Today that sort of parochial neglect is a thing of the past. Writers in the West are lionized and anthologized as never before. And when quizzed about who is responsible for this change in the literary landscape, the first name those writers mention is invariably Stegner’s. When he died last week at 84, he was the undisputed dean of Western writers. In more than two dozen books of history, biography, essays and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Angle of Repose,” he helped reshape the way we see the West. As the director of Stanford’s Creative Writing Center from 1946 to 1971, he enlisted dozens of aspiring writers, including Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane, in his campaign to rescue the purple sage from the purple prose of dime novelists and the indifference of the critical nabobs of the East.
Stegner never quite stopped pressing his case. Only last year he published “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West,” a collection of essays that earned him a nomination for a National Book Critics Circle award. And last month, when he was injured in the car crash in Santa Fe, N.M., that preciped his death, he was in town to give a lecture. Stegner despised cliches; he was proud that in all of his fiction, only two short stories included cowboys. Nor did he have much use for cliche’s better-pedigreed cousin, myth. “The West does not need to explore its myths much further,” he once told a reporter. “It has already relied on them too long.”
As early as 1943, in “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Stegner was pondering the ruin that awaited modern Westerners bewitched by the 19th century’s notion of the romantic loner on the boundless frontier. That novel was largely autobiographical. Stegner spent his childhood following his Micawberish father all over the West in search of illusory fortune. The experience turned him into a lifelong skeptic. (And left him loath to move: once he relocated to Stanford, he never left.) “We do a good deal of harm to ourselves with this myth of pioneering self-reliance,” he said in a recent interview. “I grew up in pretty frontier circumstances, and what let us survive was not self-reliance but the cooperation of neighbors.”
The West as Stegner envisioned it was a region bereft of false hope but a place nonetheless congenial to the “heroic virtues: fortitude, resolution, magnanimity.” The key to his vision was geography. “Western literature differs from much other American literature in the fact that so much of it happens outdoors,” he wrote. To understand the West, he insisted, “you have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.” The spooky boundlessness of the place, along with its appalling aridity, “tends to make humans as migratory as antelope,” he once wrote. “Look at any novel or book that strikes you as somehow Western in its feel-‘Roughing It,’ ‘The Grapes of Wrath, ‘The Big Sky’. . . and you will likely find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but about desire.”
Like the West he loved, Stegner was first and last a study in contradiction. At his best he managed not only to entertain contrary ideas but to reconcile them. He was a traditionalist who wrote about people mired in the past. He was a regionalist who excoriated his region for its “inexplicable crimes against the land” and called it “rootless, culturally halfbaked,” yet insisted that the West “remained the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only American society still malleable enough to be formed.”
He was never reluctant to take a stand. An outspoken environmentalist long before it was chic, he was a critic of such federal policies as cheap water and grazing rights. Last year, along with Stephen Sondheim, he turned down the National Medal for the Arts, issued by the National Endowment for the Arts, because he was “troubled by the political controls placed upon the agency.”
To the end of his life, Stegner remained delightfully contrary. Last year, in an interview with NEWSWEEK, he affirmed that he had waited all his life for the West to develop its own literary culture. But while many writers and critics have loudly insisted that this has come to pass, Stegner wasn’t convinced. Sure, in America, East and West “are different subcultures of the same culture.” And yes, “this difference is spiritual and literary and in other ways difficult to define. You can recognize it, but you’d have a hard time defining it.” But beyond that, that stubborn old man would not go.
