William Eastlake

BORN IN 1917 during the First World War, William Eastlake was old enough by the 1930s to experience the Great Depression and then to serve as a replacement infantryman in World War II. That war, and the following police actions and wars, served him as subject matter for two novels, but nothing made as large an impact on his writing as his experience living in the American Southwest. Four of his seven novels are set in New Mexico, and his two war novels include southwestern characters. As an "amateur rancher" and professional writer in northern New Mexico, Eastlake has learned to know the people–Anglo and Spanish ranchers, Navajo Indians, small town businessmen, the military and scientific communities of Los Alamos and Albuquerque, and even the strange and alien tourists who pass through his novels. Most of all, Eastlake has come to know the land, through both an intellectual understanding of its geological evolution and what Gerald Haslam has called his ability to feel, shamanistically, the emotional and spiritual relationship of the land to the people who live on it. He is, indeed, a western novelist, even though he was born in Brooklyn.

Before he was a year old, his family moved to Caldwell, New Jersey. When he was old enough for school, his parents enrolled him in an Episcopalian boarding school, Bonnie Brae, in nearby Liberty Corners. The school operated a farm, and the students did farm chores before and after classes. After this working education, he returned to Caldwell for high school and was graduated into the jobless world of the Great Depression. Like many other males, Eastlake decided to see something of America as a hobo, and he traversed the country hitchhiking and riding the rods, working at a variety of jobs where he could find them. He ended up as a clerk in Stanley Rose's bookstore in Los Angeles, where he not only met a young artist, Martha Simpson, whom he married, but a number of American writers, including William Saroyan, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathanael West. Then came the war, and Eastlake enlisted in the army in 1942. He trained in camps in California and Oregon, served for a time as a military policeman, but then signed up as a replacement in the infantry. In 1944 he was sent to England, and landed in the second wave of the Normandy invasion. He served in Belgium and France, and was wounded while leading a platoon during the Battle of the Bulge. He was returned to the United States, and was finally given a medical discharge from the Army in Van Nuys, California. He returned to Europe after the war when a former army buddy, also interested in writing, found a backer for a literary magazine. The backing lasted for only one issue, and Eastlake attended the Alliance Française for a semester under the GI Bill, studying French and history. He had a brief career as a professional soldier, writing propaganda, being a weapons instructor, and finally a border guard for Israel during the first of the Arab-Israeli wars. After he returned to America, he and Martha bought some land in Van Nuys, subdivided it, and built houses, designed by Martha, on the lots. They had become real estate developers in order to make the money necessary for writing and painting, but not, evidently, without suffering a good deal of guilt. No other occupation, with the possible exception of designing and building nuclear weapons, has received more satirical treatment in his novels than real estate development. After visiting several times with Martha's brother, paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, in the New Mexico mountain country, the Eastlakes decided to move there themselves. They found a four-hundred-acre ranch near Cuba, New Mexico, northwest of Santa Fe, and lived there until recently, when they moved to another ranch in Arizona.

William Eastlake has not become a tremendously popular writer either with eastern or western readers, nor has he been adequately treated by the critics, although his reputation among western critics is growing gradually. Almost all of his novels have received good reviews at the time of publication, but there has not yet been the continuing appreciation of his work that would lift his reputation to the first rank of writers. There are several reasons for this failure of the critical community. In the first place, as he told the editors of TriQuarterly's special western edition, "never . . . let a publisher put a picture of a horse on the dust jacket of any novel [you] might happen to publish. `The people who buy it will think it's some goddamned shoot-up, and they'll hate it when it isn't.'" 1 Another reason is that Eastlake is a highly individualistic and experimental writer. He once suggested, in discussing one of his contemporaries, that the writer would never become first rank because he would not take risks, he would not experiment, he was too content to remain in the mainstream of the naturalistic novel. Finally, although Eastlake has developed into a superb craftsman–especially as a sardonic humorist–his vision of the world and his approach to that vision have been too intellectual to satisfy most westerners and too uncompromisingly honest to please the easterners.

Eastlake's first three novels (Go in Beauty, 1956; The Bronc People, 1958; and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, 1963) are set in "Indian Country," the high mesa and mountain country in New Mexico, and any one of them could have featured a rider on horseback on its cover. Eastlake was immediately tagged as a "Western" writer, yet his works were not the type of "Westerns" that would sell.

