Customer Reviews

Wallace Stegner and the American West

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Philip Fradkin, a Los Angeles Times reporter turned environmental historian, has given us a skillful biography of an important novelist, teacher, essayist, and environmental activist. Despite a tough childhood roaming the hardscrabble northern prairies and intermountain West, Stegner earned a Ph.D., taught at Harvard, and established Stanford University's creating writing program just after World War II. That program assembled a long list of fabulously gifted writers, and well before Stegner left it in 1971, he and his students (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Thomas McGuane, Edward Abbey, Evan Connell, etc.) were thoroughly reimagining the literary West. Fradkin's work complements two earlier biographies by shifting the focus from Stegner's literary achievement to "the whole man ... set against the passing backdrops of his life." The attention to place is fitting, and Fradkin expertly reveals a canny, forthright figure in twentieth-century American letters. Highly recommended.

In his autobiographical novel Recapitulation (1979), Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) wrote of his character that "all his earliest years in Salt Lake had been an effort, much of the time as unconscious as growth itself and yet always there as if willed, to outgrow what he was and become what he was not. A stray, he yearned to belong. An outsider and an isolate, he aspired to friends and family and the community solidarity he saw all around him in that Mormon city" (41). In this comprehensive biography of Stegner, published to coincide with the centennial of his birth and written with the full cooperation of Stegner's only child, Page, Philip Fradkin shows just how true that was of his subject.

Stegner's earliest years began in an orphanage in Seattle, the drought-stricken frontier prairie of Saskatchewan homesteaders, a year in Great Falls, Montana (where at age eleven he encountered his first flush toilet and bath tub), and then twelve years in Salt Lake City and the University of Utah: "the happiest years I ever knew or will know." His father was a gambler and a bootlegger who moved the family twenty times in ten years to avoid raids, a man with a violent temper who died in a murder-suicide. Stegner hated his father and inherited that temper. He was plagued by guilt over his mother's hard life, and devoted to Mary, his wife of fifty-nine years.

Later years took Stegner to Harvard and then Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program and nurtured future writers like Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry. Although he lived in the Stanford area for almost fifty years, he felt alienated from the university by the time he left, and a bitter argument led him to donate his papers to the University of Utah. A man who wrote eloquently about the power of place, he spent considerable time at a home in Vermont, which is where his ashes were spread after he died. Stegner won almost every literary award there is and his books have been translated into numerous languages, yet he was forever cast as a "regional" author and felt spurned by the east coast elites. His novel Angle of Repose won a Pulitzer in 1972 but was later mired in controversial and genuinely complex charges of plagiarism. Outwardly successful, Stegner was inwardly deeply insecure.

As Fradkin points out in his introduction, the previous two biographies of Stegner in 1997 and 1996 were written by professors of literature. He paints with a broader brush and hangs his narrative on the three major components of Stegner's life and work -- Talented Teacher, Reluctant Conservationist, and Prominent Author. Fradkin honors Stegner but does not ignore the many contradictions in his life. Did he ever fit in or "become what he was not?" It's doubtful, Fradkin suggests; the autobiographical character Bruce Mason in Stegner's novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain asks, "But going home where. . . Where do I belong in this?" A bibliography of books by and about Stegner, along with a number of photos, complete the volume.

A simply marvelous work. It flows like a novel, contains references that enhance the work and never strays from the subject. Wonderfully executed. A very keen insight to a complex personality. It renewed my interest in reading the books by Stegner I haven't yet read and likewise, makes me want to read more of Philip Fradkin.

I had been an avid reader of Stegner for many years and lost all my books in the hurricane Iniki on Kauai. After reading this book, I'm buying all my old books again. This book, in providing the story of Stegner's life and career, and his writing, awakens the desire to re-read those books I've previously owned, and to read all the new stories I haven't. If you like Stegner, you should own and read this book.Wallace Stegner and the American West

Sadly, I have to disagree with the other reviews here. Stegner is a favorite author, so I looked forward to reading this biography. Unfortunately, it is my opinion that Fradkin is simply not a good writer. The book is clunky, disjointed and just not well written. I feel like it was written by someone who read a "How to Write Biography" book--all the elements on the check list are there--it's just the art that's missing. Too bad. Sounds like I'm a dissenting opinion, but honestly, especially as I moved through the second half of the book, I found myself exclaiming aloud about poor transitions, nonsensical sentences, broad conclusions not supported by the text and just downright poorly written text, etc. The life of Stegner is interesting. It's just too bad someone at his level couldn't have written his biography.

