Deep Waters: Frank Waters Remembered in Letters and Commentary

By Alan Louis Kishbaugh

In the late 1960s, while heading up the Western operations for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Alan Kishbaugh met the distinguished writer Frank Waters in Taos, New Mexico. From 1968 until Waters’s death almost thirty years later, the two wrote each other hundreds of letters. This annotated collection of their correspondence reveals Waters’s profound engagement with the land and cultures of the Southwest.

A lively introduction to the breadth of Waters’s work, Deep Waters touches on themes of ecology, philosophy, pre-Columbiana, Eastern philosophy, Egyptology, American Indians, and a host of other subjects reflecting the great cultural shifts occurring at the time. Kishbaugh and Waters write of the women in their lives, mutual friends, writing and publishing challenges, and newly discovered books. Their letters offer new views of the legendary writers’ colonies of Santa Fe and Taos and the arrival of the counterculture in New Mexico.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780826357533

Alan Louis Kishbaugh

Since the 1980s Alan Louis Kishbaugh has served on advisory boards, state and local, and led many volunteer efforts to acquire open space and parkland, protect animal habitat, and establish viable wildlife corridors in the mountains and hillsides of Los Angeles. He lives in Southern California.

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Introduction

I have always considered myself a literary man, having begun my own writing at the age of nine. In the ensuing years, from then to now, I have amassed a desultory writing record, the output of which could be characterized by the phrase fits and starts. I have dabbled, committed, anguished, abandoned, and frantically produced all in the name of the muse and have, as occasioned by this poor attendance record, alas, only a small output to show for it. Nonetheless, over the years this has found expression in a handful of screenplays, one unpublished novel, poetry, magazine-length pieces, several published op-ed tracts, three years of published monthly newsletters on civics and environmental matters, and a stint writing copy for a local TV travel show. Still, throughout all of this uneven application, I have steadfastly continued to think of myself as, first and foremost, a literary man.

When I wasn’t writing, which was all too often, I nonetheless kept up literary friendships and correspondences with those who were. I read, I wrote letters, and I encouraged writers of all ages to do the very thing that I was not doing myself. I became quite good at cheerleading others. Sooner or later, usually later, the worm of incompletion would eventually catch up with me and then I’d begin yet another round of writing that would carry me on to the next hiatus.

In the late 1960s, I was reading extensively in the area of what might best be called esoterica. I had read the yogis and Zen masters, as well as the works of Meister Eckhart, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and Hermann Hesse and was then deep into Native cosmologies, ethnobotany, and the writings of J. Krishnamurti.

My friend, Giovanna D’Onofrio, with whom I had studied voice in New York City, had moved back to Albuquerque where her son lived and where she herself had, light-years before, settled into a troubled marriage. Giovanna was then entering her seventies and was, in many ways, at the top of her form. She had studied ancient texts in Italy and was an accomplished astrologer who pooh-poohed the superficial aspects of it, the global-type generalities that have found perennial popularity in newspapers and in cocktail conversation. She was a serious student and found confirmation of astrology’s deeper workings in the many tangential texts she read that pertained to self-discovery. She had read Marie Corelli and Charles Hoy Fort and Madame Helena Blavatsky in the early part of the century, and then had moved through everything from The Shaver Mystery to Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and Rodney Collin. She too read extensively in anthropology and of the so-called primitive peoples, stewards of the land, and found in their cosmologies a high level of sophistication.

In the winter of 1967 I began to travel for the New York publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, heading up operations for the western United States, which included sales, publicity, and scouting. My new work brought me to New Mexico and provided me with an opportunity to renew my close friendship with Giovanna. In the fall of that same year, Giovanna and I decided that we must go find and meet the writer Frank Waters. We had been reading his books on Indians, most notably Book of the Hopi, and we saw in those works a sensibility far beyond that of mere anthropology. He was writing about these people as sentient beings, religious people in the best sense of that word, who were performing a cycle of ceremonies in full awareness that this was part of their harmonic role in keeping the cosmos together.

It was a crisp fall day when we set out for Taos, where we knew he lived—but that’s all we knew. As we drove north, through Santa Fe and Española and into the Rio Grande Gorge, the aspens and cottonwoods were turning. Red and gold leaves fluttered past the windshield and, as we emerged from the gorge, we got our first look at Taos Mountain as it rises above the plain of the, then, modest town of Taos.

