This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [2]
In the great words of Gamble Rogers, life is what happens to us while we're making other plans, and the next time I looked up it suddenly was mid-January of 1974 and "the Montana book" hadn't gained an inch since London. I drew in a decisive breath and began putting in half my day-by-day writing time on the book, the other half consumed as usual by magazine free-lancing. Progress on the manuscript—it wasn't yet This House of Sky in title or any other semblance—was rather messy and underfed until the middle of April of 1974, when this diary note occurred:
Work began to shape up last Friday when I began telling stories from the taped interview with Dad in '68. Harshness of the 1919 winter, for instance. Listening to that tape ... made ideas flow.
I've told in the pages that eventuated in that manuscript the growing closeness with my grandmother, Bessie Ringer, during those years. In October of 1974, she died at the age of eighty-one, and in the aftermath of her death, as I tried to sort through life one more time, it became clear to me that what I'd been thinking of as a book about my father needed to be a book about her as well. Her voice added itself strongly now to what I was attempting.
Which stubbornly remained only an attempt for the next year or so, as I endlessly rewrote and fussed and started over, amid my other labors of trying to earn some semblance of a living as a free-lance writer. In mid-January of 1975, after I'd spent half a day reworking the opening sentence of the manuscript and thought I'd managed to improve it by maybe two words, comes this diary entry:
It would be magnificent to do the entire book with this slow care, writing it all as highly charged as poetry—but will I ever find the time?
And another diary note, this one from mid-July of 1975, seven full years after that afternoon of my father's storytelling in White Sulphur Springs:
I began to look back through the Montana book, and saw how poor some of it is. The raw material is good, and there can be more, but my writing so far doesn't click. Size of the job scares me, I suppose.
That was the low point in this record of how the book happened—that afternoon of desperate gut fear that it would not happen at all.
But the next morning I made myself pencil my way through the manuscript again, and the morning after that, and after enough of those grindstone mornings, I thought the words were perking up a bit. Then something did click and, as I believe happens with many of these clicks of life, I wasn't entirely aware of hearing it at the time. Late in 1975, after I'd again carpentered away at the book as much as I could but never enough, I decided that one way to simplify existence would be to stop dealing with a couple of dozen magazine editors per year, as I had been doing now for almost six years as a free lance. To a writer, coping continually with such an array of editors is a process I've heard best described as being nibbled to death by ducks. And so I thought I would get someone else to suffer the nibbling and handle the query letters and the nagging for late fees. I would get myself an agent.
Carol and I had a longtime friend whom we had kidded, over the years, about being preternaturally efficient. Doubtless it was one of Ann Nelson's July pronouncements that she'd already finished her Christmas shopping