by Ivan Doig
My inspiration for “The Lord of the Field” in Beth McCaskill’s Fourth of July speech was Montgomery M. Atwater’s article “Man-Made Rain,” written for the Montana Writers’ Project during the WPA era. Similarly the “Subjects under discussion . . . by U.S. Forest Service crews” was inspired by the versatile Bob Marshall, “A Contribution to the Life History of the Lumberjack,” Pulp and Paper Magazine of Canada, May 21, 1931. The observation that a forest fire at night resembles a lighted city is from Elers Koch, in Early Days in the Forest Service, Region One. The theological survey joke is told by Hartley A. Calkins in that same volume. The analogy of a wedge of cool air thrusting between a fire and its smoke, and other rare eyewitness descriptions of a forest fire blowup, derive from H. T. Gisborne’s article on the Half-Moon fire in The Frontier, November 1929.
During three summer stints of research in Montana and throughout the rest of those years of delving for and writing this book, many persons provided me hospitality, information, advice, encouragement, or other aid. My appreciation to Coleen Adams, Margaret Agee, Pat Armstrong, Genise and Wayne Arnst, Robert Athearn, John Backes, Bill Bevis, Gene and Hazel Bonnet, Merrill Burlingame, Harold and Maxine Chadwick, Juliette Crump, H. J. Engles, Clifford Field, Howard and Trudy Forbes, Glen Gifford, Sam Gilluly, Madeleine Grandy, Carol Guthrie, Vicki and Chuck Hallingstad, Gary Hammond of the Nature Conservancy’s Pine Butte preserve, Eileen Harrington, John James, Carol Jimenez, Melvylei Johnson, Pat Kelley, Bill Kittredge, Dr. Jim Lane, Sue Lang, Becky Lang and Joel Lang, Marc Lee, Gail Malone, Elliot Marks of the Nature Conservancy, Sue Mathews, Ann McCartney, Nancy Meiselas, Horace Morgan, Ann and Marshall Nelson, Ken Nicholson, Peggy O’Coyne, Bud and Vi Olson, Gary Olson, Judy Olson, Laura Mary Palin, Cille and Gary Payton, Dorothy Payton, Patty Payton, Dorothy and Earl Perkins, Jarold Ramsey, Bill Rappold, Marilyn Ridge, Jean and John Roden, Tom Salansky, Ripley Schemm, Ted and Jean Schwinden, Annick Smith, Gail Steen, Fay Stokes, Margaret Svec, Merlyn Talbot, Dean Vaupel; John Waldner and the other members of the New Rockport Hutterite colony; Irene Wanner, Donald K. Watkins, Lois and Jim Welch, Rosana Winterburn, Glen Gifford, Sonny Linger, Ken Twichel. And the people of Dupuyer, Montana.
A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE
ENGLISH CREEK
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. Much of the success of English Creek stems from the credibility of the narrative voice. Show how Jick McCaskill’s acute sensitivity and observant personality make him a prime candidate for creating a balanced narrative structure. How does Doig artistically meld Jick’s psychological musings with his more historical accounts?
2. The novel is in great part about Jick’s journey into maturity, into wisdom. How does Jick bridge the gap between boyhood and manhood? Who is particularly influential in his coming of age?
3. Laconicism is a common characteristic of the ranchers and mountain men in Western film and fiction. Jick inherits his father’s wry wit; show how he uses it to deal with life’s bitter situations.
4. Is Alec a foil to Jick? Are there key choices that Alec makes and particular events in his life that save him from being a flat character and make him, rather, someone worth serious consideration?
5. At the end of Chapter One, Jick says, “Skinning wet sheep corpses, contending with a pack horse who decides he’s a mountain goat, nursing Stanley along, lightning, any number of self-cooked meals, the hangover I’d woke up with and still had more than a trace of—what sad sonofabitch wouldn’t realize he was being used out of the ordinary?” Jick’s pack trip with Stanley Meixell is a jolting thrust from innocence to experience. What prompts Jick to discard his first impressions of Stanley and delve deeper into the meaning of the man behind Dr. Al K. Hall?
6. Why is Beth eager to avoid looking back? Compare and contrast Jick’s attitude toward the past and its stories with his mother’s attitude. Do the deaths of Varick and Alec rattle Beth into retrospective musings, even regret about what might have been?
