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Saturday, September 21, 2002
5pm
Kepler's Books and Magazines
1010 El Camino, Menlo Park

Kepler's Books and Magazines and Committee for Green Foothills are proud to present Nancy Packer. For 40 years, The Committee for Green Foothills has been the environmental organization dedicated to protecting the open space of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. As the first president of the Committee, author Wallace Stegner served as an eloquent voice for the foothills.

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Nancy Packer, Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University and former Director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, is a longtime friend to both Wallace Stegner and the Committee for Green Foothills. Nancy first gave this lecture during the summer of 2001. Her topic, "Wallace Stegner-Throwing a Long Shadow," was part of a Stanford seminar entitled "The West," chaired by Professor David Kennedy, held July 12-15, 2001. Her talk was prefaced by the following remarks.

" First let me establish my credentials for this talk. I met Wallace Stegner when I came to live in California in 1958. Before that, I had loved his stories in The Atlantic and Harper's. I remember one in particular called "Pop Goes the Alley cat" that I wished very much that I had written--and I think I tried to a couple of times. In the fall of '58, Wally let me sit in on the graduate fiction writing class. Two years later Philip Roth, who was not yet famous, was to come to Stanford to teach fiction writing, but something intervened. By then Wally had grown accustomed to my face and I was pressed into service.

" There was no separate office available for me, so Wally set up a desk in the corner of his office. I overheard all his conversations, with publishers, editors, students, and faculty. I think I learned at least as much about him as a valet would have, warts and all. There weren't many warts, though there was scar tissue."

Wallace Stegner-Throwing a Long Shadow
by Nancy Packer

Wallace Earle Stegner was born in 1909 in Iowa the second son of Scandinavian immigrants. When Wally was five, the family moved to Saskatchewan where life was pretty primitive. Wally said he did not see a toilet or a bathtub until he was twelve years old.

The time in Saskatchewan permeates Wally's adult thinking and writing. It was here he experienced the frontier culture of rugged individualism, cruelty toward anyone different or weak, and an inherent distrust of law and government. It was a testosterone culture run riot, and Wally, small and weak, suffered in it.

In Saskatchewan, Stegner learned the costs of the "boomer's" get-rich-quick mentality, exemplified by his father. George Stegner was smart, talented, strong, and unrealistic, always expecting the big rock candy mountain to loom up just around the corner. And when he was thwarted, as he always was, he took his frustrations out on his two sons. He once struck Wally with a piece of stove wood and broke his collar bone.

All through his life Wally had the feeling that his father just plain didn't like him. The feeling, I think it's safe to say, was mutual. Stegner writes that after one beating when he was about six, "I lay out behind the chopping block all one afternoon watching my big dark heavy father as he worked, and all the time. . . I kept aiming an empty cartridge case at him and dreaming murder. . . .[T]he dreams of murder," Wally wrote ". . . have faded; he is long dead and if not forgiven, at least propitiated.".

Hilda Stegner was altogether different. As George was a boomer, she was a nester who wanted nothing more than to settle in a community and raise her children. She protected Wally and his brother from George's violence and was the only safe and loving thing in their life. From her Wally learned responsibility and steadiness, values at the heart of his fiction and his non-fiction and his life.

In "Letter, Much Too Late," Stegner writes to his mother that "In the more than fifty years I have been writing books and stories, I have tried several times to do you justice, and have never been satisfied with what I did. . . .I am afraid I let your selfish and violent husband, my father, steal the scene from you and push you into the background in the novels as he did in life. Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to."

It was in Saskatchewan, too, that Wally learned at first hand the limitations imposed by the aridity that is the common denominator of the West: his father lost two years' of crops not because he was lazy or a bad farmer but because drought was natural to the area and wheat was not. For a year or two there might be rain and plenty, but this was inevitably followed by years of dryness and failure. This kind of agriculture just wasn't meant for this kind of country and most who tried ended in ruin and only the banks profited.

