This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

by Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family. A powerfully told story, This House of Sky is at once especially American and universal in its ability to awaken a longing for an explicable past.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Westerns, Biography, Book Club, History, Biography Memoir

314 pages, Paperback

First published October 30, 1978

About the author

Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana to a family of homesteaders 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 lived with his wife Carol Doig, née Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.

Before Ivan Doig became a novelist, he wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service.

Much of his fiction 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.

Bibliography
His works includes both fictional and non-fictional writings. They can be divided into four groups:

Early Works
News: A Consumer's Guide (1972) - a media textbook coauthored by Carol Doig
Streets We Have Come Down: Literature of the City (1975) - an anthology edited by Ivan Doig
Utopian America: Dreams and Realities (1976) - an anthology edited by Ivan Doig

Autobiographical Books
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (1979) - memoirs based on the author's life with his father and grandmother (nominated for National Book Award)
Heart Earth (1993) - memoirs based on his mother's letters to her brother Wally

Regional Works
Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America (1980) - an essayistic dialog with James G. Swan
The Sea Runners (1982) - an adventure novel about four Swedes escaping from New Archangel, today's Sitka, Alaska

Historical Novels
English Creek (1984)
Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987)
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990)
Bucking the Sun: A Novel (1996)
Mountain Time: A Novel (1999)
Prairie Nocturne: A Novel (2003)
The Whistling Season: A Novel (2006)
The Eleventh Man: A Novel (2008)

The first three Montana novels form the so-called McCaskill trilogy, covering the first centennial of Montana's statehood from 1889 to 1989.

from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Doig"

Reviews

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do have relatives in some remote places and when I talked to this one about discovering Ivan Doig, she said that he was a great writer, known far beyond his native Montana, and that she had read several of his books and was glad I was finally starting to catch up.

This House of Sky is a memoir that begins with a very young Ivan and his father Charlie’s loss of (respectively) mother and wife and Ivan’s growing up in some of the most remote country in the lower states during the post-World War II period. The first section of the book is driven by Charlie’s determination to raise Ivan on his own. Charlie, a traditional cowboy, had been making an attempt to ranch on his own after years of hiring out to other ranchers. He bore all the scars (both physical and mental) of this tough life. It was Charlie’s streak of ornery determination that had him quitting many a job in the past. But, now he had a son to look after. Ivan, for lack of any child care, must either follow his father around learning his skills or sit alone reading. He does both. The author expresses no regrets for this hard life.

Then, as things get more difficult, Charlie has to decide whether to attempt a rapprochement with his wife’s mother. When he successfully gets her to join Ivan and him in his rural life, it marks a significant third section of Ivan’s growing up. In her fifties, Grandma is still strong and focused and needs to keep busy. She is ready to take on any job, but most frequently it is cook at a ranch on which Charlie also has a job. Charlie has seen a lot of changes and he tries his hand at sheep ranching and running a café. Doig is particularly good at providing interesting descriptions of the work and the people with whom this “family” comes in contact. Often, because school is important and ranch locations are remote, Ivan is boarded with a family in the town where his school is located and he only gets weekends and vacations with his father and grandmother. And, those times are not vacations since there is all manner of work to be done whether Ivan is eight or eighteen.

The remaining sections of the book are less detailed, while no less significant, as they chart the intertwining of aging Grandma and Charlie with the life away from home for Ivan. College and graduate school, teaching and writing, marriage and loss are all chronicled. Some find the language elaborate or Doig’s style “over written.” I am not one of those. Rather than trying to present a range of excerpts, let me leave you with this one. Ivan is finishing high school and trying to determine what he wants next.

At this point, Charlie is managing a sheep ranch with about 4000 sheep. He is splitting “the profits” with the owner, and he and Ivan and Grandma are the only ones available to do it all. The summer has gone well enough to let each think that there will be significant profit in a few short weeks. Then a cold, wet thunderstorm comes up and they have to act fast in order to prevent panicked sheep from a lemming-like run over a cliff. The only alternative is a four mile trek to a river in a sheltered canyon….Three people, 3500 sheep, one horse and cold rain. “We reached it in almost-dark, and the sheep spewed down beneath the juts of cliff to the river’s sheltering brim of willows and cottonwoods. In a dozen hours, we had managed to flog 3500 desperate sheep a little more than four miles. A hundred or more carcasses spotted the prairie behind us, dozens more strewed the base of the cliffs which the runaway clump had avalanched toward. If this was victory----and we had to tell ourselves it was, for we could have lost nearly all the sheep in a pushing massacre off the Two Medicine cliffs---I knew I wanted no part of any worse day. I remember that I looked back from the mouth of the coulee toward the dusky north ridges, still smoked with gray wisps of the storm. As much as at any one instant in my life, I can say: here I was turned.

