Once during one of the periods when we were traveling Elaine and I visited the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, an hour and three-quarters east of Tucson. It seemed like the sort of place we might enjoy for a while. We found a desert trailer park a few miles outside Bisbee and paid for a month.
There were odd folks staying there . . . besides us, I mean. There was a woman and her dog who lived in her pickup truck with a cab-over camper. She ran a quick-lube kind of place in Bisbee. She said she was an Indian Princess. We didn’t question her on that—people who live out in the desert are generally tough folks and not particularly open to one’s questioning their veracity. People in that part of the state, we’d noticed, carried guns openly and favored camp trailers over doublewides for permanent residences.
We took long walks and read and slept away some afternoons. We often went into Bisbee and walked its hilly and odd little streets. We took our mail by General Delivery at the town post office and we enjoyed the town library and a quirky used bookshop.
I remembered that the writer William Eastlake—whose work I admired greatly and whom I’d included in my anthology, Growing Old—when I’d written him via his publisher for permission to include a chapter from one of his novels, had responded with a letter postmarked and with a return address in Bisbee. I recalled, too, how he’d kindly noted my plea of poverty by saying that, sure, I could use the piece, and send him “fifty bucks.” Or, he added, if I didn’t have the money that was okay, too.
I had entered his address into a notebook I had with me on the trip and I wrote him a short note telling him who I was and where we were and that I’d sure enough like to meet him if he was so inclined. In a couple of days I had a postcard with a phone number, asking me to call. When I did so, we made plans to meet for lunch at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee. He said that Marilyn would be with him. I assumed this to be his wife, and referred to her as Marilyn Eastlake until she informed me some time later that she was not his wife, but rather his companion. And she was his devoted companion, to be sure, and came to be a good friend to Elaine and me over the next few years.
People who know Eastlake’s work are apt to call him “a writer’s writer.” I have been an admirer of the work since the spring of 1980 when I was preparing to teach a course on the Western Novel at the University of Oklahoma. A friend at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—himself a writer—urged me to consider one of Eastlake’s novels for the course. He recommended The Bronc People.
That summer I read and reread the early novels--Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist With Twenty-Six Horses—and a later fictional return to Indian Country, Dancers in the Scalp House. I recall being struck by the skill with which Eastlake made his wonderful Indian characters. These were not the Indians I was used to in fiction. These Indians spoke with remarkable voices—not the stereotypically syrupy, sentimental, noble-savage voices to which I was accustomed, but rather they uttered their truths in hard-biting, funny, and ironic twists the likes of which I had not before come across.
Those four novels—the Indian Country novels—remain my favorites among the Eastlake canon (Go in Beauty, the first published, remains my favorite). As I said, in a collection of what I considered then to be some of the best Southwestern writing, I included a chapter from Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses.
To say that Eastlake has had an influence on my own writing—indeed, on my way of looking at the world—does not suggest the extent of that influence. I have described elsewhere how the original publisher of my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, wanted me to revise dialogue because—as he put it—“an Indian wouldn’t talk that way.” How I dismissed his oddly disparaging and clearly inappropriate remark immediately as the stereotype-reinforcing foolishness it was chiefly because William Eastlake had exploded that particular myth once and for all in his writing: Indians, Eastlake had shown us, can talk any way anyone else can.
And so we met at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee. We sat on the shady patio-porch and drank beer and gin and ate hamburgers and talked for two hours.
There were odd folks staying there . . . besides us, I mean. There was a woman and her dog who lived in her pickup truck with a cab-over camper. She ran a quick-lube kind of place in Bisbee. She said she was an Indian Princess. We didn’t question her on that—people who live out in the desert are generally tough folks and not particularly open to one’s questioning their veracity. People in that part of the state, we’d noticed, carried guns openly and favored camp trailers over doublewides for permanent residences.
We took long walks and read and slept away some afternoons. We often went into Bisbee and walked its hilly and odd little streets. We took our mail by General Delivery at the town post office and we enjoyed the town library and a quirky used bookshop.
I remembered that the writer William Eastlake—whose work I admired greatly and whom I’d included in my anthology, Growing Old—when I’d written him via his publisher for permission to include a chapter from one of his novels, had responded with a letter postmarked and with a return address in Bisbee. I recalled, too, how he’d kindly noted my plea of poverty by saying that, sure, I could use the piece, and send him “fifty bucks.” Or, he added, if I didn’t have the money that was okay, too.