In town, we inquired as to where the writer Frank Waters lived, and after a few fruitless inquiries learned that he was up in Seco. So we continued north, out of town, to an intersection with a blinking light, and proceeded north again for a few miles as we looked for the cluster of small adobe buildings that formed the tiny village community of Arroyo Seco. All the while we were watching a cloud formation that Giovanna had spotted. Look, it’s a whale. I’ll bet if we just follow it, it will take us to him.

After overshooting it, we returned to Arroyo Seco and asked in a weaving shop if anyone knew where the writer Frank Waters lived and someone recalled there was a writer who lived up a dirt road at the edge of the village. The road was somewhat rough, not well graded in those years, and a plume of dust rose up behind us. All the while, our white, fluffy whale seemed to point the way. We passed a few two-story houses with steep roofs and small windows, so typical of the buildings of Northern New Mexico and the Colorado mountains.

To our right was the fenced-in land of Taos Pueblo, abundant with sagebrush all the way up to where the foothills begin and the pines come down to meet the aspens.

About half a mile up the road, we noticed a wooden gate with a small sign that simply read Waters. We stopped on the road and then with some trepidation—for we were now trespassing on who knows whose property—we drove across a narrow plank bridge, the width of a car, and just long enough to span a ditch and the stream beneath it.

Anyone who has entered the Waters property will tell you that it is magical. The feel is reminiscent of places in the British Isles where you’d swear that faeries still dwell. It is hallowed ground. On the right, one glimpses the adobe house and a fenced-in front yard filled with tall grass and dandelions and that has only been nominally mowed. To the left is a copse of aspens, tall and stately and golden in fall. The wind in the branches of those trees sets up a sequential stirring not unlike the sound of the hollow horn shells that the Pueblo Indians wear as rattles on their legs during ceremonial dances. The ground widens near a barn, a corral, and a wooden shed. There is a covered lean-to where an old oxidized red and white 1966 Ford Galaxy appears to be recuperating next to a woodpile.

We parked facing west and slowly, with deliberation and no small amount of deference, made our way to a small porch and modest wooden door. We knocked several times and the door opened to reveal a tall, slim man in a well-worn plaid cowboy shirt, boots, and faded jeans set off by a Navajo sand-cast silver belt buckle in the shape of a corn blossom.

Yes? he inquired.

Mr. Waters, we’re sorry to bother you. We’ve come all the way from Albuquerque hoping we would find you.

You have? he asked, incredulously, as if to suggest who would do such a thing.

Yes, we are great fans of yours and we wanted to meet you.

Well, come on in, he said, in that big self-effacing voice of his, graciously standing back and ushering us into the Waters cave, where so much magic resides even to this day. You’d have thought we were old friends he hadn’t seen for years.

We stayed for maybe an hour, probably less, as we were mindful that we had interrupted him. He had been writing but never made us feel anything but welcome.

It was, for all of us, the start of a long, enduring friendship that lasted until Frank’s death in 1995.

On many occasions since, Giovanna and I recalled the whale cloud that had piloted us up to Seco, to Frank, and to the years of warm friendship that ensued.

CHAPTER ONE

1967 to 1970

Our first meeting, Pumpkin Seed Point is published, comments on The Teachings of Don Juan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Later, a Christmas visit to Taos, and to Hopi, and the submission of Pike’s Peak to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Visits with John Manchester, Dorothy Brett’s birthday party, and continuing film interest in The Man Who Killed the Deer. Pumpkin Seed Point and Book of the Hopi come to paperback. Frank’s sister Naomi dies, Frank’s astrology chart, and my attempt to purchase the Midas of the Rockies manuscript. My comparison of Frank to Hesse, the writing of John L. Sinclair, and Frank’s Mexico trip to research a future book.

Los Angeles, California

November 3, 1967

Dear Mr. Waters:

Thank you so very much for the time that you afforded Giovanna D’Onofrio and myself last month when we just dropped by out of the blue to see you.

Normally, I would never impose on you like that and you were indeed kind to take the time to talk with us. For me, it fulfilled a desire that I have had for some time.

I received a letter from John Sinclair in Bernalillo today and he informed me that he is beginning a new manuscript . . . evidently, about the Indians.

I trust your horses have recovered from their bronchial condition.

I notice that you have a new book coming from Swallow Press and I shall look forward to reading it. As I mentioned when I saw you, if you ever want to consider changing houses, I hope you will contact me.

Again, thank you so very much for your time.

Very truly yours,

Alan Kishbaugh

In the fall of 1968, I again visited Frank in Taos. I stayed at the Taos Inn in town where a room in the main building cost me $7 a night. During the few days that I was in town, I saw Frank daily, usually in the late afternoon or early evening, when he was through writing for the day.

I told him about the then largely unknown book, The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda that had just been quietly published, in a small printing, by the University of California, Berkeley. I spoke glowingly about it because of its kinship to other classic guides to inner awareness and self-mastery. This kind of thing had stood out through the ages from the work of Meister Eckhart to G. I. Gurdjieff, from the Sufis, Tibetan Lamas, Zen, and the Christian mystics, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Merton, and J. Krishnamurti.

It was the close of the sixties and the hippie revolution that had captured so much of America’s youth was on the move. Thousands were beginning to leave the cities and strike out for the country and a life closer to the earth. In those first years, communes sprang up around the country and in Taos, no doubt because of its vast open space, great beauty, and the connection to the pueblo, right there at the foot of Taos Mountain. The Lama Foundation, Morning Star, The Family, and New Buffalo were the first communes to settle in the area. They had a pretty rough few years trying to coax crops out of a harsh, dry, and, in winter, bitterly cold landscape. Many did not last and the traffic in and out of the communes was constant.

I was particularly taken with the animating energy underlying the hippie movement and I conveyed this enthusiasm to Frank. These were, to my eye, people who had seen the depth of their societal and cultural conditioning and had broken with the past. Initially, it looked as though they would stay open, unconditioned, able to meet each new moment afresh, paying attention only to the actual. Krishnamurti used to say, We’re all secondhand people, neither thinking, nor acting, nor capable of living spontaneously, naturally, and without conditioned responses from the past. In those early years, it looked at though we might be spawning a new breed of human beings, more in touch with their inner selves and, as a consequence, hopefully, more responsible for their own actions. In time, the old patterns of conditioned responses prevailed. There was new content and new labels, to be sure, but it was simply new conditioning. We’d walked out of one cell and entered another and—in our initial intoxication—mistakenly labeled it freedom. The promise it had offered, at once so exciting and infectious, waned and dissipated before the seventies ended. But despite the prematurely prophetic announcement in San Francisco of the Death of Hippie in 1967, there was still plenty of unleashed energy around the movement into the late 1960s and ’70s.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux had just published Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and I sent Frank a copy because it captured the feel of this moment in history with a breezy style, framed in authentic and innovative language.

Taos, New Mexico

November 20, 1968

Dear Alan:

You were good indeed to send me the Tom Wolfe book, and to tell me about the Don Juan teachings, which I sent for immediately after you left here.

The Yaqui thing is a remarkable record. I’ve never read anything of the sort to compare with it. The preparation and use of the plants, and the wisdom accompanying them, springs right up from the ground, this strange American earth. Other persons & peoples have long taken peyote, Datura, and mushrooms without comparable experiences. But Don Juan imbues them, projects upon them, a deep tribal wisdom that is valid by itself. Too bad that academic outline was added; that sort of thing is what is wrong with us.

The Hippy book, written with such timely idiom, seemed to me a good record of a contemporary and transient phenomenon, but without meaningful validity. Already, as the author suggests, the phase is passing. If we can learn from Don Juan, we can get from these drugs only what we bring to them, and apparently most of the Hippies don’t bring much. Those around here at least are settling down. Old and old- fashioned as I am, I have great faith in these young outlaws. They are going to turn over our world and for the better. But this first phase is just a frenetic symptom. Anyway this is an eye-opener I’m passing around, with many thanks to you.

Do drop in again for another of your stimulating visits.

