At the same time, Stegner's phrases are sometimes magical: he had me quite entranced in the opening pages:
"So tonight I can sit here with the tape recorder whirring no more noisily than electrified time, and say into the microphone the place and date of a sort of a beginning and a sort of a return: Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, April 12, 1970.Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn't believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was."
I love some of those phrases! ...Whirring no more noisily than electrified time! Time, I love how he examines time itself, plays chess with it, tips his hat to it, even as the lazing surface belies the swift current. Lucky that he charmed me so early, because it took a certain dedication to finish reading the book. This book won a Pulitzer Prize, and while it is very well written, it is extremely slow-moving and requires several kinds of patience to finish it. I spoke with two co-workers who had started the book, but neither one finished it. One of them said that the book was "just too slow" and the other said he found the main character (Lyman Ward) too unlikeable and decided he was spending too much time with someone he didn't like:-) I can certainly sympathize with both viewpoints, the book tried my own patience on several fronts.
After my initial enchantment, I quickly reversed and found Lyman easy to dislike, with his rigid biases and continual crankiness, so I had to step back and take a deep breath many times. For one thing, I kept thinking that he completely lacked a female perspective as he reconstructed his grandmother's life (with Susan, herself, long dead and unable to clarify or defend herself) and also that he was jumping to strange and unwarranted conclusions as he read his grandmother's letters ...particularly assumptions about the close friendship of Susan and her best friend, Augusta:
"What is more eyebrow-raising is the suggestion of lesbianism in this friendship, a suggestion that in some early letters is uncomfortably explicit. (Good night, sweetheart. When you are here some stifling night like this we will creep out in the darkness and lave ourselves in the fountain.)...From a dozen hints, beginning with Augusta's "bold and graceful hand," we might conclude that Susan's friend was an incipient dike."
Huh??? More likely I would conclude that Lyman is a fruitcake with an unreasoning fear of women and affection. Okay ...you can see that I found him irritating.
However, over time, I made peace with Lyman. Grudgingly, he revealed more complexity: stubborness balanced a bit by acceptance of his own limitations, and a very subtle sense of humor. At first, I wasn't sure whether certain tones indicated humorous appreciation or denoted sarcasm. Gradually I gained a better sense, as when Lyman, physically ravaged and mostly confined to a wheelchair, encountered a boyhood acquaintance:
"Thun of a bith!" he said. "Lyman!"He pumped my hand. I was afraid he was going to pound me on the back, but I should have known Al better. Having been a freak all his life, he has a tenderness for other freaks. Even while he was still shaking my hand and thun of a bithing and saying, Thay, boy, ith nithe to thee you, those odd compound eyes were touching and taking in, and shyly withdrawing from, the chair, the stiff neck, the crutches in their cradle, the stump under the pinned flap of trouser leg.
"Thomebody told me you were back living on the old plathe, " he said. "I been thinking I might drop out and thay hello, but you know. Bithneth. Haw are you, anyway?"
..."Bone disease."
His laughter had already modulated into sympathy. "Tough." He shook his head, and in the middle of a shake I saw him realize that I couldn't shake mine, that I was looking up at him under my eyebrows because I couldn't tilt my head back. He sat down quickly on the Bendix crate to bring himself closer to my level. Few people are that understanding or that considerate."
I think, by the end, I was more empathetic of Lyman and more accepting of our different viewpoints. I felt I had gained some understanding of him, which is why I was completely taken aback by the last chapter. Hey, I admit it, my mouth was hanging open in shock at the sudden turn of events. Thus far, the story unfolded in a very slow, regular series of subtle changes accompanying the slow passage of time. In no way was I prepared for the sudden change of story flow and writing style. It was so startling that I found myself wondering if the author had been conked on the head and an intruder was finishing the book! The change is eventually explained, but I was still feeling disoriented upon reaching the final passage.
In the spirit of allowing other readers to have their own experience, I won't elaborate ...perhaps it shows that the events of his grandparents' lives have been steadily nudging at his avoidance of his own current relationships ...possibly resulting in a sudden landslide of awareness overcoming denial? I would be glad to hear others' impressions of why Stegner chose to end the book this way.
One compelling aspect of the book for me was the sparkling descriptions of place. This is the key to drawing me into a story, and there are many phenomenally beautiful descriptions in this book. I also loved feeling that I was back in time and history with Susan and feeling something about life in those times, like Susan's daily life in the 1876 mining settlement of New Almaden, twelve miles by stagecoach from San Jose, California. Just days passing --mornings, afternoons, evenings:
"In the early morning the light leaned on these eastward-facing mountains. She could see it gilding the ridges southward and making a moire of the varying leaf-faces of oak, madrone, and bay in the gulches. The fogfall that lay along the crest in a cottony roll was as white as the clouds of a fairytale." (105)"Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be --a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and expired again, tired as a sigh."
"The dog lay at their feet on the veranda. Along the ridge with its silvery comb of fog the sky faded from pale blue to steely gray, and then slowly flushed the color of a ripe peach. The trees on the crest --redwoods, Oliver said-- burned for a few seconds and went black. Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red, then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, finally soft black."