The first, Go in Beauty, is an exceptionally good novel about betrayal–of brother betraying brother with slight suggestions of the Jacob and Esau relationship, or of Joseph and his brothers–and a resulting drought in the land. It is a complex novel concerned not only with the mystic relationship between man's sin and nature, or the earth, but also, since the older brother, Alexander, is a writer, with the writer's relationship to the spirituality of that land, his homeland, within himself. Thus, as the Indians know, when Alexander steals his younger brother's wife, rationalizing that the artist must experience everything, he loses his integrity and his meaning. The land dies, and only Alexander's return can bring the rain. But George, the younger brother, who had years ago left his older brother to die in a mine shaft and then played the hero by "discovering" him only when he was about to be discovered by someone else, is unable to call him home. After his artistic disintegration, Alexander is killed in Mexico, his body is returned to Indian Country, and the drought is ended. In this novel, the prevailing mood is elegiac; the land broods, in Eastlake's treatment, in a way that emphasizes what Gerald Haslam has called a "contrast between nature's slow, certain, yet dynamic time, and tense human temporality." 2 In the second novel, The Bronc People, the predominant mood toward the land is one of wonder and exhilaration–a celebration of nature and the land as beauty and continuum. The narrative perspective, a limited omniscience that follows closely the growth of two young boys, one white and one black, and their young Indian friends, allows Eastlake to maintain this powerfully celebratory mood throughout an episodic novel in which many of the episodes might otherwise seem only loosely integrated. It is a novel about Little Sant Bowman, who wants to grow up to be a "really" cowboy, and Alistair Benjamin, the black youth who "presumes" in his intellectual way to find some meaning to his heritage and his existence. If Go in Beauty can be said to be a novel about "loss," then The Bronc People may be called a novel about "finding." The novel begins with a gun battle between the black owner of the Circle R and the white owner of the Circle Heart, a battle made ludicrous by the comments of two Navajo Indians as they watch from a vantage point in the rocks just above Big Sant Bowman, the white owner of the Circle Heart. The Indians watch, amazed, as Big Sant critically wounds the Gran Negrito and then rushes into the burning cabin to try to save him. The Gran Negrito's son escapes and is taken to an orphanage by the Indians. Later, he finds his way back to Indian Country to find his past and is adopted by the Bowmans. The novel develops through the friendship and escapades of the sons of the two antagonists. In the end, Little Sant finds that he must leave home to become the bronc rider that he is meant to be, and Alistair Benjamin learns that revenge solves nothing, it merely continues the unreasonable hostility that is at the base of human conflict. More important, he learns from an old westerner, Blue-Eyed Billy Pearsall, that he must fight his own battles, that he must "do it alone." The Bronc People has deservedly received more detailed critical attention than any other Eastlake novel.

Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses is, perhaps, the least successful esthetically of these novels. The thread on which a number of shortstory-like episodes are strung concerns a "long day's dying" theme with Ring Bowman passively resisting the quicksand that threatens to kill him, while quietly watching the painting that his friend, Twenty-Six Horses, has painted on the face of the mountain. He remembers the meaningful episodes of his life that involve his, and his Indian friend's, estrangement from his father, trader George Bowman. As the novel progresses, the reader discovers that both Ring and Twenty-Six Horses have left home because George Bowman has taken a young Indian girl, Nice Hands, into his blue hogan. This novel, too, then, is about "finding," about finding one's way back to wholeness through tolerance and understanding. The nature described in this novel has a duality not clear in the earlier novels. In the arroyo, where there is quicksand, there are sinister shadows of evil. In the mountains, however, there is the clear air of freedom and the sun of vitality.

Not one of these western novels would appeal to the reader of formula Western fiction. Each is deeply charged with myth, is concerned with the contrast between the Indian belief in the individual's harmony with nature and the white man's materialistic manipulation of nature to fit his own needs, and is written in a gradually developing style that has become as identifiable as the style of a Hemingway or a Faulkner. John R. Milton, in discussing Eastlake's use of landscape, has described him as a "witty, ironic, and frequently irreverent writer . . . whose Indian novels are technically more suited to urbane readers." 3 Eastlake has experimented, and usually his experimentation has been successful. He has been called an absurdist, a surrealist, a black humorist. Frequently his humor is modern, yet he has adapted the traditional American humor of a Mark Twain to his own novelistic demands. There is, for example, the innocent American abroad, Sergeant Rossi of Castle Keep, who gives his clothes to a French laundry woman, and later throws her into the water.

