The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography Of Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Chapter Eleven: Two Resignations, Son and Father

« chapter eleven » two resignations, son and father B     1952, Walter Clark was back with his wife, in Virginia City, in his beloved desert mountains. He had been oƒered a job at Iowa, first, as temporary head of the workshop , and then second, as a professor in the department for the following year once the permanent head returned from leave. But he had turned the oƒer down. Although by spring he was getting along well with his colleagues and enjoyed many of his students, he just didn’t like Iowa. He was home, but he would pay a penalty for it. The Iowa job was a good one, with a writing program that already had an excellent reputation. As head of the workshop, he would have had some administrative duties but would have taught only two classes, an upper-divisionclassandagraduateseminar.Bycontrast,hewould teach four classes that fall at Nevada, including two sections of freshman composition. Normally, no writer of Clark’s reputation should have considered such a job. The problem was that the University of Nevada simply wasn’t › 210 ‹ 11-unv002.c11.4 6/29/04 4:35 PM Page 210 able to appreciate Clark. That resulted from the nature of the school, which at the time was a small, essentially rural state university that specialized in mining, agriculture, and engineering. The administration, primarily concerned with using its resources todeveloptheseandotherpracticalspecialties,hadtendedtodownplay the importance of the arts and humanities. And after all, this focus on the practical, as a land-grant university, was its mission. Bob Gorrell, as chair of the English Department, had had an uphill battle over several years to get Clark any kind of job at all. Alloftheteachersinhisdepartmenthadfour-classloads,andthere were not very many advanced classes to go around. The main job of the department was not literature and certainly not creative writing , but teaching the required course of freshman composition (although some literature was oƒered as part of teacher education). With two advanced classes, Clark, as a new member of the department , was doing very well. Besides the heavy teaching load, Clark had a five-day-a-week schedule, and for someone who had a tough commute the schedule was an additional burden. It was almost thirty miles from Clark’s house to the university campus, all, in those days, over crowded two-laneroads.AndtheroadupGeigerGradefromthevalleyinto the mountains was narrow and full of curves and di~cult, even dangerous, in winter snow. For much of the route, mountains climbed steeply on one side of the road and sheer slopes dropped down on the other. As a result of his heavy teaching schedule and long commute time, Clark had di~culty getting any writing done. But he did feel that now he was on his home turf, he had a good chance of breaking through his three-year writer’s block—and he was determined to try. His friend and colleague Gorrell has said that Clark often commented over the years that he couldn’t really write unless he was in Nevada (the Ox-Bow, of course, was not written there, nor were many of the short stories). That summer, after coming back two resignations, son and father › 211 ‹ 11-unv002.c11.4 6/29/04 4:35 PM Page 211 from Iowa, he started on a novella, “The Angel and the Judge,” and his work on it continued, oƒ and on, into the fall. He went back to the Comstock history several times during the year and started on an article on Nevada commissioned by the travel magazine , Holiday. Neither the novella nor the history was ever completed ; the Holiday article was finished (or perhaps sent to the magazine only partially finished at its request), but it took him five years. However, during the year he did publish two book reviews, a historical sketch of Virginia City for a tourist pamphlet, and an essay defending creative writing as a valuable college course. In the meantime, he resumed his Virginia City life, going to the Sazerac and Union Brewery those evenings he could, when he wasn’t correcting papers or preparing for class or just too tired to move. Gordon Lane of the Union Brewery remembers one particular night when he and the Clarks and several other couples stayed up drinking and talking until five in the morning. They were waiting to find out if they could see the eƒects of the first...