Butcher's Crossing

"Sure. So my essay about this book was what that kicked off the series. So I’m very attached to it. John Williams is famous for Stoner , a grim academic novel. It’s really touching. It’s like, if Thomas Hardy ’s Jude the Obscure actually went to college and got a PhD, and it seemed like everything would be alright… but because he’s Jude, it’s not. Stoner is that book. It’s the way in which you come out of poverty and straitened circumstances, academia might seem to offer a salvation for you, but actually the same forces that control you are still there. How would I compare that to Butcher’s Crossing ? Butcher’s Crossing is a Western in that it’s about a buffalo hunt. A young man from Boston shows up in the last town in Kansas, and says he wants to go hunt buffalo. Since it dates from 1960, you might think of it as the world of late Zane Grey—a time when people are making a lot of great Westerns still, the High Noon era. But it’s an anti- Western. The point of the novel is that the very things you do that you think are going to make you a man, that are going to bring you into this wonderful, new, transcendent Emersonian relationship with nature… well you’re just killing buffalo. You’re killing them and killing them and killing them. At some point you realise that the glory is the obscenity. It’s a wonderful instance of what it means to be a settler-colonialist. “There’s this wonderful idea in philosophy of the impossibility of the ‘view from nowhere’. But one of the things I love about fiction is the notion of a view from elsewhere ” Butcher’s Crossing is set in the post- Civil War period, so the late 19th century, it’s meant to be the glory days of the West, what Hollywood makes so many movies about. But they are just killing machines, out to slaughter buffalo after buffalo. In the 1870s, there was a craze for buffalo robes centred in London. In an international world, everyone was eager to have a buffalo robe. But the central characters get snowed in, and by the time they get back to Kansas the buffalo craze is over and the hides are totally worthless. They’ve left these carcasses out on the prairie for nothing, and all they have is a pile of furs that they’ll be lucky if someone turns into sofas or something. Nonetheless, it is a beautiful account of the West. John Williams himself had moved out to Colorado a little bit before he wrote this and it conveys the beauty of winter in the Rockies in a way that is extremely moving. Yet the overall arc of the book is the grimness of the promise of American Manifest Destiny. It’s an auto-critique, fully embracing all the beauty of the things that people think are wonderful about the movement of white people west, yet very bitter and clear on the cost of all that. Native Americans are only glimpsed at the edges, because they’ve already been displaced from this space. He imagines the end of those who are still there. Actually, there are tons of Native Americans who are still living in the Great Plains in the 21st century, but in John Williams, or through the eyes of his character, it’s almost like they don’t exist any more. Like they’ve been pushed to the edges. That blindness is part of the story. That’s a great way of thinking about it. The character that Andrews goes hunting with is named Miller, and really what he’s doing is mill ing these buffalo into a saleable commodity. What’s left of them is bones. I recently read Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove . Have you read that? In some ways, it’s a kind of odyssey: these guys going from Texas to Montana. And it has a similar quality, because they meet a guy crouched by an enormous pyramid of buffalo bones—basically the guardian of the bone pyramid. It’s another book that reads as a kind of elegiac late Western, but there’s another, darker element—that this is not something we should be nostalgic about. And that this is the capitalism that we still live in. This is what it does, what it turns into."