[Milton is an American educator, poet, biographer, novelist, and historian who edits The South Dakota Review. In 1964 he conducted a series of televised interviews with Waters and published them in 1971 as Conversations with Frank Waters. In the essay below, Milton focuses on Waters's interest in the unity of man and his world—a unity, he asserts, that transcends time, space, form, and culture.]

Of the three writers whom I consider to be the most important Western American novelists—Walter Clark, Frank Waters, and Harvey Fergusson—Waters is the most involved in form as space (or, space as form), Fergusson relies most heavily upon temporal form, and Clark is somewhere between the two. In Western literature we are perhaps more accustomed to the linear development of events than to a logical or intuitive imposition of form upon the material. The early literature consisted mainly of travel narratives, journals, and diaries in which the action proceeded from day to day and time was often an important factor in the movement from place to place on the journey. Since it was Fergusson's desire to depict the Old West truthfully, stripped of its myth, he went to nineteenth-century themes and types of people which allowed him to make use of historical sequences, to recognize individual or family chronicles over a period of time, to see the changes in the people and in the land, and to construct a perspective for the twentieth-century West. In spite of his perceptions and his poetry, he remained true to sequences of events, to a kind of chronological inevitability. His imagery illuminated the moment; it did not strive for structural or broadly symbolic meaning.

Clark, on the other hand, while also leading the past into the present, gave more attention to the niceties of logical or imposed, structure leading to a more conscious sense of form. Although his two novels which might be called historical allow us to feel that we are in a time past, they do not specifically or necessarily rest on identifiable events in western history. They are closer to being archetypical than they are to being either historical or unique. Yet, the element of time passing—the chronology—is essential to Clark while he is rounding out his large themes. And, in spite of implications of continuance as each novel draws to a close, the themes and their supporting narratives are sufficiently rounded off to leave the impression of completeness in each case. In The Ox-Bow Incident, the specific guilty man is dead at the end, along with his victims, even though the other men, temporarily cleansed through violence and remorse, may well repeat their behavior at another time. In The Track of the Cat, the specific cat is dead, along with its victims, even though the symbolic cat lives on in the fears of man. Structurally, there are so many patterns of three's in Clark's novels, emerging in various ways, that we are at least aware of the possibility of Aristotelean form with a clear beginning, middle, and end—a linear movement. (Clark was aware of the Christian importance of "three" but denied any conscious use of the number in that context.) Even Clark's major images of color and space work within a time sequence—in Ox-Bow a going out and a coming back, and in Track of the Cat a repetition of that pattern as the isolated ranch house serves as a focal point and the brothers and Joe Sam go out from there and return, even though the homeward journey may be in death.

I cite these few facts about Fergusson and Clark because they were the Western novelists whom Waters has respected the most. And while Waters' work has some similarities to theirs, it is the differences that allow Waters to stand apart, to have special significance, and to be relatively ignored or misunderstood outside the area in which he lives.

Writing entirely about his native Southwest, Waters is unabashedly a regionalist. This label, however, should not prevent anyone from seeing that Waters is concerned with no less than the universe itself, and man's place in it. The Southwest is a fitting stage for such a cosmic pursuit, because in the mountains and on the desert man comes into direct contact with the natural forces and elements which existed long before man emerged and which played a full role in the ancient religious systems. (While most of Waters' fiction has been "contemporary," he has been going further back in his non-fiction studies, most recently to the Mayas in Mexico Mystique.) Furthermore, the interplay of three cultures, the intuitive knowledge of the old Indian tribes, and the kind of isolation which not only allows but forces a man to think about himself and his relation to beginnings and endings—these are immediate presences in New Mexico. Waters' journey has taken him back into time, into primitive and non-rational philosophies and religions, and into Jungian racial consciousness. The end of the journey, should we ever reach it, will be a fusion of Eastern (Oriental) thought with our Western notion of rationalism. In The Woman at Otowi Crossing Waters juxtaposes the scientific study of the atom at Los Alamos with the spiritual concept of oneness in the Indian beliefs just a few miles away. The old and the new exist side by side, but they have not yet been effectively fused. For understandable reasons, I think, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the least effective of Waters' novels. But, it shows the direction of his journey.

Waters has been called a visionary and a mystic. This is all right as long as we do not limit those terms to a condition which presupposes a lack of close relationship to the physical world. Waters is not a dreamer, disconnected from the world around him. His mysticism is land-based, object-based. His visions spring from nature and from those people whose ancestry is traceable to non-western origins. The mixture of cultures in his work reveals the similarities in them. In other similarities, too, between primitive myths and modern thought, or between such things as creation stories in several major religions, Waters is concerned with common denominators, with the sources which prove essentially the same for all cultures and times. In dealing with sameness, oneness, and the eternal, Waters is therefore deemphasizing the chronology of time, the clocks of the modern western world, and seeking a timelessness and perhaps even an essential form which can ultimately be called formless.

