WRITING HOUSE MADE OF DAWN

Momaday first conceived of House Made of Dawn as a book-length poem, and he had been thinking about it and even working on it in verse before it took final shape as a novel,¹ retaining a poetical quality. “I'm basically a poet, I think,” he said in a 1982 interview, “Fiction is kind of a spinoff from my poetry. I started writing poetry first, and so I think virtually everything I write is lyrical. That's just the way I write. That's the way I deal in words.”² If Momaday first conceived the genre of his tale to be poetry, he recalls in another interview the genesis of the basic subject matter, a story about a veteran returning from World War II: “I got the idea sometime after I graduated from the University of New Mexico and before I started my graduate work. There was a year in-between, and I think it was in that year that I really started thinking about writing the novel. All the time I was in graduate school, this was in the back of my mind, and the thing was turning over, you know, in my mind. I started it almost directly thereafter. …”³

In an interview with Joëlle Rostkowski, Momaday recalls that he began to think of the novel in prose rather than in poetry during “a happy and creative period” in his life. He had been writing poetry, but he notes that he wanted to work in another genre: “I felt the need to expand myself, to extend the scope of my literary work.”⁴ When he was at Stanford, he says in another interview, “I was working in poetry, exclusively. And that was such a rigorous time for me. … I was exercising a lot, and I wrote some poems. But when I left, I felt that I had worked myself into a corner, that I had become so dedicated or committed to traditional English poetry that I felt suffocated. I wanted more elbow room. So I began writing fiction. And that's when I started House Made of Dawn.⁵ Momaday had finished his doctoral degree at Stanford in 1963 and had taken a job teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara. During this period he also spent time with his parents in New Mexico, working on a draft of the novel whenever and wherever he could: “I wrote the very first part of it at Jemez Springs. I kept it up when I went to my first teaching post at Santa Barbara, and wrote that balance of it there in fairly quick order.”⁶

In February of 1966 Frances McCullough, an editor at Harper and Row who had been a former fellow student at Stanford, invited Momaday to submit a collection of poetry for the consideration of the press. At Stanford, McCullough had been editor of the literary magazine Sequoia, to which Momaday had submitted poetry, and she remembered his poetry: “you were extremely generous and gave us some of the best poems we ever published.” She wrote that she would “very much like to see a manuscript” from him.⁷ On 21 February 1966 Momaday sent this reply:

I have not written much in the way of poetry in the last three years. … I have been concentrating my energies upon several things in prose, including a novel. I would guess that it is nearly half finished now, and I have the whole of it pretty well formulated in my mind. Would you be interested in having a look at it in a month or two, when I shall have had time to sand and copy it? … I should like to get it under contract, for that would give me the incentive to turn it out, and the resistance I seem to need against procrastination.⁸

McCullough invited Momaday to submit his prose manuscript for consideration and added that it might be eligible for the Harper Prize Novel Contest. In the course of their correspondence, Momaday sent the editor a short manuscript entitled “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” an autobiographical essay he had already written about his Kiowa heritage. He was trying to place the essay in a journal and thought McCullough could help him get it published. She read it and found it good: “I've just finished reading the Kiowa piece, which is first rate. I've never read anything quite like it—it's terrifically moving in the way that good poems are, but has a great many other qualities as well. I only wish it were longer.”⁹ The prose piece would be published in the Reporter in 1967 and would become Tosamah's Sunday sermon in House Made of Dawn. The same piece, incidentally, would serve as the introduction to Momaday's next book, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969).

Momaday continued working on his novel while McCullough shopped the essay around, and by the end of May he had finished “The Longhair” section: “Today … I sent you the first book of my novel. I have a little bit of a second book on hand, but it is rough, and I want to revise it. I shall try very hard to send you a complete MS by the second week in July.” The would-be novelist was as good as his word. By 6 July he had finished the first draft of his first novel: “Here is the rest of the manuscript. Please see that it gets together with book I. … I needn't tell you what I've been doing for six weeks, nor how damned glad I am to be through. Right now I know nothing but relief—and a certain sense of having realized an old ambition: to write something like a novel. Thanks; thanks for the boost.”¹⁰