Best,

Frank Waters

Alan Kishbaugh

1238 N. Harper Ave.

Los Angeles, Calif. 90046

November 26, 1968

Dear Mr. Waters:

I have been thinking about writing you since my visit with you. In fact, as I waited for my film to be developed, I thought about you. In the interim, your letter came.

I truly appreciated your comments on the Castaneda book and the Wolfe book. I am in total accord with your observations on both books.

Don Juan does indeed spring from the earth and there’s something there that one immediately suspicions and accepts at the same time. It is a rare journal and one, that I feel, doesn’t come a moment too late. And the structural analysis IS what is wrong with us, as you so aptly state. But, we’ve come to a place where we thank Great Spirit for the simple fact that our eyes have not clouded over and kept us from recognizing the truths of that book amongst the academics.

The Hippy book is an interesting chronicle but something conceived to be au current and not much else. While it has great momentary validity, it is mostly pastiche. Still, since it was within my grasp to get a copy to you, and because of an exciting feeling that you have for these people, I felt you must be exposed to it. Presently, I am on the track of something, which I hope to send you or deliver in person.

You know, I am so grateful to you for giving your time so freely. Anyone who writes appreciates what privacy means and yet you still found time for us. Since discovering your books, I have felt a stillness coming from them that resembles the very people, the land you write about. I don’t want to gush too much, but I suppose this is, after all, a fan letter as much as anything else. But one thing I must say. I was so pleased to find that the essence and level of being in your books is the same in you; there is no gap whatsoever. One thing though, I wish the Book of the Hopi had an index. I am continually referring to it for information.

I’ve written to Swallow in Chicago about Pumpkin Seed Point but still no word at this point. Also, I’ve dug around and found some more Waters for my library.

You were right about that backcountry of Colorado. I took your advice and went through that wild, primitive country. There were small towns like Westcliffe and Salida and some abandoned buildings of a West that has passed almost before we knew it. Then too, the Sangre de Cristos, snow-capped as they were, presented a unique contrast to the fields of wild-growing Lavendel. You were absolutely correct about that country. There was but one detraction. It was the opening day of deer season. The hunters in their day-glo hats and vests were like blind creatures unable to see the beauty of the life around them. As you know, there is so much difference between the way we take animal life and the way the Indian does it. I wish our arrogance were less so that we might learn from a people whose silence is full of knowledge. Perhaps we will. I read an Inca proverb today that expresses what I would like to say about the land and what we are doing [to it].

The frog does not

Drink up

The pond in which

He lives.

I must also thank you for the information concerning Pale Ink. I am halfway through the book and very excited about what I am reading.

John Sinclair dropped me a note and things seem to be going very well for him. He is close to finishing his book and there are several assignments for the New Year.

Feeling the need to get away from Los Angeles again, I am planning on coming that way for the Christmas holidays. I want to be there for the Buffalo dance and others. Lyn and I will be leaving around the 19th and will go up through Monument Valley and Mexican Hat. Then across to Four Corners and down to Chaco Canyon before swinging across to Taos, Santa Fe, and Espanola. Later, we will go on to Albuquerque and be with John and Evelyn from time to time. Finally, we will go back through Zuni, Window Rock, a trip north to Canyon de Chelly, and then the Hopi lands. I’m very excited about being in that country again.

Thank you for your invitation to come by and see you. I would like to do that. If at any time, I can bring you something from Los Angeles that you need, or handle anything here that would be helpful to you, please feel free to mention it. I think of you as a friend, so it will never be an imposition.

Thank you again for the time you gave and the marvelous moments I’ve had in your books. . . . they have something one doesn’t find very often. You can get it from Krishnamurti and a few other places, but your books have it too. Don Juan has said it perhaps better than I, the path you follow must have a heart.

Warmest regards,

Alan

A few months later, in December of 1968, I returned to Taos by car with Lyn Hobart, a crazy, fun-loving tall blonde of Swedish extraction, whom I had been living with in Los Angeles for the past year. Lyn was outgoing, bright and bouncy, and was possessed of a great personal spirit. She told me that she once had bought flowers with her last $5.

My favorite time in New Mexico is winter, when the ground is white and the brown adobes send plumes of piñon smoke into the still mountain air where it lingers and perfumes the landscape. It is then that a bowl of red, and a bowl of green chile—what the natives call Christmas because of their colors—fires your insides and fortifies you against the cold. Winter is also a festive time both in town and at the pueblo when there are holiday dances.

