Texas Pages

6/16/1985
BLACK HEARTS OF THE WEST
"Blood Meridian" paints a ghastly picture of life without value
By Elmer Kelton

A.B. Guthrie Jr. in "The Big Sky and Fair Land" wrote of white men who
found the west a paradise but spoiled it through their ignorance and
greed.

Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" sees no paradise in the first
place. His white men find the west a living hell and keep it that way
through their ignorance and inborn tendency toward the blackest kinds
of evil.

This is the fifth novel for McCarthy, Tennessee native now living
in Texas. The man has a tremendous power in his use of the language,
invoking mental images that by turns stun the reader with their beauty,
then bludgeon him with cold brutality.

Some would class this novel as a western, but it is a far cry from
the classic western image. The grubby, blood-letting Italian western
movies of a few years ago pale in the shadow of this dark and
surrealistic nightmare of violence, of foul and wholesale murder. The
body count must rival that of the Vietnam War; one loses track after a
time.

Briefly, the story follows a nameless boy of 14 who runs away from
his Tennessee home and ends up hungry and penniless in the author's
vision of a muddy, bloody, soulless Texas soon after the Mexican War.
Here he takes up with a filibustering group led by a greedy fool called
Captain White, who leads an insane invasion of Mexico, only to end up
with virtually all of his party slain and his head floating in a jar of
alcohol for the amusement of villagers.

The kid and a few other survivors are placed in the foullest of
Mexican prisons. There he is found by one of American history's
consummate villains, one John Glanton. He is taken out of captivity to
join a scalp-hunting campaign sanctioned by the Mexican authorities,
whose people have long suffered under the Apache knife.

Not on the blackest pirate ship which ever sailed the Spanish Main
could there be found a more dreadful collection of cutthroats than
McCarthy pictures here, men without pity or remorse. They butcher
Apaches with such skill that after a time they run short. They find
that Mexican scalps are indistinguishable from Apaches' and begin to
collect those as well, cashing them in until their nefarious deeds come
to light and the survivors of bloody Mexican retribution flee across
the border into the United States.

At Yuma Crossing they muscle into a ferry operation, bullying
California-bound immigrants and local Yuma Indians until one day the
Indians rise in fury and massacre almost the whole lot, including
Glanton, throwing the bodies into a huge bonfire. History tells that
three men escaped.

In McCarthy's book the kid is among those who get away. He drifts
eventually back into Texas and many years later comes to the wild and
woolly buffalo-hunter town of Fort Griffin on the lower plains. There
he meets an old nemesis known as "the judge,' and his brutal life comes
to a bone-crushing climax.

There is much to be said for McCarthy's skill as a writer, but the
reader should be warned that this is not a book for the squeamish. It
paints a world in which life is without value or meaning, and in which
death seems the only acceptable escape.

This is a west about as far from Louis L'Amour as could be
imagined.

Elmer Kelton is the author of a number of books, fiction and
non-fiction, about the American West, the latest of which is Dark
Thicket, published this month by Doubleday.