The Nevada They Knew: Robert Caples and Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Anyone who has read and loved the portraits of Reno and Nevada in Walter Van Tilberg Clark’s highly autobiographical "The City of Trembling Leaves" will have wondered about the model for Tim’s friend, the artist Lawrence Black. Lawrence is never far from Tim’s mind in "City," from their first meeting making mud turtles on the shore of Pyramid Lake, through Tim’s discovery of Lawrence near death in Death Valley, to the obsessively imagined reconstruction of Lawrence’s painting in a hotel room in Austin, Nevada. "City" was dedicated to “R. C. C.” and others have identified him as Robert Cole Caples, but not until Shafton’s book has there been a full biography of Caples, a highly gifted portraitist and landscape artist whose work was centered on the people and scenery of his beloved Nevada. From highly realistic portraits reminiscent of Flemish old masters, through dream-like impressionistic mountainscapes and bold geometric abstractions, Caples’ style underwent changes as profound as the varied architectural rhythms of Frank Lloyd Wright. With photographs of 140 of Caples’ works in various media (many in color), Shafton provides a real grounding in Caples’ artistic styles.But although Caples has been called “Nevada’s Second Most Famous Recluse” (the first being Howard Hughes) Shafton manages to provide a rounded and sensitive portrait revealed through the lens of Caples’ writings, letters, and his friendship with Shafton (expressed almost entirely through correspondence) of some 15 years.I was delighted to learn so much more about Caples, who was obviously such an important influence in Walter Clark’s life, but I was even more pleased to read such an insightful treatment of Clark himself, about whom much more has been written including Jackson Benson’s 2004 biography "The Ox-bow Man." Clark’s reputation as a fine, sometimes great, writer rests almost entirely on two novels – "The Ox-bow Incident" (1940) and "The Track of the Cat" (1949) both of which were highly successful and made into films. "The City of Trembling Leaves" (1945) has always had a more mixed reaction, divided between those who revel in its romantic paean to Reno and Nevada, and those who are put off by its immature philosophizing and occasionally embarrassing prose (I count myself in both groups). Much of the critical attention Clark has received has been directed at his writer’s block, a near-classic version of that dreadful malady which effectively shuttered his authorial voice for the last 22 years of his life. Shafton addresses this blockage with great ingenuity and archival research and presents what strikes me as a most plausible explanation. Indeed, so thorough and sensitive is Shafton’s treatment of Clark (whom he also met) that "The Nevada They Knew" can honestly be said to be a dual biography. The volume is beautifully designed and printed, and altogether a tribute to the state and the “City of Trembling Leaves” where Shafton makes his home.

Informative.

I enjoyed “The Nevada They Knew” by Anthony Shafton. It is a multifaceted book, extensively and carefully researched, revealing the practical and spiritual aspects of the lives of these noted Nevada artists, influenced by the mystery and allure of Nevada desert, Pyramid lake and mountains. For me, a non artist, I most enjoyed the vantage point of the artist in the creation of the art; how an idea, object, or life circumstance becomes interpreted to reveal itself more deeply in the artist’s rendering, and how those renderings affect us. The process of creation, including the creative and dormant periods, were fascinating to me. Very good!

This book is an unusual blend of memoir, biographical research, regional history, nature writing, art history, and literary criticism. As an aspirining novelist in the 1960s, Anthony Shafton discovered the fiction of Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the landscape of Nevada, and fell in love with both. He wrote a fan letter to Clark and met him once in 1963. He soon met Clark’s closest friend, the painter Robert Caples, and realized that their friendship had been depicted in Clark’s 1945 novel "The City of Trembling Leaves". Shafton looked up Caples and was as smitten by his painting as he had been by Clark’s prose. He became good friends with Caples, and the two corresponded for some 15 years until Caples’s death in the late 1970s. Flash forward a generation to our century: now in his seventies, Shafton moves from the Midwest to Reno and is inspired to reclaim the memories of his long-gone mentors. The result is this book: a sort of intellectual detective story that fills in the blanks of Clark’s and Caples’s artistic careers and family lives, against the background of Nevada’s history and natural beauty. The book is richly illustrated with reproductions of Caples’s art and includes selections from his extraordinarily eloquent letters, several of them to Shafton himself.

"The Nevada They Knew" has been labeled an art book, which may be true, if one assumes ART includes literary images as well as paintings. You can find any number of stunning taut images between the covers, but to end it there would be to miss the point. Shafton's tour de force will stand in many libraries next to other captivating works of lyrical art- Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "City of Trembling Leaves", Wallace Stegner's "Big Rock Candy Mountain", Somerset Maugham's "Of human Bondage", "A Separate Peace" and, of course, Steinbeck. 'Coming of age' novels always delight, particularily when the story is about a boy sculpted from the land. What makes Shafton's "Nevada..." special is the nexus between its protagonists: Clark-the writer, Robert Caples-the painter, and the young man who knew them both. His well focused camera follows a kid from the 60's who, like many of us, was "On The Road" with Jack Kerouac, hungry to find ourselves. But Anthony Shafton actually befriended Clark and Caples, and even knew Stegner. His poetic weave of writing, painting, and revelation make Shafton's book a voyage of discovery; however, as with "City of Trembling Leaves" or "Angle of Repose", the reader must be patient enough to give the book a chance. Shafton's journey through "The Nevada They Knew" gradually explores the mystery connecting Clark's Trembling Leaves, Caples' stark western desert, and the youth who internalized it all. If you give this book the attention it deserves, then you may discover a fragment of your own 'coming of age', or a piece of the land you've decided to call home.Rich MitchellPlaywright, Historian