Momaday had thus completed a draft of his novel, and McCullough had gotten her wish for something longer than the “Rainy Mountain” essay. Nevertheless, she and the other readers at Harper and Row were not yet ready to commit to publishing the book. On 8 July the editor expressed both admiration for and criticism of the work: “your prose is always almost perfect, exact and lovely at once,” she praised; “it's enormously satisfying to read the real thing.” She and other readers at the publishing house had concerns, however: “What does bother us is that you seem to have trouble creating believable fictional characters or handling the dramatic part of the story, the plot, etc., pacing, interweaving of events and characters. … I am quite worried about the fact that the characters never come to life, as, for instance, your grandmother does in the short piece” [“The Way to Rainy Mountain”].¹¹ Despite this initial, somewhat negative response, a month later (10 August 1966), McCullough noted that the people at Harper and Row were ready to make a commitment to publishing the book: “At last an official reaction!” she writes. “First let me say that we are all agreed that we very much want to publish House Made of Dawn.” Moreover, she adds, the publishing house would even be willing to publish it with very little rewriting. Her preference and recommendation, however, would be for a thorough revision: “a good revision would yield a novel of major proportions.”¹² Momaday accepted the suggestion and began the laborious project of revising his manuscript.

REVISING HOUSE MADE OF DAWN

In an interview with Lee Abbott, Momaday discusses his sense of the importance of revision in the context of his own writing: “I do so much of the really important work in the rewriting that it's very hard for me to get very far with the first draft. … When I rewrite,” he says, “I delete very little. Because that's all been done in the first process, but I rework a great deal, and I almost inevitably add a great deal when I rewrite.”¹³ In that he conceives of himself as a poet, he admits that he is very much aware of the sound of what he writes, and listening to what he has written is an important part of his revision process: “That's how I judge my own writing. I listen to it. I revise as I go, and I write rather slowly. And if I'm writing well, I might come up with three or four pages a day. When I wrote House Made of Dawn, I wrote over a period of about two years, but sporadically. Maybe six months of actual writing time.”¹⁴ On the art of revising in general, Momaday has this to say:

[Momaday:] If I rewrite a page, and I see that is isn't going to work, I will do away with it right on the spot. But if I keep it, the chances are pretty good that it's going to show up in the final product, though it will be reworked considerably. …”

[Question:] Do you find it easy to add?

[Momaday:] I find it easy to add at that point because I have the raw material and then I'm constantly thinking as I'm going over it of things that can work in addition to it, things that I can add to it. So the revision, in a general way, is reworking what I have and adding to it, rather than deleting things.

[Question:] Did you find House Made of Dawn easy to write?

[Momaday:] No. I find writing of any kind very difficult. It was difficult to do, but I enjoyed it immensely. I got a great satisfaction out of writing that book.¹⁵

After seeing the early version of what was to become House Made of Dawn, Frances McCullough advised Momaday not to rush the unrevised manuscript to meet the deadline for the Harper Prize; rather, she encouraged him to take his time with a careful and thorough revision: “I hope you'll consider withdrawing the book from the competition. [I] … feel that it would be unwise for you to concern yourself more with winning the contest than with making the novel as good as it can possibly be.”¹⁶ Although she encouraged him to take his time, she herself became impatient. In November of 1966 she sent a query: “Should I give you a deadline or encourage you to take your time? Well, you will know what's right to do and I'm getting very anxious to see the revision.” In early January of 1967 she would again inquire: “Where's that novel?”¹⁷

Indeed, where was that manuscript?

Having received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his study of the romantic-era poets Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson, and William Cullen Bryant, Momaday had moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, for the academic year 1966-1967. The purpose of his research was to investigate “the way in which science informs the imagery and qualifies … a certain attitude toward the landscape in American intellectual history.”¹⁸ (He had a contract with Cornell University Press for a scholarly book and was negotiating with Oxford, his preferred press; the proposed critical work was announced by Oxford but was finally never published.)¹⁹ At the same time he did his research on and reading of these New England poets in Amherst, Momaday continued working on House Made of Dawn. In an interview with Camille Adkins, he admits that all that while he had been working on the novel: “… I finished it in Massachusetts, where I had the Guggenheim and was working on Emily Dickinson, or reading her. … most of it was written in retrospect, thinking back on that time at Jemez that was so important to me.”²⁰

Given his editors' comments, Momaday had a lot of revising to do. In August of 1966 McCullough had outlined what she and her fellow editors thought about what direction the revising of the book might take if he were going to write a “completely successful book”:

