I'll tell you what I believe in. I believe in human love and human kindness and human responsibility, and that's just about all I believe in . . . .
- from "A Shooting Star,"a novel by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner may seem a somewhat surprising follow-up choice for a biographer who earned kudos last time around for a study of John Steinbeck, but Jackson J. Benson doesn't see it that way.
Stegner was not, he acknowledges, a "celebrity author."
"He's never been on the cover of Time magazine - and that seems to fit him. He really was a modest, quiet man, conservative in his lifestyle - you get publicity by stabbing your wife . . . and he's never had that kind of cheap publicity."
As Ivan Doig, another admired Western writer, has noted, Stegner lived "too orderly and citizenly a life. The literary lightning rods catch our attention while Stegner has been in the kitchen writing books."
However, Stegner "is very famous, really, among literary people and people who read a lot," said Benson, author of "Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work" (Viking; $32.95; 472 pages), which elegantly interweaves details of the writer's experiences with descriptions and analyses of his manifold creations.
Although he did not make tabloid headlines, never dominated the best-seller lists or even had one of his novels or stories adapted for TV or made into a movie, the man forged a marriage-partnership with his wife, Mary, and crafted a long, remarkable career as a masterful teacher, an influential conservationist and a polished, productive writer.
Landscape, memory, the past's complex tendrils, personal responsibility, interpersonal cooperation - these became his themes as he reconstituted his childhood in Saskatchewan and his formative years in Salt Lake City and mined the histories of his own family and others.
"He was very versatile. That's the main quality of Stegner that actually floors you," Benson said in a telephone interview from San Diego. "He won prizes for virtually everything he wrote. His fiction won prizes, his stories won prizes, his biographies won prizes. His `One Nation' book of essays\ during World War IIT won two prizes. In just about every forum he tried, he won prizes."
When Stegner was still an instructor at the University of Utah in 1937 - well before moving on to posts at Harvard and then Stanford - his novelette "Remembering Laughter" captured the Little Brown Co. publication prize, effectively launching his career. He repeatedly earned O. Henry Award honors for his short stories. "Angle of Repose" took the Pulitzer in 1972, and his next novel, "Spectator Bird," received the National Book Award.
And while quality was a Stegner hallmark, his overall output proved prodigious.
"I started this about two years after the Steinbeck came out," Benson said, referring to his own "The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer," which earned the biographer the PEN USA West Award. "At the time, I'd probably read only two things" by Stegner - "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian," a biography of explorer-scientist John Wesley Powell, and "Big Rock Candy Mountain," the epic based on the writer's father, mother and his own tumultuous youth. "I'd never read `Angle of Repose.'
"The thing is, of course, I had to read everything he'd ever written." In addition to the books, there were essays galore, articles about America and places overseas and environmental pieces.
"It was a job that took years," Benson confided. "It was just overwhelming."
And always they started with history, Benson said, a point also made in the biography. He writes in the book:
Frequently, Stegner's travel articles are framed by history, as are his conservation pieces; he was . . . a writer who was shaped in large part by a personal sense of the importance of history. When he traveled, he didn't just move across the surface of the earth; with knowing eyes he traveled through a panorama of historical events, as well as through geological and anthropological time.
"I love that story that Page (Stegner's son) tells that I retell in the book," Benson said. "He was a boy and they were taking car trips around and his father could never pass anything without giving the history of it."
In the biography, Page Stegner recalled:
My father . . . could never just look at scenery. If we happened to be driving across the Colorado Plateau through southern Utah, say from Cisco to Price along the Book Cliffs, he'd offer up an anecdote about Powell being rescued by Bradley in Desolation Canyon, and then explain to his slightly annoyed 8-year-old boy , who was trying to concentrate on his Batman comic, who Powell was and why he was important. Then he'd point out the La Sals and Abajos to the south and tell that boy something about laccolithic domes, betting him he couldn't spell laccolithic . . . .
When it comes to Stegner, of course, history is not merely the collective past. Many of his tales are "autobiographical," so much so that it's tempting for readers - and biographers - to try to glean too much "reality" from the fictional prose.
"As a teacher of American literature, I find that's a very common thread among modern American authors," said Benson, who lectures on the topic at San Diego State University. "Hemingway's work was entirely semi-au-to-bio-graphy; there's a lot of autobiography in Faulkner and certainly in Katherine Anne Porter and so on, and Fitzgerald, of course. . . . I think people mine their own experience. Stegner was autobiographical in a lot of ways, and in others he wasn't. Gosh, his most autobiographical is `Big Rock Candy Mountain,' but when you get to `Angle of Repose,' it is not. `Crossing to Safety' is semi-autobiographical, but it's also about other people he knows."