Granted that the Mayas (with whom Waters is involved in Mexico Mystique) developed an elaborate system of time-keeping, and that the narrative in Pike's Peak proceeds from one generation to another in sequential order, still the drum beat in The Wild Earth's Nobility (the first volume of the Pike's Peak trilogy) serves as an image of blood relationships, not of linear sequences in a form of music. As Rogier listens, the rhythms of the drums hypnotize him, stop him in time, enter his blood stream in a way that is neither gentle nor smooth. The "timeless rhythm" grows in his blood and soon he believes "with his blood more than the capacity of his mind could ever admit." For all this emphasis on blood consciousness, Waters is much closer to Mary Austin than he is to D. H. Lawrence. In "The Woman Who Rode Away" and in Apocalypse, Lawrence leaps past the land and its immediate images directly into human sacrifice and the cosmos itself. Austin, on the other hand, is intimate with the land and its creatures and the natural rituals of people living close to the land; her attention is therefore focused on rhythms (the same two-handed beat that is basic to the Indian drumming in Waters) and on the achievement of harmony with the earth. The point may seem labored, but it is important. Lawrence jumps irrationally across the reaches of western thought to find a blood-relationship with the undefinable cosmos; Waters and Austin keep their feet on the ground, exploring images which can convey a relationship between intuitive man and the mysteries of nature and, therefore, of life. Blood need not be let, or spilled; its rhythms, or pulse, within the body are akin to the eternal pulse, and the heart beat, like the drum beat, is not considered as evidence of the passing of time but as a source, an energy, a vital link between man and nature. Rogier, in Pike's Peak, goes into the heart of the mountain in search of this pulse, this secret of life. The Mayas and Aztecs sought this secret in the sun, and it was only in death that they were placed deep inside their mountain-like pyramids, hidden from the sun. The place of death parallels the place of life, yet both are out of the sun which is an obvious source of life, an ancient deity. This is one of the many ambiguities which the intuitive mind recognizes and accepts without subjecting the conflicting parts to rational scrutiny. In this sense, then, Waters is a mystic.

As such, he might well be less concerned with structure or superficial form than were Fergusson, Clark, or a number of other Western novelists. As he notes in Below Grass Roots (which became the second part of Pike's Peak), "not the sorry form, but the splendid substance" in which "the subtle truths" are not known but felt. Waters applies this thought to all of American history: the tales and legends of the West especially, "stand there, close and touchable, (moving) truthfully with all their faults and without form." And in The Man Who Killed the Deer Palemon speaks (in the poetic and italicized words of the language Waters gives to the Indians) of form as a body. Man is imprisoned in the form which is his physical body but he must have faith in it nevertheless, as well as in the form of life which is his greater body. If he can find this faith he may then be released from his bonds: "That will free your spirit into a formless life without bounds, which will overflow and taste of all life."

This spiritual form may or may not be comparable to a kind of artistic form in the books themselves. Perhaps we are again involved in an ambiguity, saying that faith in form leads to a wholesome formlessness. It occurs to me that Waters is searching for nothing less than the perfect form, the circle, the traditional symbol of unity. In each of his novels he makes progress around the circle but never quite completes it. The circle encompasses space, and the physical space of the American West is difficult to contain, or frame. Furthermore, it is likely that Waters believes, with others, that the important thing is the journey, not the destination. In Pike's Peak, in many ways the longest of the Waters journeys, March, out of Boné and Rogier, travels a long distance, searching for himself, and the conclusion is as open-ended as the land. The Man Who Killed the Deer opens with Martiniano in trouble near Blue Lake and closes with an image of a pebble on water, suggesting the completion of a circle (the lake and the rings sent out by the impact are themselves circles). Yet, the mass of images throughout the novel, and the widening circle of ripples in the metaphorical lake, spread to "unguessed shores." And they do so "in the timeless skies of night."

With his interest in Jung and oriental religions, and in American Indian ceremonialism, it is not difficult to believe that Waters equates sandpaintings with mandalas, the symbols of psychic wholeness, and that his entire work is an effort to reconstruct the circle of unity. In this respect his work is timeless and spatial. He reaches further than Clark and Fergusson, and in doing so he perhaps sacrifices some of the more mechanical possibilities of artistic form to the largeness of the vision and to the intuitive processes necessary in achieving that vision. The sounds of the drum echo throughout an immense space.