“How long such a moment had been in the making, I am the last to judge, because once made it seemed to have begun farther back than I could remember and yet to have happened like an eyeblink…”

This is a passionate story of loss, of family, of inner strength and exterior bonds. Doig is a gifted storyteller who illuminates both the extraordinary and the mundane with touching details. Through the arc of one life, he gives us the world of those who live in the most rural (and disappearing) parts of this big country.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

More accurately, the third reading, or fifth, if I include the two times that I listened to the audio version.

*****

“I glance higher for some hint of the weather, and the square of air broadens and broadens to become the blue expanse over Montana range, and so vast and vaulting that it rears from the foundation-line of the plains horizon, to form the walls and roof of all of life’s experience that my younger self could imagine, a single great house of sky.” – Ivan Doig, This House of Sky

*****

Ivan Doig’s coming-of-age memoir begins:

Soon before daybreak on my sixth birthday, my mother’s breathing wheezed more raggedly than ever, then quieted. And then stopped.

About three years after his mother’s death from asthma in 1945, his bereaved father, Charlie, and his maternal grandmother, Bessie Ringer, entered into an uneasy alliance in order to care for Ivan. This book is Ivan's memoir, but it is also the story of his remarkable father and grandmother.

Ivan Doig (1939-2015) grew up in central Montana in and around the community of White Sulphur Springs, located in the Smith River Valley, and later near the community of Dupuyer in the Two Medicine River country, located in the northern part of the state.

His father moved from job to job as a ranch foreman or as a sheepherder who herded sheep on shares for owners, which Doig later called the equivalent of southern sharecropping. In both his works of fact and fiction, Doig concentrated on telling the stories of common people, because he believed that they deserved to have their stories told. And this is what he did in This House of Sky, his very first book, and what he would continue to do in the thirteen novels that followed, as well as a second memoir.

Most of his books are grounded in the American West, but they are not “Westerns” in the sense that many think of that term. Instead they are stories that happen to take place in the West. Therefore there isn’t a lot of action or adventure, with the exception of one harrowing episode, and no shoot-outs or saloon brawls in Doig’s memoir, but there is much hardship and perseverance.


“Scotchmen and coyotes was the only ones in the Basin, and pretty damn soon the coyotes starved out.” – Charlie Doig, on the Sixteen Country where his family first settled.

“…It was early June of 1920 before spring greened out from under the snowdrifts in the Basin. We had about 60 head of cattle left, and about a half dozen horses, and not a dime.” – Charlie Doig


At a very young age, Ivan's life turned upside down when he lost his loving mother, but he nevertheless lucked out by having two loving and caring people to shepherd him through the hard times.

T.H. Watkins writes:

And then there is Ivan Doig’s father. If there is a more appealing male figure in western American literature, I do not know of him. His attractiveness as a human being makes Doig’s father no less a westerner … it simply makes him another, rare kind of westerner – one in whom the land and its imperatives nurtured a marvelous strength, a condition that moved him not to deny the limitations of the land but to accept them and, in accepting them, embrace what the land could truly give. … [B]ut if the landscape of his inheritance never fully met his highest hopes, he never turned away from it or against it. He was one of the ‘stickers,’ as [Wallace] Stegner admiringly describes the breed.

And then there was his grandmother, Bessie Stringer, who in her younger days had stacked hay, driven horses in the cold rain and snow in the dead of winter, pulled calves from breech births, strung barbed wire fences, threshed grain, used an axe to break ice to free up water for livestock, all the while caring for a growing family without much help or support from a worthless husband. People agreed that she was a worker and Stegner would have called her a “sticker” of the first degree.

Needless to say, Bessie Stringer is a member in good standing on my literary “Tall Woman” shelf.

Despite his humble beginnings, but because of his father and grandmother’s support, Ivan graduated as the salutatorian of his high school class and won a full scholarship to Northwestern University. He graduated with bachelors and masters degrees in journalism and later earned a PhD in American history from the University of Washington.

Those degrees explain why his work, fiction and nonfiction, is so soundly grounded in fact. His devotion to historical accuracy led him to museums and libraries all over the United States as well as Scotland, the land of his ancestors. And it is no surprise that his novels nearly all fall into the category of historical fiction and that even his two memoirs are set in the past.

So he was a journalist and a historian, but he was also a writer. One critic wrote that Doig had “the soul of a poet and the mind of a clerk.” He meant that as a compliment, meaning that Doig’s poet’s soul was reflected in the lyricism of his prose and that his attention to historical and landscape detail was a product of his clerk’s mind.

Did I like the book? I guess the 5 stars and the fact that it is on my “favorites” shelf would answer that question, but it doesn’t entirely. This is the third time that I have read the book. And though I have never listened to many audio books I have listened to this book twice as narrated by the author.

