All the Little Live Responses to the Stegner Centennial Symposium

The March Symposium at the University of Utah was stellar.  A lovely potion of respect and warmth and intelligence hovered in that room for two days.

Since then, I’ve received several responses I want to share.

Scott Williams of Salt Lake City sent me this most interesting idea:

“Your comments at the Symposium in particular left me with a recurring image of a statue of Stegner on one of the large median grass islands on 12th or 8th East or perhaps on East 2nd South, maybe even standing on the slope where it climbs the rise from Stegner’s old neighborhood and tennis courts to catch the first view of the University’s Park Building. I’m reminded of the monuments to Jorge Luis Borges I saw when I was in Buenos Aires last spring and how the spirit and words of Borges permeates that city and its culture.

Statues of great citizens are relatively rare in the West but common in eastern and foreign cities where they enrich the sense of place and create a public commons out of what would be simply a park.  Even in those cities they tend to honor founders and war heroes, those who initiate community or defend it against attack, rather than those who allow it to thrive and endure as places of culture and cooperation.  Salt Lake has a few such statutes but I can’t think of one that isn’t connected to the Mormon pioneer experience.  It occurs to me that a statue of Stegner, and perhaps others going back to Chiefs Washakie and Wakara, would contribute to a stronger and more frequent consciousness of the diverse contributions to Salt Lake City beyond and subsequent to the crucial but overdominant story of the Mormon genesis.  It could also be part of an urban experiment in shifting the public’s attention and adulation from founders and warriors to communitarians and peacemakers.

Terry Tempest Williams talked about making objects as a way of changing minds.  The Stegner quote on Library Square is one such marvelous new object.  I’m already wondering how we can create more. “

Michael Antman, a fine book reviewer, wrote to remind us of Stegner’s fine 1967 novel,  All the Little Live Things. He wrote:  “I thought you might enjoy this essay I wrote a couple of years ago on Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things as the first entry in a brief series I did on great neglected books.”  In his essay, he describes the novel as “nearly perfect. From my perspective, books that deserve this designation exhibit a seamless confluence of character and motivation, physical setting, point of view or philosophy, and literary style.”

Finally, Ralph Hafen, a retired lawyer now living in Salt Lake City, gave me copies of a fascinating exchange of letters.  At the time of Stegner’s automobile accident in Santa Fe in 1993, Hafen was taking a lifelong-learning class on Stegner at the University of Utah, taught by Robert Steensma .  Hafen sent Stegner a letter, addressed to St. Vincent Hospital, and received an answer from Marion Stegner, Page’s first wife, assuring him that the family had repeated Hafen’s stories to Wally while he was still conscious.  Even on his deathbed, Stegner loved a good story about Canyon Country.  In his letter, Hafen told the Stegners of floating through Glen Canyon in 1956 with Pearl Baker (who grew up at Robbers Roost Ranch) and finding Wallace Stegner’s name on the register inside a can stashed in a cairn at Music Temple.

Hafen also described one of his first cases after “hanging out his shingle” as a lawyer in Monticello, Utah, in 1955.   The complicated saga had to do with property rights at Marie Ogden’s “Home of Truth,” the religious cult described by Stegner in a chapter of Mormon Country.  Ralph Hafen settled the case, and remembered “driving out to see Mrs. Ogden in my old Lincoln automobile on Sunday afternoons.  She told me her whole history.  She was an old woman, bur her eyes would light up when she told me of all these marvelous events.”

I’m continuously struck by how close we are to these stories that take us back to a lost world.  Ralph Hafen is an elder, telling us the stories he heard from an elder more than fifty years ago, when he was in his twenties.  Shazzam–we listen, and we have just traveled back a hundred years!

Marion Stegner’s response, written after Wally’s death, was incredibly gracious: “If Wally had survived, you surely would have had an answer (response!) to your letter.  He loved stories of the sort you wrote him.  We are still in shock with his death.  The outpouring of love and support from all parts of the world has been extraordinary.  He was a man of enormous integrity and wisdom.  His loss is profound, but he left us all with a rich legacy.

thank you again.  sincerely, Marion Stegner.”

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Happy Birthday, Wally!

Governor Jon Huntsman got it exactly right:

Whereas, Wallace Stegner, one of Utah’s most prominent citizens, was a legendary voice for Utah and the West as an author, educator, and conservationist;

Whereas, raised and educated in Salt Lake City and the University of Utah, Wallace Stegner possessed a lifelong love of Utah’s landscapes, people, and culture:

Whereas, writing 30 books and countless articles, Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Medal for the Arts, and three O’Henry Awards;

Whereas, Wallace Stegner founded the creative writing program at Stanford University and mentored some of America’s leading writers;

Whereas, as one of the founders of the modern conservation movement, Wallace Stegner served on numerous conservation boards and worked tirelessly to preserve the natural beauty of the West;

Whereas, Wallace Stegner’s Wilderness Letter, considered by many the most inspirational statement written in defense of wilderness and natural area preservation, became the “Magna Carta” of the wilderness movement and helped win passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964;

Whereas, as an early voice for balanced conservation efforts and the sustainable use of natural resources, Wallace Stegner urged Westerners to protect our natural areas;

Whereas, Wallace Stegner often returned to the Utah he called home, and through his family, generously donated his papers to the University of Utah Marriott Library and supported the establishment of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law; and,

Whereas, under the auspices of the Stegner 100 Committee, Utah civic leaders, religious leaders, conservationists, business professionals, writers, and educators have joined together to plan numerous events and tributes to celebrate the spirit of Wallace Stegner’s life and his many contributions to our beloved State;

Now, therefore, I, Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., Governor of the State of Utah, do hereby declare February 18, 2009, as

Wallace Stegner Day.

