Blood Meridian is a hard book to recommend to people. It is brilliant and unforgettable. It is violent and gruesome.
Those things are not separable.
It’s a post-Civil War tale of The Kid (never named) as he joins a marauding band of scalp hunters in the borderlands between Mexico and what will eventually become part of the United States. Led by John Glanton, this gang commits atrocities everywhere it goes while it hunts down assorted bands of Apaches and Comanches committing comparable atrocities wherever they go.
One lesson: if you are in charge of a small town in this country and you decide to hire Glanton to rid you of the threat of a murderous tribe threatening to rampage through your town, just know that the cure is as bad as the disease. But, that lesson doesn’t have a lot of relevance to you, Dear Reader.
Instead, let us turn to Judge Holden, who summarizes the fundamental message of the book thus:
If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is it once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.
Judge Holden celebrates the degeneracy of man. He is, after all, the devil.
Holden is without a doubt one of the most terrifying villains in literature. Larger than life, he rides with Glanton’s gang as they move from atrocity to atrocity. All the while, he offers a commentary on the world, recording every thing he finds in his leather notebook right before destroying those things.
Why keep this record of things he will destroy? “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent….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 everything on his earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the 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.
I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.
From the beginning until the end, the Judge hovers over the book, finding that thread of order by destroying everything around it. The Judge is the ruler of this world. Do you doubt it? Recall: Satan offered the world to Christ, but Christ turned down the offer.
You read Blood Meridian and you know you would never want to meet the Judge face-to-face. You close the book in a bit of relief that he is just fictional. Except he isn’t fictional at all. Blood Meridian is a work of fiction, but it is, as they say in Hollywood, based on a true story.
The source is Samuel E Chamberlain’s autobiography, My Confession. Chamberlain tells of joining a marauding gang of scalp hunters led by John Glanton. A surprising number of the horrific events in the novel are right there in this autobiographical tale. You want to think that McCarthy is making this all up, but the violence was very real.
The biggest shock of My Confessions is the second in command in Glanton’s crew is none other than Judge Holden. Chamberlain deftly sketches the nature of Holden in two paragraphs. The only way you could tell that the following two paragraphs are from the true autobiography and not the world of fiction is the difference in style. The description of Holden fits either one.
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 Fronteras 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 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 anywhere he had the advantage and 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 department 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.
So much for your sigh of relief that Holden is purely a work of fiction.
Holden is evil; there is really no other word for him. He has all the beguiling charm of evil; a perfect example of Milton’s Satan Problem in which the evil character in Paradise Lost is the most fascinating person in the tale of the revolt in Heaven and on earth. When Holden is on the scene, you cannot look away.
What do you do when you face evil? McCarthy’s brilliance as a novelist comes in the fact, that when you read the novel, you know exactly what you do, because McCarthy put you in the novel. You are The Kid.
You don’t think you are The Kid because you haven’t joined a gang of people committing one atrocity after another. After all, you haven’t scalped anyone lately. You just go along with the flow of things, not really doing anything particularly bad. Exactly like The Kid.
A fortune teller with a pack of Tarot Cards entertains Glanton’s Gang one night in the desert. The Judge points the fortune teller in the direction of The Kid, who draws a card. Four of Cups. The novel does not explain the significance of this card, but fortunately we have Google. Four of Cups is the card indicating apathy or disillusionment. You don’t really notice it that much when just reading this story of horrors, but as soon as you step back and isolate the Kid, you realize that Apathy is indeed the right description. Here we have someone surrounded by sadistic evildoers and The Kid just floats along.
The Kid knows what is happening is evil and wrong. He is himself the violent type, but we see throughout the story he has the remnants of a moral code which keep him from going that far, as if he is thinking that as long as he hasn’t actually scalped anyone lately, he isn’t that bad. As the Judge himself says to The Kid, “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”
In the face of evil, The Kid was apathetic. The Judge again: “For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”
If I had to name one novel from the last 50 years that is the best description of the age in which we live, Blood Meridian is it. Our problem, the problem of our generation, is that we are perfectly happy to isolate wrongdoing in an individual here and there and sometimes we are even willing to say this or that person is evil. But, we do not want to face up to the fact that the degeneracy of man is all around us. We do not like to acknowledge that human depravity is very real and omnipresent. We have no ground on which to stand. And so, we roll with the times, and every now and then we do something that seems a bit kind, like abandoning a wounded man in the desert rather than shooting him, as a way of convincing ourselves we aren’t that bad.
What if Blood Meridian is right. What if the world in which we live is every bit this bad. What if Judge Holden is real and walks among us. Those aren’t really even questions; you know those things are true. And you, like me and so very many others, draws the Four of Cups and just keep on going.
