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William Eastlake's first three novels, Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963), are generally regarded as constituting a trilogy not only because they have a common setting the Checkerboard region of northern New Mexico, with its landscapes, languages, and people but also because of the genealogical cohesion represented by the Bowmans, a white family whose stories as ranchers and traders merge with the destinies of a number of Indian characters. Despite these converging elements, however, it must be acknowledged that these novels do not share the diegetic continuity and the consistency of plot structures commonly associated with a trilogy. Specifically, their narrative organization appears to be less the result of Eastlake's response to the rich mixture of cultures and experiences he finds in Indian Country than a comprehensive frame for different, scattered stories. The editorial history of Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses bears out this impression. It is well known that the central episode of the narrative, concerning Ring Bowman's thoughts as he is sinking in quicksand, actually derives from a short story published a few months earlier under the title "A Long Day's Dying."1 Although the functional segmentation of this story provides the framing event and, consequently, the unifying plot and a central formal order to the entire narrative, still Portrait strikes the reader as less a novel than a collection of short sto |
