By Page Stegner

Introduction

Wallace Stegner, the second of two sons born to George and Hilda Paulson Stegner, arrived in this world on February 18, 1909, on a farm owned by Hilda’s father, Chris Paulson, in Lake Mills, Iowa. Paulson, a widower when Hilda was only twelve, was of Norwegian immigrant stock, English-speaking only when absolutely necessary, staunchly principled, hardworking, taciturn, rigidly Lutheran, and utterly patriarchal—the moral opposite in virtually every way of George Stegner, whom his daughter married at an early age, in spite of her father’s vigorous protest.

George, whose origins and ancestry are obscure (beyond the fact that he grew up somewhere near Rock Island, Illinois, and fled from home at the age of fourteen never to look back), was, in the words of his son, “a husky, laughing, reckless, irreverent, storytelling charmer, a ballplayer, a fancy skater, a trapshooting champion, a pursuer of the main chance, a true believer in the American dream of something for nothing, a rolling stone who confidently expected to be eventually covered with moss.” In short, a man who offended every piety Chris Paulson stood for—which was perhaps his major attraction to Paulson’s “bond-servant,” motherless daughter, and which very likely put the starch in her decision to run off. If she ever regretted her choice—and many times she must have—she kept it to herself.
Chasing the dream of getting rich quick, of finding some big rock candy mountain just over the horizon, kept the Stegner family drifting from pillar to post for nearly twelve years—from Iowa to North Dakota to Washington, back to Iowa, and eventually to Eastend, a frontier hamlet in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. There they homesteaded a farm on the Canadian side of the U.S./Canada border and set about trying to raise wheat.

More pie in the sky. Six years and five busted crops later, they were on the move again, this time to Great Falls, Montana, where George made a furtive living running bootleg whiskey across the Canadian line into Prohibition-plagued America. But a year later restlessness overcame him once more and he packed up his reluctant entourage and headed southwest to Salt Lake City.

Miraculously, in the land of Zion they finally stuck. Wallace would attend high school in Salt Lake City, graduating from East High at the age of sixteen and immediately enrolling in the University of Utah, where, working part-time in a linoleum store to help make ends meet, he would complete his degree in five years. Encouraged by his professors to go on to graduate school, he went east to the University of Iowa, completing his PhD in American Literature in 1935. After a brief teaching stint back at the University of Utah, he headed still further east to a position at the University of Wisconsin. A year later, and owing in part to a Little Brown Prize for his novelette Remembering Laughter, he was offered an appointment at Harvard.

So where does California fit into all this wandering? The California Legacy books a showcase for distinguished “California” authors, and by this point Wallace Stegner has almost reached his forties without setting foot in the Golden State, except for one academic year at UC Berkeley (1933)—an adventure terminated, says Jackson Benson, because the “stodgy graduate curriculum in English, with its emphasis on philology—on Latin, Old French, Anglo-Saxon, and Middle English—was not really his cup of tea.” As it would turn out for this deeply rooted Westerner, neither was teaching at Harvard, though Harvard would satisfy a provincial yearning for cultural respectability not intrinsic to the inter-mountain West, and would introduce him to at least two profoundly influential men with whom he would become lifelong friends, Robert Frost and Bernard DeVoto.

Nevertheless, “all my life I’ve been going away east and coming home west,” Stegner once wrote. So when Look magazine offered him a job writing a series of articles on prejudice and the treatment of minorities in America, he left Harvard and moved to Santa Barbara, California, to be closer to the predominant sources of his investigation (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Mexicans, American Indians), overshooting the true West by a few hundred miles, to be sure, but definitely headed in the right direction. And when a year later Stanford University offered him a half-time teaching job at a full-time salary, it was more than this child of the Depression could resist.

The rest, as they say, is history—nearly fifty years of it spent in the Palo Alto foothills behind Stanford, and more than enough to qualify him as an immigrant Californian. California, with its complex, pluralistic society, cultural diversification, and sheer worldliness, was precisely the environment for a man fleeing the provincial backwaters from whence he came but unable to find consoling habitat in the hills and hummocks east of the Mississippi.

In July of 1945 Stegner wrote an enthusiastic letter to his old friend and one-time University of Wisconsin colleague, Philip Gray:

California, that is Palo Alto, is not wilderness, coming at three thousand an acre and selling altogether too fast at that price. It is very pleasant country, for all that: golden wild-oat hills dotted with marvelous old live oaks and bay trees, with a dark pine-covered ridge of the coast range behind, and in front the hills dropping down over orchards and town to the bay, and beyond the bay the barren gold ridge of the San Jose Mountains with Mount Diablo coming up in the midst of it.

It was the beginning of a long-term love/hate affair with a region he would describe in a Saturday Review essay (included in this volume, “The West Coast: Region with a View”) as “America only more so,” and it would remain his home for the rest of his life.

