Fellowship & Fairydust

On November 28, I scoured a soon-to-be-closing bookstore for a copy of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. My second book club (yes, I attend multiple book clubs) had chosen it for our January meeting, so we’d all be reading it over Christmas. I had never read McCarthy but heard good things about him.

The bookstore, A Likely Story, didn’t have Blood Meridian in stock. Since it was going out of business on Christmas Eve and everything was 40 percent off, I bought $70 worth of other books I wanted.

A Likely Story was located near my town’s financial district, making it easy to find another place to check. Google Maps showed me Westside Stories was just over a mile away. I perused Westside’s bookshelves for 10 minutes before asking an employee. She tapped a few keys into her computer and informed me they didn’t have a copy of Blood Meridian. Since it felt wrong to leave without getting something, I bought a two-dollar paperback of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

At this point, I had been book-browsing for over two hours, and still had shopping to do. I decided to go franchise. Tattered Cover was a 14-minute drive away, and once inside, I found Blood Meridian within five minutes. I went home pleased and considered where this book would fit in my Christmas reading.

Midway into December, I put a plate of Christmas cookies on my living room coffee table. The wood stove was freshly fueled. I settled in, opened the book, and read about a character called the Kid fleeing home and becoming a 14-year-old mercenary in 1850s Texas. A chapter or so in, the Kid fights an earless man with a branded face called Toadvine. Clearly, this book was a long way away from my father’s Louis L’Amour paperbacks.

In fact, Blood Meridian has often been called an anti-Western. The Kid is the nominal hero, and most of the story involves him and Toadvine joining a group of scalp-hunters paid to target Native Americans around the Texas-Mexico border. McCarthy builds his story on historical facts. The scalp-hunter gang’s leaders, William Glanton and Judge Holden, truly existed, and in real life these men weren’t too particular about whether they scalped their intended targets. Some stories make the Wild West into a mythic story of adventure, glory, and riches. Blood Meridian is the ultimate demythologizing of the Wild West. I get 50 pages in (right before a three-page paragraph describing Comanches ravaging some soldiers) and decide this wasn’t right for Christmas.

The dilemma wasn’t the fact Blood Meridian is a dark book. I have read lots of dark books. However, I usually see something redemptive on the story’s margins to keep me going. Alternatively, I discover a research angle that interests me. I gladly read The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. by George Steiner because I was intrigued by Os Guinness calling it “one of the most controversial books of the twentieth century.”¹ I breezed through Heart of Darkness (well, as much as anyone can breeze through it) because I liked Apocalypse Now, and read anything I could find about how the book-movie connection. After reading Peter Kuper’s graphic novel Heart of Darkness, and seeing Playhouse 90’s bizarre 1958 movie Heart of Darkness, Conrad was easy.

With Blood Meridian, I was reading a dark story with no inoculation. Not because an author I respected had mentioned it. No hobby subject to ease me into its world. I would have to enter head first and see what happened.

In the middle of December, my library notified me that a copy of Blood Meridian I had put on hold was available. I canceled the request (made before I heard A Likely Story was closing  down).

I started reading again the first week of January, seven days before my book club meeting. I ran into an obstacle around page 185. Due to a printing error, 15 pages of my book were The Diary of Anne Frank. I went from one sentence that crawled off the page, about scalp-hunters guiding their horses across shifting sand dunes, to Anne pondering whether a boy named Peter will visit her soon. The fact I’ve never read The Diary of Anne Frank made it all the stranger.²

It was then I regretted canceling my library hold.

Fortunately, my library had 75 available copies of an online audiobook. I skipped along until I reached the sentence about sand dunes. I hadn’t missed much. The 15 pages were mostly McCarthy describing the scalp-hunters traveling between towns. Since my copy reverted back to Blood Meridian with a striking scene, I knew when to stop listening. I stopped at a scene where Judge Holden buys two puppies from a village child, and promptly drowns them. Very different from The Diary of Anne Frank.

I finished the book, unsure about its ending. After the Kid apparently dying and an image of Judge Holden dancing in a large hall, saying he will never die, McCarthy gives an epilogue about someone crawling along a barren landscape, making smelting holes in the ground. Critics are divided on what this means. Several say it’s a description of someone making fence post holes (dividing up the land, bringing an end to the wildness).³ Again, this is a book about demythologizing the West.

The day before my book club meets, I hung out with a few friends to discuss our writing. One of them (perhaps facetiously) suggested I write a compare and contrast essay on the Anne Frank pages and Blood Meridian. It wasn’t a bad idea. Yes, Anne Frank tells a very different story–a teenage girl wondering about her crush, about her parents’ uneven marriage, about what she’ll do when the war ends. Sad, tender reflections about growing up against a terrible backdrop.

However, like Blood Meridian, there is plenty of isolation and loneliness in The Diary of Anne Frank. The 15 pages felt even sadder when I realized the diary dates meant I knew something Anne didn’t know. The end was coming. The diary dates were for the early spring of 1944. Anne will be sent to a concentration camp in six months and dead in about a year. However, despite the tragedies that Anne knows (and doesn’t know), the story feels uplifted by Anne’s wit and feelings for Peter. It’s a story about pain, and how relationships keep us going.

Blood Meridian gives a starkly different vision of suffering. Like Ann, the Kid is displaced and struggling against his parents (he runs away from home at 14, his mother dies before he knows her). However, the Kid’s journey is a long endurance test with no romance or other relationships to carry him onward. He gets on with it. Then he doesn’t.

At the book club, my friend observed that the Kid’s stark journey becomes even starker because there’s no interior monologue. Not a single passage where McCarthy takes his readers into the characters’ heads; just actions and reactions. Like the book of Genesis, we get no insights into what the characters feel, just their responses. A very King James English tone.⁴ My friend described it as McCarthy operating like God—killing or not killing, letting characters survive or die as he chooses. Mount Sinai minus any of the Bible’s words about God’s mercy.

We all concluded that Blood Meridian is a well-written book. And that most of us won’t read it again soon. I made a personal commitment to finally read The Diary of Anne Frank.

Two weeks later, I returned to Tattered Cover. I held up my book and halfway through my first sentence, she said, “Anne Frank, right?” It turned out two or three other people had made the same complaint. I exchanged my copy for another. This time, I skimmed the pages to make sure it was Blood Meridian all the way through.

Since I can never leave a bookstore without buying something, I got another dark book. This one is by an author I have always found whimsical and kind, even when writing about dark things. It’s called The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. We’ll see what happens this time.

Postscript: As the book club meeting concluded, the host said, “Well, whatever we pick next, I want to read something very cheery.”

I suggested Angela’s Ashes.

NOTES:

1. Page 95 in The Call by Os Guinness. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2018.

2. In the eighth grade, I read the script for a play version of The Diary of Anne Frank (the 1990s Broadway production starring Natalie Portman, as my textbook’s photographs informed me), but never the original book. So, blame it on my public school education.

3. Busby, Mark. “Rolling the stone, sisyphus, and the epilogue of Blood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, summer 2011, pp. 87+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A270372893/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=db57178f. Accessed 24 Jan. 2023.

4. Aaron Gwyn of University of North Carolina-Charlotte sees this as a key element of McCarthy’s style. https://twitter.com/americangwyn/status/1613154023707738119.

Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash