History of My Reading/ Eastlake Winter 1967

William Eastlake, undated photo but
probably earlier than 1967

When the fall 1966 term was over in December, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays.  After I experienced some odd symptoms, our family doctor concluded that I had a case of mononucleosis.

It was known that mono is an infectious disease, and though the length of time between infection and manifestation aren't known, I almost certainly was infected at Knox.

The virus is passed along through saliva, which earned it the nickname of the "kissing disease."  So in addition to sore throat, swollen glands and fatigue, I had to endure the same jokes over and over.  While I couldn't entirely rule out that specific mode of transmission, it's more likely that sharing a glass or bottle did it (although I didn't hear of any other cases at school when I went back.)  I was probably run down enough--especially by participating in Macbeth--to be susceptible.  But who knows?

This section of the present day hospital was pretty
much the entire Westmoreland Hospital in 1966

What was unusual is that our family doctor admitted me to the county hospital for treatment.  I received large injections of vitamin C, or at least that's what he said.  He tended to talk to my parents but not to me.

But in another way, being sent to the hospital wasn't unusual then. At the time the most common form of medical insurance was called "hospitalization" because it paid for everything if you were hospitalized.  In fact, I was hospitalized three times (twice in high school), for treatment that today would not require a hospital bed.  It was done then, as such decisions are made now, according to what insurance covered.  In any event, vitamin C injections would likely be considered nonsense today.

In most cases, as in mine, mono isn't very serious.  It mostly goes away by itself. But in addition to a week or so in the hospital, I was told I needed several weeks of rest and recuperation before the fatigue lifted.  (In fact, fatigue drags on for months, though less acutely.)  This meant I would miss the beginning of the winter term.  I arranged to drop one course--Brady's Shakespeare, ironically--and took on an independent study with Doug Wilson on the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I was signed up for a writing course, and could do some of that work at home, too.  My transcript for the winter says my third course was Literary Criticism, but I have no memory of it.

I don't remember how much of the winter term I missed.  I do know however, that when it was over, I had aced all my courses.  For the first and last time, I made the Dean's List.

My fiction writing course was with William Eastlake, writer in residence for the winter term.  At that moment, Eastlake was best known generally for his World War II novel Castle Keep, which was going to be made into a Hollywood movie.  It had the same skepticism, the witty dialogue, the irony and paradox and sense of the absurd that appeared on every page of the World War II novel we were all reading on our own, Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Eastlake's novel is about U.S. soldiers defending a castle full of art treasures during the Battle of the Bulge, in which Eastlake had participated. (It was during the early stages of this same battle that William Spanos was taken prisoner, but he was no longer at Knox.)  Eastlake had been wounded and received the Bronze Star, but did not talk about his own experiences.  Later he reportedly said that his wounds came from his own gun misfiring, which, if true, is enough to suggest an ironic perspective.

Eastlake had published three previous novels, about Indian Country in the Southwest, including Navajo characters.  (The first--Go In Beauty--centered on the owner of a trading post, a character who might have been based on Henry Goulding, the trading post owner that Sam Moon later wrote a book about.) Eastlake's imminent arrival at Knox was known during the fall term,  and Doug Wilson had copies of these hardback novels.  I read at least one while babysitting in his house on W. Tompkins. They were later collected in a single large paperback--3 by Eastlake: The Early Fiction (1970), which I acquired and still have, and still later republished together as Lyric of the Heart (1996.)

One connection that may have brought Eastlake to Knox was Robert Creeley.  Creeley for a time lived near Eastlake's New Mexico ranch, and included two sections of Eastlake's Indian country novel Portrait of An Artist with 26 Horses in the fiction anthology Creeley edited with Donald Allen titled New American Story.  (Creeley wrote stories and a novel in these years, as well as poetry.)  The ultimate connection  was of course Sam Moon, still pretty much the entire Knox writing program, who had brought Creeley to Knox two years before.  In addition, he had himself visited New Mexico during a sabbatical, and may have known Eastlake's books independently.

 Donald Allen had also edited The New American Poetry, which sported a similar cover, but the connection implied between new poetry and this new fiction was made explicit in another anthology that had preceded this one by a few years, The Moderns: an anthology of new writing in America.  Its editor, LeRoi Jones (who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka) writes in his introduction of the "definite connection" between the new poets and these new fictionists.

I bought both of these anthologies around this time.  The writers represented with at least one story or excerpt in New American Story were Creeley, Eastlake, Kerouac, Burroughs, LeRoi Jones, Edward Dorn, John Rechy, Michael Rumaker and Douglas Woolf.  Eastlake and all these authors were also represented in The Moderns (though only two stories were in both anthologies), as well as Fielding Dawson, Diane DiPrima, Russell Edson and Paul Metcalf.

So William Eastlake arrived with both artistic cred and popular appeal.  He was also a writer of the West (meaning anywhere west of Manhattan, or at least Chicago), which was a real bifurcation in American letters, and still is.  In addition, he was a living connection to an older generation of writers we might be studying.  As a young man he'd worked in a Los Angeles bookstore frequented by John Steinbeck, Nathaniel West, William Saroyan, Theodore Dreiser and Clifford Odets.  As a reporter he met William Faulkner.  His own writing shows a Hemingway influence, though he was quick to criticize Hemingway.

