Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [4]
He not only taught the standard fare; he spent much time in the library reading the magazines and journals of the period in order to get a better feeling for the times and to discover new material for an anthology he was editing. While doing so, he discovered Mary Hallock Foote, the real-life counterpart of Helen Burling Ward in Angle of Repose. In the novel Ward’s true love is the most famous magazine editor of the period, Thomas Hudson, and as a result of his research, Stegner was quite familiar with the careers of nineteenth-century editors and with their magazines. Ward is seen in the novel as an illustrator and story writer (as in life was Foote), and her work, like that of her counterpart, is much in demand by the periodicals of her day.
Wallace had no plans to become a professor, but it was the Depression, and there was hardly any place for him besides school. Nor did he have any notion of becoming a writer. After writing his dissertation about Dutton, getting his doctorate, and coming back to Utah to teach, he happened to see an advertisement for a novelette competition with a prize of $2,500. He was making only $1,800 a year as a professor, and his wife, Mary, was pregnant. Almost with the desperation that leads us to bet on the lottery, he sat down and wrote a story he had heard from his wife about some of her distant relatives. The result was Remembering Laughter, which, much to the Stegners’ surprise and delight, won the Little Brown Novelette Prize. At that point, for the first time, he thought that writing as a career might be possible.
However, two undistinguished novels followed, and he was having more success with his short stories than his novels. It wasn’t until he wrote the novel that told the story of his growing up, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), that he had another success with the longer form. Leaving Harvard, where he had been teaching writing as a Briggs-Copeland Fellow, he went to Stanford after World War II and began what became one of the most renowned creative writing programs in the country. He continued, however, to have more success with the short story (winning several O. Henry Memorial Short Story Awards) and with his nonfiction (including the Powell biography—a Pulitzer finalist) than with the novel. He was discouraged, and thought that he might give up writing novels altogether.
A breakthrough did not come until late in his career, when he wrote All the Little Live Things (1967). It was with this novel that he at last found his voice by inventing Joe Allston, the narrator, who is witty, sometimes wise, and often cantankerous. Allston in All the Little Live Things would become the pattern for the narrators in Stegner’s last novels and the forerunner in several ways of Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose. Allston was in part a product of Stegner’s own reaction—now that he himself had grown older—to the late 1960s and its radicalism, and to the blossoming of the “now” generation with its antihistoricism, intolerance, and hypocrisies. Sometimes this voice is light, even flippant, but always there is an undertone of skepticism.
With Allston, for the first time the novelist experimented with the first-person singular, which up to this point he had avoided. It seemed to him that “you couldn’t deal with really strong emotions in the first person because it’s simply an awkwardness for an individual to talk about his own emotions.” But once he began to work with it, he found he could do things that he could hardly do by any other means:
First-person narrative encourages you to syncopate time, to bridge from a past to a present. It also allows you to drop back and forth, almost at will, freely. When Joe Allston or Lyman Ward is working with the past, his head is working