Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

by Tony Hillerman

  I had attended an informal one-student seminar on that subject while covering the state capital in Santa Fe. It was taught by Mike Gallegos, an elderly Guadalupe County rancher, political philosopher, and longtime activist in Democratic Party affairs. As had Otis Sullivan of the Daily Oklahoman, Gallegos spotted me as a fellow country boy and decided I might be enlightened on how politics operated. I learned from Mike, for example, the formula for public works budgets.

  Mike’s formula: “A job requiring ten citizen workdays, requires twenty merit system [state] workdays, or forty civil service [federal] workdays.” He had held both merit system and civil service jobs himself and insisted that was pretty close to the accepted budgeting formula.

  On political patronage: “When candidates quit giving jobs to kinfolks of those who help their campaigns then Southern Union Gas Company, the telephone people, the railroads, and the insurance companies move in and do the work for them. And corporations expect a lot bigger pay than kinfolks.”

  Mike rated editorial influence as trivial in races for highly visible offices such as governor, Congress, mayor, sheriff, etc. But voters didn’t have a clue about the county treasurer, clerk, assessor, or the other mostly invisible offices. In those, the paper could be dominant. We tested Mike’s theory in a race for county school superintendent, which involved a situation so convoluted that even diligent voters couldn’t be expected to understand it. A group of parents of kids attending the schools at Pojoaque had sued to separate from the county district, thereby running their own schools. If they won, the office of the county superintendent, then Henry Trujillo, the incumbent, would see his job abolished. Henry opposed this plan.

  Pojoaque is an old valley village, once Indian and Hispanic but now a bedroom community for high-tech newcomers building the nuclear bombs at Los Alamos whose children attend Pojoaque schools. These claimed the district judge, a friend and political ally of Henry, was stalling the case until after the election. They demanded that the newspaper expose this conspiracy and do something about it. That seemed like a good idea. I wrote an editorial arguing for splitting off Pojoaque and exhorting the judge to act on the case. Nothing happened. The Pojoaque PTA returned, angrier than ever. I wrote another editorial, demanding that the judge explain what he’s waiting for, hinting that he was stalling so that Henry can stay on the payroll another two years. This irks the judge. He tells me I’m guilty of a blatant attempt to influence a pending civil judicial proceeding. If I continue he will cite me for contempt and lodge me in the county jail.

  While I ponder this, the Pojoaque folks arrive again—demanding action. I explain the problem and propose a solution. If they pick one of their own as a candidate against Henry in the Democratic primary, the New Mexican will endorse this person and provide full and accurate coverage of the campaign. If the Mike Gallegos theory is correct, maybe we can beat Henry at the polls. But the only hope lies in a simple campaign run on a single issue.

  Most of the votes are cast in urban Santa Fe, folks totally disinterested in Pojoaque schools, but who approve of such notions as home rule, freedom, apple pie, and parents running their schools. So the single issue must be: Let Pojoaque Parents Control Their Own Schools. No name calling. No comparing credentials. They agree and pick their candidate.

  Sounds like a sure winner. Right?

  The Pojoaque group picks as their candidate a woman from a well-known Santa Fe County Hispanic family. Great, because Henry is also old-family Hispanic. After that, it doesn’t look so good. Our choice is from a family that has been ardently Republican. Our choice is a bartender. Our choice’s education credentials stop with high school. Henry worked his way through college, then went back and worked his way through to a master’s in Education, has taught school, has administrative experience and a fine reputation. More important in the Santa Fe County Democratic primary, his family has been Democrat forever.

  The political grapevine, which covers Santa Fe as kudzu covers Georgia, had told Henry what was afoot. He comes in to ask me what we’re up to. I tell him we want Pojoaque split off into a separate district and the only way we can get it done is to beat him in the primary since he has been winning by such margins that the Republicans no longer oppose him in the general election. He says he’ll bet me $5.00 he’ll win. We shake hands on that, with me thinking by then that I’m probably just making a donation.

  The campaign is quiet. When we hear our Pojoaque bunch is violating our single-issue policy and slamming Henry we stop that with a couple of telephone threats. On election eve the Pojoaqueans follow my suggestion and picket noisily on the Santa Fe plaza, asking city folks to give them control of their schools. We run a front-page photo of that, and our endorsement editorials repeat the plea. We describe Henry as a fine fellow but a roadblock to parental control.

  The polls close. Henry drops in again and we go down to a typical city voting precinct to see who is winning our bet. The poll clerk gives us a reading—with Henry losing by a ratio of about four to six. Which means Henry has lost the urban vote, which means he lost it all. Henry hands me $5.00. When the polls closed, the stinger comes. While the disinterested urban voters had defeated Henry, the voters of Pojoaque (for whom I had thought I was speaking) picked him two to one over our candidate.

  One of the participants in a poker group I joined in 1965 wears a shirt emblazoned with the question: “Why are you telling me this?” I suspect many readers are asking the same question. It’s because for years I described that incident to students in my Social Effects class. In the middle sixties years of lethargy they listened without questions. I was simply illustrating how a newspaper could influence public action if the issue was simple. When the Vietnam protests hit campus, things changed. Hands went up. Wasn’t it my responsibility to know that the PTA group did not represent majority opinion? Should I have defied the judge and exposed his politically motivated delay? Such questions cause the professor to admit that he didn’t want to go to jail, and that he was totally conned by the PTA, and that his ignorance cost Henry his job.