The first time I listened to it was on a road trip headed for the Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Park. I was able to drive through the Smith Valley and White Sulphur Springs and on to Dupuyer and the Two-Medicine country and listen to Doig describe the towns and the landscape that I was viewing. It caused me to respect his writing even more, for what I was looking at in that “house of sky” was exactly what he was describing on the tape.

I have read nearly all of his work, but I still have three novels to go, which I am looking forward to. I know exactly where to find them: they are resting at the top of my TBR list.

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exceptional. It's slow, and needs to be read patiently. Preferably in chapters over many days. And there is description excellence far beyond my poorer degrees of explaining in succinct reaction.

The language used, the names appointed, the locales are exquisitely placed. Sometimes in wordy and anecdotal flourish, but ironically also accomplished in a way in which there are actually no extra words. Each verbal phrase or dialect nuance for the sheep and cattle herding country drills a meaning for which there is no excess redundancy. So as slow as it is, it never has "extra".

It's a boy's life as he matures to a man's life. His memoir and identity formed. And within the smaller family sense and yet also beyond that to the very separate world of the Montana ranchers of the 1940's- 1950's.

This is his very personal masterpiece. Few people can demonstrate the exact cognition and emotive flux of a 7 or an 11 year old, for instance. Ivan Doig does. But even more astonishing is that he grabs the core of that Montana challenge and the grit of its every day to a 5 star degree.

There are other books of far less expression and literary style that I have enjoyed more, to be truthful. It was never a fast or "need" to find out- read. This book was very, very real. And like reality, it sometimes shows us views our "eyes" would rather not see. He is one of the very few American writers who can impact the truth of that vast aspect in the West's plains.

That winter is long and extremely difficult. Still is.

[Laysee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir published in 1977, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, brings the reader up close and personal to Ivan Doig (1939 – 2015), an American novelist best remembered for his literature of the post-war American West.

I was drawn to Doig’s memoir after having read The Bartender’s Tale and The Last Bus to Wisdom. These stories were set in his native Montana. The protagonists were typically young boys with fiery red hair raised by a widowed father and a doting grandmother. I have loved following his young characters as they braved domestic crises and overcame unimaginable hardship. Reading this memoir, I understood the inspiration behind these stories, which were forged in the life he shared with Charlie Doig, his rancher father, and Bessie Ringer, his maternal grandma who worked as a ranch cook. How interesting that the young Ivan accompanied his father to the saloons every evening after work was done. No wonder The Bartender’s Tale came alive with the dialogue of the drinking men and inner workings of a bar.

I enjoyed following Ivan Doig’s journey from thinking he ought to follow in his father’s footsteps to becoming a historian, journalist and writer. Much as he loved his father, Doig increasingly knew he wanted a life beyond ’the grindstone routine of ranching, the existence at the mercy of mauling weather, the endless starting-over of one calamity or another.’ Doig wrote vividly about the landscape of the Smith River Valley in south-central Montana and the incredibly tough life of eking out a living – herding and shepherding in extremely harsh mountain conditions. While reading this memoir, a good friend posted some pictures of Montana and I was struck by how aptly Doig’s prose described them: ’Mountains stood up blue-and-white into the vigorous air.’ I have to admit that sometimes details about the ‘relic faces’ of White Sulphur can start to bore unless you knew the area or were especially interested in geography.

I derived much pleasure reading about Doig’s academic triumphs in high school and subsequently, college and graduate school. He had a phenomenal vocabulary which baffled his high school English teacher who thought he cheated on her quizzes. But the foundations of his writing genius could be traced to his voracious reading as a young child. It was inspiring to know that his hard scrabble life did not stop him from sourcing out books he could lay hands on and reading.

But perhaps, for me, the most powerful writing centered on his relationship with his father and maternal grandmother, particularly, when they became very ill. When his father was dying, Doig reflected: ‘The dying of a parent is a time without answers, and I wished that I were an older and wiser guesser, able to come onto some angle of insight, which would declare: Here, this is to be done. I wished a thousand useless longings, and amid them made whatever small tactics I could reason out.’ I could relate to this. And this: ‘Nothing new can be said of the loss of a parent; it all has been wept out a million million times.’ These two most important persons in his life never got along and yet, they stuck together for his sake. It was great knowing that at the end of their lives ‘Their time together had passed through armistice into alliance and on to acceptance, then to affection, and at last had become one of the kinds of love.’

A reader who enjoys Doig’s writing will appreciate this memoir. It was the finalist for the National Book Award for Contemporary Thought. Ivan Doig is the Winner of a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner’s Award (2007). His prose is an immense joy to read.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I have not read any books by Ivan Doig, I have been aware of his acclaim as one of the premiere writers about the American West. Therefore, I was attracted to his memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind. This memoir goes into the hardscrabble existence growing up in the American West, specifically on sheep and cattle ranches in the rugged wilderness of western Montana. Losing his mother at a young age, his father and later his grandmother forged a close-knit and loving family in the midst of healing from much grief. Some of the writing here was incredible in how it would draw comparisons of the beautiful land and sky and how it connects us to those who have shaped our values. Being from the American West, I found it hard to put the book down. Having not read any of Doig's works, I found this memoir exceptional. What I loved was that each chapter ended with Doig's reminiscences in italics and usually taking a more poetic and literary bent.

