Angle of Repose (4 page)

But in so many ways she really is contemporary. Living in an age and a stratum of society in which a woman could only find the freedom to leave her family by submitting to a husband and committing herself to his life, Susan remains her own person. Outwardly a captive, she is liberated from within and makes her way to success in the larger world. What she has in common with her grandson, Lyman, is courage and a strong sense of independence. After marrying Oliver, a civil engineer, she follows him west to one mining camp after another and makes the best of each situation, experiencing a way of life so different from the society she enjoyed in the East and regrets leaving. Lyman says of her,

Our connection to her is reinforced by Lyman’s affection for her, although as the drama of her life unfolds before him, he often wishes he could take her aside and, knowing the future, warn her about apologizing for her husband and constantly comparing him unfavorably to more socially adept men.

Separated from the culture of the East, she keeps her connection by her correspondence with her friend Augusta while at the same time exercising her talents for writing and drawing, becoming the best-known woman illustrator of her time. Not being able to enjoy the liberation provided by the feminist revolution, Susan Burling Ward goes beyond the modern woman by having liberated herself. There is connected to this, of course, the theme of the conflict between traditionally male and female roles and values, here exacerbated by the strains and extremes of western life. In the Wards we have to some extent the stereotypical nineteenth-century American man and woman—the man mostly silent and devoted to making his way in the world, and the woman loquacious and socially conscious. Their complexity raises them above the stereotypes, but the basic conflict in roles and values remains.

Susan’s husband, Oliver, is also a complex character, but since we see him only indirectly, he remains throughout a somewhat shadowy figure. We do know that he is quiet, competent, ambitious, and hard-working. After nearly five years of acquaintance, he proposes to Susan. He has been trying to make his way in the world to be worthy of her. He worships his wife in an old-fashioned way, but is withal a man’s man. Lyman says of him,

His complexity only comes through Susan’s reflections on him, which are decidedly mixed.

Before their marriage she is attracted to him because “he had an air of quiet such as she had known in men like her father, men who worked with animals.” But after their marriage she frequently compares him unfavorably to other men, particularly Thomas Hudson, the man she would have liked to have married and who marries her best friend, Augusta. But even more overtly and painfully she compares him to her husband’s assistant, Frank Sargent, with whom she falls in love. In reaction to all his failures, Oliver starts drinking, much to his wife’s disgust:

Lyman decides that Susan “must unconsciously have agreed with [her husband’s] judgment that she was higher and finer than he. I wonder if there was some moment when she fully comprehended and appreciated him?” He remains somewhat mysterious to us, almost mythic in stature. He suffers the slings and arrows of many misfortunes, both personal and professional, silently. One wound that has surely grown and festered over the years is his wife’s disappointment in his inability to achieve the material success that would have raised them socially. He can do his job well, but his sense of duty leads him to pass up opportunities in order to stay with his family, and he is too honest to compete in the helter-skelter western world of get-rich-quick exploitation. At heart, Lyman tells us, he was a builder, not a raider.

This is a thoughtful book with a rich panoply of characters, both major and minor, and one that explores many themes, themes that bring the novel into the center of our culture. Like
The Great Gatsby,
it helps us define who we, as a people in this new land, are. Oliver in his gallant romanticism is our Gatsby, and Susan in her own romantic snobbish world is our Daisy, and ne’er the twain shall meet until at the end they find their angle of repose. We have all, to use Fitzgerald’s words, looked toward the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” and we all believe, or would like to believe, in the American Dream, although we each may define that dream in our own way. We may, like Willie Loman, be defeated by the system or by our own self-delusions, but we can only live and try to go forward if we believe. Our going forward, of course, often means going west, looking for the main chance, as Stegner’s own father did, or as Bo Mason, the character in
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
modeled after George Stegner, did, or as Oliver and Susan Ward did. East versus West, civilization versus opportunity is a theme at the heart of the American experience. And as our boats beat ceaselessly into the past to find our future, we continue to ask, What have we inherited?

 

All the Little Live Things.
New York: Viking, 1967.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner.
New York: Random House, 1990.

Crossing to Safety.
New York: Random House, 1987.

Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace
Stegner’s American West.
Edited by Page Stegner. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.
New York: Random House, 1992.

Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.
New York: Viking, 1962.

 

 

Benson, Jackson J.
Wallace Stegner: His Life and
Work. New York: Viking, 1996.

Etulain, Richard W., ed.
Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature.
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.

 

 

 

Colberg, Nancy.
Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography.
Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.

 

 

Arthur, Anthony ed.
Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Meine, Curt, ed.
Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape.
Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997.

Rankin, Charles E., ed.
Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson.
Wallace Stegner.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence—though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported to it without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data.

So tonight I can sit here with the tape recorder whirring no more noisily than electrified time, and say into the microphone the place and date of a sort of beginning and a sort of return: Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, April 12, 1970.

Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn’t believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say
I am,
I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were—inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.

Even places, especially this house whose air is thick with the past. My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall down.

Rodman, like most sociologists and most of his generation, was born without the sense of history. To him it is only an aborted social science. The world has changed, Pop, he tells me. The past isn’t going to teach us anything about what we’ve got ahead of us. Maybe it did once, or seemed to. It doesn’t any more.

Probably he thinks the blood vessels of my brain are as hardened as my cervical spine. They probably discuss me in bed.
Out of his mind, going up there by himself . . . How can we, unless . . . helpless
. . .
roll his wheelchair off the porch who’d rescue him? Set himself afire lighting a cigar, who’d put him out? . . . Dammed old independent mule-headed . . . worse than a baby. Never consider the trouble he makes for the people who have to look after him . . . House I grew up in, he says. Papers, he says, thing I’ve always wanted to do
. . .
All of Grandmother’s papers, books, reminiscences, pictures, those hundreds of letters that came back from Augusta Hudson’s daughter after Augusta died . . . A lot of Grandfather’s relics, some of Father’s, some of my own . . . Hundred year chronicle of the family. All right, fine. Why not give that stuff to the Historical Society and get a fat tax deduction? He could still work on it. Why box it all up, and himself too, in that old crooked house in the middle of twelve acres of land we could all make a good thing out of if he’d consent to sell? Why go off and play cobwebs like a character in a Southern novel, out where nobody can keep an eye on him?

They keep thinking of my good, in their terms. I don’t blame them, I only resist them. Rodman will have to report to Leah that I have rigged the place to fit my needs and am getting along well. I have had Ed shut off the whole upstairs except for my bedroom and bath and this study. Downstairs we use only the kitchen and library and the veranda. Everything tidy and shipshape and orderly. No data.

So I may anticipate regular visits of inspection and solicitude while they wait for me to get a belly full of independence. They will look sharp for signs of senility and increasing pain—will they perhaps even hope for them? Meantime they will walk softly, speak quietly, rattle the oatbag gently, murmuring and moving closer until the arm can slide the rope over the stiff old neck and I can be led away to the old folks’ pasture down in Menlo Park where the care is so good and there is so much to keep the inmates busy and happy. If I remain stubborn, the decision may eventually have to be made for me, perhaps by computer. Who could argue with a computer? Rodman will punch all his data onto cards and feed them into his machine and it will tell us all it is time.

I would have them understand that I am not just killing time during my slow petrifaction. I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity? What if I
can’t
turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

Increasingly, after my amputation and during the long time when I lay around feeling sorry for myself, I came to feel like the contour bird. I wanted to fly around the Sierra foothills backward, just looking. If there was no longer any sense in pretending to be interested in where I was going, I could consult where I’ve been. And I don’t mean the Ellen business. I honestly believe this isn’t that personal. The Lyman Ward who married Ellen Hammond and begot Rodman Ward and taught history and wrote certain books and monographs about the Western frontier, and suffered certain personal catastrophes and perhaps deserved them and survives them after a fashion and now sits talking to himself into a microphone—he doesn’t matter that much any more. I would like to put him in a frame of reference and comparison. Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don’t completely comprehend. I’d like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don’t have to live in my own. Actually, as I look down my nose to where my left leg bends and my right leg stops, I realize that it isn’t backward I want to go, but downward. I want to touch once more the ground I have been maimed away from.