Welcome to the book show, A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Judd Anu.
Often called the Dean of Writers about the American West, Ivan Doig is the author of such
National Best Sellers as the Whistling Season and the Bartender's Tale.
In his latest novel, Sweet Thunder, he reprises his beloved character, Mori Morgan, to take
on the power of the press and an era of intense corporate greed and social unrest.
The story takes place in Budemontana in 1919 and is a love song to newspapers and the countless
writers, reporters and editors who bring them to life each day.
Again the name of the new novel is Sweet Thunder and it's a great pleasure to welcome Ivan
Doig to this week's book show.
Thank you very much for spending time with us.
Well, delighted to be here.
You're a newspaper man at heart.
I assume that never really leaves you, doesn't?
I guess not.
I did not spend all that much time as an editorial writer as my Montana folk said back east
in Illinois, Joe.
But it very much seems to have stuck with me.
And when I began thinking about what Mori might be up to next in the next book, I'd
seem to me he would probably sign on with the Butte Thunder newspaper and try to take on
the Wall Street might of the Anaconda Copper mining company which pretty well had Montana
in its grip there 1919, 20 and 21.
Several things I think that are interesting in what you have written and of course first
and foremost with Mori as the chief editorialist for The Thunder, it gives us a perfect time
to good versus evil to look at that wonderful conflict that is always around.
However also of looking at newspapers and the power of the press and obviously a question
that still comes up of what is the power of the press and certainly the power of the
Daily newspaper.
Right.
I decided in doing this I would take Mori right back to what I and my journalism professor
wife, now retired Carol, see as a bedrock principle of journalism and newspapers in particular
the old saying to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
And Mori outright says at one point in the book that a newspaper without principles is merely
a sort of a collection of ongoing messy events.
And so fighting for mind safety, living wage, trying to break the copper collar as Anaconda's
grip on Montana and its politics and economy was called.
It seemed to me that those were things Mori would find worth fighting for and I think journalists
long since have found worth fighting for in various venues around the country.
I found a fascinating that you wanted him to be an editorialist and not a reporter.
So this is not an investigative reporter.
He is going at it through the eyes of an editorialist.
Right.
Mori is above all I suppose a word slinger.
He was an unorthodox school teacher in a one room school when he first appeared in the
whistling season and in the prequel to this book works on he is back working in a library
and helping write a union anthem and things of that sort.
Mori is chock full of things.
I'm not sure I know myself Joe.
I shouldn't admit that the character is smarter than the author.
But Mori has this walking encyclopedia ability.
It can function in Latin and a little Greek as he says as well as English.
And so he will get an idea and I have to dive into some of the Latin books I have around
to get the translation, follow, investigate it myself and do what his ideas are.
And so in writing him as an editorialist it gave me a chance to have Mori really unleash
his barrage of language at the Ogre Company and Akonda.
You have some 15 novels to your credit and the first Mori Morgan story debuted in 2006.
What was it about this character or I guess another way of asking if I follow up to what
you just mentioned of when did you realize that this character was perhaps more than the
author and had a life that could go on beyond one novel.
Joe, you've undoubtedly been to the book signings and readings and someone is always asking
the audience where did you get that character?
Is that character you or what?
Sure.
And very promptly Mori about took over the floor.
Questions about Mori took over the floor at these audience gatherings.
People would say I wish I'd had a teacher like him or he reminds me of a teacher I had
or something of that sort.
And I also remember, you know, I'm usually up there at the mic, firmly denying that I favor any
character over any other or anything of that sort.
But I do remember putting Mori down on paper when he arrives at a train depot in Montana and
Homestead country in 1999 that he came to life immediately on my page in front of me.
I could see what his hair was like.
I could see what he was wearing.
I could all once hear him.
The conductor of the train has confiscated Mori's brand new Stetson because he's broken.
And I have a plane ticket.
And I think the first words out of Mori's mouth and out of my head were,
Mori asking his sister, Rose, what about my shop pole?
You know, and so,
immediately he's got a vocabulary.
And he simply has been a character worth writing about.
And I guess reading about according to the response of the audiences.
And a character I assume that you enjoy being with for the amount of time that you have to
be with the character in the process of writing an album.
That's true. He's very interesting to be around because
as well as being a bit of a rap scallion, I give that much away.
He thinks about things, things have happened to him both good and bad.
And so as a writer, and Mori is the narrator of these two butte books, both work song and sweet thunder.
He is able to put on page thoughts, ideas that it'd be difficult for me to get to if I was writing
the impersonal voice of God third person.
