Finding Silver City Poet Irene Bruce

Silver City, Nevada - One of the things that continues to come as a surprise about Silver City is how often it is erased from recent history. For instance, although an unusual number of Nevada artists, writers and musicians have made the tiny town their home since the 1960s, their place of residence is often listed as Carson City, Reno or Virgina City. There have been very well known artists who’ve made their home in Silver City for twenty and even thirty years who are nevertheless always listed as Carson City residents in art exhibition catalogs. Partly this has been due to a desire for privacy on the part of some of these Silver City denizens. But it has also been an error of more urban biographers, researchers, and reporters who assume that Silver City is not a “real” community due to its size, or that it must be merely a place to sleep, a “ghost town” not worth naming. And perhaps, people who aren’t familiar with the area hear “Silver City” as “Virginia City” because they don’t realize that the historic village exists at all.

So of course I was delighted to discover the seldom reported fact that prolific poet Irene Bruce and her husband, Harry Bruce, a Ragtime Dixieland pianist, lived in Silver City for many years. Some of Irene's poetry can be found in her books A Legend of Pyramid Lake; Crag and Sand; and Night Cry. Her first book, Crag and Sand, was self published but was so popular that it sold out in 2 years, according to UNR Professor Cheryl Glotfelty. A 1950 review in the Berkeley Gazelle declared that “it is seldom that the West...comes so alive as in the descriptive and well-disciplined verse of Irene Bruce.” Some of her poems were included in Desert Wood, Shaun Griffin's 1991 anthology of Nevada poetry, and in Cheryl Glotfelty's comprehensive literary anthology of Nevada, Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (2008). Over the years, more than 500 of Irene’s poems were published in the San Francisco Examiner, Nevada Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Sunset, etc. In addition, Irene was poetry editor for Nevada Magazine, co-editor of the literary magazine Destinies, and host of a weekly poetry broadcast on KOH radio.

Irene and Harry Bruce are of particular interest to me because their time on the Comstock spans an unusual time period. There was a fascination with Virginia City held by post World War II “bohemian” artists and writers, which began to fade by 1965. This was followed by the “cultural re-population” of nearby Silver City, which began around 1965 with the arrival of “bohemian” artists, musicians, writers, and academics who’d left cities in New York, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.

1950’s era photos of Irene and Harry Bruce with literary greats such as Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Ox-bow Incident) survive in collections by multi-disciplinary artist Gus Bundy and in the Reno Gazette Journal’s archives. Bundy captured several glamorous photos of Irene in Virginia City, including one with some of the other “lights of Nevada’s literary world” such as Duncan Emrich, Roger Butterfield, Charles Clegg, and Lucius Beebe.

PHOTO DETAIL FROM A PHOTO OF IRENE BRUCE IN VIRGINIA CITY BY GUS BUNDY, UNR SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Before moving to Silver City, Irene lived in Oklahoma, Texas, Reno, and Virginia City (poet Gary Short recalls that she had a house on B Street not far from the Castle). Bernard Mergen, professor emeritus of American Studies at George Washington University, writes that he remembers a “small, but strong, community of publishing poets [in Reno in 1956] that included Margaret “Monte” Thornton..., Irene Bruce, Dorothy Caffrey, Robert Hume, Gus Bundy, and Harold Witt." Poet Shaun Griffin notes that Irene was a “dear friend of Joanne de Longchamps,” a central figure in both the literary and visual arts community of Northern Nevada for more than 40 years. De Longchamps and Irene Bruce were among the co-founders of the remarkable Reno Poetry Workshop.

It’s not entirely clear when Irene and Harry Bruce began living in Silver City, although Red Dog Saloon co-founder Don Works recalls that they were already residents of Silver City when he moved there in 1963.

After Harry passed away, Irene decided to sell her Silver City house and move to a smaller place in Carson City. Around 1971, she sold her property to newcomers Patty Marshall, who was a horse trainer and artist at the time, and her husband Mert Crouch, a pre-med student with a degree in psychology who had studied sculpture in Switzerland. Poet Gary Short recalls visiting Irene Bruce at her Carson City house on Hot Springs Road in the 1980s and having dinner with her to celebrate a grant she'd been awarded to support her writing.

Drawing of Irene Bruce from her book of poetry "Night Cry."

Bruce Home Later Became Part of an Ashram: Beginning in 1993, Patty Crouch made a number of trips to India where she met Swami Sri Atmananda in Pondicherry and became his first disciple. She gave up painting and devoted her life to study, meditation and contemplation. Her Silver City home, and a number of other nearby houses, became the local branch of the international Satyachetana Ashram in 1995, attracting sincere ascetic practitioners of meditative practices from around the world. Today Patty, who is now known as Pooja, wears the orange tunic of the Sannyasini (female Swami), and resides in the Ashram, a complex of buildings that includes a meditation hall. Swami Pooja recalls Irene as a woman who loved cats and plants, and wore moccasins to avoid damaging any growing thing. She notes that the Ashram’s trees and lilac bushes, which provide a lovely barrier from road noise, were planted by Irene Bruce about 50 years ago.

A version of this article appeared in the Mason Valley News in Jan. 2018.