lOOKS
293
But here milieu is less the focus of draIlJa than a stage for char–
acter, which requires this stage but
is
not circumscribed by it. For
on this stage is exhibited a range of human potentialities from
murderousness that needs only a tempting occasion to infect a
whole community; to all the ironic depths of doctrinaire masculin–
ity and of timid recoil from killing; to the impulses that lead to
maneuverings toward justice and against violence; to the modes of
recognizing evil done-- by flight from it, by self-punishment for
it, or by the moral pragmatism of accepting, as people might ac–
cept a flood or holocaust, what can be neither undone nor properly
expiated by community action.
John Williams belongs with Guthrie and Clark in that he has
the same artistic conscience and the same basic tack of working
stubbornly through the milieu. Even when he is using the old
theme of survival against nature, he does not fall back on cliches
of language and situation; any "western"-glutton who is beguiled
into this book by the buffalo on the jacket will not last for twenty–
five pages. But that remark is misleading, for it may imply that
Butcher's Crossing
brushes off or condescends to the regional scene
and event of which it is born, whereas it does no such thing. It
makes the most of western plateau and of alpine meadow in the
Rockies, and of a frenetic-epic-grotesque buffalo kill, but without
being bound to its places and subjects; it is not fulfilling rigid
expectations or playing for automatic responses. There is a good
deal of life in the ordinary sense, and there is constant movement.
Williams has unostentatiously introduced, while keeping it always
subordinate to human concerns, a quantity of trail lore, mountain
lore, buffalo lore, blizzard lore, and finally even economic lore;
all this is vivid, but it never gets drafty or cute or "educational."
Williams keeps himself out of it; without showmanship he puts
his characters through an extraordinary range of physical settings
and threats- flat plain and an obscure, almost unclimbable moun–
tain pass; extremes of summer heat and winter cold; autumn
drought and spring flood; scarcely endurable blizzard and maniac
arson. In this inclusiveness, as well as in the subordination of ' this
outer world to the actions of men, it reminds one of Conrad's
Youth
(nowadays too easily disparaged). Such kinds of life, not
to
mention various peaks of suspense and, near the end, the ad-
