Prairie Nocturne Read online

  —The dust storm that overtakes Monty and Wes in the summer of 1924 may seem more characteristic of the drought-stricken 1930s, but one of the most detailed memoirs about the Montana homestead period—Traces on the Landscape, by Kent Midgett—recounts dust storms on the sod-broken prairie as early as August and September of 1917. The U.S. Weather Bureau’s climatological data for the summer of 1924 in Montana includes a term which prefigured the rural disaster on the northern plains in the Depression years, “a pronounced shortage of rain.”

  —In a remark by my Broadway character Phil Sherman, I have shuffled Marc Connelly’s 1930 spirituals-inspired play The Green Pastures into production five years earlier.

  —And for purely dramatic purposes I have promoted Varick McCaskill to forest ranger at the fictitious Indian Head station about a year earlier than alluded to in my Two Medicine trilogy about the McCaskills and their times.

  Students of the Harlem Renaissance will notice a resemblance in Monty’s arc of career, from approximately nowhere to the heady neighborhood of Strivers Row, to that of Taylor Gordon, my fellow townsman back where we were both born, White Sulphur Springs, Montana. The late Mr. Gordon provided his own sprightly telling of that rough ride to New York, and in his case, back to White Sulphur, in his 1929 book, Born to Be. But while the example of Taylor Gordon’s splendid tenor voice inspired me in the writing of Monty’s singing career, the background and personal path of life I have given Monty is as different from his as I have been able to make it. In my attempt to sketch what life might have been like in a tiny community of the early-twentieth-century American West for a person whom we now would call African-American, I have restricted myself to a handful of crystallizing details, and a few sparkling turns of phrase, from the Gordon family itself as told to me by Taylor and his sister Rose in an afternoon-long interview in 1968. Examples include: the passed-down tale, from the time of slavery, of their mother minding the white horse in the woods, which I considerably embellished; Rose’s unbetterable phrase about the rough knocks of life, “this old pig-iron world”; the highly appealing recounting of “Angel Momma” when they referred to their mother, which chimed in me with Roland Hayes’s term of endearment for his mother, “Angel Mo’ ”; and Rose’s recounting of the joke back on the world she and her brother found themselves in, their habitual pause just out of hearing before joining in on the otherwise all-white gatherings in town, to remark wryly to one another: “Well, the two colored persons are here.”

  Of the songs I’ve conjured for my characters to possess, two were born of intriguing phrases in other genres. The “ballad” sung by Susan at Angus’s funeral takes its inspiration from a line of “The Making of a Poet,” John Davison’s haunting poem about the Clydeside port of Greenock: “this old grey town . . . is world enough for me.” And in Monty’s Medicine Line song, the phrase “forty miles a day on beans and hay” is an irrepressible jingle evidently picked up from a pair of 1875 vaudevillians by various U.S. cavalry units and tailored into their own songs about various campaigns; this musical background and much other lore of the cavalry regulars in the West is told by the late Don Rickey, Junior, in his military history that also used the phrase as its title.

  The splendid murk that is the past posed me a couple of spelling puzzles. “Assiniboin” is the customary spelling of the tribal name in the northern borderlands where a portion of this book is set, but the U.S. War Department of the time dubbed the military post established there in 1879 “Fort Assinniboine”; I’ve used the military spelling because it preponderates in historical references to the once-massive fort. And in the instance of the private whose last name is given in half the histories of the Lewis and Clark expedition as “Fields” and the other half as “Field,” I’ve followed the lead of Gary Moulton, editor of the most complete edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, in calling him Joseph Field.

  Devoutly as it might be wished to exist, no journal account by Joseph Field nor his brother Reuben nor George Drouillard of the Lewis party’s clash with the Blackfeet in 1806 has been unearthed. The isolated battle site on the Two Medicine River is in its own way everlastingly eloquent, however, and I am grateful to rancher Vernon Carroll for providing my wife and me the doubly poignant journey across ranchland where my father and grandmother once worked.

  In library holdings that I have drawn from, those of the University of Washington library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University were particularly vital for the period of the 1920s. At the Montana Historical Society, once again I owe all kinds of thanks to specific members of its peerless staff: Brian Shovers, Angela Murray, Jody Foley, Vivian Hays, Charlene Porsild, Lorie Morrow, Ellen Arguimbau; and Marcella Sherfy, for always smoothing the way. And Dave Walter as ever could be counted on as a remarkable human storehouse of Montana history.

  From Harvard days to lore about Western vigilantes, historian Richard Maxwell Brown generously lent me his transcontinental insights. I’m similarly indebted to another estimable historical delver, William L. Lang, for sharing his pathbreaking research on the black community within the city of Helena.

  In every realm from hospitality, encouragement, and information to the nitty-gritty of publishing, this book has had a cadre of friends in the right places: Marshall J. Nelson, Gloria Swisher, Denyse Del-court, Katharina and John Maloof, Margaret Svec, Jan Mason, Clyde Milner, Lois and Jim Welch, the Arnst-Hallingstad-Payton extended family in Great Falls, Ken and Phyllis Adler of the Duck Inn, Liz Darhansoff, Susan Moldow, Nan Graham, Brant Rumble, and Karen Richardson. And Carol Doig, always a ten, my loving companion and sharp-eyed photographer on all the travels for this tenth book.

