Revenge of the Saguaro. Tom Miller
the works of William Eastlake, especially his Western trilogy, Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses. Eastlake’s writing—as would Abbey’s in the following decade—had developed a loyal following: Arpad Gonz, later his country’s president, translated Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses into Hungarian. Writers from Jim Harrison to the late Kathy Acker praised his work. A fan underwrote the publication of an unfinished manuscript. One small press brought out an annotated bibliography, listing everything ever written by or about Eastlake. Eastlake was convinced that Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, and even Ken Kesey had copied his style. He took praise well.
His books were a curiosity at first for their unusual portrait of the West. Pulp novels, shoot-em-ups, and B Westerns thrived at drugstore paperback racks and first-run movie theaters. But Eastlake’s West was clever, literary, and droll. His cowboys stumbled and hankered for electricity and V-8s. They shaved from the same basin as Garrison Keillor’s Lefty and Dusty. His fictional Indians were funny, occasionally duplicitous, always clever, and unfailingly amused by pitiful whites. They had names like President Taft, My Prayer, Walking Across a Small Arroyo, Jesus Saves, and Henry Three Ears of an Elk. They could roll a perfect cigarette in one hand without taking their eyes off you. Said one, “Well, at least I didn’t go to Yale.” Eastlake’s Indians were neither noble nor savage.
The novels built Eastlake a steadily growing reputation for their simultaneous ability to entertain the critics and debunk the West, and by 1961 other younger authors were seeking him out, Edward Abbey among them. At age 34, Abbey and the poet Robert Creeley drove a Volkswagen bus and a bottle of Old Crow from Taos down to Cuba, New Mexico, to the W Lazy E Bar Ranch, where Eastlake lived with his then-wife Martha. Creeley, who had written Eastlake his first fan letter six years earlier, thought him like Hemingway but with a sense of humor. For Creeley and Abbey, both goateed, this was their first meeting with Eastlake. The three spoke little of literature and lots of land. Eastlake saddled up his quarter horse Poco Más, turned the reins to Poco Menos over to Abbey, and gave Elegante to Creeley. The three writers rode through the high Chihuahuan desert until they reached Eastlake’s herd, grazing illegally in a national forest. This impressed Abbey.
Abbey returned to Eastlake’s land often and, as he described it, “one cold gloomy afternoon in November, we rode out to attempt to again find his cows.” The two horseback writers became separated, and when a blizzard dumped layers of snow on New Mexico, their vision was cut to ten yards. Eastlake made it back to the ranch house; Abbey, realizing he was lost, gave his horse free rein, but Poco Menos was mucho perdido. A fire was out of the question; “I figured if things got bad enough,” Abbey said later, “I’d open my knife and eviscerate the horse, keep my hands and feet warm in his smoking gut.” When the storm ended around midnight, Eastlake trudged out, sporadically firing his shotgun in the air, hoping that Abbey would hear. After Eastlake had traveled a mile from his house, Abbey heard his shots and the writers reunited, with Poco Menos intact. The two forged a strong bond, Bill and Ed, one that held up through numerous books, bottles, wives, and zip codes.
Eastlake and I came to know each other quite by chance. I had moved to Arizona in 1969 and used my thumb to get around. One sunny December afternoon Bill pulled his tan pickup over to give me a lift. He touched the brim of his cowboy hat as I got in, leaned over, and shook my hand. “Eastlake,” he said, introducing himself. “Not Westlake; Eastlake. E-a-s-t-l-a-k-e.” As we drove down Speedway Boulevard, E-a-s-t-l-a-k-e was delighted to learn his passenger wrote for the underground press; he himself had just published an anti-Vietnam war novel, The Bamboo Bed. A couple of months earlier a local jury had found an Air Force sergeant named Palacios not guilty of the cold-blooded killing of a couple of hippies, and the Manson gang had just been arrested in California. Eastlake cautioned me against the wave of anti-longhair sentiment sure to follow. As he dropped me off near my house, he invited me out to his place at the base of Mount Lemmon for horseback riding and dinner the following weekend.