7. Discuss how the Double W embodies the characteristics of the classic villain of the West.
8. Consider Velma Simms and Leona Tracy and how Doig paints their entrance into a room full of males. Compare and contrast the adoration they receive with the more quiet acknowledgment Beth receives from the men who love her. Why is Leona so alluring to Alec, even Jick? Is her highly physical role in the novel, a role charged with sexual tension, somehow comparable to the role of Willa Cather’s Lena Lingard in My Antonía?
9. The Fourth of July dance adds mystery and musicality to the novel. Discuss the imagery surrounding this “beautiful haunting” and how the scene helps Jick to see his parents in a way that illuminates “all that had begun at another dance, at the Noon Creek schoolhouse twenty years before.”
10. Why does Varick McCaskill listen to Stanley’s advice about the fire in Flume Gulch? Were Jick not “prey to a profound preoccupation,” would the novel have turned out the way that it does?
11. Doig recognizes the danger of engaging in literary symbolism at the risk of adding pretense to a novel that aims to be more realistic. What literary devices does he use instead to enliven both the narrative and his characters’ voices? Do you think the inclusion of these devices, particularly song lyrics, is Doig’s attempt at a fusion of poetry and fiction?
BACKGROUND NOTES
THE PIECE OF THE WORLD I ADMIRE MOST
Am I Jick? People have asked me a thousand times whether the fourteen-year-old narrator of English Creek, in his pivotal summer of 1939, is my literary alter ego. No, not by a long shot, as Jick McCaskill himself would put it. But his homeland, the Two Medicine country of Montana and of my trilogy by that name, for an important time was mine.
English Creek and its valley are actually the Dupuyer Creek area of northern Montana, beneath the skyline of the Rocky Mountain Front. It’s the region where I lived during high school and was a ranch hand and farm worker for several summers, the “Facing North” country in my memoir, This House of Sky, and it is big and hard and glorious—the piece of the world I admire most. It’s a country of margin, of America changing, ascending from one geography to another, and of the sensation Isak Dinesen caught in Out of Africa: “In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
Looking back on English Creek, the first of my fiction to be set in Montana, I see that it shares with This House of Sky an emphasis on landscape and weather and their effects on people’s lives. In both books (all right, in all my books) I was trying to write about the grit of an America that even yet half-exists in the mountains-and-plains West: ranching, haying, fire-fighting, the Forest Service itself, all have their own techniques and lingo which make them vivid. What I deliberately made different from This House of Sky was the voice of this book—the narrative not as densely poetic as Sky’s. Instead, I tried for a kind of idiomatic eloquence, a western cadence ruffled by turns of phrase. Jick, the narrator, is a man of today looking back on 1939, which gave him the angle of view I needed to hang the storyline on, and he has the love of sayings and stories that animates a lot of otherwise taciturn westerners. I remember, as I worked on the book, how Jick’s voice, built as it was from my decades of file cards and notebook of dialogue and phrasing, excited me so much I hated to admit it, for fear of jinx. But that voice of his, from the opening line when he tells us “That month of June swam into the Two Medicine country,” felt true to the time and country, and came more easily than the style of any of my books before or since.
IVAN DOIG, the author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction, grew up in a family of Montana ranch hands in the 1940s and 1950s. English Creek won the Western Heritage Award as best novel of 1984 and was read by the Radio Reader on National Public Radio. Visit the author’s website at www.ivandoig.com.
THE MONTANA TRILOGY consists of English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana.
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ALSO BY IVAN DOIG
FICTION
Prairie Nocturne
Mountain Time
Bucking the Sun
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Dancing at the Rascal Fair
English Creek
The Sea Runners
NONFICTION
Heart Earth
Winter Brothers
This House of Sky
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Ivan Doig
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Scribner trade paperback edition 2005
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
DESIGNED BY LAUREN SIMONETTI
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY OWEN SMITH
Library of Congress Control Number: 2005046550
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-11478-6
ISBN-10: 0-689-11478-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7127-1 (Pbk)
ISBN:10: 0-7432-7127-0 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-4514-5 (eBook)
Contents
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About Ivan Doig
