Most interesting to me are Waters' fictional works, unsurpassed at least in the second half of the twentieth century. His most famous novels include, the spiritual and ecological People of the Valley, The Yogi of Cockroach Court, the large Colorado saga Pike's Peak, the clash between spirituality and the Atomic bomb in The Woman of Otowi Crossing, and Water's masterpiece The Man Who Killed the Deer. For many this is the work they associate with Frank Waters. The Man Who Killed the Deer has gone through numerous editions and a host of printings; however, in Waters' own words, its1942 publication was "a complete flop." The novel fortunately began to gain a word-of-mouth reputation as good fiction will do, not unlike the miraculous movement of the mid-century that revived Tolkien's moribund Ring Trilogy. The novel survived almost solely through the efforts of Alan Swallow, the founder of Swallow Press. His credo, says Waters, "was simple: to publish only the books he believed in, and to keep them in print whether they sold well or not." Through his efforts, other American editors discovered it and then the world press. The novel, although never a best seller, has never been out-of-print since Swallow championed it.
As interesting as its publication history is, the writing of The Man Who Killed the Deer is even more so. Most writers have a few works that simply outshine the rest, and when asked about them they often say such works were the easiest to compose. The sage and Vedic scholar Maharishi Mahesh Yogi explains that literature is not a labored activity, "it is a spontaneous outburst of the connectedness of the reality of both the heart and the mind." Bernard Malamud said when he wrote "The Magic Barrel," far and away his best short story, that he just went down to the library's basement and the whole thing came out. Waters' account of his finest novel is similar:
My own reaction to its miraculous longevity contains no trace of false modesty. The book has never seemed "mine." It is an independent entity, with a life of its own, which has quietly made its own way . . . The story did not have to be contrived; it unfolded, like a flower, its own inherent pattern. The words came easily, unbidden, as the flow of ink from my old, red Parker. I don't mean to imply that it was anything like "automatic writing," whatever that is. Simply that it seemed impelled by the unconscious rather than by rational consciousness.
Nothing is simple and alone. We are not separate and alone. The breathing mountains, the living stones, each blade of grass, the clouds, the rain, each star, the beasts, the birds, the invisible spirits of the airÑwe are all one, indivisible. Nothing that any of us does but affects us all.He must also learn to give back the white man ways, for he cannot be both an Indian and a white man without being a fragmented soul. Therefore, through a system of rewards and punishments the tribe leads Martiniano towards self-revelation. Deep silence exists at the heart of their spirituality which harmonizes all life, like the silence generated by the council convened to hear Martiniano's trouble: "A Council meeting is a strange thing. . . . [It is] one-half talk and one-half silence. The silence has more weight." During the meeting no one interrupts the speaker, no one criticizes, only the silence accuses; it brings out the truth. When a speaker finishes,
still no man speaks. Each waits courteously for another. And another until all the silence is one silence, and that silence has the meaning of all. So the individuals vanish. It is all one heart. It is the soul of the tribe. A soul that is linked by that other silence with all the souls of all the tribal councils which have sat here in the memory of man.Martiniano steadily becomes reunited with this silence, and in doing so he learns to act from its deepest source. He uses this silence of his own consciousness, the silence that is indistinguishable from nature, to rescue the lost child of his friend Palemon, to revive his marriage, to find a faith, and at the end to finally know peace.
--Terry Fairchild, contributing editor
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