Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work
By Jackson J. Benson
Viking, 472 pages, $32.95
During his 50-year career, Wallace Stegner sold hundreds of thousands of books and won nearly every major award for writing, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for “Angle of Repose,” his masterpiece about the American frontier. A tall, handsome man, Stegner was a mesmerizing speaker whose lectures and book signings drew crowds of fans. Yet his name never became a household word. None of his books were made into movies, and only his last novel, “Crossing to Safety,” was a best seller.
There are many reasons Stegner never achieved literary celebrity–not the least being the uneven quality of his fiction. But Jackson J. Benson, in his new biography of Stegner, blames the Eastern literary-media Establishment (including The New York Times Book Review, which did not review “Angle of Repose” and relegated “Crossing to Safety” to a small review in the back pages). Though Benson, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University, writes well and has many insights about Stegner’s work, his book is marred by an eagerness to cast his subject as a victim, and its relentlessly defensive tone. “Stegner . . . paid a penalty for his unwillingness to seek cheap publicity,” he writes. In Stegner’s view, it was “unfortunate that a literary reputation in this country is all too often generated out of notoriety, notoriety that comes by gaining a sensational press–by stabbing your wife, getting your picture taken with Hollywood actors, or throwing a tantrum in a New York bistro.”
As a moralist who stood for high ethical standards, Stegner was out of step with the mood of the literary Establishment for much of his career. “He was impatient with those who played with literature, who wrote self-indulgently to show off or as `self expression,’ ” writes Benson. “Writing was not a game; it was a challenge to the soundness of your character, a challenge to the clarity and depth of your perception. . . .”
Nor was Stegner’s great crusade–the debunking of the Western myth of rugged individualism–likely to make him fashionable. Stegner wanted to expose the social bonds that actually provided support for one of America’s most enduring icons: the lone cowboy. And he wanted to push the West, that haven for greedy developers and alternative lifestyles, into growing up, into creating “a society to match its scenery.”
He was a tireless environmental activist, serving as a member of presidential commissions and the Sierra Club and writing articles and books about conservation. Through it all, he taught full-time at Stanford University, where he founded the creative-writing program and perfected his fiction.
As a writer, Stegner (who died in a car crash in 1993 at 84) improved with age, producing his best novels in the last 20 years of his life. Benson points out that it took Stegner 30 years to find his literary voice, that of “the elderly, writer-observer figure . . . experienced, sensitive to his environment, an observer of people, a bit skeptical and self-doubting, and despite a somewhat hardened shell, vulnerable to emotion.”
Benson traces the roots of this voice to Stegner’s harsh, frontier childhood. He was born Feb. 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, the second son of George and Hilda Paulson, neither of whom were educated beyond the 8th grade. Stegner’s mother was warm and loving. His father was a faithless vagabond who moved his family from town to town as he chased one get-rich-quick scheme after another, and he always preferred his older, athletic son to skinny, bookish Wallace, who had few playmates and spent much of his time alone.
When Stegner was 4, the family moved to Saskatchewan, Canada, and settled in a scrubby construction camp, for a while living in a derailed dining car. George Stegner cobbled together a living doing odd jobs, including homesteading a farm near the Montana border. Benson finds the key to Stegner’s integrity in his lonely, rural upbringing. “Something happens to the psyche when one is alone a great deal in such an overwhelmingly large environment,” he writes. “Perhaps a permanent sort of modesty sets in, a sense of helplessness in the face of forces quite beyond the power of human muscle or spirit.”
In 1920 the family moved to Montana, where George Stegner began bootlegging liquor from Canada. A year later, the family settled in Salt Lake City. At the local high school, Wallace was a good student, but it never occurred to him to become a writer. A deep feeling of rootlessness, of being cut off from a meaningful history, haunted him all his life and became a powerful theme of his fiction.
Following his graduation from the University of Utah, Stegner drifted into an academic career. While on a teaching assistantship at the University of Iowa, he started writing stories and essays. But a series of disasters threatened his concentration. The small savings he had amassed from working as a clerk in a linoleum shop were wiped out in a bank failure. Then, his 23-year-old brother died of pneumonia after rescuing a motorist trapped in the snow. The greatest blow, however, was the death from cancer of his beloved mother. Stegner nursed her through her final illness, after her husband had abandoned her. Wallace never forgave his father, who shot himself to death in a Utah flophouse in 1940.
By then, Stegner was a respected professor and writer, a friend of such luminaries as Robert Frost and historian Bernard DeVoto, whom he’d met at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont. His first novel, “Remembering Laughter,” had been published in 1937. Three more quickly followed, including the autobiographical “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” in 1943. After a brief stint at Harvard during World War II, he joined the faculty at Stanford. Over the years, his students included the budding writers Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Evan Connell and Tillie Olsen.
During the ’60s, Stegner found himself at odds with many of Stanford’s faculty and students, who thought him hopelessly old-fashioned and tried to get rid of him. As a moral conservative, he could not abide the drugs and permissive sex on campus. But he stayed put, outlasting many of his severest critics, including Kesey. (Kesey credited his disdain for Stegner’s fiction as the inspiration for his own experimental novels.)
Stegner’s strict moral code demanded personal reserve; though he was a warm and generous man, he rarely spoke or wrote of his deepest emotions. This is a problem for his biographer. The reader never feels close to Stegner, and important areas of his life are unexplored. Mary Stegner, the writer’s wife for nearly 60 years, is a shadowy figure in the book, though she provided the stability and love that enabled Stegner to focus his energies and fully develop his talents. Without her, there would not have been any books, as Stegner himself sensed at the start of his career. “Loving you,” he wrote her during their courtship, “means a chance at mental health . . . so that you become not only the woman I love but a sort of Messiah.”
Perhaps Mary Stegner insisted on Benson’s reticence about her marriage as a condition of granting him access to her husband’s papers. As a result, Benson does not give this extraordinary woman–a musician and artist in her own right–her due.
Another problem with the book is Benson’s insistence that Stegner was a paragon. “There was nothing in the Boy Scout code (except perhaps a belief in God . . .) that (Stegner) did not adhere to,” he writes. But Benson does not explore how Stegner’s unfailing rectitude affected those closest to him. It must have been hard, for example, on his son and only child, Page, with whom he had a stormy relationship.
Benson is at his best when discussing his subject’s work. He makes a persuasive case for Stegner’s inclusion in the modern literary canon, even as he acknowledges why Stegner has been excluded. Throughout his long career, during which he produced 31 works of fiction and non-fiction, Stegner operated “against the grain, against those currently popular poststructuralist doctrines which deny that texts have any experiential meaning.
“Not only out of step in his identity, in his experiences, and in his very values, Stegner seemed very much out of step with the current vogue in fictional approaches, a vogue that all too often seems to value experimentation for its own sake.”
I had never read anything by Stegner before devouring “Angle of Repose” two years ago on a trip to Montana. Its lyrical evocation of the West, its haunting love story and unforgettable characters, and, most of all, its high-voltage tension–the mark of a great novel–moved me deeply. A few weeks later, while riding the No. 151 bus down Michigan Avenue, I sat next to a woman engrossed in “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Soon after, I noticed “Crossing to Safety” on the night table in a friend’s bedroom.
People read Stegner. Literary fashions come and go, but with his best books, Stegner stands as an American classic as surely as Hawthorne, Dreiser and Twain. Who cares that his name’s not a household word?