"Memory is a kind of homesickness, and like homesickness, it falls short of the actualities on almost every count. In the end, I come to think of the wondrous writer Isak Dinesen when she was taken up in a biplane over the green resplendent highlands of Kenya and arrived back to earth to say, 'The language is short of words for the experiences of flying, and will have to invent new words with time.' So do I wait for the language of memory to come onto the exact tones of how the three of us, across our three generations and our separations of personality, became something-both-more-and-less-than-a-family and different from anything sheathed in any of the phrases of kinship."

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 5 out of 5]

The start of memory's gather: June 27, 1945. I have become six years old, my mother's life has drained out at 31 years. And in the first gray daylight, dully heading our horses around from that cabin of the past, my father and I rein away toward all that would come next.

Following the tragic early death of his wife Berneta from asthma, Montana sheepherder Charley Doig decides to keep their son Ivan with him and figure out some way to raise him. For a few years, Ivan follows Charley around his work on sheep ranches, evening rounds of small-town taverns, and through a brief, tempestuous second marriage, all grist for the future writer's fiction. But the heart of this beautifully written memoir is the awkward formation of a family when Bessie Ringer, Berneta's mother, joins Charley to help with raising Ivan.

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mar 9, 2022 ~~ As a grand finale to my Ivan Doig On Air personal challenge, I will reread this lovely book starting today.

Mar 13 ~~ Just a few quick comments, no change to my rating at all. I first read this book long before joining GR, then once again as you can see by the 2019 review below. But this time I read it after working my way through all of Doig's fiction titles. This gave me even greater appreciation for the book. I could see the roots of so many characters and situations. That old saying 'write what you know' is portrayed in all of Doig's works beautifully.

This little project of mine took a long time to get in gear, but I have enjoyed it immensely and am already looking forward to rereads in the future.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I first read this memoir by Montana author Ivan Doig, I wanted to find more of his work, but I never managed that. In the many years since, I had forgotten much about the book, and when I recently organized my library after a move, I added it to a long list of titles that begged for a re-read while I was sorting.

Intelligent without being condescending, lyrical without sounding forced, this book transports the reader to a not-so-long-ago time in Montana. We meet Ivan when he is six years old and his mother has just died from complications of her lifelong asthma. We follow him through many rough, unusual years as his father struggles with both the pain of loss and the need to make a home for Ivan.

The book deserves to be read slowly. Savor the phrases, enjoy the company of the sometimes eccentric characters (Grandma was my favorite) and get to know ranch life in a way few of us ever could without this type of testimony.

I still want to find more of Doig's work, and now I have. I've ordered three of his novels from my favorite online used bookseller. I can't wait to see what his fiction will be like!

[Paul Falk · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a previous introduction to Ivan Doig with his wonderfully well-written book "Last Bus to Wisdom". At the time, it was just what I wanted. From beginning to end the book did not fail to entertain. When I found an earlier book this same author had written, much earlier, namely "This House of Sky", I jumped on it.

Not always but on many occasion I had come to learn that an author's first book had been many a time a learning experience. There is no Golden Rule. That's just been my observation. Seldom do I throw in the towel for a book and call it quits. Sadly, this was one of those times.

This book did not possess the appeal of a fascinating, historical nonfiction biography - as hoped. Instead, it lumbered through with the appeal of a catatonic diary. Bland at best. Again, not entirely a surprise for a first attempt.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved listening to Tom Stechschulte read this book. I especially enjoyed learning of the relationship between Ivan Doig and his father and grandmother.

Doig's mother dies when he is young. At age eight, Ruth comes into his life. Doig was hoping to be mothered again, however he writes, "she kept a tight careful mood like a cat ghosting through tall grass. But the purr of a clever voice, fresh cookies and fruit added to my lunchbox, even a rare grin from her when I found an excuse to loiter in the kitchen - all were pettings I hadn't had."

As for his father's relationship with Ruth, "They were only a pairing loins could have tugged together, and as with many decisions taken between the thighs, all too soon there were bitterest afterthoughts." Doig watches this "slow bleed of a marriage" unravel and finally come to an end after three years.

It wasn't all sad though, there was humor also. For example, "In June, mosquitoes would come in a haze off the Smith River, and the mosquito stories would start: bastards're so big this year they can stand flatfooted and drink out of a rain barrel... saw one of 'em carry off a baby chick the other day... yah, I saw two of 'em pick up a lamb, one at each end..."

Then, Bessie Ringer, Doig's grandmother, his mother's mother, comes to live with them. "Life with grandma proved to be full of squalls of emotion." She had a short temper, however, whereas his father would rage out loud, his grandma would "go silent, lips clamped. If she could be persuaded to say anything, the words were short and snapped, displeasure corking each sentence, and you discovered you were better off to let her be wordless."

However, Bessie also had a great deal of patience and a depth of love, especially for her grandson. It was she that taught Doig to read while he sat in her lap during the first three or four years of his life. She was also able to tell him stories of his mother, indeed she was a great storyteller. Bessie was quite a character and always on the move, as she disliked to sit still. She loved animals, especially dogs and talked to them all the while.

Bessie was also a wonderful cook and baker, as Doig describes her as "an oak stump. Chunky as she had grown - at times weighing more than 150 pounds, and long since locked into an everlasting lost battle against her own pastries, snacks and second helpings - she somehow seemed stout without being over-girthed; steady without being stolid."

To illustrate how remote their ranch is in the north of the Smith River Valley: "As an Irish fellow says, this place must be the back of the neck of the world." And, "Dad and I had lived our lifetimes beneath weather-making mountains, none of which tusked up into storm clouds as mightily as this Sawtooth Range of the Rockies would."

It's a hardscrabble existence that tests them all. Over time, it is a privilege to watch them grow together as a tight-knit unit of grandma/mother-in-law, father/son-in-law and son/grandson, and acknowledge how they affect each other and care for each other.

Of the relationship between his father and grandmother, Doig writes, "my grandmother and my father had become some union of life all of their own, quite apart from the abrupt knot of bloodline they had made for my sake."

Doig continues, writing of memories of their life together and likening it to the feeling of homesickness, and how he cannot put into words what he feels, much like Isak Dineson's experience of flying over her beloved Kenya and finding that there are no words to describe the experience of flying. Dineson hoped that in future new words will be invented to more adequately convey her awe.

As for Doig, he writes, "So do I wait for the language of memory to come onto the exact tones of how the three of us, across our three generations and our separations of personality, became something-both-more-and-less-than-a family and different from anything sheathed in any of the other phrases of kinship."

Further, Doig writes about his need to keep his memory of his father alive: "All of his way of life that I had sort escape from - the grindstone routine of ranching, the existence at the mercy of mauling weather, the endless starting-over from one calamity to another - was passing with him, and while I still wanted my distance from such a gauntlet, I found that I did not want my knowing of it to go from me."

I loved this book so much and found the last section where Doig and his grandmother care for his father during his last months of life so moving that I didn't want it to end, and, in fact, I backed up and listened over again.

Final sentence in the book: "Then, my father and my grandmother go together back elsewhere in memory and I am left to think through the fortune of all we experienced together and of how now my single outline meets the time swept air that knew theirs."

[Margie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books entertain; some captivate. This House of Sky was a book that wouldn't let me go; I finished it and started it again, entranced by the beauty of its prose. Doig's memoir was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1979 and was his first book, published in 1978 when he was 39. It was the beginning of a long career in which he published sixteen books, fiction and non-fiction, most of them set in Montana, his childhood home.

However, Doig was not just a writer of the west. Of his writing, he said this,

"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.

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."

Besides the stellar recommendations of its nominations and reviews, Doig's book about growing up in the high valleys and mountains of Montana held onto me in a way I can only describe as longing -- longing to connect with my past, my family, the land - an almost visceral sense of longing.

Like Doig's family, my Scottish ancestors came to North America in hopes of a better life. Doig's ancestors settled in Montana and became sheep ranchers. My ancestors settled in Alberta, Canada, just north of where Doig's family once lived. They were a hard-working, hardy group of people who survived brutal winters and catastrophes of nature.

Ivan Doig's father, Charlie, was the last of a breed, a son of Scottish immigrants who had carved out a small sheep ranch in the late 1800s in the high plains and mountains of Montana. He was a hard-working, tireless ranch foreman, sheep herder, small ranch owner, and for a time, cafe owner. This House of Sky was Ivan Doig's tribute to his father who became a single parent when Ivan's mother passed away, and also to his grandmother, Bessie Ringer, who helped raise him.

Doig's mother died on his sixth birthday and the tragedy thrust the lives of father and son into shock, grief, and initially, a bleak survival mode. His father moved them constantly in order to find work.

When Doig was eleven, his grandmother, Bessie, came to live with them. The family could not be described as conventional, but in spite of all their misfortunes and family dissension, the combination worked. This House of Sky was not only a tribute to Charlie Doig and Bessie Ringer, it was a tribute to the bonds of family and of community. Those bonds held together and helped make Ivan Doig into the sensitive and beautiful writer he was.

I immersed myself in the rhythms of the land, of the seasons and most of all, the connections to family and community. Just as Cold Mountain pulled me to my Southern roots, This House of Sky dropped me into endless Montana vistas -- into another past.

