James Carlos Blake Has Gone Up The Trail

One of the most important writers in the Frontier Partisans pantheon has gone up the long trail. James Carlos Blake, the outlaw bard of the borderlands, is dead at the age of 81.

It would be hard to overstate the impact Blake’s writing had on me. Hard-edged poetry that sang of men — often dark-souled men (John Wesley Hardin, Rodolfo Fierro, Prohibition bootlegger John Ashley, Bloody Bill Anderson) — who acted out the imperatives of their violent nature on dangerous frontiers. As I wrote back in 2012:

Blake’s protagonists are all badasses, if not downright sociopaths. They are violent and profoundly carnal; tales of such men, my mother would say, “have no redeeming value.” But in Blake’s hands, their stories are the stuff of epic, tragic poetry. For Blake’s heroes are doomed. His operating principle is stolen from Heraclitus: Character is Fate. Blake’s renegades cannot be other than what they are and their febrile character fits them solely for the fate of a searing flame, extinguished only in blood.

Their redeeming value, if redemption even matters in Blake’s world, is that they are true and authentic. Joseph Campbell might say that they follow their bliss, though their fate is never blissful, always violent and sometimes sordid.

Whatever their manifest faults, these are the ardenthearted, and like Cormac McCarthy’s John Grady Cole, Blake’s sympathies, for better or worse, lie among them.

Blake won accolades for his writing, but he never broke through to big-time literary stardom, which he certainly deserved, but maybe didn’t want.

From his NYT obit:

“He was a very important voice in American fiction, and he certainly had a lot of recognition regionally in Texas and the Southwest,” Morgan Entrekin, the president of Grove/Atlantic, one of Mr. Blake’s publishers, said in an interview. “But he never really reached that level of acclaim nationally.”

Perhaps it’s best that he remained what he knew himself to be: an outsider. As the man himself wrote in an LA Times essay titled The Outsider:

I’ve always been an outsider, an alien, a stranger in every tribe. That’s not a complaint or a boast or a plea for sympathy. And it’s certainly not a condition uncommon to others. Some feel like outsiders for obvious reasons, some for reasons more complex, some for reasons utterly and ever unknowable. In my own case, blood heritage and a borderland childhood no doubt played their parts.

Character is fate.