After several years of drought, the Stegner family moved south to Great Falls, Montana, and then on to Salt Lake City. It was the 20s and prohibition was the law of the land, and George, still hoping to get rich quick, had become a bootlegger. Until prohibition was repealed, he was constantly involved in some lawless activity, running rum over back roads from Canada and operating a blind pig, or speakeasy, in the family living room, shaming the rest of the family.

With George only one step ahead of the law, the family lived in some twenty houses in nine years. I should point out here that Wallace and Mary Stegner built a house in the Los Altos Hills in 1950 and lived there until Wally's death 43 years later, and for 55 years they vacationed almost every summer in Greensboro, Vermont. Stability was something Wally had always craved and finally created for himself.

The move to Salt Lake City was actually a good one for Wally. He became an Eagle Scout and a fine tennis player and did very well in school. Perhaps most important he met up with the Mormons.

The Mormons could not have been more the antithesis of George Stegner. They were not rugged individualists looking to get rich quick, but a community that had traveled across half the continent looking for a place to put down roots and found their Kingdom. Wally joined their clubs and felt for the first time in his life that he belonged. Their virtues, he said, were "essentially virtues of hospitality and familial warmth, and a degree of community responsibility." They "taught me to respect their heritage and their singular virtues even when I disagreed with the faith that set their world in motion."

Stegner graduated from the University of Utah where he took some creative writing courses and won a short story contest. He then went to the University of Iowa for graduate study. During his first year at Iowa, his brother died aged 23 and then two years later Wally took a leave from school to nurse his mother during her final months.

Back at Iowa, Wally received an M.A. in Creative Writing and then a PhD in literature. He went on to teach at Utah, Wisconsin, and Harvard. In l945 he came to Stanford. That about covers the important experiences of Wally's youth except for one of the most important. In 1934 he married Mary Page.

In an interview when asked what part Mary had played in his life, Stegner said, "She has had no part except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused and protected from unwanted telephone calls; also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive."

About the time Stegner got to Stanford, so had a bunch of ex GIs, hot off the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific and raring to learn to write so they could tell their stories. The head of the Stanford English Department, R.F. Jones, encouraged Stegner to set up graduate classes for the returning vets. At that time, the only other university that offered creative writing classes designed for graduate students was Iowa--now, of course, there are hundreds.. Professor Jones had a brother, Dr. Edward H. Jones, on whose land in Texas oil had been discovered. After talking with Stegner about his plans for young writers, Dr. Jones decided to provide money to set up the Stegner Writing Fellowships. The next year Richard Scowcroft joined the faculty and with Ivor Winters teaching the poets, the Stanford Creative Writing Program was born.

Wally sometimes quoted Ring Lardner that you can't make a writer out of a natural born druggist What the program can do, Stegner said, is provide the supportive yet critical environment in which a writer can develop, as Wally put it, "certain tested literary tools and techniques and strategies and stances and ways of getting at the essence of a story or novel. . . ." Wally's teaching was always specific to the work at hand, tailored to the student's need, rather than general or theoretical.

I turned in a story in the second week in Wally's class. I don't remember all his criticisms-I remember there were plenty-but I do remember his writing on page three, "This baby is a long time learning to walk." I was seven months pregnant at the time, and I didn't want anyone thinking my baby was slow or stupid. So after that my stories got up and started running on the first page. By means of a brilliant metaphor aimed specifically at me, Wally brought home to me an important technique of the short story: don't dally.

Some of America's most distinguished writers have studied at Stanford, including Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, Evan Connell, Tillie Olson, Scott Turow, Toby Wolff and among the poets Scott Momaday, Donald Justice, Thom Gunn, Philip Levine--and the list keeps on growing. Don Kennedy once said to me that Creative Writing was the jewel in Stanford's crown.

Unfortunately, Stegner began to be disaffected from teaching in the late 50s. To a friend he wrote, "It seems to me the kids get progressively brighter and worse-educated so that they need to be told more and give you more hell while you're telling them."