Not only was this book interesting it was well written and engaging. Frankin divides the prolific Stegner, usually classified as a "Western Writer" into three phases: teacher, conservationist and writer. All three phases overlap. Stegner taught some of the most famous writers (particularly those labeled "western") in the United States: McMurtry, Ken Kesey (who he did not like and may have modeled the motorcycle maniac in "All the Little Live Things" after), Carson McCullers, Edward Abbey to name a few. He was friends with Ansel Adams, one of the Udall's (who enticed Stegner to join the board of the National Parks, and, for a short while, his Senate staff) and a myriad of other writers and thinkers of the west. Stegner is portrayed as both a hopeful visionary of the potential of the west and a disillusioned traditionalist unhappy with the way the world was moving. He was not happy with the hippie generation at all, finding it dismissive of important values. But, he considered himself to be a liberal and worked towards environmental awareness and care but through reasonable measures.

Fradkin does not focus much on Stegner's personal life, perhaps because this life is not known or perhaps because he doesn't think it's relevant to his portrayal. But he does engage in significant research, relying on letters, interviews, and notes recently released to public view.

Mary, Stegner's wife, is not developed. The one characteristic that seems clear about her is that she was a severe hypochondriac, and Stegner took care of her. After reading the book, I am eager to return to several of Stengner's books (most notably Angle of REpose, Crossing to Safety and Beyond the 100th meridian). Fradkin devotes several chapters to the plagarism controversy surrounding Angle of Repose and the accusations that Stegner "borrowed" material and did not disguise the characters as the family upon which they were modeled, had wished. It was interesting to see all the intersections between Stegner's life and the characters in his fiction.

Because I am jaundiced I probably have no right to comment on this book. Although I taught environmental history for a decade or more, I couldn't quite place Wallace Stegner when a friend mentioned his name a few weeks before I became aware of Fradkin's biography. Somehow my mind came up with a jumble of Wallace Stevens and Robinson Jeffers. Then I saw the author in a book talk and caught a bit of the Stegner conference in Pt. Reyes Station CA. I am bothered by all the hullabaloo. The word that comes to mind is chauvinism, western chauvinism. I haven't read novels in 30 or 40 years, so what right have I to comment. But Fradkin mirroring Stegner is a western chauvinist, though Stenger seemed to reject that in his adoption of Vermont as a place of realized landscape dreams in contrast to the West, a place of failed dreams, exploitation, and abandonment. This chauvinism, which so bothers me in California (when I say that I like going to New England in the deep winter, Californians look at me as if I am mad), was there in the Pt. Reyes conference, a praise of the surrounding landscape neglecting the fact that it is one of the richest communities in the US and its preservation both as pseudo wilderness and agricultural community is a direct function of its gentrification.

So what about the role of place? Stegner spent part of a childhood in southern Saskatchewan. Fradkin and Stegner would have us see that as the frontier a la Turner's hypothesis. Yet Turner's frontier had already closed and what Stegner's father was chasing was $2 a bushel wheat, a result of the prosperity after the turn of the century and then the demand created by WWI. Pointing to the massive creation of farms in those years was the revisionist historians' answer to the end-of-the-frontier theory. When the bottled up US was supposed to be turning on itself it was actually expanding at a rate equal to if not greater than before. Stegner's childhood in Saskatchewan influenced him but it is hard to see that in his pretty much middle class growing up and college years in Utah adorned with vacations fishing in the mountains near Salt Lake City. In reading Fradkin's biography, I have a hard time seeing the influence of those early years. In contrast, Farley Mowat's book about his childhood Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf a little further north is rooted in place and even as his father (like Stegner's) is peripatetic. Place is evident is a detailed description on nature and it effects on the author's life. From Utah, Stegner goes to Iowa where he is "'offended' by endless green of the Midwest." In his nostalgia he misses the nature which actually surrounded him. While Stegner was going to graduate school and teaching he is unaware that at the University the great ecologist Paul Errington was bringing the landscape of Iowa ponds alive in his studies of muskrats. He had a real sense of place.

