Red Sky at Morning,
Richard Bradford (Lippincott, 1968) *****
This has always been one of my
personal favorites. I discovered it many
years ago by way of the movie of the same title, starring Richard Thomas (his
first major role), Richard Crenna and Claire Bloom. One of my closest friends, retired college
history professor Don Shannon, had told me about it. He said I’d like it because it paralleled
that part of my own life in WWII when my dad left for the Pacific and our
family went to stay with relatives in northern New Mexico. It turned out there were other parallels. I learned just recently that the author,
Richard Bradford, who died some years ago, was almost the same age as me. Not only was his father away in the Navy
during WWII (as mine was) but Richard
was in the Marines from 1952-55 (as I was), grew up in the South as well as
northern New Mexico and consequently fell in love with that country and its
special enchantment (as I did).
That is essentially the setting of
the novel. It is a coming of age story
about a boy, Josh, in his final year of high school, who has been raised in the
genteel ways of Mobile, Alabama, and is now attending classes with students in
a small town in northern New Mexico whose customs and speech are as alien to
him as if he were in a foreign country.
He is, however, fascinated by the Hispanic and Native American culture
and manages to blend in pretty well, even though he is the real ‘foreigner’ to
his classmates and friends. His mother, however, has difficulty adapting, even though
the family had vacationed there from time to time over the years because Josh’s
father loved the area for its beauty and its people for their
unpretentiousness.
The first part of the novel includes
some laugh-out-loud sections describing Josh’s reactions to adult thinking and
life in general. He experiences the
usual problems of adolescence in the hilarious and sometimes adventurous
company of two high school chums, the outspoken, cynical son of an
obstetrician, and a rector’s tom-boy daughter whose uninhibited pronouncements
are quite the opposite of the way girls spoke in Mobile. There are other characters who enrich the
story; the family’s handyman, the town sheriff, a high school tough (and his
sister who wants to be a nun), a bohemian artist friend of his father, and a
house guest whose free-loading ways eventually lead to a show down. They are much like people we all have known
in our years of growing up. They take
you back to your own bittersweet years of adolescence when curiosity and
compulsion coexisted so precariously.
This book has become a modern classic in the coming-of-age genre,
sometimes referred to as a western version of Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wonderful novel. Read it.
by Tom Scanlan
Author Tony Hillerman in his Albuquerque home with Tom Scanlan
It was my pleasure to be able to interview one of America’s most popular mystery writers in October,2002. My wife Rosemarie and I met with Tony Hillerman and his wife Marie at their lovely home in northwest Albuquerque, just east of the Rio Grande River. He came outside to greet us in his drive, making us feel relaxed and welcome, following a long drive from Zuni. Then he sat and chatted with us for two full hours, in spite of the fact that he had just flown in from Washington state the day before, had been up late that same night working on a new novel, and had a meeting later this evening to prepare for.
I had interviewed him by telephone back in 1995 (see Biblio-files in the November, 1995 Grapevine) so we were not total strangers. For this in-person interview, I had a series of questions prepared--which of his own novels did he like best, who were his favorite authors, what is his favorite music—but the formality of this approach soon gave way to free flowing conversation on a variety of topics, many unrelated to writing, but all providing insight into the admirable character of this popular writer.
Early on he admitted that his favorite among his own works, Finding Moon, was not a favorite of his readers, nor of his editor. However, it was a novel that he had always wanted to write, long before his Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn novels. So finally he broke from his mystery series and wrote the novel that had been in the back of his head all these years—to take a "totally ordinary, un-heroic man and send him into a situation where he develops character" (see review in Nov., 1995 Grapevine). He’d taken the name Moon from a fellow infantryman in his rifle company whose courage and character he had admired.
Tony Hillerman with Rosemarie Scanlan
He also especially enjoyed writing Hillerman Country, a photographic journey through the country which is the setting for most of his novels. It gave him his only opportunity to work with his brother, Barney (who took the splendid photographs in this oversize book) since they were teen-agers. It was fortunate timing because his brother died shortly after the work was finished.
Hillerman prefers non-fiction to fiction, naming such writers as Joan Didion (before she began writing novels) and H. L. Mencken. He sometimes puts himself to sleep reading Bartlett’s Quotations. He especially enjoys the non-fiction writing in The New Yorker, though he can no longer stand the fiction in that magazine. He refrains from reading any fiction while he’s working on a novel, which is most of the time, but did mention an affinity for Raymond Chandler’s novels. His wife, Marie, on the other hand, reads a great deal of fiction as well as non-fiction and we were delighted to hear that one of her favorite novels, Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, was also one of our favorites.
When I asked what memoirs or biographies he had read which might have inspired him to write his own memoirs, Seldom Disappointed, last year, he said his real incentive came from the wishes of his children, his wife and his editor. Most of the biographies he looked at were of celebrities and were ghostwritten so they weren’t much help as a guide, although he did enjoy Truman, by McCullough. He finally decided just to go ahead and write his memoirs ‘his own way’, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
As for his favorite music, he likes ballads. CD’s he’s currently listening to include James Taylor, Youngblood, Paul Simon and Judy Collins. He also likes Joan Baez and much of Willy Nelson. He and his wife, Marie, share similar tastes in art and music but he’s such a workaholic that she often has to remind him to ‘stop and smell the roses’ (or more likely, ‘come and see this sunset’--because they are both cloud lovers).
We also talked some about his days in the Army, and in spite of his battle wounds, like most veterans he considers his hitch in the Army to be one of the highlights of his life. He was unhappy with the inertia of the top brass and the fact that many of the weapons the Army used were a bit behind the times and inferior to what the Germans were using. G.I.’s were constantly grumbling about canvas machine gun ammo belts that froze up in wet weather, and tracer ammunition that, unlike the delayed tracer of German machine gunners, gave away the American gunner’s position.
The conversation got around to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and on that topic he had some thought-provoking but positive ideas. He hoped that once Americans got past the horror of that tragic event, they might begin to wonder seriously why some people hate them so much. He also felt that this event was a wake-up call to our Pentagon, reminding them that we are in a different world now, no longer fighting the Cold War.
In spite of the fact that he uses a computer to finalize his novels (his experience with computers goes all the way back to the "trash-80"), he is still intimidated somewhat by technology. He had lost the chapter he’d been working on the night before by not saving it properly. In true Hillerman fashion, he made the best of that common and frustrating situation by deciding that it needed rewriting, anyway. Tony Hillerman is a very down-to-earth guy and I left his house that afternoon with the feeling that I could go back anytime and pick up the conversation where we’d left off. The two hours flew by and Rosemarie and I both felt that we were leaving close friends behind when we walked out the door, still talking books with his wife, Marie.