Here are some of the aspects of the book that we think weaken it. First, there is no clear narrative line, so that the story falls into fragments and lacks cohesion—this diffusion of tension weakens the effectiveness of the book as a whole, so that individual scenes and descriptions stand out vividly but one is never quite sure how they are intended to work together. If there were a straight narrative built around a single dramatic subject, if perhaps Benally were the protagonist, if we could concentrate more on the Indian characters and tell the story perhaps wholly thorough their eyes—we think all of these things might strengthen the book enormously.²¹

In a subsequent letter, however, McCullough cautioned him not to overdo the revisions: “Revising the book can be a delicate job, yours isn't in any sense an ordinary novel, and I think we have to be very careful not to disturb the texture of it while strengthening its underpinnings.”²²

Certainly Momaday did not carry out all of the editors' initial suggestions for revision. The character Benally did not become the protagonist, for example, nor did Momaday limit himself to a single dramatic subject or a straight narrative. Nor did he refrain from describing parts of the narrative through non-Indian eyes. In some instances, for example, the reader gets the perspective of Father Olguin, Angela, or Milly, none of whom is an Indian character.

Momaday did make at least one major change in character and plot in response to one of McCullough's suggestions, however. In the first version of the novel, the priest, Father Olguin (named Bothene in that early draft), was visited at Walatowa by his widowed mother, Ellen Bothene, and his sister, Angela. In August of 1966 McCullough had worried that this family did not fit into the novel stylistically: “Ellen Bothene seems to be disturbing in extremis to all the readers here—if the Bothenes don't get sacked altogether, do you think it might be a good idea to eliminate scenes written from a woman's point of view? You don't seem at ease with that point of view, and the uneasiness creates an unlikely character who never comes to life as she should.”²³ Acting in accordance with McCullough's suggestion, Momaday cut the character of the mother altogether, changed Bothene's name to Father Olguin, and decided against Angela's being his sister. Perhaps the editors were right; perhaps these characters in their original incarnations did not come to life, did not fit in. In a thematic sense, however, it would have been interesting to have had this priestly family in the present action of the novel as a mirror or parallel to the nineteenth-century Fray Nicolás and the family of Francisco, his sister, and her mother.

In an early version of the narrative, published as “Three Sketches from House Made of Dawn” in 1966, the Bothenes have not yet been cut. On the afternoon of the corre de gaio (race of the rooster, or rooster pull), as it is called in this early version, Momaday writes that “Father Bothene went with his mother and sister out of the rectory. They walked slowly, talking together, along the street which ran up-hill towards the Middle.”²⁴ For the published novel Momaday made as slight a change as possible: “Father Olguin went with Angela St. John out of the rectory. They walked slowly, talking together, along the street which ran uphill toward the Middle” (39). In the next paragraph Momaday makes another change as he excises the character of the mother from his story. In the sketch Momaday writes that as they walked they “saw faces in the dark windows and doorways of the houses, half in hiding, watching with wide, solemn eyes. They lagged behind, mother and son, and Angela drew away from them a little.”²⁵ In an interim draft of this same scene, there was yet another character: “They lagged behind, O'Brien and the priest, and Angela drew away from them a little.”²⁶ Finally, in the published version, both the mother and the O'Brien character have vanished: “They saw faces in the dark windows and doorways of the houses, half in hiding, watching with wide, solemn eyes. The priest paused among them, and Angela drew away from him a little” (40). The changes are indeed slight, but their very slightness suggests that even though Momaday was willing to cut certain characters, he was unwilling to let their disappearance affect the overall gestalt of the novel.

What did affect the overall configuration of the novel was the emergence of Abel as the protagonist. Whereas, according to McCullough, he could not be distinguished as a main character in the first draft, he had emerged as such in the revision. After receiving the first one thousand words of that revision in February, the editor expressed her pleasure: she was “enormously pleased with the work … particularly with the new Indianization; it seems that Abel is really emerging as a strong character in his own right for the first time, and that is really the most important thing about the revision.”²⁷ Once she had received the complete revision in May of 1967, she felt the book to be “much more solid now, and Abel's part in it much stronger and more moving.” As always, she finds Momaday's writing in general “astonishingly good,” but still she has suggestions: “There are still a few thorns in part I, I think—a bit too much Angela, too little Abel,” for instance. She quickly adds that these are minor concerns: “I think that there's no question that the book is now finished.”²⁸

