Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Paul Valéry

  It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

  Jacob Boehme

  Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.

  The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982

  The epigraph from Valéry is taken from “The Yalu,” a dialogue between the poet and a Chinese scholar who tells the Westerner:

  You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

  The Boehme is from Six Theosophic Points:

  And yet it is not to be thought that the life of darkness sinks down into misery, that it would forget itself as if it were sorrowful. There is no sorrowing; but what with us on earth is sorrowing according to this property, is in the darkness power and joy according to the property of the darkness. For sorrowfulness is a thing that is swallowed up in death. But death and dying is the life of the darkness, just as anguish is the life of the poison. The greater the anguish becomes in the poison, the stronger becomes the poison-life, as is to be seen in the external poison.

  Boehme, like Zohar, is not easy reading. Late in his career, he seems to have read some Kabbalistic texts. No comment needs to be made on the third epigraph, which would have delighted Judge Holden. Blood Meridian begins with a vision of its protagonist, the Kid:

  See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

  Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

  The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

  In 1802, William Wordsworth wrote “My Heart Leaps Up”:

  My heart leaps up when I behold

  A rainbow in the sky:

  So was it when my life began;

  So is it now I am a man;

  So be it when I shall grow old,

  Or let me die!

  The Child is father of the Man;

  And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety.

  I do not believe that Cormac McCarthy is employing Wordsworth ironically. The brutality of the context contaminates the Kid with “a taste for mindless violence.” That violence starts on the next page, when the fifteen-year-old Kid is shot in the back and just below the heart, and continues almost with no respite until the end, twenty-eight years later, when Judge Holden, the most frightening figure in all of American literature, smothers the Kid in an outhouse.

  Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. The novel changed radically as McCarthy worked at it, particularly when the Judge began to be, together with the Kid, a central figure. And the book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.

  Even as you learn to endure the slaughter McCarthy describes, you become accustomed to the book’s high style, again as overtly Shakespearean as it is Faulknerian. There are passages of Melvillean-Faulknerian baroque richness and intensity in The Crying of Lot 49, and elsewhere in Pynchon, but we can never be sure that they are not parodistic. The prose of Blood Meridian soars, yet with its own economy, and its dialogue is always persuasive, particularly when the uncanny Judge Holden speaks:

  The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

  Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everthing on this earth, he said.

  The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

  Judge Holden is the spiritual leader of Glanton’s filibusters, and McCarthy persuasively gives the self-styled judge a mythic status, appropriate for a deep Machiavelli whose “thread of order” recalls Iago’s magic web, in which Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio are caught. Though all of the more colorful and murderous raiders are vividly characterized for us, the killing machine Glanton with the others, the novel turns always upon its two central figures, Judge Holden and the Kid. We first meet the Judge on page 6: “an enormous man, bald as a stone…no trace of a beard,” and eyes without either brows or lashes. A seven-foot-tall albino, he almost seems to have come from some other world, and we learn to wonder about the Judge, who never sleeps, dances and fiddles with extraordinary art and energy, rapes and murders little children of both sexes, and who says that he will never die. By the book’s close, I have come to believe that the Judge is immortal. And yet the Judge, while both more and less than human, is as individuated as Iago or Macbeth, and is quite at home in the Texan-Mexican borderlands where we watch him operate in 1849–50, and then find him again in 1878, not a day older after twenty-eight years, though the Kid, a sixteen-year-old at the start of Glanton’s foray, is forty-four when murdered by the Judge at the end.

  Here is the first, wonderfully outrageous, manifestation of the Judge:

  The kid nodded. An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close on to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.

  The reverend had stopped his sermon altogether. There was no sound in the tent. All watched the man. He adjusted the hat and then pushed his way forward as far as the crateboard pulpit where the reverend stood and there he turned to address the reverend’s congregation. His face was serene and strangely childlike. His hands were small. He held them out.

  Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an imposter. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing here bef
ore you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

  Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.

  On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God.

  A moan swept through the crowd. A lady sank to her knees.

  This is him, cried the reverend, sobbing. This is him. The devil. Here he stands.

  The superb talent of the Judge for theatrical improvisation is immediately in play:

  These here is on the judge, he said.

  They drank. The teamster set his glass down and looked at the kid or he seemed to, you couldnt be sure of his gaze. The kid looked down the bar to where the judge stood. The bar was that tall not every man could even get his elbows up on it but it came just to the judge’s waist and he stood with his hands placed flatwise on the wood, leaning slightly, as if about to give another address. By now men were piling through the doorway, bleeding, covered in mud, cursing. They gathered about the judge. A posse was being drawn to pursue the preacher.

  Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?

  Goods? said the judge.

  When was you in Fort Smith?

  Fort Smith?

  Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?

  You mean the Reverend Green?

  Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.

  I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.

  They looked from one to the other.

  Well where was it you run up on him?

  I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.

  He raised his glass and drank.

