posted on 29 Jun 2016

Butcher’s Crossing  by John Williams

A few years ago the great but virtually forgotten US novelist John Williams was rediscovered and his 1965 novel Stoner became a word-of-mouth sensation. The greatest novel you will never have heard of, one reviewer called it, and it is true – it is an extraordinary rendering of an almost entire life, that of a mild-mannered stoical mid-western academic.

His earlier novel Butcher’s Crossing was first published in 1960 and recently reissued in paperback to capitalise on Stoner’s success. Each of the handful of novels that Williams wrote was profoundly different – but it is hard to imagine another writer who could span the range from Stoner to Butcher’s Crossing.

In Butcher’s Crossing a young Harvard drop-out washes up in the shanty town of Butcher’s Crossing on the Kansas plains in the late-1870s. He has an ill-formed idea that in the wild west wilderness his stifling Boston gentility will fall from him and he will find his “true self”.

He hooks up with three other characters and decides to put up the stake necessary to fund a buffalo hunt led by an old hunter, Miller, who says that across the mountains in the Colorado territories he knows of a lush valley he last saw almost a decade previously where a vast herd of buffalo still lives. Everywhere else, in slaughters that last weeks and require tons of shot and powder, they have been hunted to extinction, their rotting skinned carcases stretching as far as the eye can possibly see across the plains. But not in Miller’s secret valley. There, he says, is a herd whose skins will earn them thousands of dollars.

And this is essentially the substance of the book. Under Miller’s leadership the four prepare for a hunt that should take them a couple of months. They reach the valley. They find the buffalo. For two solid weeks, Miller works a pair of hunting rifles for as long as there is light to shoot by, blackened from head to foot by the combusting gunpowder, the gunfire as rhythmic and as unending as hammer blows. Every animal – but for a couple of hundred that finally escape the confines of the valley – is slaughtered. Forty-seven hundred skins, they estimate.

The triumph of the book is its fierce imagining and its utterly relentless focus on the tightly prescribed action. You will need a strong stomach to read about buffalo slaughter and the mechanics of skinning; and a strong constitution to read what happens to a band of primitively equipped men who first run out of water and later are trapped when winter snow arrives early in the Colorado mountains and renders the route home impassable for six months. There are some cliffhangers and in some parts the tension is cranked up almost unbearably and I won’t spoil these aspects by giving too much away.

One reviewer noted of Butcher’s Crossing that it “paved the way for Cormac McCarthy” and there is almost certainly some truth in this. Williams doesn’t share McCarthy’s intense stylistic austerity or biblical language but one can certainly see what might have helped inspire McCarthy’s visceral and sometimes pitiless action and his elementalism.

But what about Williams’ inspirations? Well, he signposts us to these himself. There are echoes of Melville’s Moby-Dick in its epic struggle and obsession, but perhaps more pointedly of Melville’s bitter final satire, The Confidence Man, which provides one of the epigraphs for Williams’ book. Its other comes from Emerson’s essay, Nature.

But I believe the most profound influence is Conrad and that Butcher’s Crossing is Williams’ Heart of Darkness. Butcher’s Crossing may be a nascent boom town on the edge of the plains – if the railroad arrives its dust and mud streets will be worth their weight in gold – but it is also Kurtz’s upriver fiefdom where the worst can happen unchecked. And the young Harvard drop-out who travels there finds not some kind of wilderness nobility, but a perilously thin veneer of civilisation – the raw log shanties, the barber’s store in a tent, the lean-to saloon – waiting to be swept aside by barbarity. You can’t read it without thinking of Conrad’s, “The horror! The horror!”

Butcher’s Crossing may be a parable of primitive capitalism, the conquest of the west through plunder and depredation; it may be an early “environmental novel” lamenting greed and extinction; it may even be a metaphysical novel whose real subject is the human soul. Indeed, it may well be all of these things and more. But whatever it is, it is utterly compelling and convincing and to read it is a draining experience.

If the book has any faults – and it does have a few – it is that it seems to sag just a very little under its own weight in the final section, and may be twenty or so pages too long. But these are quibbles. Butcher’s Crossing is one of those books which will always seem freshly minted, its haunting, enigmatic message as bright and terrible and unforgiving as when it was first published almost sixty years ago. Williams has earned his rightful place in that small group of writers who have used America’s founding mythologies to explore the dark underbelly of human action.

Alun Severn

June 2016