  A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE

  PRAIRIE NOCTURNE

  DISCUSSION POINTS

  1. The Overture to the story is an excerpt from Susan’s diary, ostensibly discovered in the year 2025: “A story wants to be told a certain way, or it is merely the alphabet badly recited. At the right time the words borrow us, so to speak, and then out can come the unsuspected sides of things with a force like that of music. This is the story of the three of us, which I am more fit to tell now than when I was alive.” What do you suppose the author intended to convey with this statement? Did it hold different meaning for you after you finished reading the story?

  2. Did the passages from Susan’s journal give you further insight into her character? Does keeping a diary give her greater clarity about her own life and the people in it? Why does Susan give her diary to Wes?

  3. The reader first sees Wes when Susan does—when he lets himself into her house in the middle of the night with a spare key he has been keeping for four years since they last parted. What does this opening scene reveal about Wes? How about Susan? Why does Susan so readily allow Wes back into her life?

  4. Do you think Susan is the strongest character in the novel? Why or why not? Wes muses that “soldier Samuel Duff was too fearless for his own good”. Can the same be said of Susan?

  5. Wes not only encourages Monty’s dream of becoming a professional singer but also provides the means for him to fulfill that ambition. Discuss Wes’s motivations for aiding Monty. Did your opinion change when you read the story’s ending, specifically Wes’s conversation with Susan about Monty’s father?

  6. In one instance Wes laments that “once more he was helpless against too much memory”. Cite examples of how events in the past continue to impact the characters.

  7. Compare the two main settings in the story—the Montana prairie and New York City. Aside from geographical ones, what are the major differences? Do the characters act differently in each place?

  8. Discuss the issue of race in the book, particularly in the context of the time. Monty has to deal the most obviously with racial prejudice, but are there other instances of prejudice in the book? What accounts for Wes’s vehement dislike of the Ku Klux Klan, which Monty in particular notices? In Harlem, how is the race issue reversed?

  9. A writer has to make various decisions in the creation o
f a book. One is the method of narration, whether to make the “voice” of the story the invisible author’s own or first-person by a protagonist. How might Prairie Nocturne have been different, in each case, if Wes, Monty, or Susan had been made the narrator?

  10. Susan’s relationships with both Wes and Monty go against the standards of society—Wes because he is married and Monty because of the color of his skin. Why do you suppose Susan enters into these relationships that are destined to have complications? In what other aspects of her life does Susan defy convention?

  11. Susan and Monty share a love of music and singing. What else draws them together? From their first singing lesson to the concluding scene at Carnegie Hall, how does their relationship progress from student and teacher to something more?

  12. Why do you suppose Wes and Whit never told Monty the truth about his father’s death? Why does Susan also opt for silence about it, even burning Mose Rathbun’s hat? Does Monty deserve to know the truth?

  13. Discuss the arc of Susan and Wes’s relationship. In one instance Susan “felt a last genuine pang for Wes, and what might have been if they had dined together here when she was in her Village days and he was unattached”. If they had met before Wes’s marriage, do you think they would have had a more sustained relationship?

  14. Phil Sherman tells Wes there is speculation that Susan and Monty have romantic feelings for each other. “[Wes] hadn’t foreseen, hadn’t headed this off in time, hadn’t calculated that their courage could be greater than his”. How, as Wes believes, is Susan and Monty’s courage “greater than his”? Does this apply in any other ways in the story?

  15. When Monty suggests during the rehearsal at Carnegie Hall that Susan act as his accompanist, Wes is the one who tips the scales. Does he realize what he’s setting in motion, both for Susan and Monty as well as repercussions he might encounter?

  16. Ivan Doig has said, “If I have any creed that I wish you as readers . . . 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.” How does the land and lingo in the world of Prairie Nocturne reflect larger, more universal themes?

  Look for more Simon & Schuster reading group guideson line and download them for free at www.bookclubreader.com

  IVAN DOIG grew up in a family of Montana ranch hands during the 1940s and ’50s. The author of ten books, including the acclaimed novels that make up the Montana Trilogy—English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana—he lives with his wife in Seattle. Visit the author’s website at www.ivandoig.com.

  SCRIBNER

  ALSO BY IVAN DOIG

  FICTION

  Mountain Time

  Bucking the Sun

  Ride with Me, Mariah Montana

  Dancing at the Rascal Fair

  English Creek

  The Sea Runners

  NONFICTION

  Heart Earth

  Winter Brothers

  This House of Sky

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Ivan Doig

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner trade paperback edition 2005

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  DESIGNED BY KYOKO WATANABE

  Text set in Garamond 3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2003050385

  ISBN 0-7432-0135-3

  0-7432-0136-1 (Pbk)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2530-4 (eBook)