  In that course my premise was that power to persuade lies in the ability to make people see—sometimes literally—the situation as the writer sees it. Instead of telling readers the city should improve its maintenance programs, walk them down the street with you and show them those same details that drew you to that conclusion—the roaches around the drains, the trash collecting on the fences, and so forth. Based on that argument, I’d send them forth. They either come up with their own ideas, or choose from my list. For example:

  Go to the airport and the bus station, watch people waiting at both places, isolate the details that led to conclusions about them. If you think they represent different socio-economic classes, let me see enough to lead me to the same conclusion. And keep it in eight hundred words.

  Go to a gay bar and a country-western bar. What do you see that identifies them?

  Go to a trial. Watch the jury. Don’t tell me that certain jurists look bored, and certain jurists looked interested. Show me what you saw to cause you to think that.

  And so forth.

  The next step requires marking up the resulting papers, finding a crucial paragraph in each, typing all of these paragraphs off along with suggested modifications, handing them out at the next class meeting, and trying to teach something by dealing with the resulting arguments.

  “You say ‘obviously drunk,’” I say, “What made it obvious?”

  Everyone knew what a drunk looked like, they told me. Why waste any of those eight hundred words you allow? We finally settled on showing our citizen leaning against a Coke machine, missing the slot with his coins, giving up, etc., with the class and I agreeing that readers would be more willing to accept an undescribed drunk in the bus station than at the airport. Then it was on to the next paragraph where we reversed a sentence to change the emphasis, and dumped “walked slowly” in favor of “strolled,” after deciding “ambled” didn’t fit the scene. By the end of the semester, students were
rarely modifying verbs or nouns.

  While this was going on I was slaving episodically away on the book that became The Blessing Way—trying to impose the same standards on my own prose.

  I was writing episodically because this short book stretched about three years from 1967 into 1970 from first paragraph to final revision—with progress frequently interrupted by periods of sanity—probably induced by fatigue and sleepiness. Most of my efforts at fiction were done after dinner when the kids were abed, papers were graded, and the telephone wasn’t ringing. Sometimes in those dark hours I would realize that the scene I had finished was bad, the story wasn’t moving, the book would never be published, and I couldn’t afford wasting time I could be using to write nonfiction people would buy. Then I would pull the paper from the typewriter (remember those?), put the manuscript back in the box, and the box on the shelf to sit for days, or sometimes weeks, until job stress eased and the urge to tell the story returned.

  I had approached this first book with a plan. It wouldn’t be the Great American Novel. It would be a trial run to determine if a sprinter, conditioned to sum up disaster, triumph, tragedy, and love in five hundred words, could complete the marathon of a full-sized book. But before doing the marathon, I would try a mile. Not the five hundred thousand words that even a short version of War and Peace would require, but maybe eighty thousand or so of the suspense/mystery yarns Eric Ambler and Raymond Chandler had been writing. I read a lot of the books I intended to emulate in this first effort. I read the essays George Plimpton had done for Paris Review about how Hemingway and other great ones got their paragraphs hung together, and I tried to diagnose my own talents, and lack of them. I decided I was adept at description, good at moving narrative along, and dialogue was no problem. I had no idea whether I could develop a plot or how I could shape characters. Given the above conclusions, I would write a story in which the stage setting was more important than the play. If the actors and the story line were weak, maybe I could make the stage scenery so interesting it would carry the book.

  I come up with a plot about an emotionally challenged anthropology professor at work on Navajo culture, a woman hunting for her electrical engineer husband last seen on the Navajo Reservation, and an espionage scheme. The bad guys had hired the engineer to record the behavior of the missiles fired from the Tonapaw base in Utah across the reservation to the Army missile test site at White Sands Proving Grounds. The only important Navajo character in this plan was a “city Navajo,” a professional criminal raised in Chicago (where hundreds of Navajo families were relocated during the 1930s) with no knowledge of his tribe beyond what he’d collected from books just to prepare himself for this job. Specifically his job was to scare away the few Navajos who lived in the empty country where the engineer was setting up his monitoring devices.

  You’d meet lots of local Navajos in the book, in trading posts, at curing ceremonials, during visits to hogans, etc., but they would be minor characters. That was my plan. That wasn’t the way it worked out.

  Early in the book my fictional professor needed information from a friend, a Navajo policeman. I named him Joe Leaphorn, a totally un-Navajo name suggested to me by Mary Renault’s book on ancient Cretan culture (The Bull from the Sea) in which Cretan cowboys leaped over the horns of bulls. It was a mistake that I have never repeated. But Leaphorn proved a more serious problem. Making him seem genuine forced me to admit I didn’t know nearly as much as I should about the Dineh.

