William Eastlake’s First Novel: An Account of the Making of Go in Beauty

D O N G R A H A M University of Texas William Eastlake’s First Novel: An Account of the Making of Go in Beauty Early in 1955, William Eastlake, author of a number of well regarded short stories, received a query from Harper & Brothers about whether he might be interested in attempting a novel. Indeed he was, he replied, adding that he was busy “building a book out of the trader stories.”1 Then, on February 23, he sent to Simon Michael Bessie, general editor at Harper’s, a novel entitled Indian Country. Before its appearance in October 1956, this novel would undergo several changes in title and four extensive revisions. The resultant work, Go in Beauty, was Eastlake’s first novel. It formed the initial part of an eventual trilogy about rela­ tions between whites and Navajos in northern New Mexico and marked the emergence of a major new voice in southwestern letters. The story of how Go in Beauty evolved from a series of tenuously related short stories into a unified work cannot be told completely without examining the manuscripts. Much of the story, however, can be recon­ structed from two other sources: correspondence between author Eastlake and editor Bessie and comparison of the original magazine versions I wish to thank the University of Texas for a University Research Institute Summer Award which provided support for this project. 1Eastlake to Bessie, January 31, 1955. Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Herewith, my thanks to the HRC for permission to quote from these letters. I should also like to thank the principals, William Eastlake and Simon Bessie, for allowing me the use of their correspondence; and Robert M. Clark, for allowing me to quote from a letter written by his father Walter Van Tilburg Clark. 28 Western American Literature with their revised versions in the novel. Fortunately for the first purpose, the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas contains extensive correspondence between Eastlake and Bessie covering the entire stage of the making of Go in Beauty. This exchange of letters suggests a mutually beneficial collaboration between author and editor. Eastlake the successful short story writer was eager to become a published novelist; Bessie wanted to see his firm bring out a strong, successful work. Throughout, Bessie offered praise and encouragement while at the same time noting weaknesses and urging quite specific remedies. Eastlake was unfailingly cooperative, following Bessie’s suggestions as closely as he could, resisting changes only in very minor details. It is therefore somewhat surprising to encounter Eastlake’s own version of the genesis of his first novel some twenty years later. In an interview he gives this account of how Go in Beauty came about: Harper’s wound up taking everything I sent them. Then one of the people w'ho ran Harper’s Books, an illiterate delinquent named Alva Bessie who finally went to Atheneum, eventually saw how well those stories of mine were doing at Harper’s. So, against his will, because he had never published anything good in his life, he asked me for a book. And I took these stories in Harper’s and strung them together, and that was Go in Beauty.2 Eastlake’s harsh description of Bessie is completely at odds with the relationship reflected in the letters. Moreover, Alva(h) Bessie, the name Eastlake uses, was one of the Hollywood Ten, not an editor. Simon Michael Bessie did move to Atheneum, though, and it seems clear that the name cited in the interview is a mistake of memory. This is by no means the only misleading detail in the interview. Whatever the explan­ ation for Eastlake’s denigration of his former editor, the letters reveal Eastlake’s having profited from Bessie’s criticism far more than his later comments would lead one to suspect. When Bessie read the first version, Indian Country, he wrote East­ lake a letter mixing praise with some strong reservations about some of the novel’s faults. This first evaluation established the main lines of Bessie’s subsequent responses. In his opinion there were three major problems: (1) lack of unified plot, (2) weak character development, and (3...