Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
WALLACE STEGNER
INTRODUCTION - Terry Tempest Williams
I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
AFTERWORD
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Copyright Page
For M.P.S., in gratitude for more than
a half century of love and friendship,
and to the friends we were both blessed by.
I could give all to Time except—except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.
ROBERT FROST
WALLACE STEGNER
Wallace Earle Stegner, the award-winning novelist, biographer, historian, essayist, critic, environmentalist, and teacher who pursued the truths that lay behind the mythology of the American West, was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, on February 18, 1909. He grew up in countless boom-and-bust towns all over the West as his father shuttled the family through Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, and Nevada before finally settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Stegner entered the University of Utah in 1925 and started writing fiction while a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the 1930s. He began his teaching career at the University of Utah and later taught at both the University of Wisconsin and Harvard. From 1946 until his retirement in 1971 Stegner headed the prestigious creative writing program at Stanford, which has had a profound effect upon contemporary American fiction. Twice a Guggenheim Fellow, he was also a Senior Fellow of the National Institute for the Humanities as well as a member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stegner made an auspicious literary debut in 1937 with Remembering Laughter, a rueful tale about an adulterous triangle in Iowa farm country that evoked comparisons with Ethan Frome. His next three novels— The Potter’s House (1938), On a Darkling Plain (1940), and Fire and Ice (1941)—disappointed reviewers. But he enjoyed widespread popular and critical success with The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), a semiautobiographical chronicle of a nomadic family drifting through the West in search of an easy life that is always just out of reach. His other novels of this period include Second Growth (1947), a story about the conflict between puritanical values and modern morality in a New England town, and The Preacher and the Slave (1950), a brilliantly imagined portrait of Joseph Hillstrom, the legendary outlaw and labor organizer who became a martyr following his execution for murder in 1915. After abandoning long fiction for more than a decade Stegner returned to novel writing with A Shooting Star (1961), the bestselling story of one woman’s hard-won triumphs over the irrational drives that have brought her to the edge of doom, and All the Little Live Things (1967), the tale of a New York literary agent who retires to California only to be engulfed by the chaos of the 1960s.
Meanwhile Stegner gained a whole new readership with his probing works of nonfiction. In Mormon Country (1941) and The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964) he dramatically recounted the epic history of the Mormons. In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), a biography of naturalist and explorer John Wesley Powell, he presented a fascinating look at the old American West as seen through the eyes of the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it. And in Wolf Willow (1962), a memoir of his boyhood in southern Saskatchewan, he offered an enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of the modern world. Saturday Review judged Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and Wolf Willow “two of the most important Western books of the decade. . . . Both are so to speak geo-history, intensified, sharpened, made viable and useful by poetic insights and a keen intelligence.” Stegner’s enchantment with the West is reflected too in the essays collected in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969) and One Way to Spell Man (1982), two volumes that also voice his frontline views on wilderness conservation. As Wendell Berry observed: “Stegner is a new kind of American writer, one who not only writes about his region, but also does his best to protect it . . . from its would-be exploiters and destroyers.”
Stegner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, which came out in 1971. “Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel,” wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. “[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is ‘historical,’ an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike recreation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”
“Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything— about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future,” remarked Stegner. “It has something to say about the relations of a man with his ancestors and his descendants. It is also a novel about cultural transplantation. It sets one man’s impulse to build and create in the West against his cultivated wife’s yearning for the cultural opportunities she left in the East. Through the eyes of their grandson (a man living today) it appraises the conflict of openness and change with the Victorian pattern of ingrained responsibilities and reticences; and in the entangled emotional life of the narrator it finds a parallel for the emotional lesions in the lives of the grandparents. It finds, that is, the present in the past and the past in the present; and in the activities of a very young (and very modern) secretary-assistant it reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers’ feet beat dusty.”
Stegner enjoyed great critical acclaim for his next work, The Uneasy Chair (1974), a full-scale biography of Bernard DeVoto, the historian, novelist, and ferociously funny critic of American society. “[This] book is full of dramatic episodes and offers, from a special point of view, a battlefield panorama of the literary world from 1920 to 1955,” said Malcolm Cowley. “[Stegner] is an ideal biographer for DeVoto. Their careers sometimes crossed. . . . Both were brought up in Utah. . . . And both, as Stegner says, were ‘novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us.’ ” Time agreed: “The Uneasy Chair consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.”
In 1977 Stegner won a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976), in which he again depicted literary agent Joe Allston, the protagonist of All the Little Live Things. Likewise in Recapitulation (1979) Stegner resurrected Bruce Mason, a character from The Big Rock Candy Mountain, to assess the course his life has taken. “This is Stegner’s The Sound and the Fury,” said the novelist’s biographer Jackson Benson. “Like the Faulkner novel, Recapitulation is a book about time and its multiplicity of meanings in human experience, about the histo
Although Stegner is perhaps best known for his novels, he also garnered substantial acclaim and three O. Henry Awards for his short fiction. Over the years he published nearly fifty short stories in such magazines as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly. Some were reprinted in the collections The Women on the Wall (1948) and The City of the Living (1956). In addition his work was often featured in editions of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards as well as the annual series The Best American Short Stories. “Stegner’s short fiction is unparalleled for the clarity and depth of its human insights,” remarked James Dickey. “This fact, coupled with the unobtrusive yet highly individual style that only he commands, places him among the masters by whom later practitioners of the form will be judged.” Upon publication of Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner in 1990, Anne Tyler noted: “Wallace Stegner has been steadily enriching readers’ lives for more than half a century. . . . His admirers will take him any way they can get him—novels, essays, biographies—but after sinking into these stories gathered from a ‘lifetime of writing,’ we can’t help but mourn the passing of his short-story days. These stories are so large; they’re so wholehearted. Plainly, he never set out to write a mere short story. It was all or nothing.” George Garrett concurred: “Every story in Stegner’s Collected Stories bears the indelible signature of an artist.”