[Zade · Rating 5 out of 5]

How odd that a book so firmly rooted in the power of language should leave me at a loss for words to explain its profound effect. I think I hesitate to describe it because I know I will not do justice to Mr. Doig's writing or to the lives he so compellingly illumines in these pages. Although this is Mr. Doig's memoir, he really isn't the main character in it. He shares that position with both his father and his grandmother and with the Smith River Valley in Montana as well, which is as much a presence in the narrative as any person could be. The people and places here seem so alive it is hard to believe that a trip to Montana would not find them there still, even though the passage of time and the passing of beloved people run through these pages with irresistible persistence.

Also, Mr. Doig's gift for language--both his own apt descriptions and turns of phrase and the recounting of individual eccentricities and sayings-- makes these pages glow.

I came to this book by chance recommendation, not knowing what to expect, thinking perhaps it would be something to set aside for my son to read when he is older. What I found is a book that manages to establish deeply felt connections across time, location, gender, and culture--a book about a very specific place, time, and set of people, that nonetheless touches on the very core of shared humanity. I can't recommend this book highly enough because I simply haven't the words to explain it. I suspect it will be a different book for each person who reads it, but also that it will find a way to reach each person in some significant and beneficial way.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have your read the novels of Ivan Doig – those, such as The Whistling Season and/or Dancing at the Rascal Fair? If you have and enjoyed his writing, then I believe you will enjoy this too. I would recommend reading the novels first. These novels are really not novels! One comes to understand as one reads about Doig’s and his father’s and his maternal grandmother’s life, as they are presented in this biography, that his fiction talks of his own true life experiences. In his novels you get a tightly woven plot line with the extraneous information removed. You get a good story. Here in the biography you get all the details that lie behind the scenes that you remember from the stories. Many of the places and events and prime forces (weather, park authorities and ranchers) are common to both. The setting of the novels feels so genuine since it is anchored to real life events.

This book goes one step deeper. It is primarily about three people and their relationships with each other: the author, his father and his maternal grandmother. His mother died when he was very young; the role his maternal grandmother played is unusual. The feelings these three people harbored is perceptively and honestly portrayed. Again, real life is often more strange than fiction. I found the relationship between his father and his maternal grandmother ….well, you have to read the book to understand it!

Warning: if you do not enjoy Ivan Doig’s novels, you will not enjoy this book. For me, Doig’s portrayal of teachers is the high point of his writing skills, probably because he himself is no rancher, no homesteader, no sheep herder. He was a man of books.

I listened to the audio book. The narration was fine. Not exceptional, not bad, just fine. The vocabulary used is that of Montana ranchers. I didn’t understand every word, but certainly got the gist of it just fine.

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ivan Doig is my wife's favorite author. I'm certain she's read every one of his books, and there have been several. And since he lives in our area, she has taken me along several times to listen to him read from his new work as it came out. As a result, I tried to read one of his fictional books some time back and immediately ran into what seems a trait of Doig, a trait of starting the reader out with an avalanche of descriptive text. To me, it feels like a lifetime to work through a single paragraph. So I gave up. This book was no different, but (1) it was nonfiction, and (2) it was perhaps his most highly regarded book, so I persevered. It was very good I did. True, this is a memoir, a man telling about his life growing up in rural Montana, a place that could just as well have been Turkey or the Australian outback, as far as the typical American would think. So, yes, there's an element of travel adventure to it. (There are a number of very memorable scenes.) Ultimately, however, this is Doig's reflection on the complex dynamics that constitute a family, no matter how "normal" or out of the ordinary it may seem. After the initial descriptive flood, Doig settles into a flow of seeing life to which the reader can easily relate, no matter how foreign it may be at first glance. Each scene, each setting flows so well from one stage of his life to another, the reader moves through the years without hesitation. At some point, as the author's life takes him away from the reader's home base of Montana, Doig's writing style changes. As Doig is now in college (Northwestern University), the writing abruptly switches to a series of brief tales, often one not at all related to the other. And just as I'm starting to tell myself that I do not appreciate this loss of narrative flow, Doig pulls out some of most moving narrative I have ever read, a narrative that could never have had the impact it had without all that had gone before, with all of the patience that Doig had brought to bear to get us to that point. I was so moved by the writing at that point, that I found myself reading it to my wife, the true Doig disciple. Doig soon returns to his flowing style and takes us to the eventual end of his childhood family. It was a journey well worth taking.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book worthy of its high praise and awards. Ivan Doig's memoire of his youth in the rugged, harsh, and beautiful Montana landscape is poetic and heartfelt. This is a story of hardship, triumph, and love of his father and maternal grandmother. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys stories of a family's love and perseverance.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This House of Sky is a memoir about the author’s experiences growing up in Montana. Ivan Doig grew up in the small towns and ranches in the rugged valleys of western Montana. An only child, his mother dying when he is six years old, Doig is raised by his father, Charlie, and his maternal grandmother. The family moves from place to place as Charlie works various jobs, especially as a sheepherder. We’re taken through the hard life of western Montana, the demands of lambing and terrible storms.