Fradkin's book is odd in that, besides Stegner's childhood in Saskatchewan, the first hundred or so pages of the book are about a kind of bourgeois professor and his professional life. While reading I kept asking myself why writing about Stegner was such a celebration of the West. Stegner was obviously a great writing teacher and the list of his students is truly impressive. Yet besides Fradkin constantly emphasizing it, place in this aspect of his life hard to find. And from the quotes Fradkin gives, it is Vermont and not the West where Stegner expresses a sense of place. Yet Fradkin has to get in an anti-Eastern dig. At the Bread Loaf writers workshop in Middlebury VT in 1938 Fradkin tell us "they lived on top of a mountain--actually, more a hill by western standards..." Yet as much as Stegner is a romantic about mountains he chose to spend time in these hills and when he taught at Stanford for many years, the hills of Los Altos which was ex-urbia California, yes beautiful before Silicon Valley fancy houses spread into them but ex-urbia nonetheless. Place in my mind is very different from the rich people of Pt. Reyes loving to walk along the ocean or among the Bishop pines with little hands on experience in living in the place the way the last of the farmers there have or one of the world's best birders who since childhood has covered ever inch of Pt. Reyes and has an uncanny sense of where and when what species will show up and when it did for every season of the last 40 years, a sense of place like that of Wendell Berry (a Stegner student) who would neither let his name be considered for a Macarthur fellowship nor leave his farm for a full time position at Stanford. Stegner understood that Berry had a kind of integrity about place that Stegner himself lacked.

What Western chauvinists miss about American history is that Cape Cod was once the West as was Ohio when General Clark (the father of Lewis's partner Clark) came wandering in murdering Indians, burning their villages and clearing the forests to make farms. His son moved on like very very many of the pioneers: develop place to increase its value and sell it to the next wave of immigrants. Also cut down the forests, mine, the water and devil take the consequences. The destruction of the Merrimack River is no less the despoliation of the landscape than western mining and water ranching. And by the time Stegner began summering there, the seemingly eternal landscape of Vermont had already been so devastated by logging and sheep that its infertile, abandoned farms were beginning to recover. It is hard to make a claim for Stegner's connectedness to Vermont having only spent one winter because his hands got to cold. (Further his insensitivity to the people who really lived there came from his obvious unflattering references to real people in a novel. He wondered why he was never really accepted. What did he expect? He was a cosmopolitan like Edward Hoagland Notes from The Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia (Modern Library Exploration), passing through a place winning people's trust and then using them in his writing in a way that left them feeling betrayed.) This general behavior fits American romantic idea that one is rooted in the many places we visit or vacation in. It is a mixed bag and one earns one's existential spurs a la place by really living there. Few of us do. There are bits of it in Stegner's working with Vermonters or doing chores in his Los Altos Hills home. I know what he means when he spend a couple hours cutting wood as a break from his writing. I used to cut by hand my firewood every morning in the New Hampshire renovated chicken coop in which I lived. There was nothing like dressed only in shirt sleeves in first sunlight at zero degrees F., steam snorting from my nostrils, the back and forth of the Swede saw, then watching the frozen rock maple, fire cherry, and ash explode apart with the touch of my splitting maul.

Fradkin's biography turns interesting for me when Stegner worked with Stuart Udall and the Department of Interior. Stegner really seems to have effect on conservation policy. But he does not hang in there. He drops out of the Sierra Club when things become sticky. This novelist's aloofness comes out again in Stegner's rejection of the beat and then hippie revolution. He sees Stanford destroyed by the antiwar movement. (An opinion with which Fradkin agrees, taking no independent look at what was happening.) And Stegner rejects the literature and activism of his students like Kesey, taking a particular dislike of Gary Snyder (who in a Zen monastery in Japan was not hippie and when living in the Sierras for 40 years became one of the most authentic spokesmen for a sense of place). In this Stegner reminds me of Kerouac who couldn't stand being upstaged by the people he influenced. Maybe Stegner helped set off the environmental movement, but he then seems to have become bitter. He did defend open spaces in Los Altos hills but was that just another NIMBY by well-to-do people?

So what is the conclusion here. I suppose I will have to read some of Stegner's novels. I also have to give him credit for influencing so many contemporary writers. I would have wished a more balanced and critical biography from Fradkin and more sense of American history as a whole. (I had trouble with particular historical references like: in '37 at Madison, S. went to Young Communist League meetings whose "membership swollen by" NYC Jews barred from the ivy leagues. F. doesn't mention WI Wasp progressives, La Follette folk, the coop movement etc. or F. says S.'s book on Joe Hill in 1950 "was a victim of bad timing. A far-left leader did not have much appeal during the McCarthy era." Forgetting that in '50 there still were millions of left leaners. Or stating that in the 1990s Silicon Valley was the economic engine driving the Bay Area, despite San Francisco being a great financial capital, along with the huge mega-versities and a real-estate boom driven by a migration to the coast.) I would have wanted more explicit examples of the role of place in Stegner' life rather than just mentioning that it does. Otherwise, the Fradkin's book did opened for me up some interesting aspects of the cultural aspects of American environmental history that I need to further explore.
Charlie Fisher, author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World