  There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

  McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the Judge in their final debate in a saloon. But though the Kid’s moral maturation is heartening, his personality remains largely a cipher, as anonymous as his lack of a name. The three glories of the book are the Judge, the landscape, and (dreadful to say this) the slaughters, which are aesthetically distanced by McCarthy in a number of complex ways.

  Judge Holden was, like John Joel Glanton, an actual freebooter. In the summer of 1849, after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, Glanton, Judge Holden, and a mercenary group of thugs were commissioned by Mexico to destroy the Apaches. Since the Glanton Gang was paid by the scalp, they proceeded to butcher and scalp Mexicans as well as Indians. By December 1849, the government of Chihuahua denounced them as outlaws and offered a bounty for their destruction. Glanton, Holden, and the others went to Arizona, where they usurped the ferry at Yuma on the Colorado, an essential transit point for anyone going out to or returning from the California Gold Rush. They murdered both Mexican and American prospectors, stole their gold, and then made the mistake of killing some Yuma Native Americans. On April 23, 1850, Glanton and almost all of his gang were slain and scalped by a large band of Yumas. Whether the historical Judge Holden was one of the survivors is unknown.

  The rogue Samuel Chamberlain is quoted in John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian (2008):

  The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontreras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

  Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

  He also was fluent regarding the ancient races of Indians that at a remote period covered the desert with fields of corn, wheat, barley and melons, and built large cities with canals bringing water from rivers hundreds of miles distant. To my question “how he knew all this,” this encyclopaedian Scalp Hunter replied, “Nature, these rocks, this little broken piece of clay (holding up a little fragment of painted pottery such [as] are found all over the desert), the ruins scattered all over the land, tell me the story of the past.”

  Chamberlain rather strangely refers to Holden as “another Admirable Crichton,” a reference to the resourceful butler in J. M. Barrie’s 1902 play. Only the resourcefulness is in common. The rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl is very much the mode of Judge Holden.

  What are we to make of the Judge? He is immortal as principle, as War Everlasting, but is he a person, or something other? McCarthy will not tell us, which is all the better, since the ambiguity is fecund. Melville’s Captain Ahab, though a Promethean demigod, is necessarily mortal, and perishes with the Pequod and all its crew, except for Ishmael. After he has killed the Kid, Blood Meridian’s Ishmael, Judge Holden is the last survivor of Glanton’s scalping crusade. Destroying the Native American nations of the Southwest is hardly analogous to the hunt to slay Moby-Dick, and yet McCarthy gives us some curious parallels between the two quests. The most striking is between Melville’s Chapter 19, where a ragged prophet who calls himself Elijah warns Ishmael and Queequeg against sailing on the Pequod, and McCarthy’s Chapter IV, where “an old disordered Mennonite” warns the Kid and his comrades not to join Captain Worth’s filibusters, a disaster that preludes the greater catastrophe of Glanton’s campaign.

  McCarthy’s invocation of Moby-Dick, though impressive and suggestive, in itself does not do much to illuminate Judge Holden for us. Ahab has his preternatural aspects, yet these are transparencies compared with the enigmas of Judge Holden, who seems to judge the entire earth, and whose name suggests a holding, presumably of sway over all he encounters. McCarthy tells us as much as he is willing, in the Kid’s dream visions of Judge Holden, toward the close of the novel:

  In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by whic
h to reckon his commencing.

  I think that McCarthy is warning his reader that the Judge is Moby-Dick rather than Ahab. As another white enigma, the albino Judge, like the albino whale, cannot be slain. Melville, a professed Gnostic, who believed that some “anarch hand or cosmic blunder” had divided us into two fallen sexes, gives us a Manichean quester in Ahab. McCarthy gives Judge Holden the powers and purposes of the bad angels or Demiurges that the Gnostics called Archons, but he warns us not to make such an identification. No “system,” including the Gnostic one, will divide the Judge back into his origins. The “ultimate atavistic egg” will not be found. What can the reader do with the haunting and terrifying Judge?

  Let us begin by saying that Judge Holden, though his gladsome prophecy of eternal war is authentically universal, is first and foremost a Western American, no matter how cosmopolitan his background (he speaks all languages, knows all arts and sciences, and can perform magical, shamanistic metamorphoses). The Texan-Mexican border is a superb place for a war god like the Judge to be. He carries a rifle, mounted in silver, with its name inscribed under the checkpiece: Et In Arcadia Ego. In the American Arcadia, death is also always there, incarnated in the Judge’s weapon, which never misses. I resort, though, as before, to Iago, who transfers war from the camp and the field to every other locale, and is a pyromaniac setting everything and everyone ablaze with the flame of battle. The Judge might be Iago before Othello begins, when the war god Othello was still worshipped by his “honest” color officer, his ancient or ensign. The Judge speaks with an authority that chills me even as Iago leaves me terrified:

  This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.