William Eastlake, born in Brooklyn to British parents, came West in the 1930s when he hitchhiked through New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles. There he worked at a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, meeting author Theodore Dreiser in his final years, the playwright Clifford Odets in his youth, and a host of Hollywood hacks in their prime. In that era, he later recalled, “I couldn’t spell, and typed like a wounded man.” After World War II, in which he won a Bronze Star, Bill and Martha kicked around Europe; in the 1950s, they moved to New Mexico, where they embraced ranching. Bill wanted to write about a part of the country neglected in serious fiction. To him the West meant excitement and remoteness, beauty and strangeness. He had in mind Walt Whitman’s West: “The great American promise.”
With the publication of Castle Keep, which prefigured Robert D. Hooker’s M*A*S*H and other black looks at combat and its futility, Eastlake’s reputation broadened from “Western writer”—first cousin to the “Southwestern writer”—to that of a worldly author who could blend burlesque, sharp dialogue, and morality. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations gave him money; Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses won a prestigious award in France, where it was published in a distinguished series alongside Malcolm Lowry and Jorge Luis Borges; magazines asked him to write for them; universities in California and New Mexico invited him to be their “writer-in-residence.” It was just such an offer from the University of Arizona that had coaxed Eastlake to Tucson, to our fortuitous meeting on Speedway Boulevard and our subsequent afternoon on horseback and evening around the dinner table.
Eastlake kept his horses stabled on a rural road surrounded by as much desert as you would want to ride through. We must have ridden an hour or so without spying a paved road. I do not recall my horse’s name or its color; what I do remember is how proper and natural Bill Eastlake looked in the saddle, a combination of his British heritage and his Westerly countenance. In the faint distance we heard the front-porch cowbell peal, Martha’s proclamation that dinner would soon be ready. By the time we got back to the house, Martha—a fellow writer who had written a cookbook called Rattlesnakes Under Glass—had steaks waiting. Rumors abounded that she did far more to her husband’s manuscripts than simply type and copyedit them; indeed, after their divorce in 1971 his writing lacked its former literary snap.
Eventually Bill moved to Bisbee, a small and comfortable mined-out copper town near the Mexican border. When Ed Abbey made his occasional visit to his longtime friend down in Cochise County, the two would end up sitting near the pool table. They’d speak of crops, rain, cattle, and integrity; sipping, brooding, wondering.
Only once did a discordant note break through their harmony. At Bisbee’s Copper Queen Hotel bar one winter night in 1983, a small group of us shared a pitcher with them and the talk drifted to immigration and the border. Abbey said he opposed “the Latino invasion of our country.” Eastlake facetiously countered that the U.S. and Mexico should effect a land swap, a comment that provoked Abbey to fume over his friend’s diffidence.
Usually they mused: Will our writing last? Will it stay in print after we’re gone? In their grumbling about how publishing houses didn’t understand or promote them, the Western writer once bet the Southwestern writer ten dollars that his next book, Dancers in the Scalp House, would sell fewer copies than The Monkey Wrench Gang. Eastlake won the bet. What it came down to, the two assured each other, was that in their writing about Western America, they had “fought the good fight.”
Eastlake comes to mind best whenever I’m in Bisbee and walk down Main Street. All I have to do is glance over at Café Roka, an upscale restaurant in a building where the Tavern—a good, working-class bar—used to be. You could look through the front door of The Tavern and see light streaming in through the back. Many mornings, after Eastlake had dropped his companion Marilyn off at work, he would stop by and sit alone at the bar, nursing a schooner of beer. Backlit against the clear mountain sun, cowboy hat in place, his profile soothed passersby. He was “erect and spare,” as he described a character in Castle Keep, “like an old polished sword, but unbending, fragile and hard.”
EASTLAKE’S WEST HAD COLORS, rutted roads, and sparse dialogue. Abbey’s land was tactile, almost prickly; his fiction was motivational. Their writing had little in common, yet they wrote with an affectionate respect for the land and