Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [2]
Together his parents would seem to have been the archetypal western couple. In later years, as a writer, Wallace saw them as representing the exploiter, on the one hand, and the civilizer on the other. Although they are quite different in character and background, we can see Oliver and Susan Ward in their roles in Angle of Repose as dim reflections of Stegner’s parents. (Certainly Wallace’s deep love and respect for his mother contributed to his ability to create such complex and sympathetic women characters as Susan Burling Ward.) When asked by an interviewer if the life of Mary Hallock Foote, the model for the heroine of Angle of Repose, had reminded him of the life of Elsa Mason, the mother in the semiautobiographical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Stegner said,
Not consciously. It never occurred to me that there was any relation between Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain till after I had finished writing it. Then I saw that there were all kinds of connections. There was the wandering husband and the nesting woman, and the whole business reproduced in many ways in somewhat more cultivated terms and in different places what The Big Rock Candy Mountain was about. It’s perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that’s my story.
Two periods in his growing up had a major influence on forming his outlook and interests. The first was his six years in childhood spent in the village of Eastend and every summer on the homestead farm in Saskatchewan near the Montana border. After the first year, his older brother, Cecil, got a summer job at the grocery store in town, and so Wallace was alone with his parents, out on the hot prairie, living in a tarpaper shack. It was a place with “searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree.” Yet, amazingly enough considering such a barren and hostile environment, he could still look back on a childhood not of suffering and boredom, but of “wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals.” His summers on the homestead and winters in the frontier village during his most impressionable years marked him, as he has said, “a westerner for life.” And they would eventually produce a writer determined to represent the western experience as it really was, and the relationship of its people to the land as it was, is, and should be.
Aside from the empty flatness of its 320 acres, the homestead’s most prominent feature was its dryness—there was a source of water, but just barely. The Stegners’ crop was wheat, which required summer rain to grow, and in four years out of five they were dusted out. During a sixth summer there was so much rain that the wheat was ruined by rust. This period in Eastend was the only time in Wallace’s life that his family was together in their own home, and so having to leave Saskatchewan was for him a trauma he never forgot. Family, home, and community are valued throughout his work, and while Susan, in Angle of Repose, is on a much higher social level than Wallace’s mother, she too is a nester who tries to create community wherever she must move in response to her husband’s search. Wallace’s sense of the importance of water in the West, which had been drilled into him so forcefully, eventually led him to write about John Wesley Powell—one of the few to understand the basic dryness of the West (contradicting the propaganda of the developers who promised a “new Eden”). And still later he would use as the central episode in Angle of Repose Oliver Ward’s attempt to transport water to the near desert of southern Idaho.
His experience in Saskatchewan also led him to a consuming interest in history. Angle of Repose, which is about the life and thoughts of a historian and the history of his family that he uncovers, would seem to have been written as much by a historian as by a novelist,