Angle of Repose Read online

  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 otder—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:First-person narrative encourages you to syncopate time, to bridge from a past to a present. It also allows you to drop back and forth, almost at will, freely. When Joe Allston or Lyman Ward is working with the past, his head is working in the present.

  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, especially the anithistorical pose of the young, at least the young of the 1960s. They didn’t give a damn what happened up to two minutes ago and would have been totally unable to understand a Victorian lady. I could conceive students of mine confronting Mary Hallock Foote and thinking, “My God, fantastic, inhuman,” because they themselves were so imprisoned in the present that they had no notion of how various humanity and human customs can be.

  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.”

  I.

  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.

  Reading her quaintly 19th century letters, I thought her interesting but certainly not the subject of a novel. She lay around in my mind an un-fertilized egg.... What hatched, after three years, was a novel about time, about cultural transplantation and change, about the relations of a man with his ancestors and descendants.

  He did not want to write a historical novel (as he commented on several occasions, western literature was too often “mired in the past”), but a contemporary one, and as he thought about the story in the Foote letters, it occurred to him that perhaps he could somehow link the two together so that the past was made part of the present. That, in turn, led him to look for the sort of narrator that had “tunnel vision,” frequently focused
on the past and thinking about the present in terms of the past.

  The perfect model for what became his narrator, Lyman Ward, presented itself to him in the person of Norman Foerster, Stegner’s dissertation adviser at the University of Iowa, who had come to the Stanford campus to retire. Foerster, unfortunately, had been struck by a disease that had paralyzed his legs. With some sorrow about what had happened to his old friend, Stegner nevertheless put himself into Foerster’s ptace—how would he, a largely immobile literary historian, view the world? As the novelist has said, “We all have to have in some degree what Keats called negative capability, the capacity to make ourselves at home in other skins.” Here was the tunnel vision that Stegner was looking for.

  Foerster did not provide a character—Stegner invented him, descended from Joe AUston—but a point of view, literally a position from which to view the world. In comparing Allston with Lyman Ward, Stegner notes that Allston and Ward are very different types. Allston ismore emotional than Ward, less over-controlled. Lyman Ward is pretty uptight all the time. Joe Allston is likely to get drunk and disorderly and to wisecrack in the wrong places. He’s another kind of character, but he has some of the same functions as a literary device.

  Observer and commentator, Lyman Ward, immobile, travels through time and space via his mind’s eye, which of course is precisely what a novelist does. He is not immobilized by just his disease, which does allow him to move about in his wheelchair, but also by his attachment to place, his ancestral home, and by his obsession with his family’s history. Both literally and figuratively, he lives in the past. While one cannot agree with Lyman’s son, Rodman, that his father’s investigation of the past is a waste of time, his devotion does seem extreme—except when one realizes that his devotion is not just to the past for its own sake, but that he is also looking for guidance in his present situation. The subject of Angle of Repose is the life of Susan Burling Ward, but the essence of the novel is the evolving consciousness of Lyman Ward, her grandson.

  The novel can be roughly divided into two parts. The first third of the novel deals largely with Lyman Ward and his experiences and thoughts about his life. Lyman’s story and his character (a contemporary man who can understand and sympathize with a Victorian lady) frame the remaining two-thirds, which deals with his grandmother and whose state of mind is often conveyed to us by her letters to her eastern friend, Augusta. This Susan Burling Ward material, based on Mary Hallock Foote’s papers, would bring accusations of plagiarism, charges of misuse of source materials, and even angry denunciation by feminists who claimed that a male writer had deliberately set out to destroy the reputation of an accomplished female artist. Some of the charges grew out of misunderstanding and miscommunication; some, out of spite and, no doubt, jealousy.

  Stegner had gotten to know Janet Micoleau, one of Mary Hallock Foote’s three granddaughters, in Grass Valley through the husband of his secretary, Alf Heller. He visited the Micoleaus on several occasions while he was thinking about using the papers, and Janet encouraged him to do something with them, since her grandmother had been largely forgotten. She hoped that through Stegner’s work, interest in her grandmother’s life and work would be revived. When Stegner decided to go ahead with a novel based in part on the papers, Janet told him to use the papers in whatever way he wished. Stegner assumed that she, who had had custody of the papers, spoke for the family.

  There probably would not have been any trouble if the whole Foote family had been willing to become involved in dealing with the novelist and if Stegner and the Foote family had agreed on what they meant by “novel.” What the Footes meant was explained by Janet’s sister, Evelyn Foote Gardiner, when she stated in an interview: “I thought he would write something like Irving Stone’s biographical novels. That he would invent conversations and all of that, but that he would pretty much stick to the facts of their lives.” Although he changed and added in order to create a plot which gave the novel its central drama and which would bring together the past with the present, he did stick to the broad outline of their lives. However, Mrs. Gardiner and those who have taken up her cause have complained that he used too much of Mary’s life and too many of her letters, accusing him of “stealing” Mary’s material in order to write a prizewinning book.

