Wild West Archives - Mostly About Stories

Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”
John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.

Did you find what you were looking for? John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing

This is the real deal: Butcher’s Crossing, a Western by the author of Stoner, is a truly awesome book. Because although it’s deadly serious, it’s also a Western through and through. Adventure, violence, and the great outdoors are all here in abundance and lovingly described. The only difference between Butcher’s Crossing and more traditional examples of the genre is that Williams, through respect for it and its worlds – he himself grew up in Texas – shows that behind its clichés there lurks an untapped dread, horror, and depth. Just as Conrad cut incisively into the myths of Western Imperialism in works like Heart of Darkness, here Williams does the same for legends of America’s westward expansion. But instead of resorting to the fantastic brutality of Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, Butcher’s Crossing works by being completely realistic. Its enemies are not superhuman judges but simple nature, harsh and incomprehensible.

The first edition cover of Butcher's Crossing, showing two crossed rifles and a buffalo. — The first edition cover of *Butcher’s Crossing*. In the story Western tropes are used to reveal the nihilism and terror lurking underneath our romantic view of the West. But the story itself is romantic, and that’s where its great power comes from.

A Hero and his Search

Our hero is William Andrews. A young man of twenty-three, he has done a few years at Harvard and had enough. Inspired by the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Butcher’s Crossing takes place around 1872), Andrews sets out West, to find… something. “It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous”. But the word “perceived” already clues us into Andrew’s uncertainty. We have no reason to doubt the goodness of his intentions, but every reason to doubt his surety in what they are. At the beginning of the novel Andrews blunders into Butcher’s Crossing, a small town dependent on the trade in buffalo hides. He has a letter of recommendation for a man there, McDonald, who knew his father.

Andrews is not heroic. He is terribly naïve and idealistic. He mistakenly identifies a local prostitute as the friend of a man he’s meeting in the saloon, rejects an offer of work from McDonald (“I don’t want to be tied down”) and almost immediately gets involved with a huntsman, Miller. This man tells him a story about a mythical, heavenly valley in Colorado Territory filled with buffalo, and Andrews can’t resist offering to help finance an expedition there. He’s attracted by Miller, a man of action who knows the land, and who seems to understand what Andrews is after. “A body’s got to speak up for his self, once in a while”, he says. Three men join Andrews on the expedition: a religious one-armed drunkard, Charley Howe; a coldly independent German, Fred Schneider; and Miller himself. For Andrews, this is the most meaningful time of his life.

But perhaps that meaning’s not what we’re really after.

Adventure and Style in Butcher’s Crossing

What does the feeling of adventure mean, and how do stories give us it? Perhaps it is feeling of seeing something new when it is balanced by the sense that this new thing is real and valuable. When we look out of the car window and see nothing except repeating suburbia, or an endless forest, it can feel like it’s not an adventure because we don’t want to find value in the landscape, though for someone with a different set of experiences, this suburbia or woodland could be exactly the novel world they are looking for. A writer of talent can make the familiar new and the unvalued valuable, but there certainly needs to be a journey involved in an adventure too. We need to feel a sense of movement, of progression in landscape or in knowledge.

A painting showing a mountain, lake and forest — Albert Bierstadt – The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, used on the cover of the NYRB version of Butcher’s Crossing. The painting, like the novel, captures the beauty of the landscape.

The adventure of Butcher’s Crossing is a descent. I noticed that the characters of the book are almost always described as going downward in key moments. And this downward path is a moral one as well as a physical one. But long before the darkness creeps in, we are treated to a world of beauty. The world of Emerson’s “Nature” and picture books Andrews read when he was at home. And this beauty is described with a style that for me is incomparable. Williams is a master of the perfectly carved sentence, one neither too long nor too short. When you read him you have the feeling that he worked out every word and its position with the utmost care and long before he put pen to paper. An interview with his widow I read bears this out. But he is also meticulous – every action is described in detail.

“The rich buffalo grass, upon which their animals fattened even during the arduous journey, changed its colour throughout the day; in the morning, in the pinkish rays of the early sun, it was nearly gray; later, in the yellow light of the midmorning sun, it was a brilliant green; at noon it took on a bluish cast; in the afternoon, in the intensity of the sun, at a distance, the blades lost their individual character and through the green showed a distinct cast of yellow, so that when a light breeze whipped across, a living colour seemed to run through the grass, to disappear and reappear from moment to moment. In the evening after the sun had gone down, the grass took on a purplish hue as if it absorbed all the light from the sky and would not give it back.”