Stegner’s inheritors

We asked our students in the “Wallace Stegner and Western Lands” class at the University of Utah to pick a writer who experienced Stegner’s influence—either directly, as a student in the Stanford writing program, or indirectly, looking back to Stegner as literary or ethical elder.  To engage with this writer, each student read at least one book by their chosen author, learned a bit about his or her life, and placed the work in literary and historical context in relation to Stegner.  

When they reported back, the students emphasized different aspects of connection: the work itself, the author’s role as Stegnerian citizen/writer, intersections in values.  Each student grappled with the idea of Stegner as a teacher/mentor/guide/influencer—and then tracked the journey as one of his inheritors took Stegner’s teachings to a new place.

Their choices were diverse, ranging from Tillie Olson to Rebecca Solnit, from N. Scott Momaday to Scott Turow (who was in the last crop of Stegner Fellows just before Stegner’s retirement from Stanford).  Their insights were penetrating.  I learned a lot.  Here are some excerpts and observations from their work:

 On Wallace Stegner & Wendell Berry:

“Since the two men were great friends, I would assume that each man influenced the other.  I don’t know of friendships that operate any other way.  …I began to see these two writers as regional echoes of one another.”

  “Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry have produced works of revelation and lamentation that are capable of jolting the public out of their apathy to seek a new path for the future.”

On Scott Turow:

From Stegner, he learned the discipline of being a writer.  Stegner told him that if you wrote two pages a day, by the end of the year, you would have over 700 pages, and that something in those pages would be worth holding on to.  His use of his own law school experience in One L mirrors Stegner’s use of his own life in his fiction.

On Ellen Meloy:

“It is not so much a land ethic or a geography of hope that Meloy inherits.  It is a peculiar association between place, people, and language.  The blend of these three, as a positive relationship, seems to me as originally Stegnerian, and is a tendency that finds continuance in the writings of Ellen Meloy.”

 “Wilderness as an ‘idea’ is not only a plea for the preservation of land; it is a plea for the preservation of an influence, an influence of land on ideas and on language.”

 “Meloy ponders the color palette of a landscape while Stegner explores the smell of a memory (in Wolf Willow).  (Interestingly, they both are allied with the instinctual response of memory of the limbic system.)  Meloy inherits from Stegner an idea of being determined by the landscape that has chosen you.  One is chosen by the landscape because it invades the limbic regions of your mind, influencing your memory, changing your language, all before you even realize that you have a place to call home.”

On Robert Stone:

“Stone’s experiences with a mother with a severe psychological condition, time in a Catholic orphanage, Vietnam and political affiliations are all incorporated into the major subjects and themes of his books. In this, he shares a strong similarity with Wallace Stegner’s fictional writing.  Stegner incorporates what he knows from life, the places, the people and culture, into his works of fiction.  I believe this is what brought success to both of these authors.  They are able to draw their readers in because of the realism in the books and the sense that, although a work of fiction, the novels provide a seemingly first-hand insight into the complexities of American society of the past and present.”

On Ken Kesey:

“Stegner’s fiction focuses on the tragedy, stress, difficulty, and beauty of life in the West.   Kesey, through his depiction of human struggle with ideas, is able to break free from the regionalism of his teacher, Stegner.  …Both modern writers are trying to put our American West into a context that allows for an exploration of ideas and interactions so that we may better understand our role in our own world and what it means to live within it.”

On Ed Abbey:

“The Uintas are to Stegner as the Wasatch is to Abbey.  To Stegner’s syncline, Abbey is the anticline.  Terrains eroded out of two very different eras, conjoined by location and the West’s rapid and perpetual cultural change; the craving to tell stories, write fiction, and the way their respective times have further uncovered features in each writer’s complex terrain that carve out identity and ways of being in the West.  How else explain Angle of Repose’s Pulitzer, or Desert Solitaire’s grassroots reputation as possibly the most backpacked book—if second, only to its forefather Thoreau’s Walden?”

 “Reality is complex and open ended.  Abbey is human:  complex and open ended, the archetype of paradox, of resistance to closed interpretation, as were Thoreau and Emerson in their day. Abbey’s wilderness ethic absorbs Stegner’s, subsumes many of the same ideas that make Stegner’s argument unique in the history of the wild.  He goes on to create an ethical standard that resonates loud and clear, brash and bold, with Abbey’s self interest, stubborn anarchy, and the volatile times and feelings of his audience of the late ‘60’s.”

“Escape is as important to Abbey as hope was for Stegner.  If Abbey is the Thoreau of the West, Stegner surely is his Emersonian counterpart.”

 

—Stephen Trimble