Benson started work on the Stegner project a decade ago, and as a result had opportunities to interview his subject repeatedly over the course of seven years before the writer was mortally injured in a car accident in Santa Fe in March 1993. Stegner, then 84, died a month later.
The novelist made no bones about the personal nature of much of his fiction, and in "Wolf Willow" and many essays wrote in detail about his own life. He also "wrote a long series of articles about teaching writing and about the principles of good writing, so he'd often use examples from his own experience and how he'd translate it narratively into fiction," Benson said.
Yet, while Stegner understood the biographer's task, he "was really sort of hesitant to talk about those things" - about his own life and the real people upon whom many of his characters were based.
During interviews, Benson remembered, Stegner would say, " `I don't want to talk about that; that's something that is' - I don't know what he said, not exactly `private'; he didn't want people nosing around and digging up parallels.
"I think a good part of that was how he got burned" via "Second Growth," a 1947 novel set in a New England village, with characters close to people Stegner knew, and "Angle of Repose," which incorporates portions of letters penned more than a century ago by a real person, Mary Hallock Foote, as if they were written by Stegner's focal character, Susan Burling Ward.
Although the novelist used the letters with permission, and offered to let Foote's descendants read the manuscript before the book was published, "the family's still bitter," Benson said.
The acrimony, involving what in many ways was his greatest success, hurt and haunted Stegner.
"The family complains that he stole the letters and that the entire book was made up from stuff from her letters - if it was it was about 10 percent, and even that's changed. And they're upset he made it into a novel, even though he told them what he was going to do.
"And he was such a stickler for right conduct and good behavior that being accused of these things - plagiarism and theft - just absolutely threw him; it was heartbreaking, very upsetting."
Stegner sometimes said, and in the book Benson notes it a few times as well: "Never have a writer for a friend."
The subject reminded Benson of a Stegner anecdote:
"In `All the Little Live Things,' he included his doctor in the book, made him a character. The doctor read the book and said, `Gee, I don't mind your putting me in the book - but why did you have to give me bad breath?' "
In places throughout the new documentary film "Wallace Stegner: A Writer's Life" (see related story beginning on E1), Stegner himself is heard commenting or reading from his own works. Benson scored a similar coup, interviewing and working with the writer before his death.
"It was a mixed blessing," Benson said. "It was a blessing that I got to know the man pretty well, and he was so interesting a man - so bright, so funny. You don't really get that in his books. He was a very bright and witty man. Most of his books are so glum - and he admitted that himself.
"I had maybe 100 hours of interviews. I got to go through papers in his office - while he was working. I'd go through his files, and he'd help me and I'd ask about this, that and the other. But you do get the feeling that this guy is looking over your shoulder.
"He'd say, `Don't write about the sources of my books; don't get personal.' He said, `When I wrote my biographies of John Wesley Powell and Bernard DeVoto, I wrote about their careers; I didn't get into their bathroom habits. I don't want you to get too personal.'
"What is `too personal'? The DeVoto had lots of fairly personal stuff in there," Benson said. "It was all very ambiguous, but he knows I've got to go back and talk about the sources of these books.
"The main thing is (that) he should say that. There's no hint that he ever did anything that anybody could consider bad behavior. His worst fault was his temper. He could get angry . . . (especially) about what people were doing to the environment. Gosh, he was married to the same woman almost 60 years, and didn't fool around so much as I know. He was personally conservative, he believed in morality and family.
"A lot of that he got from when he lived in Utah." Although Stegner was not LDS, "he loved the Mormon family life; he loved their joy in living; he loved the way they ate, the way they danced, their community. He was a big man all his life on community effort and cooperation, and very opposed to the idea of rugged individualism. And this was something that was reinforced by living in Utah."
Jackson J. Benson, author of "Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work," will stop in Salt Lake City next month to talk about and sign copies of his book. He'll be at Sam Weller's Bookstore, 254 S. Main, at 7 p.m. Dec. 4.
*****
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Notable works and honors of Wallace Stegner:
Remembering Laughter (novelette, 1937, Little Brown & Co. Prize)
Mormon Country (history, 1942)
The Big Rock Candy Mountain (novel, 1943)
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (history-biography, 1954)
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memoir of the Last Plains Frontier (1963, Blackhawk Award)
The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (history, 1964)
All the LIttle Live Things (novel, 1967, Commonwealth Club gold medal)
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974)
Angle of Repose (novel, 1971, Pulitzer Prize)
The Spectator Bird (novel, 1976, National Book Award)
Recapitulation (novel, 1979)
Crossing to Safety (novel, 1987)
The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (1990)