Sunday Morning! “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams

“I expect from this journey a rebirth and a spiritual baptism. I sense so many deep and great possibilities within myself and up to now I have realized so little.”

So wrote Mikhail Bakunin to his friend Alexander Herzen in 1839; he was hoping to borrow some money to travel to Germany and away from the stifling atmosphere of Tsarist Russia. At the time, Bakunin was also hoping to become a university professor, however his encounters in Berlin with the Young Hegelians and various socialists pointed him in a different revolutionary path. But, if his earlier, more respectable intentions were dashed, well, the destructive urge is also a creative urge.

It occurs to me that Bakunin’s expectations were met, and the journey was indeed a catalyst that set him on a new path and unlocked his potential. It also occurs to me that everything feels that way at that age- every monent is a door that we might step through and start on a whole new path. Certainly, all of us felt as if our young possibilities were coiled and sleeping in the darkness and ready to strike- kept in a state of suspended animation in the glacial mass of our days. This is the dream of Romanticism: that we will escape social selfhood long enough to do the great work of our lives- to become most fully ourselves. That we will set off on some great adventure, at least once, and find out who we could be.

Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California.

And, it’s strange too, because I feel myself on the cusp of a great journey myself, for the second time in my life (at least), and with all the doubts of middle age, but somehow still anticipating a “rebirth” and a “spiritual baptism.” And so, the question arises what if every moment throughout our life really is that way- as loaded with potential and any other moment- and the only thing that really differs is our degree of awareness and strength of will. A frightening thought, isn’t it?

Now, Bakunin was an anarchist and more concerned than most with the social forces that prevent chunks of the population from ever having any hope of self-actualization. And it does seem that one problem is our journey of development is so often caught up and confused with “making a living,” being a financial success, and just with raw necessities. The trouble is there’s no numerical value wherein one is officially a “success,” and even if there were, other people would still be doing better!

And, then finally, when society yokes self-realization to notions of success, it creates a problem around how we should deal with failure, something that’s far more common in human life. It’s one of my little pet theories that post-Christian societies don’t really have the cultural resources to process failure; we’re expected to brush ourselves off and not bother others about it, which creates a cultural void and a crisis. It’s no real surprise to me that the great American art form of the 20th century, noir fiction, comes out of the “victories” of World War II, in which evil was realized on earth and then everyone was required to move on and make a living for themselves. Failure still waits, coiled up in the darkness beside our possibilities.

Which at long last brings me to the book in question: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams! Williams spent the war years enlisted in the Air Force in Calcutta; when he returned, he had sustained physical and psychological injuries that stayed with him for the rest of his life; he also had the pages of a first novel, Nothing but the Night, about a young man in crisis. Williams later disowned this short novel, but his later works Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing are also about young men trying to find a purpose in life to sustain them through the injuries of fate. In the end, simply surviving is success.

In Butcher’s Crossing, the young man, William Andrews, is on a quest out of American mythology: with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his mind, he leaves Harvard behind and heads out West to find his life’s purpose in the sublime of nature. Like last week’s book, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted, Williams is drawing on the cowboy legend in this novel with a more cynical and world-weary tone than is typical. The transcendentalists might have sought an experience beyond embodied selfhood; but real cowboys got their hands a lot bloodier.

Andrews is looking for the real thing when he arrives in Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, a town awaiting its own salvation through hunting and ranching and the impending apotheosis of the railroad. He tracks down a family friend who offers him a job trading buffalo hides, but the young man wants the full western experience of going along with a team of skilled men on a buffalo hunt. He contracts a seasoned hunter and outdoorsman named Miller to lead the crew, which will consist of Andrews, a pious, alcoholic wagon-driver named Charlie Hoge, and a skinner named Fred Schneider. Miller knows of a hidden valley off an abandoned trail where the buffalo are rumored to migrate each year. The young man will put up the money for the trip, and in return, they will bring back enough hides to get rich and Andrews will find out what kind of man he might become.

But the novel hews, I think, more closely to noir fiction than the Western: it’s a classic can’t-miss money-making scheme that goes awry due to men’s moral failings. They find the buffalo, as promised, and they start in with the killing, only to find that Miller can’t let up when the season’s running late. In a chilling passage, we realize it’s not about “bloodlust” for him, or even greed; it’s about asserting his will through this one destructive act of mastery. He has to cull the herd entirely, or not at all.

But then, as if by an act of God, the snows come and the group has lingered too long. They will have to dig in and survive the winter with the limited supplies they have. Williams was an experienced outdoorsman and these passages are filled with harrowing and granular detail. It is a a survival tale to rival Shackleton’s own doomed voyage. On one level, this is simply a cracking good story. The group triumphs over death (for the most part), and Andrews learns what he is made of, but there is no great victory to be had here. In the end, the few remaining dregs at the bottom of the cup are bitter. The railroad has moved on; the rising tide sinks most boats. Failure is the common experience.

Nicolas Cage wants YOU to read the book first.

John Williams’s own literary triumphs came a little too late. After decades of neglect, and nearly twenty years after the author’s own death, his college novel Stoner was rediscovered and hailed as a great lost masterpiece. Butcher’s Crossing has followed behind, and has been called one of the greatest Westerns ever written. I’d actually consider it the superior novel; nothing feels superfluous or out-of-place, the prose is pitch-perfect, and the story lingers in the mind long after reading it. (I actually read it months ago and am just writing on it now.) Now, that it has been rediscovered, we can look forward (?) to a film adaptation starring, inevitably, Nicolas Cage as the driven hunter Miller.

But, the underlying question posed by the novel- do we become oursleves more fully in failure or success?– is one that only life can answer, and that takes years and years.

So, until then, what are YOU reading, writing, pondering, playing, watching, or testing yourself with this weekend?