Butcher's Crossing was one of the first serious books on the West. Today it's a Nicholas Cage movie.
Today, October 20, Butcher's Crossing — the film starring Nicolas Cage that's based on the novel by John Williams — opens at theaters across the country. To mark the occasion, we're republishing this November 2010 piece by Alan Prendergast on the Denver author and educator.
Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past...wanted to write — clear as a mountain creek, without gimmicks or glitz, almost without words. It was the kind of seemingly effortless performance that requires tremendous skill and profound reserves of discipline and love.
The memories and papers tell a Williams kind of story — tough and unexpected and utterly without apology. By junior high, John had become a voracious reader, was working in a bookstore and dreamed of becoming a writer. A teacher's praise for an essay he wrote on the movie actor Ronald Colman all but sealed the deal."It was one of the first compliments I ever had in my life about anything I'd done, and I said, 'My God, I've found my vocation,'" he recalled years later.
Nearly a thousand men and 600 transport planes were lost flying the hump — to enemy fire, deadly weather or treacherous landing strips hacked out of the jungle. Williams flew dozens of missions. He contracted malaria and saw the ravages of famine in India. Once, while lost with a volunteer squad sent to retrieve dog tags from bloated corpses in a downed plane, he was reduced to roasting monkeys on a spit.
In 1945 Williams returned to civilian life. He spent some time with his family, who had moved to California, then drifted to Key West, where he helped launch a radio station. He continued to tinker with his novel, sending drafts off to New York editors, who called it an overblown, overwritten short story. Discouraged but stubborn, Williams sent the manuscript to Alan Swallow.
Dr. Williams collected his degree in 1954 and headed back to Colorado, to accept the only teaching job he'd been offered. Swallow had stepped down at DU in order to pursue his publishing business, and Williams succeeded him as director of the university's budding writing program. Miller shot, and reloaded, and shot, and loaded again. The acrid haze of gunsmoke thickened around them; Andrews coughed and breathed heavily and put his face near the ground where the smoke was thinner.
In addition to teaching prosody, the modern novel and other English courses, Williams had built the writing program into one of the most academically demanding in the country, reasoning that most writers would have to find teaching jobs in order to support themselves. A doctoral candidate in creative writing was required to take the same load of courses as Ph.D. candidates in English literature, while producing a dissertation that might be a novel or a book of poetry.
The camaraderie extended to graduate students, too, some of whom were as old or older than the youthful faculty. After lecturing in a fog of cigarette smoke through his allotted class time, Williams would adjourn to the Campus Inn with a gaggle of students in tow. A Williams writing workshop wasn't the sort of group therapy one finds in MFA programs these days — but it wasn't a ritual of humiliation, either."He would criticize a story as being 'the great unwritten story' that was still in the writer's head — he didn't get it out on the page," says Joe Nigg, who went to DU in the 1970s and has since authored several books on mythical beasts."He wasn't mean at all.
"I had just withstood a very ugly workshop that he felt was off the mark," she says."I was attempting a type of prose that John felt very strongly couldn't be taught, but he knew I would find all the tools I needed in the great writers." He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man.
One of the book's fans was poet and Dante translator John Ciardi, who presided over the oldest and most hallowed writing workshop in the country: the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. Ciardi invited Williams to join the staff of the two-week gathering, and he became a regular for the next seven summers, until Ciardi's departure in 1972. For Williams, it was an intense and exhilarating escape from routine, a chance to connect with the literary world well beyond Denver.
"It was a feast of vanity," says novelist Seymour Epstein, who met Williams in 1966, when they were both at Bread Loaf for the first time."A lot of drinking and a lot of talking." Yet there were peculiar gaps in the conversation. Williams never talked about the war with Epstein. And he was not given to shop talk, not only about his own work but about that of other writers.
Largely on Irving Howe's recommendation, Williams obtained a Rockefeller grant that allowed him to visit Italy and scout the locations where it all happened. He also spent long hours scouring ancient texts in translation. "But that's one of the interesting things about his drinking. All that rage was stored up, and it came out when he started his nightly booze — directed at the wrong targets. He could get very aggressive."
In the late 1970s, Williams was diagnosed with emphysema. He started showing up on campus tethered to an oxygen tank, but he refused to let it interfere with his long-established classroom routine. He'd take a puff of a cigarette, then a puff of oxygen, then resume his lecture.by health troubles and rising grumpiness — about the state of education, the ugly new glass buildings downtown, the way Denver was starting to look as"fakey" as every other place.
A fuss was made, finally, on March 29, 1986, with a series of readings and panels at DU and the Denver Public Library focusing on Williams's work. The guest of honor drove out from Fayetteville and basked in the appreciation and opportunity to see old friends — in some cases, for the last time. A special issue of the, the literary journal that Williams had founded twenty years earlier, was devoted entirely to essays, interviews and his work.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Lawmakers urge action to protect San Antonio's missions amid recent vandalismDoors, walls and holy objects hundreds of years old have been damaged in recent years
Read more »
10 Harsh Realities Of Rewatching The First Mortal Kombat Movie, 28 Years Later1995's Mortal Kombat was a trailblazer in the genre of video game movies, but the film's many missteps are distractingly obvious upon a rewatch.
Read more »
7 Superpowers Wolverine Still Hasn't Used 23 Years After Hugh Jackman First Donned The ClawsHugh Jackman's 23-year tenure as Wolverine still hasn't come to an end, but there is still a plethora of superpowers Wolverine hasn't used on-screen.
Read more »
Las Vegas Aces beat N.Y. Liberty, become first repeat WNBA champs in 21 yearsThe Las Vegas Aces became the first team in 21 years to win back-to-back WNBA championships, getting 24 points and 16 rebounds from A'ja Wilson and a...
Read more »
Las Vegas Aces beat New York Liberty, become first repeat WNBA champs in 21 yearsThe Las Vegas Aces became the first team in 21 years to win back-to-back WNBA championships, getting 24 points and 16 rebounds from A'ja Wilson and a defensive stop in the closing seconds to beat the New York Liberty 70-69 in Game 4 of the Finals on Wednesday night.
Read more »
Las Vegas Aces become first repeat WNBA champs in 21 years, beating NY LibertyThe Las Vegas Aces became the first team in 21 years to win back-to-back WNBA championships.
Read more »