That night the captain had him in his office, giving him hell with the irate laundrywoman shrieking, and Sergeant Rossi just kept repeating dully, "I caught her down there at the river beating the shit out of my clothes with a rock." 4

Or there is the literalist innocent, like Ben Helpnell in Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, who had bought a Monkey Ward pump.

The new pump was the latest thing, later even than the piston pump. It worked on the theory that "it is easier to push water than it is to pull it. It is a hermetically sealed, self-contained unit, and without any fuss or bother or expensive plumbers or electricians, you just drop the whole thing in the well." Ben had done that yesterday and since, he had been looking for it.5

There are absurd anachronisms, especially in Castle Keep, where soldiers during World War II go hunting deer with a crossbow; in The Long, Naked Descent into Boston there is a use of a hot-air balloon during the Revolutionary War. Startling incongruities, like the Indians watching the gun battle in The Bronc People, and commenting on it, or the use of the castle with its moat in modern warfare, are frequent in Eastlake's novels. Further, there are continual breaks in the pattern of expectation, where the boys in The Bronc People follow behind the trapper Charles Enright, picking up the supposedly poisoned meat that he drops for the coyotes, then cooking it and offering him some. He eats it and doesn't die, and when they find he has not been mixing poison with the meat, they accuse him of dishonesty. Eastlake is especially successful in pricking the bubble of man's pride, and especially in man's pride in his reason. In The Bronc People, not only do the young boys talk about the secret city where nationalistic scientists are creating bombs to blow up the world "before somebody else does," but Big Sant explains to the Indians that he is shooting at the Gran Negrito to keep him "from shooting at me."

Eastlake consistently plays with language in puns and double-entendres, through humorous revisions of literary quotations, and through contrasts between languages or even between levels of usage in English. In dialogue between characters, he is especially successful as a humorist. In the badinage between Little Sant and Alistair Benjamin in The Bronc People, as only one example, there are elements of vaudeville or minstrel-show techniques in which each character takes turns becoming the "straight man" for the other. Eastlake is also a master of constructing the humorously satirical situation. Finally, his novels are replete with humorous characters, such as Doris Bellwether in Portrait, the Texas man-hating wife of a nuclear weapons expert.

Seldom, however, is Eastlake's humor used for its own sake; the result finally is a satire on mankind and his foibles, and Eastlake finds much to satirize. Little seems sacred to Eastlake, leading, perhaps, to Milton's categorizing him as "irreverent." Yet, Eastlake is hardly irreverent except to mankind. He treats the earth, sacrality, and the indomitable spirit of man with a good deal of reverence.

In some ways, Eastlake's approach to the western experience is much like that of earlier western writers like Eugene Manlove Rhodes, who saw the bankers and the lawyers as the real villains in western development. Eastlake's villains are the "go-getters" in real estate development, the scientists and technologists who are intent on violating the earth and its creatures in the name of progress in weaponry and progress toward materialistic superficialities. He is almost as vehement in this position as Edward Abbey. Unfortunately for his western reputation, however, Eastlake is unable to treat man's problems simplistically, for he sees them in all their complexity. Eastlake's novels are extremely intellectual, reflecting his wide reading in literature, art, paleontology, biology, and a variety of other subjects. Further, Eastlake is not in the tradition of the historical novelist, which has been the major literary tradition in western American literature. He is a modernist in technique.

As a modernist whose work shows the influence of such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner in his earlier works, and of Heller and the revisionist-historians like Berger and Barth in his later works, it would seem that Eastlake would be more popular with eastern critics. This has not, however, been the case. Eastlake's Castle Keep, for example, employs his very individualistic adaptations of some of the techniques Joseph Heller used in Catch 22, but neither the novel nor the film made from it was nearly as successful as Catch 22. Yet Castle Keep may be one of the finest novels to come out of World War II. However, it does not have a protagonist with a Saroyan-like sensitivity to the horrors of war, nor does it have a simplistic division between the bad guys in the system and the good guys victimized by the system. One of the major concerns in Castle Keep, for example, is whether or not the castle, full of art treasures and symbolic of man's culture and civilization, should be held by the American forces trying to stop the German attack. If the Americans attempt to hold the castle, the Germans will certainly destroy it. For Eastlake, there can be no easy answers, for man is not only the creator of beauty–of music and art and literature–but he is also the rapacious predator whose very nature has caused him to create organized warfare. It is Eastlake's unflinching, unblinking, satiric eye that allows him to examine the problem without sentimentality in a novel that successfully blends a surrealistic and mythic treatment of the castle and its environs, including the Red Queen's bar, with a certain amount of realism, and some highly imaginary situations that fade in and out of realism into absurdity. It is a novel peopled by some at times amazingly realistic characters who drift from reality into the symbolic structures of the novel, characters who, as one of them admits, are all out of "an undying past." They, and particularly Major Falconer, a western Ahab with both legs but only one eye, are archetypal characters who have found an author.

