THE IVAN DOIG PAPERS

Ivan Doig at his Puget Sound home

When I first came to Browning, Montana,  I didn’t hear much about “Montana Writers.”  Maybe A.B. Guthrie, Jr. (b. 1901) because of the movies made of his books.  Dorothy Johnson (b. 1905) the same.  A few miscellaneous people wandering around, mostly “poets” who wrote people-pleasing doggerel.  The old-timers sometimes self-published through a “vanity press,” which set the pattern of a peddler with a box of unimportant books under his bed and the general conviction that being published was equivalent to a college degree, a certificate of quality.  Mildred Walker (b, 1905) was writing best-sellers that have held their appeal.

I mostly came to the “Edwardians”, James Willard Schultz (b. 1859), Frank Bird Linderman (1849), George Bird Grinnell (b 1869), Walter McClintock (1870) et al from reading Bob Scriver’s library.  John Ewers (b. 1909), Harold McCracken (b. 1894).  The category of Western Art or Montana Writing, were both as yet uninvented as sales categories, but just about to take hold.  Native American Writing was still a bit of a paradox, since most of it was oral transcription of legends recorded by white people.

By the time I returned in 1982, “Montana Writing” was as hot and revered a category as genuine imitation pearls.  Very appealing but always a little bogus around the edges.  “Montana Margins: A State Anthology” (1946) by Joseph Kinsey Howard (b. 1906) was a little too early to define this group.  Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917) had just exploded still waters with his 1960 essay, ”Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” which set the key Western archetype as two men escaping to the wilderness together.  Fiedler was an East Coast ethnic Leftie with streaks of Red. 

Leslie Fiedler

Now it was the gentleman chroniclers of the West who got out of Dodge.  (Richter (b. 1890), Stegner (b. 1909), and Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909), who was gratefully claimed by Nevada.)  Now Missoula was not just a hotbed of liberalism as the humanities center, but also the experimental edge of what became a time of drugs and iconoclastic politics.  We’re living with the mixed consequences.  A different sort of group developed in Bozeman/Livingston.

So it was with a certain amount of amusement and even cynicism that I reacted when the Valier librarian handed me a postcard announcement about Ivan Doig, “one of Montana’s most cherished writers.”  His papers have gone to MSU, the rival Montana university.  I approve.  I even celebrate.  But it’s all very ironic.  Go to ivandoig.montana.edu for the whole story and DO watch the short video interview to get a sense of the man.  There’s a link on the website, but here’s a straight shot to YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C20ONfvcZCw  

Doig in the 1980's at Annick Smith's ranch

Quite apart from that, I have such a tumble of responses.  Ivan Doig and I were both born in 1939.  We were both in the National Merit Scholar program at NU but we didn’t know each other.  His roommate, the fabulous piano player, Ralph Votapek, dated my roommate, Gwen Cline.  But Ivan and I were never introduced.

At Northwestern, Doig was in journalism and history.  I was in theatre with Alvina Krause, at a time when the School of Speech was quietly a haven for gay male theatre people, like Marshall W. Mason, Laird Williamson, and Tom Foral.   They were among my best friends though I’m not gay.  It was their kindness and intelligence that attracted me, and I was a bit of a disguise for them in a closeted, criminalized time for gays.  As soon as I could, I made a beeline for Montana — not the university towns, but rather Browning, Montana.  Doig was traveling as fast as he could in the opposite direction.  He never returned to live in Valier where he had graduated as class nerd, and has lived ever since near Seattle.  The comparison might be Sherman Alexie.

I spent the Sixties on the Blackfeet Rez with Bob Scriver, a sculptor twice my age.  Bob’s daughter, Margaret, went to Valier HS one grade ahead of Ivan, who said he sort of knew her but she seemed very grownup and not part of his group.  After a retread and an interim as the first lady dogcatcher in Portland, I became a student at the U of Chicago Div School in 1978. There I read the newly published “This House of Sky” right straight through and called him up.  He wasn’t famous yet, so he answered the phone and we visited a while, tears streaming down my face.  That was the end of it.  When I graduated from seminary, I spent three years as a circuit-rider in Montana.  By that time he was long-gone to Seattle, but considered a Montana writer because of his content.
   

