Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [5]
And time, this merging of the past with the present, is not only an essential aspect of structure in these late novels; it is in itself a central theme and of particular importance in Angle of Repose. During this period, with the onset of the Allston type of narrator, Stegner made a conscious effort to, in his words, “interpenetrate the past and present.” In several essays he has stated that his goal was to do for the West what Faulkner had done for Mississippi: discover “a usable continuity between the past and present.” And he has added, “That’s what western novels too frequently don’t do.”
With Allston in All the Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird, and the narrators descended from him, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose and Larry Morgan in Crossing to Safety, Stegner used a first-person narrator to achieve a voice close to his own, yet fictional. It would convey a sense of truth and conviction which came not, as in his one previous major success, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, out of the telling of his own story, but rather out of the force of his personality and belief. These narrators fit Stegner not only because he was getting older and matched them in age and perspective, but because his character stood in strong opposition to the excesses of his times, to the nihilistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered attitudes we see expressed so often by the younger generation in Angle of Repose. He has said that one of the themes of Angle of Repose is this generation gap,
especially the anithistorical pose of the young, at least the young of the 1960s. They didn’t give a damn what happened up to two minutes ago and would have been totally unable to understand a Victorian lady. I could conceive students of mine confronting Mary Hallock Foote and thinking, “My God, fantastic, inhuman,” because they themselves were so imprisoned in the present that they had no notion of how various humanity and human customs can be.
Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn’t understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war. By nature Stegner was the antithesis of the in-your-face hatred and anarchy that surrounded him. He was a liberal politically but a man of old-fashioned virtues—polite, courteous, kind—who applied a great deal of self-discipline to his life and who usually repressed the kind of witty sarcasm or outspoken opinionatedness that his first-person narrators are likely to voice. Nevertheless, he obviously enjoyed speaking his mind through his characters—to balance the penalties of aging, there can be a perverse pleasure in being candid. When asked in an interview if the voice of this narrator was close to his own, he replied, “Yes, but don’t read him intact. He goes further than I would. Anybody is likely to make characters to some extent in his own image.”
I.
Stegner first came across Mary Hallock Foote—the genteel nineteenth-century local-color writer and illustrator whose life became the basis for Angle of Repose—in 1946, when he came to Stanford. He was doing research for a chapter to be included in the Literary History of the United States called “Western Record and Romance.” He read several of her novels and story collections, as well as uncollected stories in their original magazine publication. He judged her “one of the best, actually; she was good and hadn’t been noticed.” He took notes on her work, put one of her stories in his anthology Selected American Prose: The Realistic Movement, 1841-1900, and included one of her short novels on his reading list for his American literature class. At the time, he was probably the only professor in the country to be teaching Foote’s work.
A GI student in that class, George McMurray, enthusiastically reported to Stegner that he had come across Mary Hallock Foote’s illustrations and writings about New Almaden (in the Coast Range foothills near San Jose, California). He told Stegner that he had found out that