Where the wild things were
I once locked eyes with a raccoon whom I came across stealing (as it were) eggs from the chicken coop. Never before or since have I met a gaze so incomprehensibly alien. At the very least it provided a glimpse into H. P. Lovecraft territory. Aside from that, this creature's eldritch stare gave me a powerful sense that though nature inspires feelings of the sublime -- whether terrifying, as in this case, or overpoweringly beautiful -- it is, itself, beyond ideas, beyond human understanding. Any moral or spiritual qualities we may find in it are put there by our own wishful thinking and are more or less a way of making it homey. Mind you, this is what I believed before this disturbing encounter, but I had never felt frightened by it or taken it personally.
I know that many people don't look at things this way, especially in the United States, and more particularly around here, once a hotbed of Transcendentalism. But the odd thing is that, despite American optimism about nature -- despite people wanting to get in touch with it, as if it is in nature that authenticity lies -- an enduring and popular American literary theme runs against it. It is the story of sallying out into nature's realm, filled with certainty and great expectations of spiritual exaltation, only to run into her less happy aspects.
John Williams's "Butcher's Crossing," first published in 1960 and recently republished (New York Review Books, paperback, $14.95), is a novel of that ilk, so much so, indeed, that in its outlines it is practically a template for it, while in its explicit articulation of metaphysical beliefs it could have turned into a tiresome novel of ideas. In fact, however, it is sui generis and a fully realized work of fiction with a lot of meat on its bones. The story itself is preceded by two quotations from the alpha and omega of American Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville, which made me lick my chops in happy expectation of the worst.
We begin with the arrival of Will Andrews in the tiny Kansas town of Butcher's Crossing in the 1870s. He is in his early 20s and has left his native Boston, his well-heeled family, and Harvard College, influenced by a lecture by Emerson (seemingly the famous "Nature" itself). Will means to find his real self, a "wildness," vital and powerfully generative, which lies smothered beneath the quotidian and routine arrangements of civilization. Filled with Emersonian confidence, he contrasts the untrammeled, unknown reaches of the Kansas prairie, coursing with "a subtle magnetism" and holding the promise of union with the Universal Being, with the puniness of human devices as represented, at the moment, by Butcher's Crossing, "which seemed to move in a sluggish, erratic rhythm like the pulse of some brute existence."
He leaves town in a few days, embarking on a buffalo hunt, with the object of taking hides, with three other men, one of whom, the leader, Miller, claims to know of a hidden valley in Colorado where possibly the last pristine herd grazes. After harrowing trials, the men do, in fact, reach this valley, and it is as unspoiled and teeming with buffalo as they had hoped. But, it seems, man was not made for Eden -- nor the reverse. A rage for killing seizes Miller, who is intent on massacring and skinning every last buffalo. The men, delayed by their bloody work, are snowed in and pass the long winter in a crude shelter, swaddled in stinking buffalo hides. Long, dismal months later, spring finally arrives, bringing a form of redemption for Will. His senses come alive, and he is at ease in himself and in nature. When the men finally leave, he looks back: "At this distance, the new growth of grass was like a faint green mist that clung to the surface of the earth and glistened in the early morning sun. [He] could not believe that this same valley had been the one he had seen pounding and furious with the threshings of a thousand dying buffalo; he could not believe that the grass had once been stained and matted with blood; he could not believe that this was the same stretch of land that had been torn by the fury of winter blizzards."
After this short respite, the men's tribulations continue, and I will say no more of that. By novel's end, young Will has in fact been transformed by nature, though not quite as he expected. He has discovered her grim aspect: death, decay, chance -- or otherwise? -- disaster. Much of the optimistic starch has been beaten out of his Transcendental convictions, but he remains a Transcendentalist nonetheless, having simply traveled, shall we say, from Emerson to Melville. Whatever your own views on nature may be, you believe absolutely in the person who has made this spiritual journey. It is this and the novel's immense visual power and tangibility of material detail, its fully realized sense of time and place, its telling incidents, its nimble and subtle resonance with the Bible, and its fleshed-out characters, that make it a very great work.
Stef Penney's "The Tenderness of Wolves" (Simon & Schuster, $25) is another frontier novel, but Canadian, set in the 1880s off Georgian Bay, in Ontario. It does not have the verisimilitude of Williams's novel -- no one would have used the word "shambolic" or wondered where the "bathroom" was at this period -- but it does have a number of ingredients that our own day finds congenial, among them benign wolves and a middle-aged married lady heading off into the wilderness with a silent, manly stranger. A number of people I know have enjoyed the book thoroughly.
It begins with the discovery of a murdered body. The unraveling of this mystery occupies only part of the plot, which sprawls over much territory and is spun out from a great number of points of view. The result is less a whole story taking shape as seen from many angles than a collage of stories that impinge upon one another. But maybe that is the nature of frontier society: People of disparate backgrounds and aspirations find themselves in the same place, but as isolate souls. In this case, these are the waning days of the Hudson Bay Company's profitable trapping business -- the population of animals having been nearly wiped out -- and the sense of unconnectedness is amplified by a backdrop of plundered nature.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
