Angle of Repose Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  I - GRASS VALLEY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  II - NEW ALMADEN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  III - SANTA CRUZ

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  IV - LEADVILLE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  V - MICHOACÁN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  VI - ON THE BOUGH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  VII - THE CANYON

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  VIII - THE MESA

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  IX - THE ZODIAC COTTAGE

  Chapter 1

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  PENGUIN CLASSICS ANGLE OF REPOSE

  Wallace Stegner ( 1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.

  Jackson J. Benson was born and raised in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received his M.A. from San Francisco State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. From 1966 to 1997 he served as professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, where he taught twentieth-century American literature. Twice a fellow of the National Endowment of the Humanities, he has published eleven books on modern American literature. Among them is the authorized biography The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984), which won the PEN West USA award for nonfiction. His latest work was the authorized biography Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (1996), which won the David Woolley and Beatrice Cannon Evans Biography Award.

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  First published in the United States of America by

  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971

  Published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Published in Penguin Books 1992

  This edition with an introduction by Jackson J. Benson

  published in Penguin Books 2000

  Copyright @ Wallace Stegner, 1971 Introduction copyright © Jackson J. Benson, 2000 All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-

  Angle of repose / Wallace Stegner ; with an introduction by Jackson J. Benson.

  p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07582-1

  1. Historians—Fiction. 2. Physically handicapped—Fiction. 3. Married

  people—Fiction. 4. Grandparents—Fiction. 5. Aged—Fiction. 6. California—

  Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3537.T316A82000b

  813’.52—dc21 00-062402

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  For my son, Page.

  My thanks to J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.

  INTRODUCTION

  Angle of Repose is Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, the crown jewel in a multifaceted writing career. From the time he finished his Ph.D. in 1935 to his death in 1993, he published some fifty-eight short stories, a dozen novels, two histories, two biographies, a memoir-history, and five collections of essays. He was given numerous awards for his writings, including the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Los Angeles Times.

  From the early 1950s, he became as well known for his environmental activities and writings as for his fiction. However, it was the writing of novels that was closest to his heart, and it was as a novelist that he wanted to be remembered
. In a recent poll of readers of the San Francisco Chronicle voting on the best one hundred novels written about the West, Angle of Repose was listed number one. Often mentioned by critics as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, it alone should ensure Stegner’s reputation. (In a Chronicle poll of best nonfiction books, his John Wesley Powell biography, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, was listed number two.)

  Wallace Stegner’s life almost spanned the twentieth century, from the last homestead frontier in Saskatchewan to the information age in Silicon Valley, from horse and plow to mouse and computer. The major strands of his career—his love of the land, his concern for history, his advocacy of cooperation and antagonism toward rugged individualism—and his dedication to writing can be clearly seen as products of his early life. He was born in Iowa in 1909, the younger of two sons, but the family soon moved to North Dakota, to Washington State, and then to Eastend, Saskatchewan. His father, George Stegner, was what his son later called a “boomer,” a man looking to find a fortune in the West and who, not finding it in one place, went to another. His mother was what Wallace called a “nester.” She wanted nothing more than a home of her own in which to raise a family.

  Wallace’s accounts of his growing up make it clear that a dichotomy developed early in his consciousness between the proud, tough, intolerant rugged individualism represented by his father and the friendly, tolerant, neighborly tendencies toward caring and cooperation represented by his mother. And as we can see throughout his writing, Wallace’s sympathies lay with his mother and the values she represented. Although like her husband his mother never went beyond the eighth grade in school, she loved books and passed on a love of reading to her son.

  Together his parents would seem to have been the archetypal western couple. In later years, as a writer, Wallace saw them as representing the exploiter, on the one hand, and the civilizer on the other. Although they are quite different in character and background, we can see Oliver and Susan Ward in their roles in Angle of Repose as dim reflections of Stegner’s parents. (Certainly Wallace’s deep love and respect for his mother contributed to his ability to create such complex and sympathetic women characters as Susan Burling Ward.) When asked by an interviewer if the life of Mary Hallock Foote, the model for the heroine of Angle of Repose, had reminded him of the life of Elsa Mason, the mother in the semiautobiographical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegner said,Not consciously. It never occurred to me that there was any relation between Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain till after I had finished writing it. Then I saw that there were all kinds of connections. There was the wandering husband and the nesting woman, and the whole business reproduced in many ways in somewhat more cultivated terms and in different places what The Big Rock Candy Mountain was about. It’s perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that’s my story.

  Two periods in his growing up had a major influence on forming his outlook and interests. The first was his six years in childhood spent in the village of Eastend and every summer on the homestead farm in Saskatchewan near the Montana border. After the first year, his older brother, Cecil, got a summer job at the grocery store in town, and so Wallace was alone with his parents, out on the hot prairie, living in a tarpaper shack. It was a place with “searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree.” Yet, amazingly enough considering such a barren and hostile environment, he could still look back on a childhood not of suffering and boredom, but of “wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals.” His summers on the homestead and winters in the frontier village during his most impressionable years marked him, as he has said, “a westerner for life.” And they would eventually produce a writer determined to represent the western experience as it really was, and the relationship of its people to the land as it was, is, and should be.

  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.