Finished or not, however, the manuscript still received some constructive criticism. McCullough had a few more comments for revisions. One comment, for instance, concerns the section that becomes Tosamah's Sunday sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” Momaday had incorporated the sketch into the novel in the first place at McCullough's suggestion, but he had given that sermon to Tosamah. The editor did not think that he was the proper speaker for the sketch: the sermon is “completely wrong for Tosamah (whose speech and thoughts are completely different) and should be attributed to someone else.” As we know from the published version of the novel, Momaday stuck with his decision to have Tosamah deliver this speech, an indication that he was not easily swayed from authorial decisions that he felt were right. Another problem McCullough still perceived with the novel concerned Abel and Angela in Los Angeles. In the published version of the novel, Abel coincidently sees Angela one day while he is in the Los Angeles suburb of Westwood with Benally, but he does not speak to her, nor does she see or speak to him. When he is in the hospital, Ben telephones her to tell her about Abel; accordingly, she visits him in the hospital. In an earlier version, one that McCullough had objected to, Angela's husband, a doctor, was in the same hospital, so Abel and Angela had a coincidental meeting that way. Even more troubling for McCullough than such a coincidental meeting was that Angela's son, Peter, did not necessarily exist (though Angela did have two daughters). Momaday had left the son's existence and the identity of his father vague, suggesting that Angela was not pregnant in Walatowa after all and that Abel could have been the father of one of her children. The “note of the nonexistent son,” McCullough writes is “bothersome”: “it strikes a false note somehow, it's too tricky and almost corny, and the fact that we hear second hand from Benally makes it seem almost ludicrous.”²⁹ From reading the novel in its present published state, the reader knows that Momaday did make the changes in this instance: Angela is clearly pregnant before she meets Abel, and she clearly has a son, Peter, to whom she has told the bear story.

In May of 1967 McCullough had claimed that the novel was finished, but she had yet another concern. She feared that because of the many different sections with various flashbacks and narrators, for instance, the novel remained too choppy. She wrote that the only:

serious weakness is the disjointed, choppy quality it has. Individual scenes and descriptions are magnificent, but they are pieced together in a sort of mosaic that moves backward and forward in time and place in such a way as to leave the reader a little unsatisfied. For this particular novel, of course, the disjointedness has its own function in that it reflects Abel's own experience. …

In any case, I think that one thing that would ease the sense of choppiness would be to smooth out the chronology. … I think it could be done easily by simply dating each section (and placing it too).³⁰ In response to these and other less substantial comments from the readers at Harper and Row, relayed though McCullough, Momaday began another revision of the novel. From Amherst he had returned to Santa Barbara in the summer of 1967, and there he made a final revision. Most of these changes were minor, but a few are worth mentioning as examples of how the novel took its final shape. McCullough had suggested that he cut the August 2 paragraphs of “The Longhair” section of the novel: “They are a great anti-climax, and they don't really accomplish anything except to tell us that Angela went home and Father Olguin is upset. I think they undercut the effectiveness … of the murder scene, which is the logical place to end Part I.”³¹ Momaday felt differently however. Interestingly, he did cut the reference to Father Olguin and the information about Angela's leaving. Part of the paragraph he cut from the manuscript had read as follows: “The priest looked on from a distance. Ellen [Bethene, the priest's mother] returned. She returned to find that Angela was gone, and there had been a murder in the town.”³²

More significant than what he cut, however, is what he kept. Against his editor's advice, he retained the description of the procession honoring Porcingula, and he kept the scene describing Francisco's returning to work in the corn field the morning after the murder of the albino. On his way the old man looks for the bird snare that he had set on his way to pick up his grandson in the opening pages of the novel. By retaining this passage, Momaday maintains the thematic or symbolic importance of the empty snare in the context of Abel's departure. He also maintains the structural balance by rounding out the conclusion of the section with that second description of the snare: Francisco “looked for the reed. It was there still, but the rise of the river had reached it and made it spring; it leaned out over the water, and the little noose hung from it like a spider's thread” (35û36).

Another significant change Momaday made in the course of this revision concerns the relationship between Angela and Abel. In the draft version, the description of their first sexual encounter comes not after he has finished chopping wood on 28 July but on the night of the twenty-fifth, the night of the rooster pull. The implication is that Abel and Angela have an actual relationship rather than merely a brief, one-time sexual encounter. This implication is borne out in that the manuscript description shows the couple to be more like lovers than they finally appear. In the published version, Abel and Angela have only the single sexual encounter, which Momaday describes as briefer and harsher than it was in an earlier version. In the former version the two spend time walking in the moonlight and sitting in the house holding hands before climbing the stairs to Angela's bedroom. The revision is important in that it significantly changes the nature of the encounter between these two characters. If Abel's sickness manifests itself in, or is reflected in part, by his inability to maintain a relationship, it is important that he not be shown in a relationship with Angela. A remnant of this relationship does survive, however, in the finished novel: Benally's description of her in the “Night Chanter” section suggests that Abel and Angela had more than the one brief encounter: “She was going to help him, he said. She liked him a lot, and, you know they fooled around and everything, and she was going to help him get a job and go away from the reservation, but then he got himself in trouble” (177). Angela and Abel may have talked about such things, but the reader never hears of it nor suspects it, and as a result, Benally's comment seems a little out of place. Another change in the gestalt of the novel came about as a result of Momaday's cutting several passages from Angela's point of view. Remnants again survive, however. The reader sees sections of the rooster pull and Abel's wood-chopping, for instance, through Angela's perspective. This perspective adds a dimension to the novel that enhances its narrative complexity.

During the course of this final revision, at the editor's suggestion, Momaday added the specific dates and locations as chapter and section headings. Thus the reader does not have to wait for the clues within the text for the time and location of certain events. Even without the dated chapters, however, the clues were there in the earlier versions. In the opening scene, for instance, Francisco rides out of the canyon “on the old road to San Ysidro” (7); from this clue the attentive and informed reader will be able to identify Walatowa. According to Abel's flashbacks in that first section, the reader discovers that Abel has gone off and returned from World War II. In the next section, as Abel lies on the beach, the reader can assume he is in Los Angeles since Tosamah, we are told, lives and preaches in Los Angeles. The reader also knows six to seven years have passed, because after the sermon, Abel remembers the trial that had taken place six years earlier: “After six years he could remember the white man's body” (101). McCullough felt that such a demand for careful reading might frustrate readers, and so she convinced Momaday to include the dates and name the location of each section. Momaday did so carefully, noting, for instance, that 26 January 1952 was indeed a Saturday. Of course the festival honoring Porcingula had to be on the first and second of August, her traditional feast days.

Having made these and other changes, Momaday thus finished this revision of his novel. On 26 September 1967 he wrote Buzz Wyeth, one of the other editors at Harper and Row, that he had concluded another revision of the book: “The revision of House Made of Dawn is complete, and I am sending it to Fran at her home address. It is bigger and better than it was; I think that you will be pleased with it.”³³ On 25 September 1967 Momaday wrote to McCullough describing his responses to some of her comments: “I think you will like what I have done with it; for one thing it is bigger; for another it is better made. But let it speak for itself. I cut a good deal, added more.”³⁴ McCullough did indeed like what he had done, and she saw his writing as greatly improved: “What you've accomplished in the revisions, I think, is a great understanding of character; in the first version, the writing was outstanding but the characters flimsy, only illustrations of the points you were making. But now they jump to life in a most compelling way.”³⁵ On 1 November, McCullough wrote that the sales people from Harper and Row had read the book and were excited about it. Now was the time, she urged, to get the book to press: “it would be a mistake to allow the salesmen's enthusiasm to wind down gradually. So unless you are anxious to undertake another major revision, I would suggest that we concentrate on getting this book out now, and that you spend your energies on the next novel.”³⁶ After two substantial revisions, the manuscript was thus essentially ready for copy editing, which Momaday completed with very few revisions.

In a run of 7,500 copies, the novel was published in June 1968, and to the surprise of many, according to Momaday's biographer Schubnell, this previously unknown Kiowa writer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in May of 1969. Though he was perhaps well started in establishing his literary career before receiving the award, actually winning it—especially in the context of the novel's comparative obscurity—set Momaday up as an important American author. His winning the Pulitzer established him as a preeminent American writer. The completed novel and its winning the prize let it be known that he was a meticulous and sophisticated writer of national importance.

