The Nevada They Knew: Robert Caples and Walter Van Tilburg Clark by Anthony Shafton (review)

Anthony Shafton's The Nevada They Knew is something of a hybrid: an engaging, meandering, and at times powerfully moving book that combines archival research with personal anecdote, biography, memoir, and visual and literary analysis. Shafton, a polymathic independent scholar who has published on topics ranging from dream interpretation to the evolution of self-consciousness, drew inspiration for the book from his personal acquaintances with both the painter Robert Cole Caples and the fiction writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark, along with his deep and abiding love for the stark Nevada landscape.

The book opens with Shafton procuring a copy of Clark's sophomore novel, a bildungsroman set in Reno called The City of Trembling Leaves (1945): "That used copy, a first edition, became a precious possession, an ikon of youth" (9). Later, visiting Clark in the flesh at Pyramid Lake in 1963, Shafton hears Clark confess: "Tim, Timothy Hazard [the protagonist of City] was he; while Lawrence Black [Tim's tortured artist friend in the novel] … was a painter named Robert Cole Caples" (140). This revelation becomes the spark for The Nevada They Knew, as Shafton follows Caples and Clark over the course of their entire lives, charting their artistic production (or lack thereof), and weaving in his own personal observations throughout.

Shafton consulted a wide variety of sources for the project: family and friends of both Caples and Clark, along with archival materials housed at the University of Nevada, Reno; the Pyramid Lake Tribal Council; the Nevada State Museum; and the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution, among others. The result is a book that presents a kaleidoscopic and vivid portrait of the two men—their work, their relationships, their drinking habits and health troubles, their frustrations and quirks, and, in the end, their friendship with one another and their shared struggle to create meaningful western art.

The book thus adds to the important work done by Jackson Benson, whose biography on Clark, The Ox-bow Man (2004), is arguably the definitive work on the Nevada writer. Even more important is the material dealing with Robert Caples. Along with Clark and the poet and collage artist Joanne de Longchamps, Caples formed a trinity of Nevada artists who helped define the aesthetic culture of the place; moreover, Shafton is especially good at providing both an overview and a series of interpretations of Caples's drawings, paintings, and murals, many of which are reproduced here, collected in one volume for the first time. Caples was a richly talented visual artist whose work spans early portraiture, especially of local Indians and out-of-towners staying in Reno for the "divorce trade," on to more abstract depictions of a house in Austin, Nevada (182), gorgeously rendered depictions of Nevada's many mountain ranges (246-47), and, of course, the jewel of the Great Basin: Pyramid Lake. Caples has been shamefully overlooked in western studies, and Shafton deserves credit for presenting the artist's work in such a thorough and compelling way.

All that said, scholars are likely to be frustrated by the lack of a clear citation system. Shafton explains in a "Sources and Credits" afterword that he decided to eliminate citations, based, apparently, on aesthetic considerations: "This solution satisfies my scholarly conscience, while honoring the intention that guided me for five years and more: to write a memoir, to tell a story." It turns out that "the endnotes, bibliography and index" are housed at the Special Collections in the University of Nevada, Reno library (361). While I respect Shafton's intentions, it would have been helpful to have an easier means of following up on the wonderful work Shafton began.

Even so, this is a remarkably valuable book, with some passages that are heartbreakingly moving, such as the depiction of Walter Clark's final days, withering away from colon cancer. And Caples also emerges clearly in these pages as a conflicted, talented...