Author's first novel shows native intelligence by Cynthia O. Stowell "A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited 8eographic area - a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes or Slate and county lines), with irs own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, .;tl"e'ams, hflfs, rocks iJnd critters (including people), its own nuances 01 rain, wind and seasonal chanse. Native inrefligence develops through an unspoken Or soh·spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as lhe native involves himself in his retJion .•. I don" think you set native intelligence j(l5( by wanting it. But milybe through loog intimacy with an intelligent native, or with your nillive world, you besio to catch it kind of like you catch a cold. It's a cold worth c a ~ ~ ~ 7 3 · J : m e s Duncan, from The River Why The native intelligence that author David James Duncan ('73) "caught" while growing up in Oregon fills lhe pages of his first novel, The River Why, published in 1983 by Sierra Club Books. As Duncan's fictional fisherman, Gus Orviston, travels up the rivers of self-discovery, it's clear that the native Oregonian has also caught another kind o( intelligence from his "long intimacy" with great books and ideas, some of which he encountered while a student in the University Scholars' Program at PSU. This combined intelligence has been profitable for Duncan, whose writing efforts have been rewarded with both critical acclaim and commercial success. The River Why stands alone, not only because it was the first novel published by Sierra Club Books: drawing as it does on the rich diversity of Duncan's experience and imagination, The River Hlhy has resisted being pigeonholed as a fishing tale, environmental {realise, spiritual odyssey, coming-of-age chronicle, regional work, or any other genre. And yel the novel is all of these things. It is about growing up in Portland and fishing the rivers of Oregon; about the changing environment and enduring human qualilies; aboul findinJ love and living with the question " ~ ~ ~ ? ~ i ~ ; r ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ; ~ r n of the realization that a writer has to write about the familiar. "I was working on a Christmas story that was quite serious," explains Duncan over breakfast at his favorite cafe near the Oregon coast. "There was this old man in the story who kept burring in With these fishing scenes that were completely ruining the novel. 1 realized I didn't know anything about what I was trying to write about, but I did know something about what this old man was butting in about ... It was some kind of fiction about fishing that wanted to be written." Nol much later, Gus Orviston was conceived. Spawned by a "raucous cowgirl" and an "effete angler" who have taken predictable sides in the age-old bait-versus-fly fishing controversy, Gus seems fated to a solitary streamside life. But once he has left home, settled into a coastal cabin, and immersed himself in his "Ideal Schedule" (14'12 hours of fishing per day), Gus is awash. . "Alii recall," says Gus, "is stream after stream, fish after fish, cast after cast, and nothing in my head but the low cunning required to hoodwink my mindless quarry. Each night my log entries read like tax tables or grocery receipts, describing not a dream come true, but a drudgery of double shifts on a creekside assembly line." 10 David James Duncan ('73) Then the "whys" start coming. Why fi5h? Why have friends? Why die? Why live? Why love? Gus finds many answers - in his offbeat neighbors, in a "fishergirl" named Eddy, in a little brother wise beyond his years, in Indian legends and dassical philosophy, and finally in an upstream quest that reveals the finer-lhan-monoWament line connecting all things. Duncan returned to Portland Stale in May and capfivated a small crowd wifh readings from The River Why and a novel in progress that he's calling "Kid Buddhas." When his friend and r ~ ~ : ~ ~ ~ t ~ i ~ ~ r ~ ! ~ ~ d e H ~ ; ~ f ~ ~ ~ l e a r : Duncan is not Gus and, much to Carlile's chagrin, Duncan is not the product of creative writing classes. "Anybody who talks to me for a half an hour knows that I'm nol Gus," says Duncan later. " I don't know how to tie flies - Henry was glad to announce that 10 everyone. I'm a little put off by the fascination everyone has between an artist's art and the personality of the artist ... I guess I'm more interested in how The River Why is autobiographical for the person reading it." "I don't like angry environmental tirades. They're boring." And yet Gus' experiences, with the rivers, mountains and people of Oregon as wen as with the metaphysical world, are obviously quite familiar to Duncan. Growing up on the east side of Portland, Duncan watched his family's two "country" homes get swallowed up in urban sprawl, and his fishing creeks with them. "When I was young we used to watch silver salmon spawning in Gresham. I think the last salmon got killed when I lived there." Duncan pauses, the comers of his mouth turn up, and he launches into a tale thai sounds like a River Why episode. "I saw these little kids one day with garden rakes and pitchforks chasing this moldy old salmon down the creek ... " As an adult, Duncan saw the creeks deteriorate even more. "I wrote The River Why living on Johnson Creek (portland), which is just a mess. The steelhead would come every winter and by midsummer the water levels were so low that all the fingerlings and smalts would just be dying like crazy from alJ the detergent and chemicals in the water." He saw it but he couldn't write about it. "II wasn't inspirational, it was infuriating. I don't like angry environmenlaltirades. They're boring." This is where Duncan, who is not a member of the club that published his book, may disappoint environmentalists. While Duncan secretly wishes that the Columbia River dams would self-destruct and he admits that a clearcu! is "horrifying when you first see it," the grandson of loggers is sympathetic to humans and their pradical pursuits. In this way, Duncan is truly Oregonian. "I'm all for preservation ... but a weakness of Ihe environmentalists is that a lot of them are just nol finanCially dependent on doing anything that is at least ostensibly destructive to the environment ... You get down to these little lawns, towns like Valsetz or Vernonia, logging towns where these guys grew up in a logging culture and there isn't much else that they know how to do . . . Guys like that are bound to be casualties of environmentalists, and bound to hate them." Duncan is a maverick among writers, too. Calling his writing style "Baroque" in comparison with the spare style of much contemporary fioion, Duncan recalls a negative review he particularly liked. "The guy said, 'This writer sounds as if he hasn't read anything written in the last (arty years: He wanted me to be reading - I can't even think of their names - those guy5 in New York." Duncan laughs at the lapse of memory. As far as Duncan is concerned, many contemfX>rary fiction writers make two fatal mistakes: they study creative writing and they read only fiction. "People, as soon. as they have an inkling that they want 10 write, lust stan studying writing ... Americans are such how-ta-isls. Ihey think there's just going to be some technique. 'Where do I go to take a class so Ihat I can write a novel like Charles Dickens?' Well, first you live in London for about 25 years, 150 years ago. Then, if you're amaZingly perceptive, you can come to my class and I'll show you how to do it by handing you a pencil and a piece of paper." Duncan admits 10 reading hiS contemporaries, but says, "I like ideas probably more than fiction (or coffee beans to grind." Some of his favorite ideas come from "really obvious people like Jesus and Mohammed and Krishna and Rama and Gautama Buddha. I guess that's my favorite intellectual hobby - reading about the lives of those five and the culture thaI spread around each one." The "native intelligence" of the eastern hemisphere crops up in The River Why, especially when Gus returns from the source of his river and reflects, "You have seen that the answer to the 'why' was the word itself." Even while Duncan was at Portland State, when he wasn't writing "steamy crap," he was joining his native experience with other worlds. "I published a poem in The Review, a doggerel poem about a Zen cowboy," he remembers with amusement. " It was prophetic because this TV program came on called 'Kung Fu' . " Continued on p. 15
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