BUILDING CHARACTER

It is difficult to generalize Momaday's character building because it seems to vary significantly from character to character. Momaday claims that the characters of Tosamah, Milly, and Angela, for example, came out of his imagination exclusively, that they have no real life counterparts or models. The character Aho, described in Tosamah's sermon, in contrast, is the author's own grandmother very much as Momaday remembered her. Naturally, the creative impulse for other characters falls somewhere between these two extremes. The two priests, Fray Nicolás and Father Olguin, are imaginary, attests Momaday, but he did know Catholic priests at the Pueblo and thus did have examples, if not models. In various interviews and letters, Momaday has addressed the issue of how he envisioned and built certain characters, and these explanations provide indications of what the characters may have meant to the author.

Abel: Telling Abel's story was one of Momaday's primary inspirations for writing House Made of Dawn. At Jemez Pueblo the author had known many men of Abel's generation (including a veteran named Abel, who shot himself). These men had returned from World War II wounded in spirit (and often in body as well), and Momaday felt the urge to tell their stories. As he recalls in an interview with Laura Coltelli, Abel's was the perfect generation to write about “simply because it's a tragic generation. … the logical one to deal with in literature.”³⁷ In an early letter to McCullough, Momaday alludes to the type of which Abel is a composite:

Abel is a composite of the boys I knew at Jemez. I wanted to say something about them. An appalling number of them are dead; they died young, and they died violent deaths. Joe Sabaque was drunk and run over. Eddy Loretto was drunk and froze to death. (He was the best runner I ever knew.) Andy Armijo was murdered, butchered by a kinsman under a telegraph pole just east of San Ysidro. And Abel Tosa committed suicide. A good many of those who have survived this long are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, etc. They're a sad lot of people. That old cliche about the Indian living between two worlds is a bitter truth.³⁸

When asked about the biblical allusion in naming his protagonist, Momaday agrees that he was aware of the reference, “but perhaps to a lesser extent than most people realize. I didn't want to make too much of the Abel-Cain story in the novel. Of course it was there in my mind, but I think at a fairly low level. I knew someone at Jemez whose name was Abel, and I had that character very much in mind through part of the writing anyway. So the name is more suggestive than I meant it to be.”³⁹ The biblical allusion is, of course, to the story of Cain's slaying his brother, Abel, because he felt God preferred Abel's sacrificial offering to his own. Critical commentary has thus suggested that Momaday's character Abel is somehow slain by a white culture, the symbolic representation of Cain. Momaday himself does not commit to such a reading. Seeing Abel as a victim is also problematic if one reads his final dawn run as a sign that he is restored or revitalized.

In another conversation Momaday jokes with the interviewer about the character, suggesting that Abel would not have had to have been named as he was: “Quite a common name, you know, in the Pueblo society, most of the names are Christian. A lot of people have wanted to make some symbolic sense out of the name Abel, but suppose I'd used the equally common name, Jesús? What would they have made of that?”⁴⁰ Even though he may have had a specific person in mind at some stage in the formulation of Abel, the character is a “composite of several people” that Momaday knew: “I had models for him. So I took this aspect from one person and this from another and so on. And finally, I came up with my character, Abel.”⁴¹

Tosamah: If he admits to have had someone in mind in creating Abel, Momaday argues that he drew Tosamah out of his own imagination. Some critics have asked whether or not Tosamah is actually modeled on the author himself; Momaday evades such questions. The author does admit, however, that it is with Tosamah and the Saturday sermon that he articulates his own thoughts about language and the importance of the word. In the Sunday sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” Tosamah tells Momaday's own story about traveling the Kiowa migration route from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma. The author lends his grandmother Aho to the Priest of the Sun in the same sermon. In response to a question about why he chose Tosamah to speak of his own personal history, Momaday says that the “character of Tosamah” appeals to him in many ways: “I enjoyed writing his part into the novel. He became a character who interested me immediately, and I still wonder a lot about him. He is intriguing to me. There are many facets to his character. He is intelligent. He is cynical. He plays games. He likes to misrepresent himself in certain ways … he is interesting on various levels.” ⁴² Momaday adds that the character of Tosamah did indeed give him a chance to say some of the things he wanted to say about language.