So Mori, sometimes he gets in a spot, he will lie flat on his back in bed and look up at the
plaster map of the ceiling above and wonder where should I go next.
Is it Tasmania?
Or am I going to tough it out here and butte?
So there are things of that nature.
I'm hoping you can read a short passage from the new novel, Sweet Thunder,
in which Mori talks about butte and describes the landscape, which obviously plays such a
large role in the novel.
All right, we have a minute and a half worth here, I think. Mori is up on the butte hill,
always called the richest hill on earth as you will hear.
And he is looking around, he's up there on an errand.
As I top the last street rise and left behind the world of downtown butte,
the day was a rare one of winter clarity.
The snow held Rockies beyond the city limits, dazzling and full sunshine.
While the 30 or so mining operations and full swing along the hill stood out in every detail,
black steel, head frame towers, and bin cars loaded with peacock shades of copper ore,
squat, red brick, hoist houses, throbbing and thrombing with cable work.
The entire spectacle as if a gigantic factory had been thrown open for inspection.
The richest hill on earth never ceased to thrill and chill me at the same time,
with its powerful manufacturing of wealth, the squalad leaving of that, dump heaps like Sahara dunes
and gaping bottomless pits called glory holes.
Three times a day, the human equation came into stunning view.
As shifts changed and miners and their legions poured forth to and from neighborhoods
gullied into the surroundings of machinery and dumps and pits.
That is I have enjoyed reading from the new novel Sweet Thunder published by Riverhead Books.
What brought you and ultimately this character to to butte?
Well, it took a deep breath for me. I'm from the other Montana, Joe.
I describe myself as being from the Lariat proletariat part of Montana, the ranch country.
My folks, parents and grandparents both were ranch hands and ranch cooks.
And so it's the rural part of Montana, small town part that I grew up in out there.
Butte, quite frankly, was a foreign place in several meanings of the word to us
because it was a city and its haydabe back in the early part of the 20th century.
Butte, in fact, was the largest city of the northern Rockies.
It's big enough that straining every muscle to be metropolitain.
The Vodville circuit there drew in people like Charlie Chaplin and Sarah Bernhard and Clark Gable.
And it's always a stop for traveling politicians on and on.
And so butte had a reputation as being rough and tough and full of attitude.
I still think when I go to Montana, I can often tell whether someone is from butte
because when they say the word their chin comes up about an inch, you know,
and pronouncing the word.
So I had never thought I would write about a novel, a full novel about butte.
I've written about it glancingly in some of my earlier books.
But I just decided to throw the dice with Mori, put an end butte.
And I have since spent, I don't know by now, three or four years, I guess, living in the butte
of the past in research, in book after book after book.
In some places Google doesn't go yet or hadn't gone by the time.
I found a photo, say of the old butte public library, kind of a wonderful gothic extravaganza.
That absolutely captivates Mori.
And I knew immediately I had put that in the book.
And so by kind of getting myself by the scruff of the neck and saying, okay,
learn a little something about these minors, learn why copper miners all around the world is to
so dazzled by the prospect of butte and its wages and its 2,000 miles of mine tunnels under
there with copper that they used to say don't even stop in America, just go to butte.
So it's captivating in some ways.
So in your research and in the history that you have explored, how common was an anaconda?
Well anaconda was actually a kind of a what will I say politely on the air here, some kind of a
stepchild of the standard oil trust. And so some of the same figures from the turn of the
20th century, Henry Rogers and William Rockefeller, who had pretty well cornered the oil market
in the United States, began investing in butte with the same notion in mind on the copper market.
So this is the era of the trusts. Ultimately Teddy Roosevelt comes along and gains a reputation
as a trust buster. The press takes them on and so on. But it was a day of
colossal financial Wall Street baronage and the miners unions in particular that had pretty
reasonable relationships before anaconda was bought up by a Danaconda mine, was bought up by
these Wall Street interests. They found themselves slipping in influence and safety and wages in
every other way. So I don't like to draw historical parallels, but in the long,
the long book that is history, this chapter doesn't look too unfamiliar to some others in our
past. And that's inevitable, right? I mean in several ways, one being that I assume things like
this are on your mind. You are a historian. So you think about what has happened and what he is
happening and the same way of this story of corporate greed, which is sort of which is certainly
time honored. And what we were talking earlier about the newspapers, the troubles they're having now,
basically looking at large business, which is now comprises the media as well.
Well, I think that I think you have a good point there. I am a writer whose imagination
lives somewhere decades away from me. In the past there, I'm sure. But the atmosphere of my own
times has to seep into me, to some extent I think. And so yes, I think I am driven, pulled, what?