By the late sixties, the radical students were giving out even more hell. They thought they were going to construct a brave new world and that liberals, though they shared many of the same goals, were actually the enemy because they opposed the radicals' methods. Wally was definitely a liberal. He had written a book, One Nation, describing discrimination and unfairness to blacks and other minorities, had been a member of environmental organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union, and had opposed the Vietnam War from its inception.

He was indeed the radicals' enemy. He had little sympathy with what he thought of as self-indulgence and arrogance and mindless destruction of the University. About the radical youth of the day, he wrote ". . .their faith leads them to disparage tradition, convention, organization, discipline, the past, and all forms of authority."

In short, they were more like George Stegner than like Wallace Stegner. When in 1971 he became financially able to do so, he retired. He was 62, and it's astonishing to think that after that he published more than ten books, fiction, history, major works on the environment.

Stegner's interest in the environment began with his strong aesthetic sense. In remembering a trip to Yellowstone, he writes, "It was pure delight to be where the land lifted in peaks and plunged in canyons, and to sniff air, thin, spray-cooled, full of pine and spruce smells, and to be so close-seeming to improbable indigo skies."

It was not just the dramatic and glamorous parts of the West that he loved. He loved the prairie, ". . .winter wheat . . . scoured and shadowed as if schools of fish move in it," and the Big Sky, "pouring with light and always moving. . .a light pure, glareless, and transparent. . ." "At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset you throw a shadow a hundred yards long."

In his first major non-fiction work, he combined his concern for the environment with his interest in history. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West is still considered the best book on Powell's explorations of the Colorado River.

In writing history, Stegner used the techniques of the fiction writer to tell stories that make person and place and event concrete and specific--but the stories are based on meticulous research into primary sources. When he describes Powell's hanging by his only arm from a cliff and being saved when George Bradley took off his drawers and held them down so that Powell could let go the tree limb and quickly grab the drawers, he is calling on articles written by Powell as well as on Bradley's journal.

Stegner set out to write the kind of history, as he said about the work of Bernard DeVoto, "that not only permitted the selection and dramatization of striking actions, it also allowed the historian to pass judgments on both events and people, and it permitted the elaboration of large umbrella themes." But here, too, the work is solidly researched. When Stegner criticizes William Gilpin, whose views were so different from Powell's, his analysis is based on Gilpin's own words, government documents, and contemporary accounts.

Because his opinions were so well grounded, Stegner doesn't hesitate to write that Gilpin's "conception of [the West's} resources and its future as a home for millions was as grandiose as his rhetoric, as unlimited as his faith, as splendid as his capacity for inaccuracy." Stegner never tried to hide his opinions behind a false valueless objectivity. He cared and he judged.

After Hundredth Meridian, Stegner entered the environmental fray directly. Because of his own experience in Saskatchewan, he was skeptical about the future of the West. The West, he said, "was a more fragile environment than any well-watered country" and when hurt it "doesn't heal."

To oppose the Upper Colorado River Project plan, Stegner edited the Sierra Club's book This is Dinosaur. The book helped to persuade the Congress to pass The Wilderness Act of 1964. Dams at Echo Park and Split Mountain were removed from the plan and Dinosaur National Monument was saved. It was not a complete victory: in the political give-and-take, Glen Canyon was sacrificed. Wally never really forgave himself for not winning that battle, too.

The conservation movement really came together after the Dinosaur Monument victory, and Wally was deeply involved. He wrote articles for national magazines and letters to government officials and was active in environmental organizations. At one point he took a leave from Stanford to serve as Special Assistant to Kennedy's Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall.

Perhaps his most famous statement about the environment was his "Wilderness Letter," in which he wrote, "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste."

He concludes the letter with a passage that many environmentalists know by heart: "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

When Wally died, Secretary Bruce Babbitt of the Clinton Administration held a memorial at the Interior Department. Stegner had become the sane voice of conservation.