Doig writes with a beautiful, rich prose that provides near-poetic reflections on the landscape of the American West. He captures and preserves a way of life and a generation of men and women that has almost vanished from America. It rekindled thoughts of my own mother growing up in a cabin camp in north central Nebraska. I would give his writing style five stars. Although it’s a superbly written memoir, I found the story itself to be somewhat mundane. The story was slow and failed to draw me in as have other memoirs. I would give the story three stars—nothing special.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant and yawning narrative of growing up in the west at a time when to be literate meant knowing how to tame the challenges that animals, land and weather brought. He imparts a simple communion among his extended family that is articulated in few words but an unflinching understanding of their mutual love. Doig writes about his somewhat fractured childhood, how his father tried raising him alone after his wife's death. Doig deeply respects his father's Montana roots. The ties to that way of life are something he could escape physically but not in his heart. He is drawn to the world of journalism in his college and professional years, but this past is in his bones. The book ends with Doig's journey toward his father's death. The impact of that loss, not just one of a father. A loss of a mind that carried the last remnants of a different time and landscape.

Not all of the book rates a five star, but ultimately it stands alone in its beauty. This is much better than his fiction.

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully written memoir by Ivan Doig about growing up in Montana from the late 1940's through the '70's. The writing is poetic and the descriptions of both the characters and the country astoundingly beautiful. It is one of the best books I have ever read about the relationship of a father and son. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to read about living and ranching in Montana or who just loves their father.

[Alyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful and prosaic account of rural Montana, family, carving an identity for oneself, and the process of acceptance. This is the first Doig I have read- after hearing praise for years from my father and others. If ever there was a memoir to read, this is it. As a semi-native Idahoan familiar with rural lifestyles and landscapes, I was moved to tears and beyond with his painful and glorious story.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1978, Ivan Doig’s memoir recounts the story of his life growing up in rural Montana. After losing his mother at age six, Doig’s father Charlie remarries, but the marriage does not last. His father then joins forces with the author’s maternal grandmother, Bessie. Together, they form a tight-knit family, working as ranch hands, cooks, and sheep herders. Doig’s portrayal of his childhood is one of hardship, but also deep affection for his family. He describes the sacrifices his father and grandmother made to provide for him, which led to his own strong work ethic and appreciation for the land.

The memoir also explores Doig’s complex relationship with his father, a tough, resilient man shaped by a life of physical labor and loss. As with many men of his era, Charlie is often stoic and difficult to approach. Bessie, in contrast, brings a softer presence to Doig’s life though her life has not been easy, either. Doig’s writing captures the rugged beauty of Montana’s vast mountainous terrain. The author shares his family’s story of a hardscrabble life on a ranch, while emphasizing the themes of memory, loss, and resilience. It is a beautiful portrait of life in the American West in the early to mid-twentieth century.

[Rich Flanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a romantic, Zane Grey depiction of the American West, but a vivid, gritty, fearlessly honest tale of the bleak existence of ranch life in early 20th century Montana and of the author's coming of age. For me, at times, the memoir was frustrating in its overload of poetic and metaphorical descriptions. I often found myself re-reading sentences just to decipher what was being described under all the colorful verbiage. However, the last third of the book is well worth the effort, as all the carefully wrought characters move into the deeply moving climax of their years.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best reads I've had in a long time. Touching, brilliantly and vividly descriptive. Ivan Doig's words are textures, fabrics. You are transported through time and place to his memories, his fantastically detailed memories, reaching back to six years old, his mother's tragic early death. Doig and his father and grandmother are a somewhat unlikely trio, but their lives are filled to the brim with Montana, ranching, growing up, and endless copious amounts of love and tolerance.

This story touched me strongly. Mainly, in particular, due to Doig's interactions with his father. His father was a good man, a lifelong smoker and occasional drunk, but a hardworking, self-taught man who transferred his skills to his son, encouraged him in his schooling, always trusted him and knew when to be cantankerous. Bluntly put, Doig's father was a simple man. And herein I was touched. Doig loved him with all the love a heart can muster. Theirs is a truly special bond, between Doig--a future writer with a gorgeous touch for expression and an envious vocabulary, but a person that Doig Sr. just plainly saw as his son--and his father--a simple man who worked all his years as a ranchhand and ranch manager, a man who can be numbered hundreds of thousands of times over, a man who would be forgotten otherwise. A simple man, but a remarkable man. Doig spectacularly captures this soul, along with his grandmother's near-equally amazingness. There is palpable love here. Plain relationships that are familiar to us all, but that we envy regardless. These are everyday, American, western relationships, yet they're also universal, spreading, ignorant of boundary. Captured here is the true heart and soul and *meaning* of what it is to be family. To stick together.