There is something of the same in The Bamboo Bed, Eastlake's novel of the Vietnamese war. There is again the same mythologizing, although it is in some ways a more realistic novel. Once more, however, Eastlake produced a novel that would not be popular. It was not a novel that specifically attacked the war in Viet Nam; it was a novel that attacked war as a condition of man–the result of his folly–and not as a piece of political propaganda.

Unfortunately, Eastlake's last two novels have been his least satisfying artistically. In the first of these, Dancers in the Scalphouse, he returns to the Southwest. The plot, bizarre enough to match most of the novel's characters, centers around attempts by the Navajo to blow up a dam built to provide recreational facilities for the whites in northern New Mexico. The Indians have sent one of their own children to the white man's school and then to the university in Albuquerque, where he learns how to make a nuclear weapon. At the last moment, however, the Indians are too sane to allow an atomic explosion, and their land and homes are covered by the rising waters behind the new dam. A concurrent theme concerns the killing of eagles, and a young white teacher named Mary-Forge is involved in both plots. The novel demonstrates Eastlake's humorous talents during various episodes, but the overall effectiveness is lessened in this novel by sentimentality, especially in the characterizations of Mary-Forge, and the oversimplification of all positions in the novel, both white and Indian.

His most recent novel, The Long, Naked Descent into Boston, is an absurdist recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill. It does not in any way enhance his reputation as a western writer, although it may be his most controlled satire to date. Unfortunately, it has not received much critical attention.

William Eastlake's career has been marked by experimentation. Because of his experimentation, he has not yet received the attention he deserves, even from scholars of western American literature. Thus, his abilities as a humorist and satirist have not been adequately recognized. His first three novels, Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses, have been his most successful, at least from the western perspective, and they are enough to guarantee him a high place in the ranks of contemporary western writers.

DELBERT E. WYLDER Murray State University

Notes

1. William Kittredge and Steven M. Krauzer, "Writers of the New West," TriQuarterly 48 (Spring 1980): 10.

2. Gerald Haslam, Introduction to William Eastlake's The Bronc People (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 5.

3. John R. Milton, The Novel of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 174.

4. William Eastlake, Castle Keep (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 86.

5. William Eastlake, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 19.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources (in chronological order)

"Ishimoto's Land." Essai 1 (Summer 1952): 9–18.
"Homecoming." Quarto 6 (Fall 1954): 17–28.
"Little Joe." Accent 14 (Autumn 1954): 273–83.
Go in Beauty. New York: Harper, 1956.
"The Bandits." Harper's Magazine 213 (September 1956): 56–62.
The Bronc People. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.
Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963.
Castle Keep. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.
"There's a Camel in My Cocktail." Harper's Magazine 232 (April 1966): 63–68.
"Jack Armstrong in Tangier." Evergreen Review 10 (August 1966): 24–27.
"The Last Frenchman in Fez." Evergreen Review 11 (December 1967): 44–46, 93–95.
"Now Lucifer Is Not Dead." Evergreen Review 12 (November 1968): 22–25, 69–71.
"The Hanging at Prettyfields." Evergreen Review 13 (February 1969): 67–68.
"Dead Man's Guide to Mallorca." New Mexico Quarterly 38 (Winter-Spring 1969): 9–19.
The Bamboo Bed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969.
"The Dancing Boy." Evergreen Review 14 (December 1970): 34–37, 68–69.
Three by Eastlake (Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.
A Child's Garden of Verses for the Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1970.
Dancers in the Scalphouse. New York: The Viking Press, 1975.
The Long, Naked Descent into Boston. New York: The Viking Press, 1977.
"Don't Be Afraid, the Clown's Afraid Too." South Shore: An International Review of the Arts 1 (1978): 66–75.