It is, of course, Wally's fiction that establishes him as a great American writer. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937, his last, Crossing to Safety in 1987. In that remarkable fifty-year span, in addition to all his books on history and the environment, he published twelve novels and two volumes of short stories.

As do virtually all fiction writers, Wally left strong traces of himself in his fiction. A few of his novels could be called autobiographical. The life of the Masons in Big Rock Candy Mountain closely parallels the rootless life of Wally's family. Crossing to Safety, based on a years-long friendship, was so close to reality that Wally asked the friends' children for permission to publish it.

About the autobiographical elements, Stegner speaks for every novelist when he says in an interview with James Hepworth, "The very fact that some of my experiences goes into the book is all but inescapable, . . . Which is real and which is invented is a) nobody's business and b) a rather silly preoccupation and c) impossible to answer. . . . I often don't know myself what I invented and what I didn't."

Stegner once spoke of the novel as "dramatized belief." And his underlying beliefs were in the importance of "personal ethics and the obligation of personal integrity" and "concern for the species, for the culture, for the larger thing outside of ourselves." These beliefs are, he said in an interview with Richard Etulain, "buried not too deeply in most of the books I've written."

The novels celebrate cooperation, flexibility, emotional generosity, tolerance. These virtues are usually represented by one of the female characters. Ruth in The Spectator Bird and Marian in All the Little Live Things are open to new ideas and people as the male protagonist is not. Elsa in Big Rock Candy Mountain provides the only softness in Bruce Mason's life, protecting him from his father's fury. Sally in Crossing to Safety is much more tolerant than her husband.

But not all the female characters are paragons of virtue. Sabrina in A Shooting Star is foolish and passionate. Charity Lang in Crossing to Safety has an insatiable desire for power and almost destroys her husband and her family and the friendship that is at the heart of the book. The brilliant and talented Susan Ward in Angle of Repose brings calamity down on her family because of her discontent and willfulness and self-indulgence.

It is remarkable that Wallace Stegner, born a frontiersman with the western macho myth bred in his bones, created perhaps the richest and most complex gallery of female characters of any writer since Anton Chekhov.

The male protagonists seem to me a little more like each other than do the female ones. They are responsible and observe an admirable code of conduct, but they are apt to be willful and assertive and intolerant. Perhaps this, too, has an autobiographical kernel. In a remarkable passage in Wolf Willow, Wally writes that, "Having been weak, and hating my weakness, I am as impatient with the weakness of others as my father ever was. . .I cannot sympathize with the self-pitiers for I have been there, or with the braggarts for I have been there, too." The men must struggle against their harshness and arrogance, and like a bucking horse, they need to be gentled, by a woman.

One might say that Wally's view of the human condition and what it takes to lead a good life was in a way an androgynous one. His novels suggest, that the complete human being must incorporate what we think of as masculine and what we think of as feminine. The toughness of Bo Mason, the gentleness of Elsa in Big Rock Candy Mountain. The rigor of Joe Allston, the sensitivity of Ruth in All the Little Live Things. The adventurous instinct of Oliver Ward, the aesthetic culture of Susan Ward.

Virginia Woolf writes that for the writer "Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can take place." For Wally this collaboration is not only in the creative process that brings his books about but also in the workings of his moral universe.

Stegner's concern for the environment is the sub-text of all his novels. The bad characters are apt to be those who exploit and destroy the land. Even the good guys can be destroyers. In All the Little Live Things Joe Allston attempts to construct an Eastern Eden out in the western Los Altos Hills. To do so requires killing of gophers and aphids and snails and indeed all the little live things.

In a sense this novel is an argument between Allston and Marian--a dying young woman who loves the natural even red in tooth and claw and wants to preserve all the little live things. By the end Allston has learned something about love and acceptance of life and even the sanctity of the environment.