  I talked to Navajo friends, discovered I didn’t even know enough to ask intelligent questions, and began endless hours of reading. Reading everything: various versions of the creation myth, of curing ceremonials, of witchcraft beliefs, clan structures, sand painting, social life, sexual beliefs, taboos, puberty ceremonials, place names, hogan building, etc. I read Ph.D. dissertations, proceedings of dignified and scholarly societies, collected papers of the Peabody Museum, the autobiography of Son of Old Man Hat, the accounts of River Junction Charley, and on and on and on. Now I was ready to interrogate Navajos. And the Navajos I asked were ready to recognize that I was motivated by something more than idle curiosity.

  The last chapter of what was to become The Blessing Way was one of the very few that I have signed off on knowing it was a bad one. It was late in 1969. I had been working on the book off and on for about thirty months. Some parts of it were good. One part, a scene in which my hero escapes Big Navajo in the darkness of Many Ruins Canyon, is as good as anything I’ve written. Other parts badly needed improvement. In sum, the book wasn’t nearly as good as I’d intended. I was disappointed but I wanted to be done with it and it needed a terminal wrap-up chapter. I’d written two of these, both unsatisfactory, started a third one, which was going nowhere. To hell with it. I took the better of the bad ones, spruced it up a bit, printed the whole book out on my Radio Shack “Trash 80” computer, and sent it off to my agent.

  Ann Elmo, may she rest in peace, didn’t want me to write fiction. She said I was competent at nonfiction, a rare quality, and probably would get better. She could sell that for me. Why waste my time trying to be another wannabe novelist with which the world was already infested? I told her my scheme. She was not impressed. If I did it, she’d read it, and if it was any good she’d try to sell it somewhere. Now she had it and I waited for a response. After three weeks of silence I called her.

  What did she think? Could she sell it?

  No.

  Why not?

  Because it’s a bad book.

  Bad? How?

  It’s neither a mainstream novel nor a mystery. Reviewers won’t know what to say about it. Booksellers won’t know which shelf it goes on. Publishers won’t know where to list it in their catalogs.

  Did she think I could fix it? She didn’t recommend the attempt. Well, I said, just send it back to me then. I think I’ll rewrite it. Did she have any advice about that? She recommended “getting rid of the Indian stuff.”

  Today that sounds like bad advice. In 1969 it’s about what every competent literary agent would have said. Aside from textbooks and anthropology journals nobody was publishing material about our tribes. In the field of fiction Indians existed only as the enemy of the cavalry in westerns. If I had been paying any attention to the market, I’d have noticed that.

  But it seemed to me that the only worthwhile part of my manuscript was the Navajo Nation and its culture. I didn’t try a rewrite. I let it sit. Providence steps in—an article in Writer by Joan Kahn, the famed editor of mysteries at Harper & Row. Ms. Kahn liked mysteries less involved with plots and puzzles and more involved with character and culture. So did I. I wrote her that evening, telling her I had written a mystery set on the Navajo Reservation, that my agent and I disagreed over whether I should rewrite it, and asking her if she would read it and give me her opinion.

  Back came a typical publishing house response.

  Dear Mr. Hillerman:

  In re your inquiry of Monday. Yes. Send it in.

  Joan Kahn.

  A few days later some sort of Journalism Department accreditation meeting took me to New York and I stretched the trip to visit daughter Anne, who was doing a semester exchange student tour at the University of Massachusetts. Changing planes at Kennedy I called Ms. Kahn to see if she’d had time to read my manuscript.

  The resulting conversation is inscribed in my brain.

  “Yes. Haven’t you got my letter?”

  “No. I’ve been away.”

  “Well, we want to publish it if you can write a better last chapter.”

  “I can,” I said.

  Jubilation is a wonderful word but not strong enough here.

  Ms. Kahn’s letter was not as terse as her telephone conversation. It was a three-page list of flaws and shortcomings of the book with no words wasted on praise. Had I not made the call I would have seen it as a detailed explanation of rejection.

  One’s attitude toward a manuscript changes when one learns it’s likely to be published. I worked night after nigh
t clicking off the improvements Ms. Kahn wanted, coming up with a more satisfying finale, and inserting a bunch of new stuff to better develop Leaphorn’s character and expand his role. This drew another Kahn letter, suggesting a few more modifications and asking me to send her a list of “possible titles.” The name of the book, The Enemy Way, was already typed on the title page of the manuscript and on all other pages, but who was I to argue? I sent her eight possible names, leading with The Enemy Way and listing The Blessing Way, which has nothing to do with the plot but is the most important of the Navajo ceremonials, as choice number seven. Ms. Kahn chose number seven. I still wonder why but it didn’t seem to matter. The only complaint I received was an indignant letter from a woman who had her bookstore send one to her elderly mother thinking it was a religious work.

  I used the word “jubilation” a moment ago and I will use it again when the Harper & Row business rep came through Albuquerque with a copy of The Blessing Way dust jacket in his briefcase and a third time when I opened a package Joan Kahn sent me and pulled out a copy of the actual book. After writing for more than a quarter century I was now, formally, officially, and incontestably an author. Does it bother me that the Mohawk Indian whose profile forms the cover looks no more Navajo than does Bill Clinton? Hardly at all.