Going West

I am next to a businessman at a formal dinner. The conversation dries up after the soup. At a loss, I ask what sort of books he enjoys. Risky, I know. Either he won’t read, ‘except on planes when I buy whatever I can find at the airport’, or his answer will be as revealing as if I had asked him to tell me his life story. I am lucky. My businessman, more interested in fiction than foreign exchange, tells me, the book junkie, of a wonderful American author of whom I am ignorant. I am eternally grateful to him and still have the scrap of paper – menu on one side, ‘Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose’, on the other – which I stuffed into my tiny bag.

Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-93) was the founder and for twenty five years director of Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. Born in Iowa on his grandfather’s farm, he spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, Canada, and his youth in Salt Lake City. Author of many novels and short stories, Stegner was one of America’s preeminent authors yet, as I discovered when I tried to buy one of his books, he is scarcely known in the UK. Angle of Repose, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and therefore the best known, is at one level a fat epic novel about the struggle to build America and the myriad forces that went into creating the American dream. The protagonists represent the opposing but equally strong qualities required to build a new country. Susan Burling is a refined artist, rather precious, for whom books and education are prized above all else. Often she appears to have more understanding of places than of people. She clings to the importance of an East Coast education for her son and the manners that she believes go with it. The unlikely man she marries, Oliver Ward, is a handsome engineer, determined to run prosperous mines, build crucial irrigation projects or own the patent to a cement-making process. He is the strong silent type, an adventurer who carries a pistol when he comes to propose, by nature obstinate or ‘mulish’, a characteristic emphasized in the face of his wife’s superior education and sophistication. Because Susan is an illustrator, it is through her eyes as she journeys bravely to her new life that we experience the dirt and dust, the heat and brutality of the emerging West. It is a place where men are hanged or beaten in what passes for rough justice, homes are as quickly pulled down as put up, and the demon drink is never far away. The shanty towns they stop at boast boarding-houses where it is assumed that Susan is a woman of easy virtue and she is offered only a curtained-off bed to sleep in. Stegner does not have an idealized view of the West, yet some of his most lyrical writing lies in his descriptions of the towering mountain peaks and deep canyons, the satisfaction derived from creating a home out of the materials Nature left lying around, as well as the ever-present dangers of an untamed landscape. Above all, he brilliantly conveys the slow pace of nineteenth-century life, when letters may not arrive for months, if ever, or when a visit home takes a whole year. But Angle of Repose is also much more than a book about how the West was won or how Native Americans were subdued and their land seized. Stegner, through his narrator Lyman Ward, is at pains to point out that writing a book about the history of the West is not what interests him. Ward, a retired historian now confined to his wheelchair as a result of a degenerative bone disease and unable to move his neck, is intent on chronicling the remarkable early life of his grandparents Susan and Oliver, whom he remembers only in their old age. ‘What interests me’, Lyman tells his disapproving son, ‘is how two such unlike particles clung together and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached their angle of repose . . . that’s where the meaning will be if I find any.’ It’s a clever device which lifts the book from being merely an impressive period novel to one with a timeless quality. Lyman’s sympathies appear to be squarely with Oliver, too trusting, honest and hard-working for his own good, who suffers a run of bad luck which drags down the whole family. Only in the final pages, when Susan is humbled beyond imagination, is one forced to reconsider the nature of the sacrifices she has made, imprisoned in her century as much as she is in her inarticulate husband’s life, trying to overcome her hatred of the heartless mountains and the brutal West. As their fortunes decline, she is described as a woman ‘dragged along after her husband’s warped buggy wheels’. That she bears her pain until the age of 91, ashamed of herself for having been ashamed of her husband, only serves to underline her suffering. And so, at the core, this is the story of a marriage, or perhaps the story of any marriage. Parallel with the discovery of the West, Lyman Ward discovers much about the desperate sadness of his grandparents’ imperfect union, and at the same time he comes to understand his own newly failed marriage. Stegner shows huge compassion for Oliver and Susan’s predicament and a deep understanding of how people behave in extremis, when ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I didn’t mean it’cannot un-say and undo what has been said and done. At the crux of Susan and Oliver’s difficulties lies Oliver’s sense of inferiority, sharpened by his failure to provide for his family and Susan’s constant reminders that her commissions to write and draw for an East Coast publisher could see them through. Of course, we believe the version of events given by Lyman, this ‘gorgon with stone lips’, who takes his grandfather’s side. After all, he’s telling their story as well as his own. And he tells us that he himself has been cruelly treated by his wife who abandoned him after twenty-five years just when he needed her. Yet by the end, as a more nuanced picture of Susan develops, even he must admit some responsibility for his own marital break-up. Rereading the book last year, I was struck by the clear-sighted forcefulness of the pioneers’ determination to impose their will on a hostile and barren land; the desire to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for civilization. It is a vein that runs deep in the American psyche but it may not be suitable for export to other lands and cultures – when I tried to order this book ten or so years ago I was met with ‘Wallace who?’ by a number of booksellers. Now, however, it is available on the Internet, as are other books by Stegner such as Crossing to Safety, equally powerful and thought-provoking, and The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It is no coincidence that dreams feature heavily in the novel, which closes with an intensely realized dream sequence. Stegner understands the power of the American dream, and his enormous sympathy for those who have to settle for less than their dreams is what resonates long after the story itself has been read.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Anne Sebba 2005