What Would Wallace Stegner Say About Donald’s Felonies?

Today I take leave of a writer I love. I am on the porch of the cottage where I read, write, and study. Before me is a verdant garden, tall trees in every direction, and a riot of chattering birds. I sit here in a wood rocker from Poso Park, a century-old cabin on the boundary of Sequoia National Forest. Nearby is another rocker from Poso, both older than my 81 years. I mention this cabin in California because of Wallace Stegner’s last book, a non-fiction work from 1992, and one worth reading about living and writing in the West.

Stegner loved wilderness and national parks and fought the good fight on their behalf.  He died 23 years before Donald Trump’s first reign and his gutting of the EPA, as if the agency were a rotting fish. Given Wallace’s moral code, he would not have been able to stomach anything about the rich boy who inherited Big Rock Candy Mountain. This was the mythical place that Stegner’s father George sought throughout life. And the wreckage from his father’s false dream was strewn everywhere he went, while dragging a fine wife and two sons with him. Stegner describes his father as “a boomer from the age of fourteen…always on the lookout for the big chance, the ground floor, the inside track… And if you believe the world owes you a bonanza, then restrictions and laws are only an irritation and a challenge.” How familiar this sounds.

Wallace Stegner, the famous writer and environmental activist, never reconciled with his father in life or death. Which is to say the violent did not bear it away. His father shot his mistress and then himself on June 15, 1939. News of the murder-suicide “splashed across the front and inside pages of Salt Lake’s three daily newspapers for two days.” (Fradkin bio, p.94) Stegner wrote that his father “did more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime.” George’s story is one for tawdry rag-sheets like The National Inquirer. But the past week did bring this welcome headline to newspapers throughout the world and in our country. 

Ironically, George Stegner did not die with a felony, since there could be no trial. But his grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery alongside son Cecil and wife Hilda is unmarked.  In Recapitulation, a brilliant novel about memory and time, Ambassador Bruce Mason does order a gravestone for Bo Mason. Yet in real life, he never took this action, unable to forgive his father for what he had done to both family and to those whose lives he crossed in a relentless search for the ‘deal’ and the summit of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In early July I return to Literature I Love with Colm Toibin (Column Toe Bean ) as the Irish say!  

A Letter to George Saunders from the Northern Neck of Virginia

To: George Saunders

From: Gail Wilson Kenna

A student, one of those who took my course on your book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (of Chekhov short stories) is taking my latest course on Wallace Stegner.

She was one of those who wrote you a note after the “Swim” class met in an extra session to discuss your novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. You read the notes that students wrote to you about the Chekhov book, and then gave us helpful advice for reading Lincoln in the Bardo. I know enough about Wallace Stegner to say that he, like you, made time for students and readers until his death at age 84 in 1993.

In my current class, we are reading three Stegner novels with aging narrators: Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose, and Bruce Mason in Recapitulation. In the first class I discussed how Stegner’s fictional realism can be traced to his life and his historical interests, and that he was often at odds in the 1960s with those who distained his realism. One student, during a break, asked if I thought Stegner would appreciate the wildly experimental Lincoln in the Bardo.

I believe this first novel of yours would have amazed Stegner, and that by book’s end, it would have deeply moved him, as it did me.  At some point in your years of teaching, you might have used the 1982 Stegner essay, “Fiction: A Lens on Life.” At the beginning he asserts, “It is fiction as truth that I am concerned with...fiction that reflects experience instead of escaping it, that stimulates instead of deadening.” He goes on to say the writer tries with every piece of fiction to “create a world.” Which is what you did in Lincoln in the Bardo.

The essay concludes with words that Stegner might have written to you, George.  “The work of art is not a gem… but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist. The ghosts of meaning that flit past the windows of his fictional house wear his face. And the reward of a lifetime of reading is a rich acquaintance with those gentle or powerful or rebellious or acceptant, those greatly mixed and humanly various but always greatly human ghosts.” 

What Stegner accomplished between 70 (Joe Allston’s age) and 1993 when he died, included two brilliant novels, Recapitulation and Crossing to Safety, plus non-fiction. Lucky you (and us) that you are only 66, and keeping alive the genre of the short story, and inspiring so many of us to write.

 Next week I’ll have some thoughts on why Stegner deserved the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird.

Dear Wallace Stegner…greetings on Cinco de Mayo

In 1989 at nearly 80, you wrote a letter to your deceased

mother, Hilda, who died at age fifty. Today I recall your death at 84, thirty-one years ago in Sante Fe. I also note it is 52 years since you won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose. Articles are still written about this novel. In the June 1, 2022, New Yorker, Roxanna Robinson discusses Angle of Repose & the “act that mars” your literary legacy. Once again, the claim is made for a house of fiction built on purloined pillars. Forgive my borrowed phrase from Henry James, a writer you honored. And who is to say this phrase is original with Henry?

In front of me are two large biographies, totaling 839 pages. The 1996 “authorized” one took a decade for Jackson J. Benson to write. He devotes fewer than twenty pages to the Angle of Repose controversy. Yet Philip L. Fradkin’s 2008 biography has a detailed chapter of 45 pages, “Angle of Unrest.” I find this biography beautifully structured and a pleasure to read… because Fradkin physically visits all the landscapes of your life.

What did I learn in the chapter, “Angle of Unrest?” That a mélange of communication mishaps occurred.  First, you thought about a project involving the real-life Mary Hallock Foote from as early as 1945. Much later and on multiple occasions, you met with Foote’s granddaughter, Janet. She was the one (of three) with whom you communicated through the years.  The family in Grass Valley had un-transcribed “Reminiscences” & letters; and they worried Grandmother Foote, the late 19th century illustrator and writer, would be forgotten in history.

By 1995 the Stegner-Janet Micoleau correspondence was in the U of Utah library and accessible to scholars. But the communication mix-ups, as you know, happened after the novel’s publication in 1971. A few of these are sisters not in accord with each other, Janet not taking the time to read the draft you offered before publication, neither she nor sister Marion reading the novel cover to cover when it came out. And by then aggravation was felt because Grass Valley folk began to comment on Mary Foote in unpleasant ways. Yet you had warned Janet to think of the character as Susan Burling Ward, not her grandmother.  Then at some point Blake Green, a journalist in search of a story, contacted an aggrieved Marion, not Janet. Green sensationalizes what you claimed would have been a dull story otherwise. In 1978, Professor Walsh at U of Idaho (publish or perish world of universities) gets in touch with sister Marion. Professor Walsh thinks you also stole your narrator Lyman from Mary Foote. Walsh does not contact you but conducts “a nasty piece of character assassination.”  If asked, you could have explained that Lyman’s prototype was your old mentor with one leg and a frozen spine. Okay, I have limited space, and the mélange could continue.  I just wish you knew something I just read.  The 2002 hardcover about the life of Mary H. Foote sold fewer than one-thousand copies. Between 1997 and 2007, Angle of Repose sold over half a million. Your novels and other books remain in print. You acknowledged your borrowing and once again mixed history and fiction. I am a wiser person for having known you, Wallace Stegner.

Next week:  Your memorable Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird