New West Book Reviews

The Revival of Chatham’s Clark City Press

By Allen M. Jones, 6-21-05

Odds on, you already know about Russell Chatham. Painter, publisher, restauranteur, the guy’s everywhere. His lithographs and original oils (with their distinctive, Piazonni-influenced palettes) have informed an entire generation of Western artists and writers. A cottage industry unto himself, if he closed shop tomorrow half of Southern Montana would be going on relief. Genial and distracted, paint-spattered and graying, a generous nose tillered off twenty degrees to starboard, there’s little about the guy himself to suggest the wide tide of his influence. Twenty-five years ago, they were hanging his lithographs at Chico Hot Springs. Even then, I remember being surprised by the improbable price tags. During a trip to New York, one of his posters was hanging across the bar in Elaine’s. You think about it, is there any other living painter (west of New York, anyway), whose sensibilities have had more of an influence? Can any of us, particularly in Montana, appreciate a certain kind of mountain landscape without thinking, Chatham.

Among his many other projects, the thumbs plugged into various pies, he’s recently been resuscitating his admirable book house, Clark City Press. A regional fixture back in the eighties and early nineties, the list of titles Clark City once published reflected an eclectic and sophisticated palate. A reprint of Richard Hugo’s classic mystery novel, Death and the Good Life was shelved right beside sporting writer Steve Bodio’s memoir Querencia; his own Angler’s Coast was being promoted next to an anthology of sporting essays and stories, Silent Seasons. If you were a fly-fisherman and bird hunter, if you appreciated art and maybe liked to cultivate an unfashionable melancholy (check, check; check, check), these books couldn’t be beat. And so, what a treat now to sit back and stand witness to Chatham’s second rotation over the publisher’s plate.

Beginning a few years back with a collection of pieces on the Clark Fork River, later followed by a single volume of poetry, his newest efforts have focused on a pair of memoirs: Mile High Mile Deep by Richard K. O’Malley, and For All Time by Helen Claypool. Reading through these two books, dissimilar but for their final emotional impact (anyone who isn’t choking back a couple tears by the end of either volume, they have a chunk of plastic for a heart), it would be difficult to come up with a more auspicious revival.

Mile High Mile Deep is a reissue, but a necessary one. It’s a publishing truism: When a book goes out of print, it’s like closing the lid on its casket. And what a tragedy if this particular volume should be buried in anonymity. A narrative of growing up and working in Butte, Montana c. 1920, it’s a melange-mix of coming-of-age wonder and jaded, hard knocks pragmatism. As a child, O’Malley describes his wonder at witnessing various Butte brawls, the Irish and Bohunks mixing it up after a few glasses of “moon.� But then a few pages later, older now, working in the mines himself, he passes along the sage advice that lighting your cigarettes off a miner’s carbide lamp will ruin your teeth. A journalist whose career took him around Europe, to Moscow and Greece, Mile High Mile Deep was written while O’Malley was stationed in Paris. And indeed, there is a kind of expatriate wistfulness about it. Despite the often brutal environment, the exploitations of the workers by both the mine owners and the unions, this is a childhood he couldn’t stop pining for.

One of the early reviewers remarked, quite appropriately, that this was, “the kind of book every veteran newsman hopes he’ll write some day.� And indeed, no matter the vividness of the narrative, the exotic whiff of Cousin Jack pasties and the rattling cough of miner’s lungs, the share of immortality this book manages to carve out comes almost entirely from the strength of the ending. You close it with a piece of your heart broken off.

Which is about what you can say for Helen Claypool’s memoir as well. For All Time is, first and foremost, an unassuming, unstylized take on young love, on tragic illness, on growing old before your time. You could boil it down to bare grit and not find an ounce of pretension in it anywhere. In a refreshingly straightforward, unstylized voice, Claypool offers up to us her first marriage to a young soldier, his subsequent battle with terminal cancer, and her efforts as a 20 year old mother of two to deal with his passing. In an age when the “woe-is-me� memoir is polluting the shelves of every bookstore (IE: “Here’s my million-little-pieces scenario of drug addiction and sexual abuse, but it’s okay because I’m better now,�), when the young literary hotshots can’t stop playing around with font-sizes and self-aware tricks of perspective, reading through Claypool’s unassuming narrative is like sitting down to meat and potatoes after an extended, unsatisfying cocktail party of toothpick hors d’oeuvres. It’s nothing more, nor less, than the tale of an ordinary life lived with extraordinary awareness and feeling.

Given Chatham’s sensibilities, it’s no surprise that the production values of both these books are as striking as their content. They exist as art pieces quite apart from their readability. In the process of resurrecting the O’Malley narrative, Chatham found 39 relevant photographs from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and World Museum of Mining. He painted an original oil for the cover, and went to great lengths to choose a paper stock he found appropriate (eighty pound Finch Vanilla Opaque, as he tells us in an end note). He bound the pages in lavish cloth boards and gave both books dustjackets idiosyncratically unpolluted by text. (If you want to know the title of the book you’re thinking about buying, you have to look at the spine.)

Of course, it seems obvious that art – real art – arises out of a hundred thousand tiny little judgment calls. One type of brush rather than another, a dab of mauve not magenta, pine trees insteads of aspens. Writers, photographers, musicians, every act of creation needs, first and foremost, a strong ego and a surefooted aesthetic. Taste is finally the only thing you have for sale. When the taste is as refined as Chatham’s, and when he chooses to disseminate it to such wide benefit, the best thing for the rest of is just to sit back and read.

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