In 1934 a graduate student from the University of Iowa was regularly hitchhiking the 50 miles to Rock Island, Illinois, to teach at Augustana College. At half-time, four courses a semester, he constituted the English department. It was hard work, but $900 a year was fair money in the Depression, so the young teacher was sorry to receive a letter from the board demanding to know if it were true that he was an agnostic and atheist, a disbeliever in the Augsburg Confession. Wallace Stegner wrote back to the Lutheran board “that he didn’t see how he could be an agnostic and an atheist at the same time—which seemed to him philosophically difficult—and that as far as the Augsburg Confession was concerned, he couldn’t remember ever having read it.”
This is the kind of profile in courage that Jackson Benson sketches so approvingly in his biography of the late novelist Wallace Stegner. Not surprisingly, Benson’s book has been scorned in the New York Times Book Review as an injudicious exercise in hero worship. But if Benson seems adulatory—and he is—most readers of Stegner will affirm there is much to admire, both in the man and in his work. Benson’s biography, the first on his subject to appear, serves as an illuminating if somewhat awestruck retrospect on the long lifetime of professional, civic, and literary effort that has made Stegner (1909-93) a national treasure.
It was John Milton who said that a good poet must first of all be a good man. Benson in effect argues that few writers of the twentieth century have taken this dictum to heart, and that Stegner was one who did. Benson’s emphasis on the moral seriousness of the writer and his work is terribly unfashionable, but in the long run it may have been these very moral qualities that have made Stegner so durable. In over half a century as an active writer, Stegner published twelve novels, ten volumes of essays and short stories, and six works of history and biography. Many, if not most, of these books are still in print.
Though Stegner was in no deliberate sense of the word a professing Christian, he was nevertheless dedicated to exploring Christian values of community, caring, and personal integrity. “What saves us at any level of human life,” Stegner once wrote in an essay, “is union, mutual responsibility, what St. Paul calls charity.” Almost every one of his novels attempts what Benson calls “forgiveness.” Reading him, I am reminded of the Victorian earnestness of George Eliot, who, like Stegner, hoped we could be good without God.
Benson explains Stegner’s devotion to constancy as the result of a pioneer childhood and the reaction to an unscrupulous father, both of which are chronicled in his first major novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). Born on his Norwegian grandfather’s farm in Iowa, Stegner moved with his parents and older brother in quick succession to North Dakota, Washington, and Saskatchewan, where his father filed a homestead on the Montana line. The idea was to grow wheat to sell at a high price during World War I, but the weather didn’t cooperate, and his father turned to bootlegging. Stegner’s early years in Saskatchewan form the root of his most lyrical work, Wolf Willow (1962), a unique combination of history, fiction, and memoir. His father’s bootlegging business took them to Great Falls, Montana, for a year or so, and finally to Salt Lake City. The family moved 20 times in nine years to stay one step ahead of the law. Big Rock Candy Mountain records the shame the brothers felt, the magnetic yet abusive personality of their father, and the longsuffering patience of their mother.
The adolescent Wallace Stegner escaped the shadow of his father first through the many activities offered by the Mormons. He thought their beliefs preposterous but felt their warmth and care as profound. He was to honor them with two books of history, Mormon Country (1942) and The Gathering of Zion (1964). In the former he writes, “Among garden-variety Saints, one finds rather more human kindness, more neighborliness, more willingness to devote time and trouble to the assistance of their fellows, than one will find in most sections of the United States.”
Stegner’s second escape from his father took the form of academic achievement. From the University of Utah he went on to graduate school in English at Iowa and Berkeley and later found teaching posts at Utah, Wisconsin, and Harvard. In the meantime, his brother died of pneumonia, his saintly mother died of cancer, and his father committed suicide in a cheap hotel in Salt Lake City after shooting his woman companion. It was Wallace who nursed his mother until her death, his father having abandoned her, and these events marked him for a lifetime. The lone survivor of his family, as a young man he turned to the writing of Big Rock Candy Mountain to try to understand his past. Much later in life, with the novel Recapitulation (1979), he returned to the same ghosts.
