When writer Wallace Stegner died in a Santa Fe hospital Tuesday night, America lost more than it knows.
It not only lost a champion of Western landscape, beautiful sentences and common decency, it lost one of the few sane people in an insane world.More than anything else, it is Wallace Stegner's sanity that will be missed.
Stegner died after being seriously injured in an automobile accident March 28. And for a man who spent much of his life cautioning us about our out-of-control "machines," there's an irony in that. Stegner never had much use for "boosters" and developers. He liked "stickers," the ones who set down roots and made a stand.
Just as there is a "true north" Stegner knew there was a "true west." It was hiding beneath the cowboy myths, the backhoes, the strutting attitudes and the exploitation. True West, for Stegner, meant a Responsible West. And in 50 years he wrote millions of words pointing us in that direction. "Angle of Repose," "Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Crossing to Safety" are better novels than America's literary critics realized at the time. They are better novels than we readers realize now. His latest collection of essays, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs" is the "sanest" book I've ever read.
As boy, Stegner lived like a gypsy. His father, in search of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," tugged his family from Kansas to Canada, from Utah to California. Stegner spent his formative years in Utah, attending East High and the University of Utah. He was a tennis player, something of a rounder and the finest prose stylist the U. has ever produced. Thomas Lyon of Utah State University says Stegner's writing is under-valued because "It isn't tricked up. It's straightforward, honest Western speech."
You could never parody Steg-ner's style. A parody would simply sound like good writing.
I interviewed Stegner a couple of times over the years. We corresponded a little and I tried to be on hand whenever he lectured locally. In 1979 he was in town to promote his novel "Recapitulation," the story of a Utah boy come home. In his Hotel Utah suite, Stegner was obviously that boy come home.
"It's too bad people coming in from the airport don't get to see the best part of Salt Lake City first," he said. And he felt our new granite flower boxes and little crosswalk blocks smacked a bit of "Soviet worker art." But the criticisms were gentle, wry; the kind of thing people say about places they love.
I asked him why Utah had trouble producing great fiction. It seemed to me we had many of the same qualities as the South - strong family ties, an oral tradition, religious roots. He thought that over.
"The problem is, you haven't sinned," he said. "The South sinned with slavery and rebellion." Then he said something I've never forgotten. "One day, however, you'll ruin the land here. Then you'll have your sin, and you'll have your great writers."
"Great novels," he said, "don't have to take it all in. Great novels just get things right."
Wallace Stegner got things right.
We met again 10 years later at a local book convention. This time his novel "Crossing to Safety" had just hit the stores.
I asked him about his Pulitzer Prize for "Angle of Repose" in 1972 and how John Leonard of the New York Times refused to review the book. I asked if he felt there was an anti-West bias in the Eastern press.
"A lot of people got upset when the Times wouldn't review my book," he said. "People out here felt that the Eastern bullies were picking on one of the local boys. I didn't worry much about it, though. I don't worry much about it now. I have other things I want to worry about."
Now, the West has lost its best and brightest worrier.
He was a model and a master - an American original who had both the style and the substance. His passing brings to mind the lines from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here today." Some might think the world will little note the passing of Wallace Stegner.
But, like the Gettysburg Address, the world will remember. Maybe not tomorrow, next week or next year. But it will remember.