Angle of Repose (2 page)

Aside from the empty flatness of its 320 acres, the homestead’s most prominent feature was its dryness—there was a source of water, but just barely. The Stegners’ crop was wheat, which required summer rain to grow, and in four years out of five they were dusted out. During a sixth summer there was so much rain that the wheat was ruined by rust. This period in Eastend was the only time in Wallace’s life that his family was together in their own home, and so having to leave Saskatchewan was for him a trauma he never forgot. Family, home, and community are valued throughout his work, and while Susan, in
Angle of Repose,
is on a much higher social level than Wallace’s mother, she too is a nester who tries to create community wherever she must move in response to her husband’s search. Wallace’s sense of the importance of water in the West, which had been drilled into him so forcefully, eventually led him to write about John Wesley Powell—one of the few to understand the basic dryness of the West (contradicting the propaganda of the developers who promised a “new Eden”). And still later he would use as the central episode in
Angle of Repose
Oliver Ward’s attempt to transport water to the near desert of southern Idaho.

His experience in Saskatchewan also led him to a consuming interest in history.
Angle of Repose,
which is about the life and thoughts of a historian and the history of his family that he uncovers, would seem to have been written as much by a historian as by a novelist, and Wallace was both. As a child, so often alone, Wallace became an omnivorous reader, reading whatever came his way, even devouring the Eaton Catalog. But neither his education in Canada, which tried to make a European of him, nor his own reading in geography or history had any relevance to the place where he lived: “Living in the Cypress Hills, I did not even know I lived there, and hadn’t the faintest notion of who had lived there before me.” The sense of his own lack of history grew in him as he matured, leading him to recognize the importance of knowing the history of one’s own family and region. Later, in addition to writing histories and the memoir-history
Wolf Willow,
which came out of an investigation of his own roots, he would do extensive historical research as a basis for several of his novels, including, of course,
Angle of Repose.

The second important period in Wallace’s life would bring further support to his passion for history and to his interest in his roots. After leaving Saskatchewan, the family eventually ended up in Salt Lake City, where Wallace spent his teenage years. “The Mormons who built it and lived in it,” he has written, “had a strong sense of family and community, something the Stegners and the people they had lived among were notably short of.” Wallace never became a Mormon, but almost all of his friends were members of the church, and they brought him into its social activities. And despite the dislocations caused by his father and a dysfunctional family, he came to believe that he could belong, that he was not an outsider. In later years he considered Salt Lake his hometown, and he chronicled his returning home and rediscovering his youth in the novel
Recapitulation.
He was attracted not only by the Mormon emphasis on community and cooperation, but also by the Mormon devotion to the study of history and genealogy. He was so impressed by his experiences in Mormon culture that he later wrote his two histories,
Mormon Country
and
The Gathering of Zion,
about the development of that culture.

A sense of community and a sense of family unity were not, however, things that he had in his own immediate, personal life during those years. His father, giving up wheat farming (with which he had planned to make a fortune because of the demand during World War I), turned to bootlegging and running a “blind pig,” an illegal saloon, in their home. The family moved some twenty times during Wallace’s high school and college years in order to escape discovery by the police. This rootlessness, his mother’s isolation, and the fact that he could not bring friends to his own home further reinforced his sense of the importance of family and community We can see this background reflected in
Angle of Repose’s
concerns: for the effects of cultural transplantation, for the questions of what holds a family together and what drives it apart, and for having roots, in both family and place, and knowing about them.

Wallace worked his way not only through college but through graduate school as well. He had a fellowship at Iowa that kept him in school after graduating from the University of Utah. After he wrote three short stories for his M.A., his adviser, Norman Foerster, told him he should switch from creative writing and get his doctorate in an academic subject if he wanted to get a job teaching. Foerster further suggested that he investigate the writings of the western naturalist-geologist Clarence Dutton, a figure out of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth who had been largely overlooked.

By taking up this challenge, Stegner committed himself to what turned out to be a lifelong interest in nature writing. He would also develop a strong, continuing interest in that group of surveyors and geological explorers who, after the Civil War, mapped and described the West. (They included not only John Wesley Powell but Arthur De Wint Foote, the real-life counterpart of Oliver Ward in
Angle of Repose.)
And his dissertation topic led him to become an expert on the literature and history of the realistic-naturalistic period (from the Civil War to World War I)—the period that he concentrates on in the historical sections of
Angle of Repose.
Stegner would go on to teach the literature of that period—the works of Mark Twain, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser—throughout most of his teaching career.

He not only taught the standard fare; he spent much time in the library reading the magazines and journals of the period in order to get a better feeling for the times and to discover new material for an anthology he was editing. While doing so, he discovered Mary Hallock Foote, the real-life counterpart of Helen Burling Ward in
Angle of Repose.
In the novel Ward’s true love is the most famous magazine editor of the period, Thomas Hudson, and as a result of his research, Stegner was quite familiar with the careers of nineteenth-century editors and with their magazines. Ward is seen in the novel as an illustrator and story writer (as in life was Foote), and her work, like that of her counterpart, is much in demand by the periodicals of her day.