There are thus a few identifiable biographical similarities between the author and his character: Tosamah is, for the most part, an example of Momaday's creativity and playfulness. In an interview with Louis Owens, Momaday admits that Tosamah is his favorite character in House Made of Dawn and that he was the most fun to write: “I think he's the most intricate. He's much more interesting because he's more complicated and has many more possibilities. He has a strange and lively mind, and I find him, and did at the time I was writing the book, fascinating.”⁴³ In another interview he says much the same thing. Tosamah is “a trickster, and he takes advantage of language in the situation, and he's bright. Much of what he says, I think, is provocative and true. I think of his sermon as being a wonderful kind of commentary on language, even in his own ironic terms. What he says is thoughtful and makes sense.”⁴⁴

The Albino: Tosamah may have been Momaday's most fun character, even perhaps the most intricate, but it is the character of the albino that is the most mysterious. One possible reading of the novel identifies the character as Juan Reyes, the albino child born to Manulita and Diego Fragua in January of 1875. In this case the agile and expert horseman would be seventy years old during the rooster pull ceremonies in the summer of 1945. As he watches Francisco at work in the cornfield on the night of 28 July, shortly after the rooster pull ceremony, the albino seems to be a spirit rather than an actual human. Francisco senses the presence of evil watching him, and he peers “into the dark rows of corn from which no sound had come, in which no presence was.” But there, the reader is told, was the “rapid and uneven” breathing, “the open mouth, the nearly sightless eyes” that flutter “helplessly behind the colored glass” as they watch Francisco leave the cornfield (66û67). Momaday acknowledges the ambiguity of this character in an interview with Gretchen Bataille: “He is a kind of spiritual realization to me. Of course we're talking about the whole concept of witchcraft in Pueblo society and that's a very, very large subject. I had many things in mind when I was dealing with the Albino. I think I thought of him primarily though as a kind of symbolic and spiritual reality—rather than as an individual man.”⁴⁵ The ambiguity connected with the albino was fully intended. In a letter to McCullough, Momaday wrote that the character “is neither white nor a man in the usual sense of those words. He is an embodiment of evil like Moby Dick, an intelligent malignity. I wanted to be subtle about him. … what he is … is in the book, and I believe that a careful reader can divine him.”⁴⁶

Fray Nicolás: Another somewhat ambiguous character is Fray Nicolás. On the one hand, he serves as an inspiration to Father Olguin; reading the journal restores Olguin “to faith and humility” (194). On the other hand, however, the reader knows that Nicolás is hardly a priest to admire. He broke his vow of chastity (fathering Francisco and Viviano and possibly Porcingula as well), and he demonstrated himself to be somewhat petty and vindictive in his letter to his “dearest brother J. M.” (51). In the context of the ambiguity of Nicolás's character, it is interesting to note Momaday's thoughts on his role in the novel: “I wanted a character that would represent that sort of dichotomy in pueblo life. Fray Nicolás was the answer for me. He could occupy that position of an intermediary in the pueblo and articulate some of the conflicts that informed the pueblo world.” Thus, in response to a question about the character, although the author initially says that does not know how he “happened to get the idea of the character of Nicolás,” he does write a thematically important role for him. Momaday adds, “He's very much in place because he's a missionary, and the missionaries, especially the Catholic missionaries in pueblos, are very important.” To a certain extent, Father Olguin plays a similar role. By the end of the novel he is aware that, like his predecessor, he remains excluded from pueblo life. “It seemed that such a character would be interesting and, indeed, I enjoyed working with both Fray Nicolás and Father Olguin,” says Momaday.⁴⁷

Angela: In one sense, Momaday suggests, Angela is a character who, like the priests, represents the conflict between the Pueblo and the non-Pueblo worlds; Momaday calls her “a later representative” of that same conflict faced by the priests.⁴⁸ There is clearly a similarity between Angela's ambiguous attraction to Abel and the priests' attractions to the pueblo people. She is an outsider, a non-Pueblo, yet, like the priests, she attains some sort of insider's view, at least according to Benally, who is impressed with her bear story: “And she was a white woman and she thought it up, you know, made it up out of her own mind, and it was like that old grandfather talking to me” (187). In the context of her similarities with the priest, it is interesting to remember that in an early draft of the novel such an identity was made manifest in that Angela was cast as Father Olguin's sister. In the novel's later incarnation, and thus in another sense, Momaday suggests, there is a parallel between Angela and the albino: “They both test Abel in certain ways—not in the same way. But they are alike in that they demand certain difficult responses from Abel.”⁴⁹ Momaday maintains that he had never known a woman like Angela, and thus, like Tosamah, she is made up out of his own imagination.