By some of the feel of the current society, I will slip in quickly here that my first book,
This House of Sky, was a memoir of my people in Montana, my father and grandmother.
And I wrote that way back there, it came out in 78, way back there determined that, you know,
if Spiro Agnew, this grace device president, could get a book contract right in novel,
by gosh, I was determined to write a book about my family doing the chores as honestly as we could.
So yeah, there are some incentives in the air.
You, even though you had several careers and several different academic and career paths,
there was always a point where you wanted to be a writer, where that was at the center of what
you wanted to do. Yes, hopelessly from probably a senior year in high school certainly.
When that fall, I got on a train and went off to Northwestern University, enrolled in the
School of Journalism there. And by my sophomore year there, I had sold my first magazine article
a very short one to a very, very small magazine probably. But yes, my life has been words on paper
ever since. And so, so far, you know, ultimately Joe, you keep out long enough, the life turns into
a living, if you get enough books out of you. The idea, and I mentioned it in the introduction of
being this writer that is so associated with the West. And certainly Montana embodies that. And
what do you make of that of our fascination with the West for both people who live there and for
the people who do not? And that, that notion of that it's, it's a normity and its power and its
mystery. Well, that draws a lot of readers. You're certainly right in all the way from what the old
dime novels of Ned Buttline and on through Zane Gray and John Wayne and so forth. I suppose a lot
of us though and I count myself very much in this have written against what we see as the
myth of the gunslinger. I've sometimes said, you know, the Louis Lamore, John Wayne figures with
20, 30 pounds of gut held up by a couple pounds of belt buckle. That is not the real West. It is the
West of school teachers and home stedders, minors, corporate, corporate outfits like giant and
a conda and so on. And so I don't feel I'm purposely writing about the West. I feel like writing
about that larger country life. And I happened to be from the West born in in Montana. I was in
Montana until I went in the Air Force, you know, college. I was away for college, but until I went
in the Air Force after college and I now live out here on Puget Sound. And so I'm simply doing what
I think writers have long done, which is to write about their home territory. As Conrad wrote
about the sea as James Joyce goes off to Paris and Treesston's on and on and was he right about
Dublin. So I think it matters more for your imagination lives than where the writer seats
himself. At this point your imagination lives in Montana, you now live as you mentioned in Seattle. So
what brought you to even further West and what was there a changing of the place or something that
was missing that avoid that you wanted to fill elsewhere?
Carolyn and I were married and both had magazine editing jobs in Evanston, Illinois.
And so Chicago and Northwestern, of course, our university is there in Evanston, the same
Chicago suburb. We'd had several years of Chicago living, liked a lot of things about Chicago,
but greatly missed things like mountains, access to the outdoors, things of that sort. And so we
quite a number of years ago, threw over those two magazine editing, editor ship jobs,
got in a gunboat, Buick. And as a lot of people have done in this country, pointed ourselves West,
where I entered the University of Washington towards earning a PhD in American Western history.
And we never got away from Seattle after that. All my books have been written here with my
imagination. And often the two of us, me with notebook and so on and Carol with camera, revisiting
Montana, going through Montana, looking at this, listening to that. And so we seem to have followed
a compass that had a Western pole on it, I think, Joe. Is it still true to you to write about
Washington State? Well, I have written a couple of books that take place out here on the coast.
And my second book, Winter Brothers, does take place on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.
If I were starting over, if I had been born and spent more time out here, yes, I think I'd
be known as the writer of the Grand Cooley country here or the writer of the state of Washington.
By now I have some 500 characters that I've invented spread across these
dozen or 13 novels that I go back to their, my population of my imagination. And they happened
to be in the two medicine country and butte and other places in Montana. So I'm following
huge footsteps, not particularly deliberately, but they're there. You have to notice them.
A Faulkner writing time after time about his postage stamp of a county, as he called it in Mississippi.
They're a Yachtman Patafa and Thomas Hardy across the pond in his Wessex country. Again,
using that home territory. It's like Joseph Conrad using the sea, I would say, that you go back
and back to where you were young and your impressions were strong and you know how they talked
and what happened and you might as well write about it.
Well, the name of the new novel is Sweet Thunder. It is published by Riverhead. I've
enjoyed a great pleasure to have you on the book show. I can't thank you enough for being with us
and sharing your stories and career with us. You bet it to delight. Thank you very much.
Again, the name of the novel is Sweet Thunder. It's published by Riverhead. We enjoy hearing
from our listeners about the show. You can email us at book at wamc.org. And you can listen
again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org. Sarah Liduke produces our program book
Marcus for next week and thanks for listening for the book show. I'm Joe Donaue.
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