Stegner’s final book, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, another collection of essays about the West, came out in 1992. The Los Angeles Times Book Review deemed it “the essential Stegner . . . the brilliant crystallization of his lifetime of thinking about the American West.” Wallace Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, of injuries resulting from a car accident. Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, a compilation comprising many of his unpublished essays about the West, appeared posthumously in 1998. As the Los Angeles Times observed: “The reader of Stegner’s writing is immediately reminded of an essential America. . . . A distinct place, a unique people, a common history, and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can.”
INTRODUCTION
Terry Tempest Williams
When I think of Wallace Stegner, I think of a man who offers us his hunger for justice and his love of possibility. He is a writer who acknowledges the human desire to grow, to struggle, to make mistakes, to rise in small moments of greatness and find personal redemption in being “a sticker,” the dignity found in choosing to stay rather than following the impulse to leave. He has little patience for “the booster,” whom he sees as someone who is simply moving through, exploiting a person or a place for his own gain.
Stegner’s overriding ethos, on the page and in the world, is simple and straightforward: What does it mean to love? It is exactly this question that brings me back to Wallace Stegner’s work over and over again.
Crossing to Safety is a love story, not in the sense of titillating dialogue and actions, but in the sense that it explores private lives. No outsider ever knows the interior landscape of a marriage. It is one of the great secrets kept between couples. Whether the nature of physical and emotional intimacy in marriage goes largely unspoken out of respect and loyalty, a sense of propriety held between husbands and wives (not found between lovers), or more out of the terror of unleashing a thousand barking hounds in pursuit of a mythical fox is difficult to say. The hunt for love is always on, and in some tragic, truthful, stunning way it forever eludes us. Our imaginations pick up where our lives fall short. Stegner understands and invites us inside the domain of partnership.
Crossing to Safety is a quiet novel. It is a story of an evolving and enduring friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans, who meet while beginning academic careers in Madison, Wisconsin, during the Great Depression. Larry Morgan, the narrator, is more writer than professor, western and without advantage. His sensibility is rooted in the arid landscape of New Mexico. Sid Lang is more professor than writer, eastern and endowed with family wealth. His consciousness has been shaped by the Transcendentalist nature of New England. Sally Morgan is gentle in her strength, wide in her humanity, and a model of perseverance as she lives with polio. Charity Lang is relentless in her love, her generosity, the force of her will, and her desire to manipulate, control, and choreograph the world around her. She is the hub of this relational wheel.
And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is . . . held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
The rarity of friendship, the complexity of friendships as they metamorphose through time—this is the drama Wallace Stegner builds word by word, scene by scene. It has an internal tension wrought by memory, the what-ifs and if-onlys that devour us when we fall prey to the past and future. We bear witness as friends share dreams, first babies and first novels, disappointments and failures, the dismissals from universities, the loss and gain of tenure, all part of the petty turf wars within the academy that create the deep history of regard, regret, and respect among colleagues. Through his characters Stegner slowly, gradually opens wide the doors and windows inside relationships. Crossing to Safety becomes a book about ambitions, hungers, triumphs, and accommodations both in the landscape of marriage and in the terrain of shared and private lives.
“Drama,” Stegner writes,
demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting. Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome. Given the usual direction of contemporary fiction and the usual contemporary notions of human character and conduct, what more plausible than that Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat unmalleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. . . .
The possibilities are diverse, for friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to Charity. She is an impressive woman. . . . There are other possibilities, too: Sid with me, Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. . . .
Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Something less orthodoxly dramatic is.
In response to Larry Morgan’s question “How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?” Carl Brandt, Stegner’s friend and agent for many years, said this:
The road to maturity flows through accommodation in some serious sense. The first step is the recognition of mortality, of limited time, of limited arms with which to fight. One’s hunger can never be satisfied because of those limits. . . . To stay, to keep one’s promises, to fulfill one’s obligations does require courage. But to do it well is truly grace under pressure. It also has something to do with age. It’s impossible not to look back and wonder what would have happened if you had had the wit, or guts, or luck to go in some other direction. Such looking back is not an assault on the present. You might, in fact, call it a howl of rage against the inevitable future.
Perhaps this is the literary genius of this most American of writers: He understood that part of the tension of being human is found in our desire for, and love affair with, both risk and security. What do we risk in our quest for security? What do we secure in a life of risk? And where are the motivations behind creating a life of meaning in the presence of uncertainty? Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute.
. . . We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. . . .
I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.
The personal in Stegner’s fiction becomes the universal. Impatience turns to patience. Reservations become possibilities of transformation. We find the musings of Larry Morgan turbulent in their truth-telling. That’s why we read, to understand what we have not dared to consider, to see ourselves in the characters portrayed.
This is the sorcery of literature. This is the alchemy of Wallace Stegner’s pen.
In reading Crossing to Safety, I begin reading my own relationships, wondering what accommodations I have made, need to make, and why, what risks of the heart are worth taking, and what I wish to create in the choreography of love. The circle of our friendships holds us in place with its possibilities.
Consider this scene: Charity has just given birth to the Langs’ third child. Larry has just received word that his first novel will be published. Sally is about to give birth at any moment. A party ensues. Sid and Larry break open bottles of champagne.
Whup! His cork hits the ceiling. Whup! Mine follows. Cheers. People drain their glasses, and hold their empties toward us, and we pour. Then Sid is lifting his glass and calling for quiet. Finally he gets it. Sally, I see, is back on the couch. I move to get to her with the champagne bottle, but she raises her glass to show me that someone has already provided.