This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Ivan Doig, 1979
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156899826
Summary
Memoir. This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Ivan Doig grew up along the rugged rims of the Rocky Mountains in Montana with his father, Charlie, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer. His life was formed among the sheepherders and characters of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. The prose of this memoir is as resonant of the landscape of the American West as it is of those moments in memory which determine our lives.
What Doig deciphers from his past is not only a sense of the land and how it shapes us, but also of our inextricable connection to those who shape our values in the search for intimacy, independence, love and family. This magnificently told story is at once especially American and quietly universal in its ability to awaken a longing for an explicable past. (From the author's website.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington
Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.
After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.
Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).
Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)
Extras
His own words:
• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.
• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."
• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Preinternet books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
(Audio version.) This is the endearing story of a Montana man's reflections of growing up during a tumultuous, yet enlightening, time in history when life was slower, the landscape was environmentally protected, neighbors more supportive, and a boy's imagination could flourish. Doig describes in detail his mother and father's devotion for him and each other, and paints vivid portraits of a tightly knit family living in a rugged terrain and struggling for survival. After his mother's death, times got tougher, and Doig's portrayal of his dad's difficulties are touching. Poetic interludes are charming and contrast interestingly with Doig's portrayal of a wild and rugged Montana and its curious inhabitants. This unusual and beautifully expressed autobiography is a stunning work of art.
AudioFile
Discussion Questions
1. Doig has criticized much of the fiction that has arisen from the cowboy myth. In most of these formulaic stories, the hero is strong and predictably invincible against the enemy, be they forces of nature or forces of evil. How does Charlie Doig defy our stereotypical notions about the Western hero? How do his struggles raise him above the standard masculinity of the common Western man?
2. Describe how Doig's realistic sense of place broadens when he describes town life in Montana and the characters he and his father encountered at the Stockman Bar. Why are these trips to the Stockman so important to Charlie?
3. Charlie once tells Ivan, "Scotchmen and coyotes was the only ones that could live in the Basin, and pretty damn soon the coyotes starved out." Do these words explain why Charlie is able to survive his tenuous existence? How does he cope with the death of his first wife and the divorce of his second?
4. The discord between Charlie and Ruth brings for Ivan a mix of "apprehension and interestedness." Contrast Ruth with Berneta, and explore why Ivan might view his second mother in the way that he does.
5. Why does Doig call the reunion of Charlie and Bessie Ringer a "truce" and their relationship an "alliance"? Trace the development of Charlie and Bessie's relationship from the time of Charlie's divorce up until Charlie's death. How does it change? How does it stay the same?
6. Discuss the scene in which Ivan tells his father he is going to leave Montana for good. What makes it so poignant? Does Charlie understand his son's ambitions, or does he merely accept them? Does Ivan's decision to leave simply reinforce the idea of "absence across distance" for Charlie, an absence he has reluctantly grown accustomed to?
7. Bessie Ringer emerges from a generation of women still reeling under the influence of what feminist critics call "The Cult of True Womanhood," whose values (purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity) were often misunderstood and thus misapplied. Does Bessie, in some sense, break free from the rigid expectations for women of her time? Describe her personality and compare it to some of our classical notions of women on the plains.
8. In "North," Charlie, Bessie, and Ivan fight to save their sheep from an attack of ticks and a subsequent storm, which sends the herd bawling toward a steep precipice. Discuss the artistic elements of this scene.
9. Study Bessie's language patterns. Find instances of the humorous, often proverbial words that add spice to the memoir, making her come alive as a character. Is she, in some simple way, a mentor to Ivan with regards to the "mystery and meaning in the world around him?" Contrast Ivan's book learning with her more practical wisdom.
10. The vaulted symmetry in the mountain peaks, the "walls of high country," and the windswept floor where shadows accent deep valleys, all these provide the dimensions in the "house of sky" which would become part of Doig's heart and soul. How does the landscape shape Doig's recollective voice?
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)
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