In a letter to the author, McCullough questions the character of Angela: “Why is Angela really there? is she really pregnant? what about Peter the mysterious son? does he exist, or did she only hope to make Abel think she had a son by him?”⁵⁰ In response to these questions, Momaday revised his character, gave her both a literal and a thematic purpose for being at Walatowa. She is there for the mineral baths and is thus in need of healing, as is Abel. She is also there as a sort of foil to Abel; she is there as a part of the non-Indian culture that Abel must encounter throughout the novel.

In discussing Momaday's creation of character, one should keep in mind that however the author might first conceive of a character, a good character will take on a life of his or her own. He has never known a woman like Angela, but he adds that he would like to know such a woman. Tosamah, too, remains alive and interesting and intriguing to his creator. In several instances Momaday has commented that he does not know what Abel does finally. He does not know, and he does not want to know. In response to a question about indirection in his novel, Momaday suggests a principle behind his creation not only of plot but of character as well:

if you have several points of view and you keep going round and round the thing until you can see it from all sides, that becomes interesting in itself, it seems to me. There are lots of devices, of course, the novelist has available to him. And one is the incorporation of stories within stories. There are other such stories in House Made of Dawn. The old woman whose hamster dies is another such insert. And in a sense, these things are digressions, but in a greater sense they're not. They're integrating principles.⁵¹

Notes

1. See Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 93.

2. Bettye Givens, “A MELUS Interview: N. Scott Momaday—A Slant of Light,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 87.

3. Persona, “Shouting at the Machine: An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 120.

4. Joëlle Rostkowski, “Looking Back: House Made of Dawn as the Portrait of a Lost Generation,” QUERTY, vol. 7 (1997): p. 147.

5. Camille Adkins, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 221.

6. Ibid.

7. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 14 Feb. 1966, Momaday Correspondence with Harper and Row, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

8. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 21 February 1966, Bancroft Library.

9. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 8 May 1966, Bancroft Library.

10. Momaday to Frances McCullough, 28 May 1966; 6 July 1966, Bancroft Library.

11. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 8 July 1966, Bancroft Library.

12. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 10 August 1966, Bancroft Library.

13. Lee Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, pp. 25, 26.

14. Bettye Givens, pp. 87û88.

15. Lee Abbott, p. 26.

16. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 10 August 1966, Bancroft Library.

17. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 3 November 1966; 6 January 1967, Bancroft Library.

18. Announcement in the Emily Dickinson Bulletin, 9 (June 1969; rev. November 1962): p. 2.

19. The study's proposed title was The Furrow and the Glow: Science and the Landscape in American Poetry, 1836-66. According to Matthais Schubnell, Momaday had secured a preliminary contract with Oxford University Press, and the book was announced in the Emily Dickinson Bulletin, but never reached publication. See Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 32.

20. Camille Adkins, p. 221.

21. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 10 August 1966, Bancroft Library.

22. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 22 August 1966, Bancroft Library.

23. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 22 August 1966, Bancroft Library.

24. Momaday, “Three Sketches from House Made of Dawn,” Southern Review, new series, 2.4 (1966), p. 941.

25. Ibid.

26. Typescript of House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday Papers, Bancroft Library.

27. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 27 February 1967, Bancroft Library.

28. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 11 May 1967, Bancroft Library.

29. Ibid.

30. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 23 May 1967, Bancroft Library.

31. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 23 May 1967, Bancroft Library.

32. Manuscript of House Made of Dawn, Bancroft Library.

33. N. Scott Momaday to Buzz Wyeth, 26 September 1967, Bancroft Library.

34. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 25 September 1967, Bancroft Library.

35. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 18 October 1967, Bancroft Library.

36. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 1 November 1967, Bancroft Library.

37. Laura Coltelli, “N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 162.

38. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 6 July 1966, Bancroft Library.

39. Gretchen Bataille, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 61.

40. Persona, “Shouting at the Machine,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 119.

41. Bettye Givens, p. 90.

42. Wm. T. Morgan, “Landscapes,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, pp. 49û50.

43. Louis Owens, “N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 186.

44. Dagmar Weiler, “N. Scott Momaday: Storyteller,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 172.

45. Gretchen Bataille, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, pp. 60–61.

46. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 8 December 1967, Bancroft.

47. Weiler, p. 170.

48. Ibid.

49. Bataille, p. 61.

50. Frances McCullough to N. Scott Momaday, 23 May 1967, BancroftLibrary.

51. Kay Bonetti, “N. Scott Momaday: Interview,” p. 139.