Perhaps love/hate is too strong. But Stegner’s initial enthusiasm for this “region with a view” certainly tempered over time as those hillsides and orchards were transformed by development into an endless suburb stretching from San Francisco to San Jose, and as the home he built in 1949 in the Los Altos Hills became inexorably surrounded by mini-mansions and starter castles. A good deal of his time over the ensuing years was spent fighting that development and arguing for the preservation of open spaces. Asked by Richard Etulain (in Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake, 1983) if he was optimistic about the future of the West, Stegner offered a qualified “no.” The few things that had been done right in the West were belated, he said, inadequate, too little, too late, and while he was speaking specifically of the inter-mountain West, his opinion included California—only more so. Nevertheless, counting himself among its permanent inhabitants, he felt a moral responsibility to the place which he forevermore would call home, and while, as noted, he was no native son of the Golden West, over the years he did as much as any aboriginal toward the advancement of its cultural environment and the protection of its natural surroundings.
In must be said, however, that the “essential” Wallace Stegner was never so parochial or sub-regional in his literary output as to be categorized as a “California writer,” unless that term refers only to living space. Relatively few of his 35 published books, 57 short stories, 242 articles, 164 forewords, afterwords, introductions, essays, chapters, and critical prefaces to other people’s work are set in, or have anything to do with, that “terrestrial paradise” so named by our esteemed sixteenth-century composer of episodic novels, Garci Ordóñez Rodríguez de Montalvo. All the Little Live Things, A Shooting Star, two sections of Angle of Repose, and five short stories comprise the regional oeuvre—which seems remarkably little for so prolific a writer.

The New York Times, identifying him as “William” Stegner, went on to describe him as “the Dean of Western writers.” That is perhaps closer to the truth, as most of his work was concerned with that much broader region, and as various localities west of the hundredth meridian claim him as one of their very own. The State of Utah counts him a native son, though he wasn’t, quite, and the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law has created the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment in his honor. Montana, where he lived for one year when he was eleven, also argues for a piece of the action. Montana State University at Bozeman has created the Wallace Stegner Chair in Western Studies to commemorate his passing through. The Eastend Arts Council in Eastend, Saskatchewan, where he attended grammar school and learned those frontier attitudes and cowboy codes of conduct he said he’d spent much of his life trying to escape (not altogether successfully), has restored the house his father built in the town in 1915 (now called The Wallace Stegner House), transforming it into quarters for artists in residence. And then there’s the State of Vermont, the setting for two of his novels and five short stories, where he spent many summers of his life at his summer home on Baker Hill in the village of Greensboro, and where, in accordance with his written instructions, his ashes were scattered after his death.

But when the maples started to turn outside his “think house” on that hill and Vermonters started covering up their tomatoes in anticipation of an early frost, it was back to northern California, his home in Los Altos Hills, his duties as director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. As much as anything it is that writing program that identifies him with the state and its contribution to literary culture. Founded by Stegner in 1946, it became, under the twenty-five years of his guidance, a virtual Who’s Who of contemporary American writers—writers like Eugene Burdick, Tillie Olsen, Max Apple, Evan Connell, Steve Dixon, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Ed McClanahan, Nancy Packer, Ernest Gaines, Merrill Joan Gerber, Scott Turow, Wendell Berry, Kenneth Fields, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, Edward Abbey, Al Young, James D. Houston, John Daniel, N. Scott Momaday, Thomas McGuane, Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Ray Carver, William Kittredge. “Stegner Fellows” they were called. “Stegner Fellows” they are still called, fifteen years after his death, and in spite of the fact that not long after his retirement, furious with the Stanford English department for hiring a postmodern, avant-garde, experimental writer whose work was an insult to everything Stegner stood for artistically, he tried to have his name deleted from the program. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

But he did retire early. As he explained to Richard Etulain:

I…was pretty fed up with the disruptions of the sixties. It was no fun teaching.…So I decided I had other things to do, and it was getting on toward the time when I had only a few years to do them in…and I’ve managed to get three or four books into the years since.

Those few years turned out to be, in fact, twenty-one years (Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1993 from injuries sustained in a car accident), and the books he turned out over that period included four more novels, Angle of Repose (which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972), The Spectator Bird (which received the National Book Award in 1977), Recapitulation, and Crossing to Safety; a biography of Bernard DeVoto, The Uneasy Chair (along with an edition of his letters); and four collections of essays, American Places (with Page Stegner and Eliot Porter), One Way to Spell Man (for which he received the prestigious John Muir Award from the Sierra Club), The American West as Living Space, and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. A fifth collection, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, edited posthumously, was published five years after his death.

Betwixt and between this flurry of activity he wrote forewords and afterwords to a half-dozen books by other people, gave countless lectures and talks, traveled frequently to receive honorary doctorates from the University of Montana and Middlebury College, the first Robert Kirsh Award for Life Achievement from the Los Angeles Times, the John Muir Award for contributions to conservation from the Sierra Club, the Western History Association Prize, the Governor’s Award for the Arts from the California Arts Council, the PEN USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, The Cyril Magnin Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Only when he was to receive a National Medal for the Arts Award from President George H. W. Bush did he stay home, declining the honor in protest over political controls imposed by the administration on the National Endowment for the Arts:

I believe strongly in government support for the arts—believe, in fact, that a government that does not support the arts harms both itself and the nation. I also believe that support is meaningless, even harmful, if it restricts the imaginative freedom of those to whom it is given.

Asked why, in retirement, and fast approaching his seventy-fifth year, he continued taking on new projects, new assignments, new deadlines, he told Richard Etulain:

It’s like a beaver’s teeth—he has to chew or else his jaws lock shut…You keep doing it because that’s really what you’re made to do, that’s what you want to do, and everything that you do projects you one stone further…so you throw another rock, until you just wear out.