Against the Current

Wallace Stegner seems on the brink of being forgotten. Half a century ago he was acknowledged as a major figure in American letters; one of his novels won the Pulitzer Prize, and another the National Book Award. He was highly regarded, not just as a novelist, but also as a pioneering teacher of creative writing and as a mentor to a generation of younger writers. Yet when I asked around recently, not one of my bookish acquaintances recognized his name. I had never heard of him myself until a friend recommended him on a pandemic relieving country walk.

Even in his native land Stegner is now neglected. In 2020 he was the subject of the first of a series of New York Times pieces on overlooked or under-read American writers by the critic A. O. Scott. ‘Stegner’s books abide in an under-visited stretch of the American canon,’ wrote Scott, ‘like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or a ski resort.’ It was an apt simile, because the American landscape in all its variety and majesty permeates Stegner’s fiction. My walking friend kindly sent me a copy of Stegner’s Crossing to Safety (1987). I was slow to pick it up but when I did finally read it, I found it profoundly satisfying. It is one of those books that reminds you of the solace to be found in reading. Since finishing it I have been praising it to anyone who will listen, and I know of at least half a dozen people who have read and enjoyed it on my recommendation. Now I have the opportunity to proselytize to readers of Slightly Foxed. Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, who meet at a Midwestern university in the late 1930s and who are immediately drawn to each other: so much so that they form a lasting bond. Both couples are then newly married and full of plans for the future. Both husbands are English teachers, ambitious for the tenure which will guarantee their future careers; both wives are pregnant, beginning a different type of adventure, one both dramatic and humdrum. One couple has money, the other does not. One man gets tenure, one does not. One becomes a successful novelist, the other a less successful poet. Their circumstances diverge, yet they remain close, through all the frictions, the jealousies, the disappointments, the necessary compromises, the corrosion of ideals and the ageing process itself. The novel is a meditation on friendship, and on marriage, and the way in which life turns out. When they meet for the first time in Madison, Wisconsin, the circumstances of the two couples could scarcely be more different. Larry Morgan, who comes from Arizona, personifies the energy and self-reliance of the American West. Orphaned as a teenager, Larry has nothing but what he can earn, and struggles to make enough to support his wife Sally, the daughter of impoverished Greek immigrants, and their growing family. He is determined to get on, and he is proud of his achievements as a writer. Sid Lang, the son of a wealthy Pittsburgh industrialist, is more ambivalent and less assertive; he wants to be a poet, but something holds him back. (Towards the end of the novel there is an excruciating moment when Larry, searching for Sid, discovers a rhyming dictionary, concealed spine inwards, on Sid’s study bookshelf.) Sid allows himself to be ruled and indeed emasculated by his forceful and exuberant wife Charity, who comes from a long line of wealthy New Englanders, accustomed for generations to the benefits of privilege. She is both generous and domineering. There is love between all four of them, but there is also a tension between Larry and Charity throughout. He disapproves of her treatment of Sid; she remains defiant. Even while she is dying of cancer, she is still giving the orders. Meanwhile Sally, who has been crippled by polio, is calm and resigned. Crossing to Safety was Stegner’s last novel, published when he was nearly eighty. The book is narrated by Larry in old age, looking back over the events of half a lifetime, a perspective which gives the novel a nostalgic, elegiac quality.

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? . . . Instead the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.

Larry wakes early one August morning in a Vermont cottage, part of the compound where they have holidayed with the Langs for decades; he strolls out alone, leaving his wife sleeping, and climbs up the shoulder of a hill as the sun rises, and pauses to gaze down

at the sleeping unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying greens of mayfields and meadows and sugarbrush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting and warming as the stretched shadows shorten. There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Battell Pond, where Charity’s family have their summer retreat, is an arcadia in the American tradition of the simple life: another Walden, where living close to nature nourishes the spirit. Stegner, a committed environmentalist, shares this pastoral ideal; yet he is too sharp an observer not to notice that this rural retreat is as artificial in its own way as the parkland of eighteenth-century England. The only moments when you will see a crowd at this discreet summer colony, he remarks, is at ‘summer auctions, and at the village store at the hour when the New York Times is delivered’. Not much happens in Crossing to Safety. The couples remain married, and no one has an affair. The most dramatic moment occurs during a hike through the woods, when Sally becomes ill, and has to be carried out of the wilderness. Stegner had a distaste for the casual promiscuity and the ‘wife-swapping’ (how dated that term, once so fashionable, now seems!) that featured so prominently in the work of a novelist with whom he was sometimes unfavourably compared, John Updike. Yet despite this lack of action, Crossing to Safety is compelling. In Stegner’s hands, marriage itself acquires an epic, enduring quality. Larry accepts the inexorable passage of time and its concomitants, mortality and loss, but he also clings to his memories, and to the value of long-lasting love.

We weren’t indifferent. We lived in our times, which were hard times. We had our interests, which were mainly literary and intellectual and only occasionally, inescapably, political. But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on $150 a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship – parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars poetica.

Stegner is hard to categorize. In some passages he seems like a left-leaning critic of capitalism, with all its crassness and waste. In others he appears deeply conservative. What concerns him most are those values he wants to protect: the environment, family, community. He proudly declared himself ‘a square’; he stood firm against the current of his times. Perhaps this stubborn resistance to modish preoccupations explains why he is less often read these days. In a collection of essays published in 1996 and entitled Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, the Native American critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn deplored the absence of minorities in his work. She had a point; yet twenty-five years on ‘cultural appropriation’ is being deplored. So perhaps Stegner was not so square after all. One aspect of Crossing to Safety that fascinated me was how distinctly American the book is. My late wife Robyn was American, and I recognized in the novel dozens of details that I had learned from her and her family, who themselves had been academics in the Midwest. She and I once stayed in a rather uncomfortable Vermont cabin, kept by educated New Yorkers as a refuge from the city. I don’t think that Robyn ever read the book, and it saddens me to reflect that she never will. Another reason why the book appealed to me may be that I have reached what one might call the philosophical stage of life: on the cusp between middle age and old age, a period when one spends as much time looking back as looking forward. Many of the hopes I once cherished have faded or disappeared altogether, but I have learned to value more that which remains. This, I think, is the meaning of the novel’s somewhat cryptic and otherwise rather forgettable title, taken from a poem by Robert Frost:

I could give all to Time except – except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There, And what I would not part with I have kept.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Adam Sisman 2023