I found Stegner's descriptions of time, both it's moment-to-moment fading flow and the longer passage of aging and of lives lived, to be dextrous and often haunting:
"At seven in the morning it is quiet in the house, quiet in the yard, quiet across the pine hills. The freeway is a murmur hardly louder than the chiming hum that millions of pine needles make in a little wind. I roll to the door and onto the porch that Grandmother referred to as the piazza. Ed has brought the rose garden in the courtyard back, though it isn't what it was in my grandfather's time. It, with the mown lawn and the pines beyond, stares back at me like an old photograph caught between the ticks of time. It all looks as it looked in my boyhood, when I was back from school for the summer. My eyes have not changed, the St. Paul's boy is still there. I feel sorry for him, imprisoned in nearly sixty years of living, chained to a chair, caged in a maimed and petrified body. For an instant the familiar grounds glare and tremble, the prisoner rages at his bars. It would be easy to call it quits....Behind the pines the sun is a shifting dazzle. It breaks through and glitters along the wet grass. Golden-crowned sparrows are hopping and pecking among the roses, a robin cocks his head to the underground noise of a worm out on the lawn, a pine top shakes to the impetuous landing of a jay. Off on the freeway I hear a diesel coming, shifting down as the hill steepens. Each gear is a lower tone, heavier and more laboring. Doppler Effect? Not quite. But I like the sound of these things better when they are shifting upward through their web of gears, not shifting down. Shifting down, they remind me too much of myself."
Perhaps nothing could be as haunting as the vicarious memories he builds for us, the substance of what may have been Susan's inner light and shadow in the last 40 years of her very long life. Sensations ... sight, sounds, emotions --joy that foreshadows sorrow.
...The sounds of miners at work, traveling through stone:
"Put your ear against the wall,"She pushed her hat askew and leaned her cheek against wet rock, "I don't ...oh, yes! Yes, plainly!"
Tak, said the stone against her straining ear. Tak ...tak ...tak ...tak. Then it stopped. She held her breath until the sound resumed. Tak ...tak ...tak.
"Understand their language?" Mr. Prager said.
"Is it a language? It's more like a pulse. It's like the stone heart of the mountain beating."
...or the absence of sound deep in Boise Canyon, a landscape now hidden under the waters of Idaho's Arrow-rock Reservoir, but Susan's home in 1887:
"The ragged flame along the wick trembled without sound.And outside the silent house, the silent moon-whited mountains the vacant moon-faded sky. No cry of bird or animal, no rattle of hoofs among stones, no movement except the ghostly flash along the surface of the river, no noise except the mutter of water as muted as rumination.
...her moonlit emptiness was so great that she said aloud, "Oh, it's like trying to communicate from beyond the grave!"
1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show.
...but Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-television, pre-record player."
The joy beloved children bring ...
"She charms us, makes us laugh, awes us, frightens us almost. How she came among us on our crude frontier I shall never know. It is that double rainbow she was born under. She comes from a better world than this, and she has moments of remembering it. She speaks with the fairies. Sometimes I sit and watch her playing quietly in my workroom when the other two are at their lessons, and I see pass over her sweet little face reflections of some pure life she lives within herself. She conducts conversations with invisible playmates, sings songs that she makes up herself, draws pictures with a confidence and imagination that her mother, at least thinks utterly remarkable for a three-year-old. There is no doubt which of my children will be the artist of the family. When she looks up at me and laughs it is as if someone had thrown open the windows of a stuffy house and let the clean sea air rush in."
The grief that will become more muted with passing decades, but never vanish:
"Yet the one rose that remains, the old Harison's yellow on the piazza corner, has the power to disturb me more with its promise of life than all the others with their reminder of death. I can hardly wait for it to bloom again, though I know that when it does I shall cry myself sick. As you know, it came into its first blooming in the canyon the summer Agnes was born. When I came out into the sun for the first time, and she lay in her cradle in the entry, that golden profuseness yellowed the air all above her face, and scented the whole yard....do you ever think how death may be? I do. I think of it as dusky and cool, a room with a door open to the outside, and a soft wind coming in as cool as if it blew off the stars. In the doorway, which faces away --in these visions I am never looking back-- may at any moment appear the faces that one has wholly loved, and the dear voices that one remembers will be saying softly, like a blessing, We love you, we forgive you."
So, after a few days of musing, I amend my judgement. The thoughts settle and find a pattern, some passages require longer examination. Slowly, I see something different in Stegner's flow from stark to mundane and a weaving of a place between. Powerful, heartfelt visions flowing beyond the slow bounds of time and grief ...perhaps, after longer reflection ...sad visions certainly, but not meaningless ...moving beyond depression to the cherishing of the moments we have.
Lori
August 1997
Stegner Links
THE WALLACE STEGNER ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER has links to biographical notes, reveiws of many of his works, and a complete bibiography.
Public domain e-texts This came up on a search for Stegner, although I --personally -- couldn't find any Stegner in the links ...if someone has a really concise and clear understanding of Public Domain, I'd love to hear from you!:-)
I'm currently sorting through more possible links for Stegner, but not finding much...patience is a virtue:-) If you know of any links, please email me.