The Mountains: Buffalo Killing

A virgin land, the mountain valley, their goal – Miller’s suggestion that there is a secret paradise has a kind of mythic feel to it. Elsewhere, the buffalo numbers have already massively declined from overhunting. But the place is real, and soon the hunters reach it. “A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched”. Andrews feels a sense of fulfilment as they approach the mountains, but as before this fulfilment is vague and nameless. Once more the narration refers to a “descent”. The hunters set up camp at the top of the valley, and then each day they head into it. Their aim is to slaughter and skin as many of the buffalo as they can.

A buffalo — However proud these beasts are when free to roam, dead and dying they have none of that grandeur to them. Death is emphatically deromanticised in *Butcher’s Crossing*, so that we see the hunters’ actions for what they really are – terrible, pointless, slaughter.

The killing is mechanised and pointless. Horror is something we need to imagine for ourselves, from sounds and images, like the sea of bones Miller talks about being left behind after the buffalo have been stripped and had time to decay. Williams’ characters don’t acknowledge it themselves. The buffalo they kill are strange creatures. It can happen that they go into what is called a “stand”, where they – deprived of a leader – refuse to move, even as they watch their brethren being slaughtered all around them.

“They just stand there and let him shoot them. They don’t even run.”

This happens in Butcher’s Crossing, again and again. Instead of showcasing nature’s nobility, we find nature’s stupidity, its incomprehension. The idealised joy of the hunt – of the chase, of the feeling of man vs beast – is relentlessly undermined by the way that the buffalo just let themselves die. And Miller is obsessive. He aims to clear the entire valley, killing thousands of buffalo even though they don’t have the space for all the skins on their wagon. His urge is frightening and destructive, but none of the other characters stand in his way. Instead, they watch and help. Andrews himself has a go with his own rifle, even as he admits to himself that “on the ground, unmoving, [the buffalo] no longer had that kind of wild dignity and power that he had imputed to it only a few minutes before”.

The Mountains: Nature and Identity

What meaning can be found in this slaughter? Is this what Andrews wanted, what he needed? Butcher’s Crossing is not a book to tell us what to believe. In fact, it is brutally anti-ideological, destroying truths rather than trying to build them. Andrews, because he is searching for a meaning, is susceptible to the meaninglessness around him. Instead of filling the absent centre in his heart, the slaughter hardens it. It says that there is nothing good here, and the world is simply amoral, empty of any kind of truth. In some way, his journey reminds me of that of William in the first season of Westworld. In both cases, the person that we find in the search to find ourselves isn’t who we wanted to be at all. But by that point it’s already too late to change.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a black and white photograph. Butcher's Crossing attacks many of his ideas. — Ralph Waldo Emerson. His essay “Nature”, with its benevolent view of the natural world, is subject to an implicit attack in Butcher’s Crossing. Here nature is anything but peaceful.

Nature cannot passively take beatings forever. At some point, arbitrarily, the tide turns on the hunters in their mountain paradise. Snow begins to fall. And what once was going to be the easiest hunt of them all quickly descends into hell. With snow, there is no way out of the valley, and the same battle for survival that the men prepared for the buffalo, now nature prepares for them. And the battle is worth waiting for, though I shan’t spoil its outcome here. The climax of the book’s second act is something to behold. It takes the Western genre and builds from them something every bit as horrific and beautiful as Blood Meridian. But here it is a thousand times more real – and for that, perhaps even more frightening.

Conclusion

I read Stoner a whole ago, but for me Butcher’s Crossing is the better book. Everything about it is awesome. The style is a model worth studying, of clean sentences and powerful images, but what really sets it apart is the story. Butcher’s Crossing is an adventure, taking those simple Western tropes that many have taken before, but unlike those predecessors Williams’ builds from them a work that is thematically dense and demands close attention. Andrews’ story of self-discovery and its dangers is one that has only become more relevant as time has passed and our culture has moved more and more towards self-creation, and the story’s fundamental lesson – that the person we find in extreme situations is not “real us” so much as only a possible version of “us” – is one that everyone can learn from.

But most of all, Butcher’s Crossing is a Western – exciting, adventurous, and fun. It’s a joy to read, and I thoroughly recommend it.

Have you read Butcher’s Crossing or anything else by Williams? What do you make of him? Leave a comment below!

Dec 2020 Update: I have now also put up a review of Augustus, Williams’ unbelievably awesome final completed novel. I think it’s even better than Butcher’s Crossing.