Fact or fiction? or a little bit of both?
Re-reading Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
I’ve just finished reading a masterpiece. I have some objective evidence for this claim: Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 with this novel, Angle of Repose. I have subjective evidence as well - this is my second time through with the book, and I loved it even more on repeat.
Wallace Stegner is not a well-known name in the UK. I only came across his work because I go through phases of listening to BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’ and someone (Justin Webb) recommended another of his great novels, Crossing to Safety. So I listened to that as an audiobook, and was completely smitten, and the one thing led to the other…These two novels have rolled around in my memory for ten years or so, particularly vividly because I listened to them, and the fact that I have heard every word, without skipping or jumping as I do on the printed page, always makes the deepest imprint on my butterfly memory. So, over the last month, I went on a treasure hunt through the secondhand book sites and equipped myself with a handful of Stegners. Crossing to Safety was slightly less striking than I remembered, but still a lovely portrait of a friendship between two couples over many years…Recapitulation was excellent but slightly confusing, (I only found out when I finished it that it was a sequel to a much more famous book, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, which I may decide to look for next). But Angle of Repose blew me away, I devoured it over two days. And I still have the Collected Short Stories to look forward to.
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) is without doubt one of the great American novelists. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, and at Harvard, before founding the Creative Writing programme at Stanford University. His many distinguished pupils included the authors of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Lonesome Dove. There are schools, annual lectures and scholarships named after him, his childhood home in Saskatchewan has been turned into an artists’ residence, his papers are preserved and studied. But it is this very novel, Angle of Repose, that I now discover has caused the most controversy and left a nasty shadow on his name. And it is the very thing I like most about it, its blending of fact and fiction, that is the root of the problem.
Stegner tells the story of an American pioneer, a woman called Susan Burling Ward, raised and educated in New York State, trained as an artist, who in the 1870s marries an engineer and follows him West, to live in primitive cabins in mining towns in northern California and Mexico, in Leadville, Colorado and in Boise, Idaho. What makes Susan an exceptional subject for a novel is that throughout her travels and travails she leaves a vivid, personal record as she writes and illustrates articles for the East Coast literary magazines like Scribner’s (which became The Century), and The Atlantic. The novel also incorporates extracts from letters she writes to her best friend Augusta, who is married to a famous and well-connected editor. There is plenty of action, there are near-misses with runaway stagecoaches and fights over disputed mining claims. And Susan never quails or runs away. As one of her East Coast friends puts it:
She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She goes to Mexico for two months and returns with a hundred magnificent drawings and what amounts to a short book…She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard amd across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it.
But this novel is mainly the portrait of a marriage: Susan has shocked her friends and family with her unconventional choice of husband, and the story of their love, and of the challenges they face, and the eventual erosion of trust and respect that ensues, has its own tragic consequences.
All well and good and extremely interesting. And I am particularly taken by Stegner’s understanding of the life of the pioneer women (the book is narrated by a character called Lyman Ward, Susan’s grandson, who is piecing her story together through letters and family papers):
When frontier historians theorise about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionisation; what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men.
This is a photograph of the real Susan Burling Ward. Mary Hallock Foote is the exact original of Stegner’s story: although she had been very famous in her prime as an illustrator and novelist of life on the frontier, by the time Stegner came across her papers, held by her family, in the 1960s, she was, like so many of her female contemporaries, almost forgotten. He chose to fictionalise the story, but the letters that he quotes from, often in full, are Foote’s actual letters. And he does not credit them as such. This is what he says at the front of the book:
My thanks to JM and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilises selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.
It is doubtful that the first critics who showered praise on the book, or the judges of the Pulitzer Prize, spent much time wondering what exactly this meant. But within a year of the prize, a member of the family published an edited version of Foote’s actual letters and all literary hell broke loose. Stegner was accused of plagiarism, of not giving the credit where it had been due. He pointed out that he had been given permission by the family to use the material, as long as he disguised the name. He offered them the chance to read the finished manuscript, having warned them that he had taken some liberties with the story, and they declined, saying they trusted his judgment. So, the two principal sins were firstly that he never credited Foote by name, and secondly that he made up a slightly racy plot development which had no basis in fact, and would certainly have surprised and shocked Victorian matron Foote herself. None of this has in anyway diminished the book’s following, and it is regularly voted one of the best novels of the American experience.
For what it’s worth, I know only too well how hard it is to get a biography of a Vcitorian illustrator and artist published, if she is a woman and has been forgotten. I would suggest that Mary Hallock Foote would have been much harder to find out about, and to enjoy and appreciate, if Stegner had not first taught her novels at Stanford, and then written this fictionalised version of her life.
Of course, one of the reasons that this novel resonates so strongly with me is because it sits right in the middle of the history and biographies I have been writing for the last ten years, of Victorian illustrator and artist Nelly Erichsen, who I wrote about in A Hidden Life, and of the Macmillan brothers, in Literature for the People. Characters from both my books litter the pages of Angle of Repose: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Grover Cleveland, Henry James, Longfellow, F Marion Crawford, Hawthorne and Kipling.
Stegner writes of Susan, and thus of Mary Hallock Foote, ‘She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly. There were plenty of women who could have provided her with the models for a literary career, but hardly a one, unless Mary Cassatt…who could have shown her how to be a woman artist’. I wish she could have met Nelly Erichsen, who struggled in the same way at the exact same time. Nelly also made her living, not as the great painter in oils I know her to have been, but as a jobbing illustrator of travel guides. They would have had so much to discuss!
I had the chance to meet Wallace Stegner in 1968 when I was at Manchester University. Unfortunately I attended a faculty party the night before and somebody must have spiked my wine. I didn’t drink in those days and was horribly incapable for days. I spied Stegner from a distance.
Angle of Repose is one of my all-time favorite novels. It tells the story of the late 1800's American frontier so beautifully--especially by using the POV of Susan Ward (or, as you say, Mary Halleck Foote), a woman from the upper-class East.
Big Rock Candy Mountain is similarly half-fiction and half-biography. It's a fictionalized story of Stegner's own father--a man who probably is treated better than he deserves by Stegner's story. The first half of Big Rock is fantastic, when it focuses on Bo Mason (fictionalized Stegner's father), but it's weaker when it switches POV in the end to the son, Bruce Mason (who's kind of a fictionalized version of Stegner himself, but much more fictionalized than his father). But even with its weaknesses, it's a fascinating portrait of a man who spends his entire life searching for an easy fortune, only to destroy his wife and family in the process.