, and did not know who he was, or where he went.The plot from here plays out with exciting details, to end more or less where I thought it needed to go; but the plot is only the framework upon which Williams pins his philosophy. So what of young Andrews' transformation? Despite forswearing bodily comforts (and especially urban living with its painted lamps and velvet sofas), Andrews can't help but be focused on his body as he discovers that living close to nature is painful, brutish, and detaches him from life – more than once, conditions force time and space to pass Andrews by as though he were on a treadmill, as though he were not present in his life at all; surely this isn't what Emerson saw in a communion with nature?
Repeatedly, Andrews feels as though his body is emerging from a cocoon into his authentic self – riding out on his horse, “He thought at times that he was moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath unreal layers of softness and whiteness and smoothness”; he emerges from an envelope of buffalo skins after a blizzard, “When at last he was able to look around him, he viewed a world that he had not seen before”; he bathes for the first time in eight months, “Watching in a kind of ecstasy the dirt fall away in long strips beneath the gritty soap...marveling at the whiteness of his skin, and slapping it to see the rosy welts appear there” – but although Andrews is frequently reborn bodily through these experiences, he is forever upset by the sight of bare and defenseless carnality. He runs away from a beautiful woman when she offers him her nakedness; he retches at his first sight of a skinned buffalo ready for butchering; he turns away in distaste when he sees his lover sleeping, unguarded and “ugly”. But if he shies away from the body and his transformation is to be a purely mental one, Andrews is further disturbed to have seen each of the men he's dealt with turn into (if only briefly) blank-staring automatons by their face-offs with nature and its deadly forces; could this really be all the fabled West had to offer? Near the end, McDonald gives Andrews this view:
You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies at school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you that 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. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old.Andrews is horrified by this speech – and mostly, I think, because McDonald seems to be talking about money and power and these things aren't really of interest to the young man; he knows that he gained more on the expedition than buffalo skins, even if he can't articulate it – and his repudiation of McDonald seems like a repudiation of American exceptionalism and its foundational myths. When Andrews is ready to leave Butcher's Crossing at the end, it's with maturity and clear vision; he is finally able to engage with the world as it is, as a transparent eyeball, unsullied by preconceptions of what that world should look like.
The writing in Butcher's Crossing is in the sweeping Western style, and read as just another entry in that genre, one might think it simply an interesting look at the last great buffalo hunt. But John Williams was a master of bending genre to his service and this tale is more Homer than Hondo; it cuts like sawgrass and lingers longer than a prairie sunset but it deals with hubris and hamartia and retribution from gods Olympian. Absolutely loved reading this and thinking about it.