Mary Clearman Blew

Over the years I’d make brief contact, more often with Carol at a reading, but it never went anywhere.  We didn’t correspond.  No one saw me as a writer, just as an appendage to Bob Scriver.  In 1977 Mary Clearman Blew was just beginning to be published and some said she was the only female writer in Montana, though she soon migrated to Idaho.  The same people claimed Jim Welch was the only “Indian” worth reading.   Jim Welch’s father, who was also Jim Welch, was Bob Scriver’s best friend in grade school.  So I knew Jim Welch in a sort of private way.  I’m not welcome in the tight Missoula Circle that “owns” Jim and makes these judgements.  I barely publish and am not their kind of academic.

Writers are defined partly by sales and partly by academic studies.  Lately academics have minds only for Cormac McCarthy, who is close to an opposite of Doig.  As a youngster, Doig absorbed the attitudes of what he called “sharecroppers of the West,” which is to say someone who raises livestock on shares — not that different from the Southern share-cropping experience and as low-pay/low status.  It gave them an abiding yearning for legitimacy, recognition, security.  In his teens he and his family were raising sheep near Heart Butte, and the sociological dynamics did not cause him to romanticize Indians.  He never wrote about them.  

Late in his career he was friends with the Welches, more Lois than Jim, who was not so much an academic as a visionary poet.  Doig was a bit of a snob and sexist (women who wrote surprised him) but Jim was neither.  Both men could be writers because their academic wives paid the bills.  Jim was not much a rez boy — his HS years were in Minneapolis.  His mom’s rez was Fort Belknap.  His sibs were successful urban people, I suppose “assimilated.”

Both Doig and Welch were defined by marketing, locked into stereotypes, just as much as L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott were trapped into writing the same story over and over.  Both of them tried to escape, but the atypical books (for example, Doig's "Prairie Nocturne" or Welch's "Indian Lawyer") wouldn’t sell.  

Doig’s underlying poor health put a lid on him too early.  He was pretty much an author who wouldn’t have pleased Leslie Fiedler by going for the deep mythic dimensions.  But he is deeply satisfying to the ranchers and farmers he wrote about — second generation immigrants with high values on work, respectability, and family.  They all love a good joke, even if it’s on themselves.  Life itself is one of those jokes.  But Doig defined himself a relic, son and grandson of relics.

A couple of days ago a comment showed up on a prairiemary post about  “My Friend Flicka,” by Mary O’Hara.  http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2011/02/where-did-my-friend-flicka-go.html  (The comment is there.)  “My Friend Flicka” was a book that literally saved O’Hara’s ranch, but not her marriages nor the lives of her children.  Promoted as a kid-book, it’s one of those semi-autobiographical tales that will stay with you the rest of your life, worth rereading now and then.  The comment was from her great-niece, Adele Alsop, who is living in Utah.  The Alsops were a privileged, wealthy, highly educated, well-connected family who were exactly the kind of person an author hopes to be.  

Patricia Nell Warren

Several of that family did write books, something like writing by the descendants of the Conrad Brothers who founded Valier and Conrad, as well as building a mansion in Kalispell.  The sociology of writing in Montana has not been explored.  It drops out many people.  I wonder where Patricia Nell Warren (b. 1936), author of the much beloved “The Fancy Dancer” will leave her papers.  The history of the Grant-Kohrs ranch where she was born is already recorded.  But she’s part of the same cohort (b. 1936) as Doig, Welch, Blew, Warren, and others, including myself (b. 1939).  Maybe this bequest of Doig papers to Montana State University will trigger something.