Allen Tate said that Dr. Johnson had his prejudices but that he was certain that Johnson knew his own prejudices better than Tate knew his own. Something like that might be said of Stegner. “Incompetence exasperates me,” he writes in Wolf Willow, “a big show of pain or grief or any other feeling makes me uneasy, affectations still inspire in me a mirth I have grown too mannerly to show. I cannot sympathize with the self-pitiers, for I have been there, or with the braggarts, for I have been there too.”
That’s from a good piece, Proud Flesh: A Recollection of Wallace Stegner, in the July/August 2009 issue of Humanities magazine.
The following are Stegner quotes found within that essay. The first if from All the Little Live Things — I can’t tell for sure from which book the second one was taken:
You wondered what was in whale’s milk. . . . The same thing that’s in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under, or grub out, or poison. There isn’t good life and bad life, there’s only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born!
……………………….
The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.
It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones.
I read a bunch of Stegner’s books about twenty (or more?) years ago. I like his books about childhood; I’m not so taken with his stories about adults. Here is a bit from his Foreword to the book, Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner:
It would not be accurate to say that these stories gathered up near the end of a lifetime of writing constitute an autobiography, even a fragmentary one. I have tried autobiography and found that I am not to be trusted with it. I hate the restrictiveness of facts; I can’t control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve.
… Any reasonably long life, looked back upon, irresistibly suggests a journey. I see these stories, inventions on a base of experience, as rest stops, pauses while I tried to understand something or digest some action or clarify some response.
… but few lives take the shortest distance between two points. Certainly mine did not. It backed and filled and lost the way and found it and lost it again. The traveler, moreover, has been largely created by the conditions of his beginning, and retains the tastes, prejudices, and responses that the early stages have bred into him.
-Julie