Tale upon tale, this book will always haunt me. It has inspired me like nothing since probably Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. As a father, I strive now, harder and more conscious, to pass along that which is worth passing along, to be a father work remembering--simple or not. To love love love.

--- ---

"Life was to be lived as it came. If it came hard, you bowed your neck a bit more and endured." (116)

"Memory is a kind of homesickness, and like homesickness, it falls short of the actualities on almost every count." (239)

"the contant clasp of keeping me at your side, whatever the place or the hour or the weather or the mood or task or venture" (273, said regarding his father and his childhood)

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

“On that ranch where dreams were trapped in rock...”

This is a wonderful memoir about Doig's life growing up, in the rugged wilderness of western Montana. It captures a time and place that seem so distant now and his incredible recollections of working as a sheepherder and the brutal struggles, of living on a ranch, are poignant and unflinching. The true heroes of the story are his father, Charlie and his grandmother, Bessie. Pioneers, with big hearts and thick skins. I love this description of a young Bessie:

“But it was her look to the world that changed most, and in the few photos from about her thirtieth year, her tenth in Montana, a newcomer now gazes out from where the new bride had been-a flinchless newcomer who has firmed into what she will be all the rest of her life.”

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not want it to end! I absolutely love Ivan Doig's language and to have it grace his memoir was wonderful. I was in Montana in the early 1900's - I could feel the characters and touch the landscape. His description of his father's death is incredibly moving. I saw the genesis of his fiction that I so enjoy. I think I enjoyed this as much as The Whistling Season - and that's saying a lot!

[Jack Christensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The language of the book is beautiful. The story, less so.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diane C:
This House of Sky is a memoir written by Ivan Doig. It is a book to be savored, read slowly and then reread to fully absorb his beautiful language. It reads very much like a novel and covers Doig's life in Montana after his mother's death when Doig was only six years old. It's a hard-scrabble life but rich with imagination, grueling work and love. This is also a story of family, particularly fathers and sons. The surrounding characters on the ranch and in the neighboring town are like your favorite character actors. My choice was Mrs. Tidyman, the gruff and caring high school English teacher. "For her the language held holy force, and she shuddered at any squander of it. In what must have been her fullest spate of forgiveness, she once apologized about one of the townswomen: 'Once you get used to her split infinitives, you'll find she's a very nice person.'

Doig is a master at characterization and gorgeous prose. Don't rush through this lovely book. Stop, absorb and FEEL the words (If you haven't read The Whistling Season, you might try that one first!)

[Sharon Huether · Rating 5 out of 5]

This House of Sky:Landscapes of a Western Mind By Ivan Doig I was intrigued by this book because Ivan Doig is a writer from Montana. I think this is his best book so-far. I read it I few years ago. Where he grew up was a place I was familiar with. He grew up with the land. It dictated their lives. He learned responsibility at a young age. At the time of his youth there were many characters in the small local towns. He brought out the scenes of times that were simipler. This is one of the best books I've ever read.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read edition: I haven't spent time with this old friend in many years. The writing is still just as beautiful to me.

Just beautiful. I can't even remember the different reactions I had when I read this book. I just remember being captivated by the writing, and I went on to recommend this (and Doig's fiction) to book-loving friends.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Ivan Doig’s memoir. I was engaged and found it interesting to read of his life and that of his family.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Dang. Ivan Doig can write!

His mother died on his sixth birthday on a ranch in Montana. His dad, Charlie, chose to bring up Ivan by his side. That policy of his corded us together at once, twined us in the hours of riding to look over the livestock, the mending of barbed-wire fences, all the prodding tasks of the ranch. The dad eventually realized he needed help, and mended a barbed-wire relationship with his wife's mother —Ivan's grandma— who joined Charlie and Ivan, forming a makeshift family.

After many migrations, Ivan settled in to a small high school, where Mrs. Tidyman, the English teacher, changed his life. Reader, this was my favorite part.

The foliage of her learning laced everywhere through the school.
It was the grammar of English that exalted her most. Day after day we would troop to the blackboard to take apart sentences for her, phrases chalked to one another like scaffolding, being shown how a clause dovetailed here, an infinitive did the splicing there, the whole of it planed and beamed together as her pointer whapped through a reading of the revealed sentence.
For her the language held holy force, and she shuddered at any squander of it.

This is my third Doig. Right now I'm toying with the idea and adding Ivan Doig to my list of authors whose entire oeuvre I wish to read.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is equal parts memoir and cowboy poetry and all of it is beautiful. Doig's lyrical writing is absolutely enchanting and has officially been placed on my Favorites shelf, right next to Dandelion Wine. It was the perfect read at the perfect time.