Secondary Sources

Abbey, Edward. "William Eastlake: Para Mi Amigo." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 18–20. Comments on the qualities he finds in Eastlake and his writing, and finds the qualities "add up to greatness."

Angell, Richard C. "Eastlake: At Home and Abroad." New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 204–9. The most complete biographical information on Eastlake through 1964.

Barnes, Barbara E. "Debunking the Myth of the West." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 62–68. In The Bronc People, Eastlake destroys the typical myths of the old West, and perhaps creates his own.

Bowering, George. "Portrait of a Horse with Twenty-Six Artists." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 55–62. Discusses art as a theme in Castle Keep, and considers the novel "one of the great novels in U.S. literature." Sees Eastlake as an artistic humanist in this essay, one of the most successful discussions of Castle Keep.

Creeley, Robert. "Cowboys and Indians." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 53–55. An appreciation of Eastlake as both man and writer.

Graham, Don. "William Eastlake's First Novel: An Account of the Making of Go in Beauty." Western American Literature 16 (Spring 1981): 27–37. A "genesisoriented" study of the revisions of Go in Beauty, and the correspondence between Eastlake and his editor during the process.

Haslam, Gerald. William Eastlake. Southwest Writers Series, No. 36. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1970. This well-done volume is still the most important analysis of the early novels.

. "William Eastlake." In Fifty Western Writers, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. This article includes a short biography, a discussion of major themes, and a survey of the criticism of a writer that Haslam believes "most clearly, provocatively, and controversially bridges the gap between the modern western novel and contemporary revisionist expression."

. "William Eastlake: Portrait of the Artist as Shaman." Western Review 8 (Spring 1971): 2–13. Concentrates on the ability of Eastlake to merge time and space and land, along with people and their relationship to the land, shamanistically rather than intellectually, through feeling rather than reason.

. "The Southwestern Novels of William Eastlake." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 20–26. Eastlake's "major thematic concern in his Southwestern novels has been exposing of negative aspects of contemporary American civilization."

Lindroth, James R. "Poetry, Abstraction, and the Comedy of Dream: William Eastlake's Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 27–31. Discusses Eastlake as "an artist whose work is always a magic of linguistic transformation." Sees Portrait as the transformation of death, through form, into comedy.

McCaffery, Larry. "Absurdity and Oppositions in William Eastlake's Southwestern Novels." Critique 19 (1977): 62–76. A study in the structure of the southwestern novels.

. "Style in Eastlake's Southwestern Novels: Personal Visions and Digressions." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 31–41. Believes that Eastlake's lack of success is a result of his "stylistic peculiarities," which are discussed quite thoroughly, along with an interesting description of a dinner with Eastlake.

McPheron, William. "The Critical Reception of William Eastlake." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 84–92. A carefully controlled discussion of critical reactions to Eastlake's work, plus some fine insight into the artistic problem created when "Eastlake's distrust of society finally overwhelmed his confidence in art's redemptive powers."

. "William Eastlake: A Checklist." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 93–105. So far, this is the most complete bibliography on Eastlake.

Milton, John R. "The Land as Form in Frank Waters and William Eastlake." Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 104–9. A comparison between Waters's and Eastlake's use of land, including valleys and mountains, secular and spiritual values.

. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. A short analysis of Eastlake's use of land, based on the article in Kansas Quarterly.

Mottram, Eric. "The Limits of Survival with the Weapons of Humor." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 68–83. Believes that Eastlake's fiction deals with an "important revision of Slotkin's thesis in Regeneration Through Violence and a fulfillment of D. H. Lawrence's vision of men giving up `their absolute whiteness.' "

O'Brien, John. "Interview with William Eastlake." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 4–17. An interview in 1978 in which Eastlake discusses influences on his writing, concepts of realism, and theories of writing.

Wachtel, Albert. "Eastlake: The Artist as Director of Revels." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 49–53. Eastlake is essentially a moral writer–a fabulist rather than a mythological writer.

Wylder, Delbert E. "The Novels of William Eastlake." New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 188–203. The first full-length critical article on Eastlake. Limited to the first three novels.

. "William Eastlake: Satiric Voice Looking for a Form." The Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 42–49. Presents the view that Eastlake is less a "western" writer than a satirist and an experimentalist in form.

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