Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [8]
As I warned you, the process of making a novel from real people has led me to bend them where I had to, and you may not recognize your ancestors when I get through with them. On the other hand, I have availed myself of your invitation to use the letters and reminiscences as I please, so there are passages from both in my novel. . . .
You suggested that I not use real names in any of my book, since what I am writing is not history or biography but fiction. I agree with that. But if the reminiscences are now to be published, it won’t take much literary detective work to discover what family I am basing this story on. . . . The question arises, must I now unravel all those little threads I have so painstakingly raveled together—the real with the fiction—and replace all truth with fiction? Or does it matter to you that an occasional reader or scholar can detect a Foote behind my fictions?
He went on to offer to modify the language and change all the names, asked her to let him know what to do about changes if she thought it necessary, and, as he had before, offered to send the completed manuscript to her to read. Janet replied that she didn’t think changes necessary, nor did she feel it necessary for her to read the manuscript. Stegner asked if anyone else in the family would like to read the manuscript. The answer was no, the others were too busy with their own lives to take the time.
In his letters Stegner warned Janet several times that the book would not be true to all the details of the Footes’ lives. “For reasons of drama, if nothing else,” he wrote, “I’m having to foreshorten, and I’m having to throw in a domestic tragedy of an entirely fictional nature, but I think I am not too far from their real characters.” Despite his attempt to make sure that the Foote family had some idea of what a novel was and what he was writing, and despite his offer to make changes as dictated by Janet and to let her or other members of the family read the manuscript, part of the Foote family took great offense to the book when it was published. They blamed Janet, who suffered deeply from their upset and anger; but most of all they blamed Stegner, who they believed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, had tricked them. The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.
II.
Using the Foote letters may have been a brilliant touch, but it not only caused him difficulties after the novel was published; it made the composition of the novel difficult:
The novel got very complex on me before it was done. It gave me trouble: I had too many papers, recorded reality tied my hands. But a blessed thing happened. In the course of trying to make fiction of a historical personage I discovered, or half created, a living woman in Victorian dress. I forced her into situations untrue to her life history but not, I think, untrue to the human probabilities that do not depend on time or custom. In the end I had to elect to be true to the woman rather than to the historical personage.
The novel is certainly a complex one, probably Stegner’s most complex, yet at the same time it remains a book that is not only readable, but a joy to read.
For one thing, it is a book of powerful, memorable characters. For another, it is a book with constantly building and engaging drama, dramatizing several important themes. It may seem odd on the surface that a novel that has a central character bound to his wheelchair and to his home should have such drama. That drama is built through not just one but a series of connected conflicts within Lyman Ward. While he is not a totally lovable character, he is a decent man who has had some bad breaks in life and whose thoughts engage us by both their wit and their occasional profundity. Because of his disease and because his wife has abandoned him, he has reached a major crisis point in his life. “It would be easy,” he thinks at one point in the novel,