In fiction and non-fiction, Wally was an elegant stylist-his writing is concrete, supple, and rich with allusion. Here's a passage describing a raging blizzard in "Genesis," the novella in Wolf Willow: "There was one afternoon when the whole world was overwhelmed under a white freezing fog, when horses, cattle, clothes, wagon grew a fur of hoar frost. . . . There was an almost continuous snake tongue of wind licking out of the north or west."

The first time I read that story was in the middle of July. When my husband came home later that day and kissed me, I was stunned that his lips and skin weren't freezing cold.

His style permeates his non-fiction as well. In Hundredth Meridian, he writes, "[Powell] had not been educated into scholarly caution and that squid-like tendency to retreat, squirting ink, which sophisticated learning often displays." Rather, he says, Powell like the Norse god Thor was "always getting caught in the attempt to drink the ocean dry.". These passages contain description, metaphor, analogy, and a good measure of wit and feeling, all incorporated smoothly and seamlessly, as though the words just grew as the prairie grass did in Saskatchewan.

Amazingly, Wally's reputation was a while a-borning. The New York Times did not bother to review The Spectator Bird, which then went on to receive the 1976 National Book Award. Nor did the Times mention Angle of Repose until after it had received the Pulitzer Prize. At one point it referred to Stegner as the Dean of Western American Letters, but it called him Bill Stegner.

Recognition of Stegner's importance couldn't be denied forever, and by Crossing to Safety in 1987 the literary establishment as well as the country had come to see him as one of America's treasures. At a reading in Washington, D.C. the crowds wanting him to sign their books wound around the whole block the bookstore was on. Several books have been written about his accomplishments and all his own books that he would allow reprinted have been reprinted. When he died in 1993, his obituary appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Stegner would have enjoyed the irony.

I'd like to say a little about Wally himself. With students he was courteous, attentive, and forbearing. As I sat in the corner of that office I sometimes couldn't believe he was listening so patiently to all that idle chatter. With his close colleagues, he was intensely loyal and tolerant, as I knew first hand. I have to say that with other faculty he could sometimes be a bit brusque and critical, particularly if he thought the Creative Writing Program was being abused.

He was the most disciplined person I ever met. Some of us used to spend a lot of time in the Creative Writing office, laughing and talking. Wally occasionally came in to get something and he'd say "I think I'll join you for a minute." He'd sit down, laugh at our jokes, and crack some of us own, but on the 59th second of that allotted minute, he'd stand up and said, "Got to get back to work," and pick up the new pencil he had come for, having worn his down to a nub, and he'd go right back to his office.

Of course that wasn't literally true, but it sometimes seemed so. When it was work-time, Wally worked and worked hard and effectively. In his biography of Stegner, Jackson Benson points out that in one two-year period of his life Stegner wrote a dozen essays, four short stories, a novelette, two novels, a few chapters of Big Rock Candy Mountain and part of a textbook and taught four undergraduate classes at a time. Makes me want a nap just to think about it. He published in all some thirty-one books. You don't do that with your feet up on the desk.

But when it was play-time, he could play with the best of them. He enjoyed a party--I can attest that he was a good dancer. He knew reams of old ballads and could discuss all the new books. And as he did his gardening he kept up by radio with the San Francisco Giants and the Stanford Cardinal. He was witty and responsive, and he was a good listener. Just about everybody who knew him fell at least a little in love with him-young and old, men and women.

Of course he had his faults. Not frequently but sometimes he could blow up at some piece of bad faith or judgment. And he was not quick to forgive. He could be hostile to new ideas--they had to stand the test of time before he'd accept them. On occasion, he made snap judgments about people, and he didn't necessarily keep his opinions to himself, sometimes even put them in print. And though usually thoughtful and measured, he occasionally acted impetuously. But these tiny warts can in no way disfigure the portrait of a man of such integrity, talent, and grace. They only show that he was not just a brilliant mind but also a passionately committed heart.