Our drive to Taos brought us through the Navajo reservation of northern Arizona and across into New Mexico. We took up residence in my favorite room, room 5, inside the Taos Inn, and for the next few days we met with Frank and with Ann Merrill and various other friends of theirs.

Frank was a few years out of his last marriage, and with three marriages in his past, he was now taking a break from having a woman living under his roof. He was firmly entrenched in his Seco lair, utilizing the space and solitude to turn out his writing. Lanky, and still handsome in his late sixties, Frank was seen as a catch and was pursued, with some regularity, by several women. One of these was Ann Merrill, a divorcee from Pasadena, California, my hometown. Ann had moved to Taos and bought a stunning old adobe house in Ranchitos and filled it with fine furniture and objects of art. She was an accomplished artist herself, primarily of landscapes, and when she wasn’t painting, she was, with some deliberation, pursuing Frank. Ann was a full-figured woman with an easy, infectious laugh. She wore elegant peasant clothes—ruffled or full-pleated skirts and simple cotton blouses—or China poblana, as they are known in Mexico. She wore stunning Navajo jewelry, from squash blossom necklaces to concho belts. And, she was great fun to be around. It was Ann Merrill who made one of the best observations about living in Taos that anyone ever uttered. We were standing in her kitchen and with a sweeping gesture toward her picture window and the great gorge of the Rio Grande in the distance, she said, You see all this space out there around you and if you’re going to live here you have to learn to equalize it all with a like amount of space inside of yourself.

Early on, I developed an affinity for the Hopis and for Taos Pueblo above all other tribes. Overall, I am interested in all Native people because they are generally closer to the land than those of us who have come to it as emigres and, as such, are possessed of knowledge about the earth that non-Native civilization has lost or never known, or acknowledged.

And these two tribes, because of their cohesiveness and continuity, seem to exhibit a stronger earth-connection than others. The people of Hopi and Taos are among the most private and secretive of all the North American tribes. Their taciturn nature and reluctance to share tribal information with those outside of the community has confounded and frustrated scholars and anthropologists for decades.

It is Taos Pueblo that has put its stamp on the land. The discovery of it—the growth, the tourism, the artists’ colony, the writers, and everything else—has grown up around the pueblo and because of it.

Its iconic adobe multistory structure, with what Frank and John Manchester used to refer to as the winter and summer pueblos separated by a stream that runs down from the mountains, was built somewhere between AD 1000 and 1450. It lies on a foothill plane of Taos Mountain, which looms above it and is viewed as its protector. Of the nearly 5,000 tribal members, only a handful, say 150, live in the old pueblo, where electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing are prohibited.

So, given the recognition of its importance, going to the pueblo was naturally very much on our agenda. During this visit, Lyn and I bundled up on Christmas Day and joined Frank and Ann for the Deer Dance there. Bitingly cold, it didn’t stop the scantily clad dancers from snaking back and forth and the koshares from clowning in the plaza. Going to the pueblo with Frank on occasions like this was always special. He’d offhandedly comment on the action from time to time, sharing an understanding of the animating cosmology that was unfolding in front of us. And he would always open doors for us. Because of his book, The Man Who Killed the Deer, Frank held a special place in the hearts of many in the pueblo. There was great respect for him even though many did not openly show it. After all, he was not of the tribes’ blood and was still a white man even though part of him was Southern Cheyenne. Nevertheless, he had close friends there living in what he called the winter, or north, pueblo, and they invited us in and served us sweet, spicy hot, Indian posole.

New Year’s Eve brought us all together at Ann’s hacienda and after a fine meal and a liberal partaking of Scotch, we all got up to dance to the accompaniment of Pete Concha, one of the Taos elders, beating on a large, round drum. Pete sang his signature number, The Pop-Eyed Ford, and Isabel, his wife, in her soft and strong, rooted-in-the-earth way, led the women in a round dance, going first to the left and then to the right, her hands held out in front of her as though holding up healing boughs of sacred spruce. Later on, when the party had dwindled to just the hardliners, I took down several decorative swords from the wall and did an impromptu Highland fling much to the amusement of all.