But life went on, and Stegner built his own circle of family and friends. He married Mary Page in his graduate years in Iowa, and they had a son whose birth in 1937 coincided with that of his first novel, Remembering Laughter. These events form part of his last novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), a quiet book about a long friendship between two very different couples. One couple is based on the accommodating Stegners, the other on Phil and Peg Gray, a scintillating but troubled pair whom the Stegners met while at Wisconsin and often summered with in Vermont. Readers familiar with Crossing to Safety will be intrigued with some of the details behind it, from Stegner’s expressed motivation in writing the book (as a private memoir to share with his wife) to the reception of it by the Gray children (enthusiastic in spite of the ambivalent portrait of their mother).
In his New England years, Stegner found two important mentors while teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference—Bernard DeVoto and Robert Frost. DeVoto had also grown up in Utah, and he encouraged Stegner’s interests in western history and geography. In later years he goaded Stegner into taking a forthright environmental stand. Stegner was to write DeVoto’s biography, The Uneasy Chair (1974).
Frost’s influence was more diffuse. According to Benson, Frost gave authority to Stegner’s allegiance to individual effort and responsibility, his tendency to find drama and meaning in ordinary lives. He transmitted to Stegner an ironic, tolerant, distanced view of human fallibility and reinformed his lack of sentimentality. Not least, Frost’s influence crept into Stegner’s sense of language. It became Stegner’s conviction that “there ought to be a poet submerged in every novelist.” Frost liked to take Stegner on long hikes after midnight under the stars. Years later, Stegner returned the favor with a long walk in the countryside on the day Frost found that his son had committed suicide.
It was DeVoto’s influence, however, that resulted in the book that established Stegner as a voice for the environment. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) is a biography of John Wesley Powell, the first man to descend the Colorado River. Stegner dispenses with this adventure rather quickly to focus on Powell’s long government career as the founder of the United States Geological Survey and Bureau of Reclamation. Powell understood before almost anyone else the essential aridity of the West, the importance of planning settlement wisely. He was virtually ignored in his own time, and Stegner took it upon himself, in this book and many others, to repeat Powell’s message for the present. The biography has had a profound influence on at least two secretaries of the interior, Stewart Udall under Kennedy and Bruce Babbitt in the Clinton administration. Udall made Stegner his special assistant for part of his time in office.
In the 1960s, at the urging of his friend Ansel Adams, Stegner twice served on the board of directors for the Sierra Club. In the 1980s he likewise sat on the governing council of the Wilderness Society. Stegner did not particularly like these advising and committee duties, but he felt bound to do what he could to help in a cause he deeply believed in. Predictably, it was his pen that helped most of all. In an essay published in The Saturday Review, for example, Stegner argues for the creation of a Redwoods National Park: “In no sense … can any tree-farm forest, even an honest one, replace the depth and silence, the druidical green peace, of the ancient groves. In a way, the redwood lumber companies are like slave owners before the Civil War: they are engaged in a bad but legal business.” More than anything else, Stegner is remembered by fellow environmentalists for the “Wilderness Letter” he wrote to a government functionary in 1960, in which he memorably characterized the American West as “the geography of hope.” This became a manifesto that helped bring about the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.
After World War II, Stegner was invited to start a graduate program in creative writing at Stanford. The Stegners were happy to move back West from Harvard and made their permanent home in Los Altos Hills. Wallace Stegner directed the writing program at Stanford for 25 years, and fellowships there still bear his name. Benson portrays him as a dedicated but no-nonsense sort of teacher who took pains to help his students as he could. Among his better-known pupils were Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, and Wendell Berry. Berry was his favorite student, Kesey his least favorite. Berry’s ethical concern for land and community are a natural fit with Stegner’s values. Kesey, on the other hand, represented to Stegner the chaos and self-indulgence of the sixties. While Stegner taught the writing seminar on campus, Kesey orchestrated an “anti-seminar” in his home that turned to drug experimentation.
Kesey seems to have a presence in one of Stegner’s more interesting novels, All the Little Live Things (1967). The narrator, a retired literary agent with a house and wife much like Stegner’s own in California, confronts a young man on a motorcycle, supposedly a graduate student, who has begun to camp without permission on their property. Remembering his own son, now dead, the narrator tries to reach out in tolerance while battling his irritation. But the squatter breaks a long series of promises and soon has started a commune of sorts. One can see Stegner the teacher trying to come to terms with a whole generation of students who “seem to throb rather than think.” All the Little Live Things also concerns a young married woman, a neighbor of the narrator’s, who, like Stegner’s mother, embodies an almost saintlike love and dies a terrible death from cancer. The contrast between the irresponsible, healthy student and the doomed young mother is almost too painful to bear.