As emphasized in this interview, he also admired Joseph Conrad.  I don't remember what writers he talked about in class, or what he said about them (although at one point he told me privately which bars writers frequent when they are in New York.)  He might have talked about Conrad. In any case, in not too many years I returned to reading Conrad.  Perhaps Eastlake's was one of the voices I heard in the sound of Conrad's name.

Between 1965 and 1970, I took a number of writing courses and workshops.  Some were more helpful than others, and the effects on my writing of most of them are unknown to me, which doesn't mean they weren't useful.  Nor do I recall many pronouncements on writing that stayed with me.  In fact, I can recall only two, and they were both made by William Eastlake.

I read the first even before I began his course, in an interview in the Knox Student conducted by Bill Barnhart.  Eastlake said that writers were born writers, but "shaped by rejection."  This impressed me at the time, and a half century later it remains both profound and retrospectively factual.

Eastlake in 1970

The second is a statement that Eastlake made in class, and it is possible that only I heard it. In worn jackets and carrying a pipe, Eastlake was friendly and funny. But except for occasionally holding forth, he was somewhat taciturn, rarely speaking beyond an ironic murmur.  So when we assembled along the long table--there were only 10 or 12 of us-- I tried to sit as close to him as possible, while keeping him to my right, so I could hear him with my functional ear.

 I think we were just getting settled for one class fairly late in the term.  Apparently some of the class wasn't turning in much work.  In urging them to do so, he observed, "The great writers all have one thing in common: they wrote their books."

As I recall there was no reaction from the class.  But that's one of the seductions of writing courses: a lot of talk, and even competitive critiques of others' work, as a replacement for actual writing.

Another aspect of this class I recall was how some of us (myself included) tried to describe the projects we were working on as "picaresque" or "episodic," somewhat in the manner of Eastlake's books.  With us, however, it mostly meant we didn't know what the hell we were doing.  Also, I think it was this class in particular that exemplified the competitive nature, the rivalries and even hostility that can characterize the writers workshop (much of it in this case, it seems in retrospect, testosterone-driven, though that may be oversimplifying.)

Eastlake also provided a particularly useful comment on my writing. By the end of the term I'd turned in probably a hundred pages or more of what was trying to be a novel, a 60s college novel.  He expressed appreciation for the amount of work (intimating that it made him look good, and indeed, after his Knox experience he secured a series of university writer-in-residence gigs.)  He mentioned a few things that he liked, then noted that some of it was not working, placing in parenthesis the word "boring."

A comment that led somewhere! Positive comments are encouraging, but often don't tell you anything specific, or at least that you can consciously replicate. Negative comments can be destructive or chastening, but are rarely useful either.  But "boring" is useful, if it's specific.

 So much more useful that the comments I got from another professor (not named in any of these posts) to the effect of: what are you trying to prove?  That's an academic comment (as well as an equivalent of the contemptuous question many children of the working class hear all too often: who do you think you are?) Academic comments, comments that come down to adherence or deviation from a theory, aren't helpful.  Nor are cute abstractions, like a comment I once got on a rejection slip by a Harvard-educated asshole who noted my poem did not "beguile or entwine."  Is this the poetic version of "boring?" Maybe, for precious jerks.

Would a writing professor ever say something is boring, especially in the age of teacher evaluations?  I don't know-- I know little about writing classes or workshops other than the ones in which I was present.  And I may be misremembering my response to Eastlake's comments, though at least emotionally, I don't think so.  The point is that it was a practical comment--you can evaluate the judgment, and if you agree something is boring and you don't want it to be, you can fix it: speed it up, elide it or otherwise rewrite it, or cut it out. First drafts in particular can be a horror: a response you can do something about is golden.

After his term at Knox, Eastlake went to Vietnam as a war correspondent, and his short absurdist pieces appeared in the Nation magazine.  In 1969 he published his Vietnam war novel, The Bamboo Bed.  

We corresponded for several years.  He wrote a short but very strong recommendation for me to the Iowa Writers Workshop.  I gleaned practical wisdom from his letters; he was my only connection with the non-academic world of writing and publishing.

I believe we'd lost touch by the time my (positive) review of his book, A Child's Garden of Verses About the Revolution was published in Rolling Stone.

In my copy of New American story, I marked the following passage in Warren Tallman’s introduction:

“The chief difference, then, between the older American writing and the new is that between writing considered as the means to an end, sentences used as corridors leading to further rooms, and writing considered an end in itself. The latter will seem limited only to readers who fail to realize that [and here the marking becomes underlining] books contain not persons, places and things but words.” 

This in one sense is obvious, and in another is an obvious overstatement. William Eastlake said that what counted was the writer’s emotional connection to what they are writing about. Older generations also cared about words, and younger generations about characters, place and story.

Nevertheless it does indicate a tension in my reading that year, and in my writing. I was reading these new stories, selected in large measure for their relationship to this poetic approach.  Some of them were very different in form and expression (as well as subject matter, which bothered me less) from fiction I'd read previously. Some of these stories I grasped, some were (and still are) impenetrable to me.

But I was also reading literary criticism with very different concerns, that referred to work from earlier generations.  And especially that winter term I was engaged in extensive and intensive reading of an author of the last classic generation (according to academia at the time): F. Scott Fitzgerald.