On our way home from Taos, Lyn and I swung by Old Oraibi, at Hopi, to see if we could connect with one of Frank’s informants in the writing of Book of the Hopi. John Lansa was away tending his fields when we stopped at the first house in the old village, where the sign warned visitors that they must stop and proceed no farther. The village was open for a while in the 1970s but came to be closed to outsiders as interest in the Hopi tribe and Indian crafts brought more people into the home area, that part of the reservation largely defined by the three mesas on which the major villages are located. Old Oraibi, was one of the most sacred of Hopi sites, having been continuously inhabited longer than any site in North America, from AD 1150.

We stayed very briefly, conveying good wishes from Frank to John’s wife, Mina. She had a wonderful face with dark, penetrating eyes that took in everything but revealed little. Her husband John had the same eyes but his appeared sterner, with less outward warmth. I only met John a couple of times over the years, as he was usually out watering his fields or performing some ceremonial duty when I visited, but on each occasion I was struck by the intensity of his eyes—they seemed to take in everything and miss nothing. They saw right through to the heart of your soul, defying anything but scrupulous truth telling.

While John was highly revered as a medicine man and spiritual mentor, Mina had the higher tribal standing, by virtue of her birthright to the Parrot clan, one of the four founding clans from which traditional Hopi leadership flows.

John Lansa, who was known as the Man Who Talks to the Rocks, is there throughout the pages of Pumpkin Seed Point, Frank’s book about the three years he lived on and off the reservation while writing Book of the Hopi.

A word here must be said about the landscape that comprises the Hopi nation. It is stark, parched, and bleached by an unforgiving sun and laid bare by long and harsh winter storms. Nature regularly and violently rakes it, while all the while denying it any real abundance of life-giving rain. Yet it is this fact, and the arduous life it delivers, that somehow sustains the enduring affection and reverence that its inhabitants hold for this benighted speck of earth.

It is holy land to them promised, given, and directed by Masauwu and Tawa. I first entered a Hopi village in the mid-1960s and quickly realized that I was on rare ground. I saw in those taciturn Hopi a quality of being that I perceived to be the embodiment of much that I had been studying in the area of esoteric thought. It can be a simplistic trap to endow Native peoples with more than is there, but when one observes the power of unspoken harmony, it cannot be denied.

The Hopi life of scratching out an existence from a reluctant earth, as part of their larger fealty to the covenant they believe they have been given, is as touching as it is powerful. Three rocky escarpments, each possessed of three mud villages at their summits, define the home area of the Hopis. When the light of the summer sun intensifies and washes out the character lines etched by ravines, one is struck by the similarity of the terrain to that of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The earth at Hopi is very much the same color.

One thing certain about Hopi is that one has to really want to be there because, after a quite arduous stretch of travel time, it seems you have suddenly arrived, yet nothing really welcomes you. It is protected by its remoteness, its insularity, and its very private, sacred meaningfulness.

For me, because of the people who live there, and what they do and practice daily, in this harsh, arid, sunbaked landscape, it is the most sacred place on the continent.

Frank Waters captured some of it—more than I am able to do in these words—in Book of the Hopi, and even more so, to my way of thinking, in his equally profound book, Pumpkin Seed Point.

Los Angeles, California

1-7-69

Dear Frank:

We are back and wondering why. Taos means more than ever now and it seems difficult to be away from it and facing the petty things that have so much importance in a big city. We created a great deal of space within ourselves while on our visit and now we are faced with the challenge of trying to maintain it against the creeping encroachment of the life that is Los Angeles.

You have not only become one of our favorite writers, but one of our favorite people as well. We must say how much it meant to us that you gave so freely of your time and yourself. We know that you and Ann and Blandy, and all, made our holidays something very special.

On our way back we went through Shiprock, Teec Nos Pos, Chinle, Ganado, Pine Springs, Wide Ruins, Window Rock and Klagetoh. Then we went over to the Hopi lands and stopped at Old Oraibi to see your friend John Lansa. He was away at the time but we did stop and see his wife Mina. She sends her best to you and was very pleased to receive the food we left.

I was thinking today about the election of the Governors and wondering if Pete has become the new Governor.

