Angle of Repose Read online

  Another aspect of Lyman that leads us to empathize with him and holds us to his track of discovery is his vivid imagination. He is not only a historian; he is, in effect, a novelist, bringing his characters and their interactions to life. Joseph Conrad was by Stegner’s testimony a favorite author, one that he learned much from, and it was Conrad who said,My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

  Through the talent of Wallace Stegner, Lyman Ward has the power to make us see. And if there is any one secret to the success of this novel, this is it.

  A major pattern of conflict within Lyman and hence the novel can be categorized under the past versus the present, more specifically at times, the old West versus the new. As Lyman thinks about his own situation, implicitly comparing it to that of his grandparents, we wonder how, facing so many obstacles to happiness, they are going to make it through life. As Stegner has put it, “Since [Lyman‘s] own marriage has collapsed he’s interested in this one that didn’t, even though it had all the provocations that his had to fall apart.” But we also have a third pair, the contemporary marriage of the two flower children, Shelly and Larry Rasmussen. Altogether, three different kinds of marriage: each in a different time frame, running from the past to the present. “ ‘Progressive decline,’ I would call it,” the author has stated.

  Certainly, as Lyman tells us in the novel, this is a book about marriage, and just as certainly it reflects Stegner’s own values in that regard. We might note that he was happily married to the same woman for nearly sixty years. But one might just as well say that this is a book about forgiveness, also reflecting the author’s values. While the marriage of Oliver and Susan remains intact, Oliver apparently never totally forgives his wife, doing so only insofar as he stays with her. Lyman wonders if he can even go that far in his own life and take back his wayward wife, Ellen.

  One of the strengths of the novel is the complexity of its characters, the many-sidedness that convinces us of their reality. These characterizations, along with the quoted letters and Stegner’s vivid descriptions, provide a depth of realism seldom found in fiction. It is like turning from the flatness of regular TV to the multidimensional picture of HDTV. After reading and rereading this novel, it is hard not to lapse into the mistake of calling the central character Mary—which may be a point in favor of the Foote family’s objections. Despite the negatives attached to the two major characters, we learn to care about them and follow with concern their progress through the novel. Like our feelings about Lyman, our connection to Susan grows despite a number of flaws—her snobbery, in particular, and her treatment of her husband. But our connection grows as we come to understand her, and it is Stegner’s triumph that we do come to an understanding of this woman, this genteel Victorian lady, so aloof, who would seem on first glance to be so foreign to contemporary taste.

  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,Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained.... A modern woman in a mining camp, even if she is the wife of the Resident Engineer, lives in pants and a sweatshirt. Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived.

  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,The silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.

  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:“Doesn’t it humiliate you to think that you can’t resist that temptation when someone like Frank, living out on the railroad with the roughest sort of man, never touches a drop? Why can’t you be like Frank?”

  And that was the greatest mistake of all. “Because I’m not Frank,” Oliver said, staring at her reflected face. “Maybe you wish I was.”

  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 bel
ieve, 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?

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  WORKS BY WALLACE STEGNER

  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.

  BIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

  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.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

  CRITICAL BOOKS AND ESSAY COLLECTIONS ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WALLACE STEGNER

  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.

  I

  GRASS VALLEY

  1

  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 comer 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 himsel 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.

  In my mind I write letters to the newspapers, saying Dear Editor, As a modem man and a one-legged man, I can tell you that the conditions are similar. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. I had a wife who after twenty-five years of marriage took on the coloration of the 1960s. I have a son who, though we are affectionate with each other, is no more my true son than if he breathed through gills. That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents’ world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. My wife turns out after a quarter of a century to be someone I never knew, my son starts all fresh from his own premises.