Wallace Stegner (1909-93) liked to refer to the hub of American publishing in the east as “headquarters.” He said it deadpan, as a Westerner might, but his stature as his era’s great literary “authority on the American West” conveyed the sardonic edge.
Stegner had good cause to be snippy. The industry’s ever-changing enthusiasms — from Jewish-American fiction to Indian-American fiction to graphic novels — have never included fiction about Stegner’s core territory of the “interior West.”
New York houses publish fiction of that sort — Thomas McGuane, Ivan Doig — but in the spirit in which Henry James supposedly wrote” all fiction — as a painful duty. For Manhattan editors, “going West” means heading crosstown to their apartments.
That sustains Stegner’s importance. If, as Philip L. Fradkin states in his ambitious exploration of the novelist’s life, Stegner remains our literary “spokesperson for the region,” it’s partly because the eastern literary establishment makes it so hard for anyone else to replace him.
Yet does Stegner merit a third full-scale biography? He does. First, his 13 novels, eight nonfiction books, and 242 articles, including “The Wilderness Letter” (1961), a modern manifesto for conservationists, carry weight. While Stegner didn’t, like Saul Bellow, consistently turn out masterpieces, novels such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971) and The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) endure as quality work, as do a number of his nonfiction books.
Second, Stegner, who started to teach writing after graduating from the University of Utah in 1930, continued to do so for 41 years, first at Iowa, Bread Loaf, Harvard and Wisconsin, then at Stanford, whose prestigious program he built. As a co-creator of the “creative writing industry” — that boon to university bottom lines (writers work cheap) — Stegner transformed literature by popularizing the idea that young people can be taught how to write it.
Third, Stegner established, in his own work and in that of mentorees such as Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey, an honored place for realistic writing about the West. Under his aegis, the West’s vulnerable wilderness, bedeviling aridity, and exposure to exploitation transcended the cowboy and Indian themes of pulp fiction.
Fradkin, an environmental historian, says the two earlier biographies of Stegner came from literature professors who didn’t attend enough to his “flawed” humanity. True. Jackson Benson’s 1996 life remains a better guide to Stegner’s fiction, while matching Fradkin on Stegner’s middle years. Fradkin’s chief feat is to dig deeper into Stegner’s childhood bond with nature, which led the introspective author to become a “reluctant” conservationist toward the end of his career.
Stegner experienced a hardscrabble childhood. His father, George, a failed farmer and career bootlegger, dragged long-suffering wife Hilda and their two boys to remote locations. At one point, Hilda deposited Stegner and his brother in a Seattle orphanage, one of the writer’s most painful memories.
Stegner’s boyhood took place on the Saskatchewan prairie, a desolate area. Stegner grew up hunting with a .22-caliber rifle and absorbing the “frontier code” that “you didn’t complain, you kept a stiff upper lip, and you never abandoned anything.”
“In other words,” Fradkin writes, “you were a sticker, a favorite Stegner expression of approval in later years.”
Dust-bowl conditions drove George to yank his family back to the United States and Salt Lake City. Stegner saw his first bathtub and flush toilet at age 11. The Stegners lived in 20 different residences over 10 years to avoid raids on George’s bootlegging.
But young “Wallie” began to experience “the closest to a hometown” he’d ever know, and normal teenage life. He came to hate his abusive father and show “excessive love” for his mother. He also displayed the need for stability that marked him, Fradkin argues, throughout his life.
At the University of Utah, Stegner evolved into a devoted reader, aspiring writer and typical undergraduate — playing tennis, dating, carousing with friends. After graduation, he took a job as a teaching assistant at the University of Iowa, arriving, Fradkin reports, just “as the country’s oldest creative writing program for graduate students was being put into place.”
From then, Stegner’s life story reads like that of a writer born 40 years later — decades spent in prestigious writing programs. He also took a doctorate at Iowa, writing on two 19th-century scientists who specialized in the West. Friendship with grad student Wilbur Schramm, the future communication scholar, led to a position at the elite Bread Loaf conference, where hobnobbing with Robert Frost and company led to Harvard and the rest of Stegner’s charmed career.
In fact, aside from the tabloidish death of his father — George Stegner killed himself in a 1939 murder/suicide involving his 38-year-old girlfriend — Stegner’s life proceeded calmly. He exercised firm control over his Stanford program, engaging in academic infighting when necessary. His marriage in 1934 to Mary Stuart Page, a fellow graduate student, lasted 59 years.
Fradkin scrutinizes Stegner as person, teacher and professional writer. Stegner considered himself a “square,” opposed to libertine `60s attitudes. He was “a moral man,” Fradkin writes.
But also an increasingly conservative one, Fradkin explains, as that era’s radicalism broke around him. Stegner intensely disliked Ken Kesey, the Pied Piper of recreational drugs, and deeply admired environmentally sensitive essayist Wendell Berry.
As a professional writer, Stegner often took on projects mainly to make money. The most prominent was an in-house history in the 1950s of Aramco, the consortium of American oil firms that developed Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.
The Washington Post reported in November that Stegner’s son and literary agent both objected to its publication in a trade edition last year. But Fradkin drives home that Stegner often gave away his rights to commercial writing that he preferred to keep quiet, such as a “home-evening handbook” on Mormonism that he ghostwrote for a church member.
Finally, Fradkin devotes the last part of his book to controversies in Stegner’s later life. One covers the author’s involvement in conservation causes beginning in the early `60s, which included working for Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. Fradkin also looks at charges that Stegner misused scholarly material in his fiction, an accusation Fradkin finds overwrought.
That Fradkin judges Stegner fairly throughout pleases, but the book’s most welcome moments come when he excerpts Stegner’s sharp descriptions of the West.
In “The Wilderness Letter,” for example, Stegner recalled his boyhood, the “field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side. …”
As his longtime California home faced assault from Silicon Valley development, Stegner chose the east for his own final angle of repose, arranging for his remains to be brought to his summer home in Greensboro, Vermont.
“In the end,” Fradkin writes, “he sought to escape change by having his ashes deposited in a seemingly more enduring place.” A simple gravestone reads, in reference-book style, “Stegner, Wallace E., 1909-1993.”
The academic style seems apt. For all his self-doubt, Stegner made it into the reference books. He turned out to be a sticker, after all.