I’m presently digging out of a pile of paperwork but expect to begin Pike’s Peak by the end of the week. I’m looking forward to it very much and will write to you when I have finished.

Frank, thank you again for all your kindnesses. We could have thought of no better way to spend Christmas and the New Year. Lyn sends her love and wants to make chile for us all, next time.

Alan

Taos, New Mexico

January 20, 1969

Dear Alan:

Just a delayed, quick note to answer your letter. Mainly to thank you for the great pleasure you and Lyn provided us all by sharing Christmas and New Year’s with us. As you know, this old mud town closes down on us in the winter, festering old sicknesses, feuds, and general grumpiness. A little new blood is the best medicine.

Ann was quite ill after you left. As the local doctors did nothing for her, she went to Santa Fe to a Spanish bruja who in three treatments took away her pain and fear. She then discovered a diseased wisdom tooth which she had pulled. But is continuing her treatments for two more weekends in Santa Fe. The bruja is a wonderful old woman—whose name, incidentally or significantly—is Dona Juanita. I don’t know how the Human mind works, but the stomach is important too; for Ann also brings back with her herbs and charms wonderful Spanish dishes and ingredients. Don’t mention her name. Despite the people she draws from Colorado and Arizona, she would probably be run out of town by the medical profession because she doesn’t have a degree and license.

Too bad you didn’t see John Lansa in Oraibi. But you can get something of him in Pumpkin Seed Point which has finally gone to press and will be released in about three weeks. Pete was not elected Governor. The new Governor is a brother of a peyote man, whose father was part or full Apache. The Council is also considered weak. All this bodes no good in a pueblo stirring with unrest. Our world in miniature.

Meanwhile nothing goes on but the perpetual lighting of fires, carrying out of ashes, the increasing sense of one’s anonymity in the cold dawns when the mountains are a basaltic blue, the sage plain white, and the birds and horses clamor for breakfast! My favorite hour.

Take it easy.

Best,

Frank

I had returned from Taos with Frank’s manuscript of Pike’s Peak, his great generational mining saga. This was the compilation and rewriting of three of his early biographical novels about his family in Colorado Springs. Originally published in single volumes by Liveright in the 1930s as The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust Within the Rock, he had now rewritten it to emerge as a leaner, one-volume trilogy, Pike’s Peak. As finally published by Sage Books, an imprint of Swallow Press, it compressed to 733 pages, but in typed manuscript form it had been 1,100 to 1,200 pages. I told Frank that I thought FS&G (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) might be interested in publishing it. They had, in the early 1940s, when it was then Farrar and Rinehart, published both The Man Who Killed the Deer and People of the Valley, the two novels that early on had established Frank’s literary reputation.

Los Angeles, California

January 21, 1969

Frank:

Just finished book #2 and about to start the final book. Very exciting material and beautifully structured. I’ll save most of what I want to say until I see you. For the moment, it’s my kind of book.

Do you have another copy there? The only reason I ask is there are a couple of very small things that we should talk about. If you have one, then I can refer to them by letter. Otherwise, will let it go until I see you.

My plans call for me to arrive in Albuquerque on the 9th. I’ll be there through the 13th and may come up one day with Giovanna. Then I’ll be in Santa Fe on the 14th and I plan to come back to Taos on the weekend and will stay at the Inn on the 15th and 16th.

I know you are thinking about some travel plans and hope you will be there during that period.

The book is a must and has to come to print. I hope my people see that and are as enthusiastic as I am. We’ll talk about it.

Give my regards to Ann and everyone and take care of yourself. If I can bring you anything from L.A. do let me know.

Warmest regards,

Alan

Taos, New Mexico

January 26, 1969

Dear Alan:

I am most glad your reading of the book is progressing so well, and that you are liking it. It will be good to talk to you about it. Just when or where I don’t know. I’m planning on driving to Sedona next weekend, to be gone all of February. If you’re driving here, perhaps you could come by way of Sedona (the southern route) and stop at my sister and brother-in-law’s house—whom you’ll like.

C.E. Arnell

Box 955

Telephone (Code 602) 282-7419

Or if you’re coming on 66, it’s only 40 or 50 miles down Oak Creek Canyon from Flagstaff—where I could meet you for a chat if you’re rushed for time.

