This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [5]
So, This House of Sky's progress was going along like a dream. But in the publishing world, the governing god sometimes is not Morpheus but Murphy. What could go wrong did go wrong the night of March 31, when word reached me that there had been a wholesale upheaval at the publishing house, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The editor-in-chief had been dismissed and several other editors and top executives were said to be gone as well.
Apprehension doesn't come close to describing my mood the next morning as I dialed to see whether Carol Hill—and This House of Sky—had survived the purge. But her distinctive energy-charged voice came over the line as usual and said yes, she had survived, work was going along as ever at HBJ, Sky was progressing through the production process, and that I really shouldn't worry about any of this—because she was the new editor-in-chief.
There followed the period of nothing-to-do-but-wait, until the book's end-of-September publication date. But around noon on the sixth of September, I came back to the house after an errand to the drugstore and found a message on my phone machine from a friend who said he'd seen the review of This House of Sky in the latest issue of Time.
What review? I said to myself.
The review in Time, the machine repeated when I replayed the message.
By evening I had seen that review, and it was a writer's dream. No snide asides, no news magazine cutesiness; just long, miraculous patches of pure quotation from This House of Sky.
The next week, a review in the Los Angeles Times. Praise again, and their reviewer, the great bookman Robert Kirsch, called my father an American hero.
Four days later, the Chicago Tribune. Praise yet again, This House of Sky credited with "all the poetry and lyricism, all the 'blood being' of a mustang running on open range."
This was starting to be fun.
It got to be even more fun when Sky arrived at the bookstores and by the end of the year had sold 15,003 copies. The reviews continued to flabbergast me; of thirty-two reviewers of national stature, thirty praised the book.
By year's end I'd gone to work on my next book, Winter Brothers, and was back into a writing trance when the phone rang again one morning. The call was from Archie Satterfield, book review editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who had become an instant champion of Sky when he read it in galley proofs and was eagerly following its progress. As usual he asked me how sales of the book were going, any more good reviews, etcetera. "Oh, and congratulations on your nomination."
"Nomination?" I say.
"Good grief, Doig," says Satterfield. "Don't you know This House of Sky has been nominated for the National Book Award?"
As it turned out, the mountains of Nepal were somehow judged to be more exotic than the mountains of Montana, and Peter Matthiessen's fine narrative of his trek across the Himalaya, The Snow Leopard, won the award. I think, now, that my sufficient award was that This House of Sky happened. More than 170,000 copies later, the book continues to ricochet along in its whats-gonna-happen-next fashion. Sky is used in college courses in autobiography, biography, history, and literature, has been anthologized to a fare-thee-well, been translated into German, read on National Public Radio, distributed in audiocassette by the thousands, and when the National Endowment for the Humanities funded a nationwide discussion program focusing on books about family, This House of Sky was the leadoff book. Whenever I've made bookstore appearances for any of the eight books I have written since Ann Nelson and Carol Hill and Carol Doig and I managed to retrieve my father and my grandmother and myself from relic-hood, people still queue up for Sky.
As when I was signing copies of one of my novels and a young woman looked past me to the stack of