I had entered his address into a notebook I had with me on the trip and I wrote him a short note telling him who I was and where we were and that I’d sure enough like to meet him if he was so inclined. In a couple of days I had a postcard with a phone number, asking me to call. When I did so, we made plans to meet for lunch at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee. He said that Marilyn would be with him. I assumed this to be his wife, and referred to her as Marilyn Eastlake until she informed me some time later that she was not his wife, but rather his companion. And she was his devoted companion, to be sure, and came to be a good friend to Elaine and me over the next few years.
People who know Eastlake’s work are apt to call him “a writer’s writer.” I have been an admirer of the work since the spring of 1980 when I was preparing to teach a course on the Western Novel at the University of Oklahoma. A friend at the University of Alabama at Birmingham—himself a writer—urged me to consider one of Eastlake’s novels for the course. He recommended The Bronc People.
That summer I read and reread the early novels--Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist With Twenty-Six Horses—and a later fictional return to Indian Country, Dancers in the Scalp House. I recall being struck by the skill with which Eastlake made his wonderful Indian characters. These were not the Indians I was used to in fiction. These Indians spoke with remarkable voices—not the stereotypically syrupy, sentimental, noble-savage voices to which I was accustomed, but rather they uttered their truths in hard-biting, funny, and ironic twists the likes of which I had not before come across.
Those four novels—the Indian Country novels—remain my favorites among the Eastlake canon (Go in Beauty, the first published, remains my favorite). As I said, in a collection of what I considered then to be some of the best Southwestern writing, I included a chapter from Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses.
To say that Eastlake has had an influence on my own writing—indeed, on my way of looking at the world—does not suggest the extent of that influence. I have described elsewhere how the original publisher of my novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand, wanted me to revise dialogue because—as he put it—“an Indian wouldn’t talk that way.” How I dismissed his oddly disparaging and clearly inappropriate remark immediately as the stereotype-reinforcing foolishness it was chiefly because William Eastlake had exploded that particular myth once and for all in his writing: Indians, Eastlake had shown us, can talk any way anyone else can.
And so we met at The Iron Man Restaurant in Bisbee. We sat on the shady patio-porch and drank beer and gin and ate hamburgers and talked for two hours.
I can tell you that I liked Bill Eastlake immediately. Some writers I know to be shy and uncomfortable—not given to brilliant conversation—struck nearly dumb, in fact, in social settings. Bill delivered strong opinions spontaneously with studied eloquence and shared anecdotes and reminiscences without prodding. And I mean for you to know that they were wonderful stories that Bill told: Stories about William Faulkner, about his friends Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison, about raising cattle in northern New Mexico and about the wars he’d seen and written about, stories about writers and writing and sports and science and politics . . . .
After that first lunch, we had many, many more—at motel restaurants, oddly enough, as well as at his home and, later, at mine in Bisbee, and later, in Tucson and in Taos. I have an especially fine memory of watching my friend Bill Eastlake dance among traditionally dressed Indian people at a Buffalo Pasture powwow at Taos Pueblo. And while we had specific disagreements, Eastlake and I, we never pursued them, and I like to think that improved our relationship. You see, always we drank gin and beer, and always we talked and we laughed, and always we told tales—some of them taller than others.
William Eastlake is gone now, he died in June, 1997 at the age of 79. But for the years I knew him I knew for a fact that there was at least one good outlaw living in southern Arizona, near the Mexican border.
After that first lunch, we had many, many more—at motel restaurants, oddly enough, as well as at his home and, later, at mine in Bisbee, and later, in Tucson and in Taos. I have an especially fine memory of watching my friend Bill Eastlake dance among traditionally dressed Indian people at a Buffalo Pasture powwow at Taos Pueblo. And while we had specific disagreements, Eastlake and I, we never pursued them, and I like to think that improved our relationship. You see, always we drank gin and beer, and always we talked and we laughed, and always we told tales—some of them taller than others.
William Eastlake is gone now, he died in June, 1997 at the age of 79. But for the years I knew him I knew for a fact that there was at least one good outlaw living in southern Arizona, near the Mexican border.