Carl & Naomi’s house is in Sedona West, just a couple of miles south of the business district on the highway, high on a hill. There’s a carbon of the ms. I’ll take [it] there with me, with a couple of revised pages.

Ann of course will be delighted to see you and Giovanna, and I’m sorry I won’t be here to see her and all of you together.

Anyway I’m looking forward to seeing you. Give my best to Lynn.

Frank

Los Angeles, California

February 4, 1969

Dear Frank:

How great to talk with you again and how disappointing the fact that my itinerary will not permit a side trip to Sedona. I always look forward to our visits and written exchanges.

Pike’s Peak is in the tradition of The Man Who Killed the Deer. It will no doubt, become a classic. I pray that our people will have sense enough to see that.

The Rogier family is a fascinating study and March’s summation of what they really are is a great, subtle climax to the story. Frank, I think the book is first rate.

The characters and the structure of the novel are beautifully handled. What I have are a few comments, which I think might tighten the manuscript even more. Naturally, I wanted to get your ideas on any possible changes.

Book I

Page 138 (bottom)—pusillanimous ebullitions.

I feel that phrase is out-of-keeping with the tone of the writing throughout the book.

Page 142 (middle)—Dinneh

This is something you know better than I, but I think it should be spelled Dineh. That maybe a typographical error, or perhaps it is written both ways.

Book II

Page 419—Calendar pages kept turning; the clock ticked on.

I feel that’s a weak sentence. In films, the idea of pages turning is already a cliché and I think it ends up being that here too.

Page 635 (bottom)—. . . as if of carven wood.

The sentence becomes awkward as a result of the use of the archaic adjective ‘carven.’ Would it not be better, for the balance of the sentence, to use ‘carved’?

Book III

Page 778—. . . that the famous artist, Maxfield Parrish,

Do you not mean Maxwell Parrish?

Page 897—. . . The men clasping each other in an embrazo, cheek to cheek.

Here again, the Spanish phrase I think you’re looking for is abrazo. The same error appears on pages 960 and 963.

Those are my suggestions and how exciting it is to read three books, almost 1000 pages, and find six piddling corrections.

Let me know what you think of these. The best thing to do is to drop me a line while I’m traveling.

Feb. 9–13—White Winrock Hotel, Albuquerque

Feb. 17–21—Heart of Denver Motel, Denver

Feb. 22–25—Hotel Utah, Salt Lake City

Frank, I’m very anxious and excited about this book and hope to submit a letter East upon my return at the end of the month. Perhaps by then, the finishing touches will have been added. I know you mentioned you have a couple of revised pages.

I’m very honored by the confidence you placed in me by letting me have the manuscript. I’ll do my best to see that we publish it and beyond that, I’ll do everything possible to get publicity guarantees for it.

Enjoy your stay in Oak Creek Canyon. We’ll write in between, of course, but I probably won’t see you again until late spring or early summer.

Vaya con Dios,

Alan

Obviously, Frank was right. It is Maxfield Parrish, not Maxwell. I must have had a blip in my brain at the time.

Sedona, Arizona

February 7, 1969

Dear Alan:

Your approval of the book’s structure and character development is enough for me. The rest is minor. The few corrections you suggested are good and can easily be made, together with a few others, and three completely rewritten pages. I’ll get them to you when I return to Taos; I have no dictionary and reference books here. Or mail them to your home in Los Angeles to await your arrival. In the meantime I’ll go through the mss. for any typos both of us may have missed.

Hope you get up in Taos on your way to Denver. Ann has snapped out of her little trouble and would love to see you.

We’ve had cold weather and a touch of snow here, but the sun is now out warm and bright for some arrowhead and Indian ruin hunting trips.

Oh yes. Tom Lyon, English Department, Utah State University, is doing the book on me for the Twayne Series. I don’t have his box number, but this should get him easily enough.

Good hunting on your trip, and many thanks for your most encouraging letter.

Best,

Frank

[Handwritten on White Winrock Motor Hotel stationery]

Albuquerque, New Mexico

2-23-69

Dear Frank:

Please forgive the long delay in replying to your letter. I’ve been up against it for both time and energy and now it is nearly three