Wallace Stegner:
His Life and Work
by Jackson J. Benson
Viking
472 pp.; $32.95
Stegner retired from teaching in 1971 with a sense of defeat, no longer able to cope with the arrogance and disrespect he felt from his students. As he later told Benson, “There was a real sense of letdown. A sense that I had wasted a lot of years of my life. I was really disgusted with the teaching business.”
In one of life’s rare compensations, in the year of his disillusioned retirement he published the novel that won for him the Pulitzer Prize, Angle of Repose. The novel evolved from an actual collection of letters from Mary Hallock Foote, a nineteenth-century artist and writer who married a civil engineer who took her from the genteel East to the raw West. As they move from one remote mining camp to another, the woman bristles with a sense of resentment and loss. At the same time, paradoxically, she writes and draws quaint sketches of the camps for the fashionable magazines back East, in effect leading a double life as a local colorist who actually hates the local color. It is the unlikely relationship between western husband and eastern wife that fascinates the narrator, their grandson. “What really interests me,” he says, “is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.” In this and in other of his novels (particularly The Spectator Bird) Stegner is—as Benson calls him—”the balladeer of monogamy.”
Benson notes that the New York Times Book Review did not review Angle of Repose and, when it was awarded the Pulitzer, blasted the choice of the judges (the editors preferred Rabbit Redux, by John Updike). Neither did the NYTBR review his next novel, The Spectator Bird (1976), which won the National Book Award. Stegner was hurt by these snubs, and Benson upholds the complaint, which may partly account for the caustic review his own biography receives. Perhaps it did not help that Stegner had on more than one occasion accused the eastern literary establishment of snobbery toward the West. (Angle of Repose is, in fact, about this very snobbery.) At any rate, Stegner himself was conscious of being a misfit in his own literary generation, a “generation that appears to specialize in despair, hostility, hypersexuality, and disgust.” This he wrote in a 1964 essay on the dilemma of western writers, which he titled “Born a Square.”
Stegner’s most concentrated and eloquent thoughts on being a westerner are contained in his small book The American West As Living Space (1987). The three essays in this book are also reprinted in his last collection, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992). In these essays he rebukes our unwillingness to admit the West’s aridity, reviles the violence and rootlessness of much of western American culture, but finally chooses to celebrate “the visible, pervasive fact of western space, which acts as a preservative.” These open spaces, Stegner argues, can promote a largehearted sense of freedom that expresses itself in a love of the land and a preference for being out of doors. He claims, in fact, that small university towns like Missoula, Montana, and Corvallis, Oregon, far from being backwaters, are close to being ideal communities, combining the loveliness of the land with a small dose of college culture—something, he says, that the eastern academic visitors Leslie Fielder and Bernard Malamud proved themselves incapable of noticing.
Having grown up in Corvallis myself, I am delighted to have been suddenly granted an ideal childhood. But I cannot say that I disagree about the effect of open spaces. My family has shuttled for four or five generations between California and Oregon, and the mountain ranges that join these states have bred themselves into my bones. I have gone to college in the suburbs of Chicago, taught for a spell in the low hills of western New York, and visited the confinements of England, but all at the cost of claustrophobia and depression. My heart knows when it is home; the saddest sight is the Rocky Mountains receding in a rearview mirror or slipping away under the wing.
Reading Stegner, I also know that I am home. And I suspect that others, from both east and west, have felt the same. For these and for readers of Stegner to come, Jackson Benson’s biography will stand as a suitable appreciation. Can a writer who “extols the old verities of love, friendship, sacrifice, compassion, and forgiveness … find a place in the literature of the 1990s?” Benson asks. One certainly hopes so. And to relinquish some of my own western chauvinism, it is only fair to note that Wallace Stegner wanted his ashes strewn across a Vermont hillside. Perhaps the ashes of a few choice copies of the New York Times Book Review could be scattered with them.
Paul Willis is associate professor of English at Westmont College.
Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
