Reflecting on interactions with the late John Nichols, author of "The Milagro Beanfield War"

By Pete Warzel

John Treadwell Nichols was born to some level of privilege and then became the voice of the disenfranchised. He grew up an Easterner and published several novels to acclaim while living in New York. One, The Sterile Cuckoo, put him into the anointed class of writers who got a film deal immediately, with Liza Minnelli playing the lead role of Pookie.

Then he became a New Mexican.

His New Mexico Trilogy: The Milagro Beanfield War, The Magic Journey, and The Nirvana Blues, put him on our map. Laugh-out-loud funny he parsed the language, traditions, foibles of our cultures in northern New Mexico, and somehow got to the core of the turmoil and angst that roils through this magical geography.

I lost his address and phone number probably four years ago when I switched out my cell phone and laptop. When we reviewed his memoir in this blog last year, another old friend from Taos who used to hunt with John, sent me his phone number so I could get in touch after a hiatus of many years, at my request. I never called.

During the time my family owned our second house in Talpa, NM, whenever I would drive from Denver to visit or check on it, I would set up a lunch with John at Michael’s Kitchen, and drive straight to it, unwinding my sore back from the drive with an hour-long diversion in John’s world of writing, activism, family, community, and writing, writing, writing. He never stopped the work. He described the act of writing to me once as “hard rock mining” – crawling into the hole every day and chipping away at it until you had something that you could crawl back out with, and see in the light of day. That light of day was literal for him, as he worked through the evening, all night, and quit when most of us were just rising from sleep. There were several phone calls from him over the years, at 6:00 in the morning, knowing I was awake then and working and he was ready to go to bed. Ships passing… He did not use email.

I was asked to interview him once by the Rocky Mountain News (no longer in publication) as Denver had picked his book, The Milagro Beanfield War, as the One Book Denver Reads for the year 2006 (long after it was published, which seemed to be the nature of the life of that dazzling novel). The title that the Rocky gave to the piece when published was “On Rage and String Beans” so you can imagine the nature of the interview. The first fifteen minutes on tape was a discussion, then an argument, then a friendly bout of namecalling about the Red Sox v. the Yankees, as moral and ethical institutions. He was the Red Sox fan, of course, me the Yankees. It got nasty, in good humor, and then we started the serious work of bringing his thoughts to the citizenry of Denver who were reading the book. Thank God we did not talk politics.

In the review we published here of his memoir in May 2022, I cited a visit I made with John to his storage shed. It was astonishing due to the constant rewrites he did on anything he was working on. All his manuscripts, every version, were there. I said in the review it was a “three-dimensional visualization of his memoir”, but maybe more. There were, on a short stretch of shelf, manuscripts/scripts of a go at a film adaptation of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I remember being surprised, then not, as whoever had the sense to put John on Hunter grasped the potential for John’s wicked sense of humor translating Hunter’s demented wit to the screen. I do not know the history of the process, but John’s script never made the screen.

All of that storage shed is now in the John Treadwell Nichols archive at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research Special Collections.

His house was like the shed – packed with books being read, books not yet shelved, files, file cabinets keeping safe every letter he had ever written, workspace, reading space – a packrat dream of a writer’s burrow. It, like the storage shed, was a visualization, this one of a writer at work. In fact, his writing process was, at least when we were in contact, archaic. Here is a quote from the transcript of the Rocky interview, 2006, about his work habits:

PW: You once told me that your writing routine involved a computer but I never got the sense that you were using technology to your advantage. Have you entered the 21st century since then?

JN: I write first drafts by hand then I type them into the computer. But I hate looking at the computer or working on the computer so I make a hard copy, then I scribble on the page and rewrite the book a hundred times on the hard copy and scribble and scribble until every page looks like a Jackson Pollack painting. And then I type it back in and I do the same thing again and again and again. I do the manual labor. I just don’t like electricity. I don’t like that little hum. But never say never. Who knows, I could change. I never thought I would go to Sea World but two weeks ago I took my granddaughters and I sat there watched the orcas jumping in the water and dolphins doing back flips and I actually had a good time. I will though, never go to Disney World or be a fan of the New York Yankees. 

If you do not know his work start with the New Mexico Trilogy. Try The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, a book of non-fiction reflections on the Taos landscape, community, and culture with excellent photos by John. American Blood, something not typical Nichols, full of fear and rage and violence, and a fierce piece of writing. And then maybe the recent memoir, I Got Mine, where it all comes to play with his incessant sense of humor.

The memoir was published last year, 2022. He is no longer with us now as we come to the end of 2023.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Yet if I am for myself only, what am I?” ― John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War