Book Sense Fiction Pick Takes Flight From Fact

Take a boy raised under the big-sky canopy of rural Montana, expose him to the charms of colloquial story-telling and colorful speech, encourage an appreciation of prose and poetry, provoke his curiosity about the people and places and times that preceded him -- and who have you got?

Well, in one notable case, you have Ivan Doig: the highly regarded writer whose 11 books of fiction and nonfiction -- including the just-published novel The Whistling Season (Harcourt), a June Book Sense Pick -- often explore and evoke Montana's vanishing past with vivid immediacy.

Or, viewed from another perspective, you have Paul Milliron: The Whistling Season's narrator, a man recollecting his youthful experiences circa 1910 from the not-necessarily tranquil vantage point of the 1950s.

Though the fictional Paul becomes not a writer but a state superintendent of schools, he proves to have much in common with the well-educated novelist who dreamed him up.

A prodigy-scholar and farmer's son Paul declares that someone "would have had to pry my cold, dead hands from my desk to withdraw me from a place of learning."

Ivan Doig Photo: Carol Doig

That's a turn-of-the-century sentiment keenly understood by Doig, who grew up "in the rural circumstances" of Montana some 40 years after his book's protagonist, but in a time when education was "still the magic carpet" for people like his Scots-descent family.

"My dad always said to me, 'For Christ's sake, Ivan, get an education,'" Doig recalled recently by telephone from his home in Seattle, Washington. "'Don't end up working for ranch wages like me, and your grandfather, and everybody we know' ... And my dad, while he had only an eighth-grade education, was a guy who could write a very good letter, perfectly punctuated; could recite 'Hiawatha' (to my astonishment); [and] liked to read. There was, I think, a fervent wish to transmit the value of education into kids, certainly of my generation."

Generations often overlap and commingle in the writing of Doig, who was trained in history and journalism, and whose novels are grounded in the reality of oral history.

"I tend to generate my fiction from historical set-points," Doig said, "and then make up my plots and people from there. So I'll turn my imagination loose -- but within historical laws of gravity of the era I'm writing about, or the time span. There's often an arc of time that determines the plot of the book, for me."

In The Whistling Season, he said, that arc is from 1910 to 1957: "Halley's Comet to Sputnik seemed to me a nice set of cosmic parentheses ... and within the book, the anticipation of Halley's Comet coming, the enthusiasm among the schoolkids and their teacher and so forth, seemed to me a pretty good narrative propulsion."

Propelling this and earlier Doig narratives are the sort of verbally adroit characters with whom the author has had close acquaintance all his life.

"I grew up around pretty good storytellers in Montana," Doig recalled. "My dad, as a ranch foreman ... could tell good jokes to keep his haying crews, or whatever, in a good mood. And the other person who raised me was my mother's mother, my grandmother, after my mother died. She was a river of proverbs ... someone who was messily dressed 'looked like they'd been drawn through a knothole backwards.' My dozen or so years with her ... brought a kind of wonderful antique feel of language into my head, I guess; as well as my dad's cowboy-sheepherder-homestead-kid kind of language -- and my dad still had Scotland in his voice, even though he was born in this country.... So there's always been a tickle in me, you know: 'Where did we come from? Where did that come from? How did that happen?'

"My college choice was journalism ... and -- seems to me journalism is 'history in a hurry'.... After not terribly many years at a brief newspaper job and a brief magazine job, I simply found myself wanting to work in longer rhythms of thinking and writing and that took me to a Ph.D. in history: kind of an open confession that I was hopelessly hooked on this stuff."

Doig's first two books were nonfiction: the now-revered memoir This House of Sky (1978) -- soon to be the state of Montana's "read-of-the-year" -- and Winter Brothers (1980). Then, with The Sea Runners (1982), he found his "liberating" way into fiction.

"The ability to make up people really was very freeing," the author said. "I seem to really enjoy making folks up." Asked a while back to write a piece on his creation of fictional characters, Doig calculated he'd by then come up with some 360. "There's another 40 or 50, I suppose, in The Whistling Season."

But again, for Doig, the freeing act of making up characters takes flight from actual fact. "Within the larger world of the book," he explained, "I get to exercise the other passion, which is details about the past. I work damn hard to get the verisimilitude ... of how things were when people were doing something in some timeframe I was not around in myself."

Doig acquires that verisimilitude from various sources, including the Montana Historical Society's extensive oral-history archive -- and from interviews he himself conducts, as he did before writing his 1996 novel Bucking the Sun.

"It's about a New Deal project -- biggest earthen-dam in the world, at Fort Peck in Montana -- that took place in the 1930s.... The workforce there was usually 10,000 people at a time, and there were usually 10,000 hangers-on: families, taxi-dance girls, bartenders, the whole thing. It was a colossal population to be dumped out there, and I interviewed people left, right, and sideways. For me ... it's the best way I can get the rhythms of speech from the time and place. Lots of details come out that my imagination can then go crazy with."

In order to find such interview subjects, Doig sometimes runs classified ads in Montana weeklies. Montana itself is only a day's drive from Washington, and Doig and his wife, Carol, often return there for a week or two's research. And then there is the spontaneous networking that occurs during his periodic visits to mostly independent bookstores ("Carol and I have perfected the Montana tour: something like 10 stores in 10 days of driving") -- when folks approach the author with their own bits of reminiscence or lore.

"I was just getting ready today the three-by-five notebook that'll carry me through the [upcoming] book tour [to several states]," said Doig, who seems in some fine, practical-literary way to have turned much of life into Paul Milliron's multiple-grade one-room schoolhouse. "It'll always be in my breast-pocket, so when somebody comes up and says, 'You know, that reminds me of such-and-such,' if it tickles me right, why, I'll get their name and phone number -- and even their website, these days -- to get in touch with them." --Tom Nolan