Wallace had no plans to become a professor, but it was the Depression, and there was hardly any place for him besides school. Nor did he have any notion of becoming a writer. After writing his dissertation about Dutton, getting his doctorate, and coming back to Utah to teach, he happened to see an advertisement for a novelette competition with a prize of $2,500. He was making only $1,800 a year as a professor, and his wife, Mary, was pregnant. Almost with the desperation that leads us to bet on the lottery, he sat down and wrote a story he had heard from his wife about some of her distant relatives. The result was
Remembering Laughter,
which, much to the Stegners’ surprise and delight, won the Little Brown Novelette Prize. At that point, for the first time, he thought that writing as a career might be possible.

However, two undistinguished novels followed, and he was having more success with his short stories than his novels. It wasn’t until he wrote the novel that told the story of his growing up,
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
(1943), that he had another success with the longer form. Leaving Harvard, where he had been teaching writing as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow, he went to Stanford after World War II and began what became one of the most renowned creative writing programs in the country. He continued, however, to have more success with the short story (winning several O. Henry Memorial Short Story Awards) and with his nonfiction (including the Powell biography—a Pulitzer finalist) than with the novel. He was discouraged, and thought that he might give up writing novels altogether.

A breakthrough did not come until late in his career, when he wrote
All the Little Live Things
(1967). It was with this novel that he at last found his voice by inventing Joe Allston, the narrator, who is witty, sometimes wise, and often cantankerous. Allston in
All the Little Live Things
would become the pattern for the narrators in Stegner’s last novels and the forerunner in several ways of Lyman Ward in
Angle of Repose.
Allston was in part a product of Stegner’s own reaction—now that he himself had grown older—to the late 1960s and its radicalism, and to the blossoming of the “now” generation with its antihistoricism, intolerance, and hypocrisies. Sometimes this voice is light, even flippant, but always there is an undertone of skepticism.

With Allston, for the first time the novelist experimented with the first-person singular, which up to this point he had avoided. It seemed to him that “you couldn’t deal with really strong emotions in the first person because it’s simply an awkwardness for an individual to talk about his own emotions.” But once he began to work with it, he found he could do things that he could hardly do by any other means:

And time, this merging of the past with the present, is not only an essential aspect of structure in these late novels; it is in itself a central theme and of particular importance in
Angle of Repose.
During this period, with the onset of the Allston type of narrator, Stegner made a conscious effort to, in his words, “interpenetrate the past and present.” In several essays he has stated that his goal was to do for the West what Faulkner had done for Mississippi: discover “a usable continuity between the past and present.” And he has added, “That’s what western novels too frequently don’t do.”

With Allston in
All the Little Live Things
and
The Spectator Bird,
and the narrators descended from him, Lyman Ward in
Angle of Repose
and Larry Morgan in
Crossing to Safety,
Stegner used a first-person narrator to achieve a voice close to his own, yet fictional. It would convey a sense of truth and conviction which came not, as in his one previous major success,
The Big Rock Candy Mountain,
out of the telling of his own story, but rather out of the force of his personality and belief. These narrators fit Stegner not only because he was getting older and matched them in age and perspective, but because his character stood in strong opposition to the excesses of his times, to the nihilistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered attitudes we see expressed so often by the younger generation in
Angle of Repose.
He has said that one of the themes of
Angle of Repose
is this generation gap,

Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn’t understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war. By nature Stegner was the antithesis of the in-your-face hatred and anarchy that surrounded him. He was a liberal politically but a man of old-fashioned virtues—polite, courteous, kind—who applied a great deal of self-discipline to his life and who usually repressed the kind of witty sarcasm or outspoken opinionatedness that his first-person narrators are likely to voice. Nevertheless, he obviously enjoyed speaking his mind through his characters—to balance the penalties of aging, there can be a perverse pleasure in being candid. When asked in an interview if the voice of this narrator was close to his own, he replied, “Yes, but don’t read him intact. He goes further than I would. Anybody is likely to make characters to some extent in his own image.”

Stegner first came across Mary Hallock Foote—the genteel nineteenth-century local-color writer and illustrator whose life became the basis for
Angle of Repose
—in 1946, when he came to Stanford. He was doing research for a chapter to be included in the
Literary History of the United States
called “Western Record and Romance.” He read several of her novels and story collections, as well as uncollected stories in their original magazine publication. He judged her “one of the best, actually; she was good and hadn’t been noticed.” He took notes on her work, put one of her stories in his anthology
Selected American Prose: The Realistic Movement, 1841-1900,
and included one of her short novels on his reading list for his American literature class. At the time, he was probably the only professor in the country to be teaching Foote’s work.

A GI student in that class, George McMurray, enthusiastically reported to Stegner that he had come across Mary Hallock Foote’s illustrations and writings about New Almaden (in the Coast Range foothills near San Jose, California). He told Stegner that he had found out that Foote had a granddaughter living in Grass Valley, California (near the Empire Mine, where Foote’s husband had been the superintendent). McMurray said that he was going to go up there and see if he could get Foote’s papers for the Stanford library, with the idea of possibly using them as the basis for a doctoral dissertation on her life and work.

The Foote family gave McMurray the papers with the understanding that he was going to publish from them and that he would supply typed transcriptions of the letters to the family. McMurray planned to do the dissertation under Stegner’s direction, but a decade went by with no progress, and he finally gave up. During the mid- 1960s, Stegner borrowed the transcriptions from the library and took them with him to his summer home in Vermont to read.