Prolific author Nichols completes work in 'novel factory'

It's the rhythm of industry, the whirr of production, maybe even the mythical Taos Hum that some say they've heard but nobody's ever been able to locate.

The author of ''The Milagro Beanfield War'' and ''The Sterile Cuckoo'' is simultaneously finishing two new novels.

A polished 120 pages, ''Great Feelings of Love'' follows a young man as he discovers love and his social conscience in Manhattan in 1961.

The other, ''The Voice of the Butterfly,'' Nichols calls ''a long verbal cartoon, a kind of slapstick 'Keystone Kops' comedy about the destruction of the planet.''

Since 1988, he has whittled it from 1,500 to 800 pages.

''Now I'm trying to cut it to 500,'' he says, and has given himself an Oct. 1 deadline to finish the draft.

Nichols has struggled with ''The Voice of the Butterfly.'' He says his editor at Henry Holt & Co. shares his frustration with it.

''I've never managed to really hit the tone I think basically is what she doesn't like about it and what I don't like about it.

"I've had a really hard time dealing with the slapstick nature of it because it's very hard to make a big wise-apple obnoxious cartoon work the way I want it to work,'' he said in an interview at his small, rustic adobe.

''The characters are kind of caricatures. It's a joke, but a joke about a hellacious problem.

"If I read sections, everybody says it's wonderful because it's so funny. It's all action and pratfalls and mayhem.''

It's Taos-based, but: ''It could be Anywhere USA as long as that anywhere had a collapsing banking system and environmental genocide and terracide going on and the usual band of evildoers and shenanigan creators (developers).''

''Great Feelings of Love'' is closest to publication. Nichols sent a draft off to Holt last month.

Nichols works the graveyard shift in this one-man novel factory a quarter-mile from Taos Plaza.

Starting nightly around 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., he scribbles until dawn then transcribes onto a computer for editing.

He emerges tousled from a good day's sleep for the 2 p.m. interview, unplugging his noisy refrigerator so he can be heard on a tape recorder.

With literary roots in his family, Nichols has been writing novels for 41 of his 57 years. At 16 he wrote his first. At 23 he sold one - ''The Sterile Cuckoo,'' conceived when he attended Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., where he did hockey, track, football, cross-country and writing.

Born July 23, 1940, in Berkeley, where his father, David, attended the University of California, Nichols found his family torn apart during World War II.

His French-born mother, Monique Robert, granddaughter of author Anatole Le Braz, died of a heart attack when Nichols was 2, and his father went off to war. Relatives looked after him.

Those feelings led to ''The Wizard of Loneliness.''

Nichols wrote ''The Magic Journey,'' ''Nirvana Blues'' and sequels to ''The Milagro Beanfield War.''

He also wrote ''American Blood,'' a surreal tale about veterans' struggles to lose the violence of the Vietnam War; ''Conjugal Bliss,'' a black comedy about marriage; ''A Ghost in the Music,'' about the relationship between a Hollywood producer-stuntman, his woman and his son; and ''An Elegy for September,'' about a middle-age author's affair with a younger woman, also a writer.

He has done books of nonfiction on nature, politics, the environment and some excellent volumes of photography. And he has written for the movies, notably ''Missing,'' although Nichols received no screen credit.

''I've only published 15 books, but I've probably written about 80. 'Sterile Cuckoo,' I think was about the eighth novel I'd written. I wrote a novel a year when I was in college. So I do an awful lot of writing that doesn't get recompensed or published.

''I sit down and can very quickly churn out first drafts. What I have a tendency to do is just bang out multiple pages, you know, 1,500 pages, and that's like clay. And then I work the clay for years and years.

"I do draft after draft. I'm not a person with a clinical mind or a particularly organized mind, but I'm a worker.

''I have great faith in work but not in talent or genius. I think writing, for me anyway, is 99 percent elbow grease.

''I write basically the way you would work in a steel mill. You've got to get up every day and make your sandwiches and take the No. 9 bus to the factory and work from 9 to 5 in the afternoon or the swing shift from 6 until 4 in the morning and do it for 35 years and maybe you'll get retirement pay.

''I treat writing the same way. I don't sit around waiting for the muse because that would be very precious, and I wouldn't get much work done. It's a job.''

When he was in college, he had a more romanticized view.

''We all sat around and thought it would be like Maxwell Perkins and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe,'' he recalled. ''And it wasn't at all like that.

"It was a hard-nosed, mean, no-good-for-nothing business. But within that, lovely things can happen.

''I didn't really start thinking of myself as a writer until I was about 32 or 33, until I was writing 'The Milagro Beanfield War.'''

He dabbled in music, cartooning and other distractions.

''I got politically involved and sort of felt maybe the best thing to do was spend my life on the barricades, but I couldn't stop writing. Finally, when I was in my early 30s, I said, 'Come on, Nichols, grow up, make a decision. I guess this is what you're stuck with, so do it.'''

Despite literary success and great talent, Nichols lives almost like a pauper. Money ebbs and flows, he says, and it's low tide now.

''When I was 24 I decided that whether I earned five-grand or 100-grand a year I would live like I earned five-grand a year, and that would probably enable me to be a writer all my life.''

It saw him through lean times when, he says, ''I wrote many heavy-handed political diatribe books until finally I backed off a bit and wrote 'The Milagro Beanfield War' and got lucky. It saved my career.''

Dissatisfied with ''Milagro,'' however, he wrote the ''Magic Journey,' which he calls his best work, to sharpen the edge.

'''The Milagro Beanfield War' is just a little too fluffy and a little too funny. It tends to take the hard taste out of what the poverty and inequality is really like. 'The Magic Journey' certainly corrects that particular weakness.''

Married three times, Nichols, who has suffered congestive heart failure and heart ailments, is now divorced and lives alone. He exercises as much as he can, taking long afternoon walks in the mountains east of Taos.

His children both live in New Mexico. Daughter Tania, 27, is a nurse in the pediatric trauma unit at University Hospital in Albuquerque. Son Luke, 30, of Taos helps build ''Earthships,'' solar houses built of discarded tires and earth.

09-25-97