Of Time and Change by Frank Waters (review)

b o o k R e v i e w s 2 5 7 the secular level— the only one that matters in this kind of novel— “who done it” and why. And even unresolved issues are not so much complica' tions as links into the plot of the next novel, and the one after that. . . . Hillerman is writing genre fiction, and he does it so efficiently that the reader is never conscious of the strain, or at least urgency, that one occasionally perceives in Querry’s novel, which seems intended to raise issues rather than solve cases and thus hurries to get everything in. Readers should enjoy each book and not wish for an impossible synthesis. Of Time and Change. By Frank Waters. Foreword by Rudolfo Anaya. Denver: MacMurray and Beck, 1998. 263 pages, $20.00. Reviewed by Charles L. Adams University of Nevada, Las Vegas During the last decade of his life, through his eighties and into his nineties, Frank Waters produced a prodigious amount of work: a novel, Flight from Fiesta; a major revision of The Woman at Otowi Crossing; an extended essay, The Eternal Desert; and a volume of minibiographies, Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten. When he died on June 3, 1995, at his home in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, a few weeks shy of his ninetythird birthday, Waters left behind a completed volume of unpublished essays. MacMurray and Beck have now published that volume. I think all Waters fans will want to add this final work to their Waters collection. In this book, Waters recalls and reflects upon many experiences of his early life, both around his home in Taos and many thousands of miles from it. I suspect that because of his long residency above Taos, we are inclined to think of Frank Waters as living in isolation in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains above the Taos Indian reservation, meditating and gazing out at the Sacred Mountain. The picture is accurate, but it is incomplete unless it includes other experiences such as the many adventures he had as a young man traveling with Mabel and Tony Lujan. With them, Waters traveled to New York City and other major eastern cities, to various areas of the South, and to Mexico. Through Mabel, Waters met Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keefe; Roy Howard of the ScrippsHoward newspaper chain; Eve and John Young-Hunter, the por­ trait painter; the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons; and the Freudian psychologist Dr. [A. A.] Brill. Others came to visit: Thornton Wilder, Wyndham Lewis, John Collier, a host of famous persons. It was a great privilege for me to meet all of them. (50) But Of Time and Change does not reflect an old man gazing nostalgically back over his youth. Rather, it reveals an exuberant Frank Waters who still has the ability to present vigorous anecdotes of his younger days and fresh 2 5 8 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 stories of his adventures with his many friends. Here are tales to surprise even his most knowledgeable readers. Can you imagine, for example, a Frank Waters being deliberately rude to Leopold Stokowski? Or having dinner in the home of the noted psychologist Dr. A. A. Brill? Or knowing intimately Owen Wister’s daughter? How about Frank with an unnamed “countess” jumping horseback at Bryn Mawr, the Wister estate near Philadelphia? We see Waters and Tony Lujan barhopping in Greenwich Village and getting thrown out because they want to buy drinks by the bottle, not by the glass. Prepublication publicity seemed to promote the idea that Of Time and Change is primarily a memoir about Taos. In part, it certainly is, as it deals with Frank’s many friends living there in the early days of that fascinating and mysterious town. Indeed, a chapter titled “The Taos Charisma” is one of my favorites. But Of Time and Change is more than Waters’s memoirs of famous Taos residents and a history of Taos’s early years. Frank was a talented racon­ teur, a marvellous conversationalist, and a great storyteller. And in typical Frank Waters manner, he always held some things back—for the...