This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig

Abstract

324 Western American Literature Indian novels, there are Mountain Man novels, railroad novels, and mining novels, to name just a few. But a reviewer should not, I think, quibble too much with a title, especially since this is such a carefully selected, wellorganized anthology of criticism. Folsom has given a great deal of thought to this one, and we will all profit from it. DELBERT E. WYLDER, Murray State University This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind. By Ivan Doig. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. 314 pages, $9.95.) Ivan Doig looks back upon his family’s past in order, as he suggests, to know “how, now, my single outline meets the time-swept air that knew theirs.” This House of Sky is not so much an autobiography as an interpreta­ tion of the lives of Doig’s father, Charlie, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer, and the hard Montana country they lived in. The true focus is the writer’s father, Charlie. If there is an authentic westerner, Charlie Doig is that man. He seems bounded, the westerner in his place. Not in any sense a traveler, Charlie is ever restless away from Montana where he is bom and toils his life away. What are the traits of this man of the mountain West? Fundamentally he is a man of work. No self pity. Little self indulgence. Work is what he does with his time from before dawn until after dark seven days a week. Fun is a couple of beers in town every other Saturday night. Rest is the daily break at noon for dinner (evening meal is supper on the ranch and farm). Noon for Charlie Doig meant “the controlled curve of the day from morning into afternoon, where the beginning of labor crossed into the lessening of labor.” Also fundamentally Charlie Doig is a wizard of survival. Ivan remembers his father as a man with a “cocked grin of wryness at having survived one time more.” Flooded and windblown, busted by disease and storm, burned by squirrelly landlords, stomped by rank horses, Charlie Doig bounces with a wry grin and tries again. “But I always healed fast,” Ivan recalls his father’s always saying. Much of the survival stuff is in these people’s making accommodations; they make do with what they have at hand, seldom worry about appearances. Ivan is raised by his father and maternal grandmother. He ponders the relationship of these two who move in together to parent a growing boy, neither of whom had reflected upon his role in life, but either capable of the most hazardous one. Finally, skill at handling men and animals is fine honed in Charlie Doig. He reminds me of the old cowmen in Larry McMurtry’s books. “Ranch Reviews 325 crews were a hard commodity, a gravel mix of drifters, drinkers, gripers, not a few mental cripples, and an occasional steady worker. . . . It was a mark of Dad’s crews that they generally went out of the bunkhouse to the school section and the creek fence and a dozen other jobs just as if the work had been their own idea all along.” Perhaps the finest thing about this book is the writing itself, the richness of thought and image and phrasing. In this it is like two other interpretive books about the West — Stegner’s Wolf Willow and Graves’ Goodbye to a River. Line after line reads fresh as Montana morning. Driving across a northern prairie at night, “Dad puzzled through the darkness along fainter and fainter scuffs of prairie road. . . . notched his chin ahead another full inch and choked the steering wheel as if it had betrayed him.” Or, of a home sheepcamp high on a mountain ridgeline: “Alone here on our abrupt tiny shelf, the three of us eased through May and the first twenty-six days of June secure as hawks with wind under our wings. Once a week, the camptender from the home ranch would come the dozen miles of trail to us. The blaze-faced sorrel he rode and the packhorse haltered behind would plod in from the shadows which pooled in our valley under the shouldering slopes...