WEST

I dream of Montana. I have since I read for the first time Ivan Doig's memoir of growing up there, This House of Sky. Then, I read his novel Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and I loved a place I have never been all the more. Doig's first three Montana novels, called the McCaskill Trilogy, are English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. The first two of those, especially, are favorites of mine enough to make it into that category of books that I do not mind to read again and again.

Is not one of the many joys of being a reader the fact that you can come to love and inhabit a place you have never been? Or, a place that does not actually exist? It is one of the miracles of fiction, and it is how I feel about Wendell Berry's Port William. I can walk around that community in my head. I can visualize its citizens and how they would greet me and what we would talk about. I remember its past. This is a place that only exists in words. And in the minds of thousands of people who have read about it. It must also exist, then, in a thousand different ways. Being human, in spite of all its sufferings, can give us so much in the way of profound gifts. Inhabiting places in our minds is one of them, I think.

And so, thanks to Ivan Doig, I can inhabit Montana in my mind as well. I first came to know Doig as a writer because of a nearly offhand recommendation by a friend, and now I consider his prompt to be one of the great gifts of that friendship, which has stood for so many years now. As I mentioned in my hastily and lazily written previous post, Doig is a successor to Wallace Stegner, who many refer to as the "Dean of Western Writers." Stegner studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to found the writing program at Stanford University. His novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and created a stir among the literature community that still reverberates. In spite of that, it is a brilliant work and one you should read. Central also to his legacy is his work and activism related to water conservation in the American West, an issue of a magnitude that we in the eastern part of the country are blissfully ignorant. The Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University is named in honor of his life and work and many on the list of recipients of that award rank among the most prominent of American letters. I tell you all of this because I am fascinated by this lineage of writers, which I might even trace further back to A.B. Guthrie, also a winner of the Pulitzer for his 1950 novel The Way West. Stegner Fellows and those who have studied at Iowa form the largest portion of my list of favorite and beloved writers and these kinds of connections among them are fun for me to discover and explore.

What links Stegner and Berry and Doig and what draws me to their work in particular is the importance of place to their writing. For them, the landscape is as significant as any of their characters. This comes through not only in their description of terrain and in their skill at writing the authentic language of a place, but also in the unspoken implication that the history of the people in their writing only begins after the history of the place itself begins. In other words, our natural and self-centered inclination to think of humanity as the starting point for all else is turned upside down, or more accurately, right side up. When one fully considers the story of a place, and I mean the complete and long, long story of a place, it becomes quickly impossible to ignore the fact that the human beings there are only inhabitants of the temporary sort. And, more to the point, they are but a small blip on the timeline of that history which, if ever fully written, will reduce them to barely a footnote.

I am not sure anything for me will ever top Doig's earlier work. There is simply no other book out there like This House of Sky and Bucking the Sun and The Sea Runners are two of the best stories to have ever been told. And, without question, I could read anytime his first two Montana novels, English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and still feel them as deeply as I did the first time I read them. His latest that I am currently in the middle of is called The Bartender's Tale and returns to the same town of his Montana novels in the middle of the last century. It is enjoyable for me in a sentimental way, taking me back to one of those communities that I inhabit in my mind. I am eternally grateful for such a thing, though, and this is another reason I am drawn to writing that is centered around place. It is a gift writers can give to us, to write a place so well and so true that we can walk around it in our head for a bit.