  The Foote family, understandably perhaps but inaccurately, has expressed the view that Mary’s letters constitute a major portion of the novel. Stegner does quote (with some changes) from many of the letters (roughly thirty-five letters out of a total of five hundred). There are thirty-eight instances of letter quotation, of various lengths, for a total of approximately 61 pages in a book with 555 pages of text—that is, slightly more than 10 percent of the whole. As small as the percentage may be, however, there is no doubt that the letters are an invaluable part of the novel, borrowing the actual words of a real correspondence to give, as they do, a feeling of depth and authenticity to Susan Burling Ward’s character. It was a brilliant tactic, but one that had ramifications that Stegner did not foresee.

  When Janet asked him not to use real names, since he was writing a novel, Stegner used fictitious ones, and went further in protecting the identity of his sources in his acknowledgments: “My thanks to J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors.” In addition, in his acknowledgments he included the disclaimer “This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.” But Mrs. Gardiner has insisted that since he did not give specific credit to Mary Hallock Foote, as she felt he should have, what he had taken from her was an unethical act, close to plagiarism. Since he was following the family’s instructions in keeping the source of his material secret, this is a very harsh and, it would seem, unfair judgment.

  The situation became more complicated when Rodman Paul got in touch with Stegner, while he was working on the novel manuscript, to tell him that he had obtained backing by the Huntington Library to publish Mary Hallock Foote’s reminiscences. Wallace agreed to read Paul’s introduction and offered to show him the letters. But the whole idea of protecting the Foote name through anonymity was in trouble. He wrote to Janet repeating the warnings that he had given before:As I warned you, the process of making a novel from real people has led me to bend them where I had to, and you may not recognize your ancestors when I get through with them. On the other hand, I have availed myself of your invitation to use the letters and reminiscences as I please, so there are passages from both in my novel....

  You suggested that I not use real names in any of my book, since what I am writing is not history or biography but fiction. I agree with that. But if the reminiscences are now to be published, it won’t take much literary detective work to discover what family I am basing this story on. ... The question arises, must I now unravel all those little threads I have so painstakingly raveled together—the real with the fiction—and replace all truth with fiction? Or does it matter to you that an occasional reader or scholar can detect a Foote behind my fictions?

  He went on to offer to modify the language and change all the names, asked her to let him know what to do about changes if she thought it necessary, and, as he had before, offered to send the completed manuscript to her to read. Janet replied that she didn’t think changes necessary, nor did she feel it necessary for her to read the manuscript. Stegner asked if anyone else in the family would like to read the manuscript. The answer was no, the others were too busy with their own lives to take the time.

  In his letters Stegner warned Janet several times that the book would not be true to all the details of the Footes’ lives. “For reasons of drama, if nothing else,” he wrote, “I’m having to foreshorten, and I’m having to throw in a domestic tragedy of an entirely fictional nature, but I think I am not too far from their real characters.” Despite his attempt to make sure that the Foote family had some idea of what a novel was and what he was writing, and despite his offer to make changes as dictated by Janet and to let her or other members of the family read the manuscript, par
t of the Foote family took great offense to the book when it was published. They blamed Janet, who suffered deeply from their upset and anger; but most of all they blamed Stegner, who they believed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, had tricked them. The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.

  ll.

  Using the Foote letters may have been a brilliant touch, but it not only caused him difficulties after the novel was published; it made the composition of the novel difficult:The novel got very complex on me before it was done. It gave me trouble: I had too many papers, recorded reality tied my hands. But a blessed thing happened. In the course of trying to make fiction of a historical personage I discovered, or half created, a living woman in Victorian dress. I forced her into situations untrue to her life history but not, I think, untrue to the human probabilities that do not depend on time or custom. In the end I had to elect to be true to the woman rather than to the historical personage.

  The novel is certainly a complex one, probably Stegner’s most complex, yet at the same time it remains a book that is not only readable, but a joy to read.

  For one thing, it is a book of powerful, memorable characters. For another, it is a book with constantly building and engaging drama, dramatizing several important themes. It may seem odd on the surface that a novel that has a central character bound to his wheelchair and to his home should have such drama. That drama is built through not just one but a series of connected conflicts within Lyman Ward. While he is not a totally lovable character, he is a decent man who has had some bad breaks in life and whose thoughts engage us by both their wit and their occasional profundity. Because of his disease and because his wife has abandoned him, he has reached a major crisis point in his life. “It would be easy,” he thinks at one point in the novel, “to call it quits.” But he is a survivor, and as strange as it may seem, he is saved by his training as a research scholar, by his thirst for knowledge. His crisis leads him to the need to find a direction for his shattered life. That direction is provided by finding out about and trying to understand his grandparents, the events that shaped them and the conflict between them; and his curiosity as it pushes ever forward becomes ours. It becomes the medium of suspense, holding us throughout. “What really interests me,” Lyman tells us, “is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reach the angle of repose where I knew them. That is where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.”