Digital Commons @ George Fox University Faculty Publications - Department of Professional Department of Professional Studies Studies 2004 Angling for Repose: Wallace Stegner and the De- Mythologizing of the American West Jennie A. Harrop George Fox University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/dps_fac Recommended Citation Harrop, Jennie A., "Angling for Repose: Wallace Stegner and the De-Mythologizing of the American West" (2004). Faculty Publications - Department of Professional Studies. Paper 5. http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/dps_fac/5 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Professional Studies at Digital Commons @ George Fox University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications - Department of Professional Studies by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ George Fox University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ANGLING FOR REPOSE: WALLACE STEGNER AND THE DE-MYTHOLOGIZING OF THE AMERICAN WEST A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Jennie A. Camp June 2004 Advisor: Dr. Margaret Earley Whitt Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ©Copyright by Jennie A. Camp 2004 All Rights Reserved Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. GRADUATE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DENVER Upon the recommendation of the chairperson of the Department of English this dissertation is hereby accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Profess^inJ charge of dissertation Vice Provost for Graduate Studies / if H Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ANGLING FOR REPOSE: WALLACE STEGNER AND THE DE-MYTHOLOGLZING OF THE AMERICAN WEST An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Jennie A. Camp June 2004 Advisor: Dr. Margaret Earley Whitt Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract When Wallace Stegner published his first book in 1937, a stereotypical Western novel invariably included a gun-slinging cowboy hero, a near-mythical gunfight at dusk, and a formulaic, predictable plot that rarely left readers unsure of who would prevail in the end. Stegner recognized the limitations of such archetypal assumptions and sought to achieve something different with his work. In this paper, I argue that Wallace Stegner asked the nuanced questions necessary to further this nation’s understanding of western archetypes and, as a result, to begin to debunk the misleading mythologies of the American West. In this study, I look first back at the predecessors who have informed Stegner’s works, the mythologies in question, and the general emergence of a western American literary canon; next I turn to Stegner’s nonfiction and fiction works to examine where and how he addresses such problematic westem archetypes; and finally I consider how Stegner’s literary successors have been influenced by his lifelong efforts to rewrite a new, more reality-based contemporary American West. While Stegner does have predecessors - such as writers Frank Norris and Bernard DeVoto - who began to recognize and disparage the archetypes of a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. glorified Old West, Stegner (1) both acknowledged and specifically cited the mythologies in his critical and historical nonfiction works, demonstrating from where they have emerged and why, and (2) attempted in his own fiction to both acknowledge and move beyond such mj^hologies. Through his essays, novels, and short stories, Stegner sought to draw those mythologies to the forefront and begin to dismantle them, one by one, in an effort to rewrite a more accurate portrayal of both the historical and the contemporary West. As one looks ahead to an increasingly contemporary westem American literary canon, I believe that Wallace Stegner marked an essential tuming point in the canon’s development; with Stegner, one leams to recognize and move beyond the mythologies that embed themselves in American language, history, and culture, and foster a literature that is rich in both history and in the diversity of today’s contemporary West. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Foreword 1 Introduction: De-Mythologizing & the Formation of a Westem 17 American Literary Criticism Chapter 1: Stegner’s Literary Predecessors & Early Idealized 80 Westem Myths Chapter 2: The Myths that Shape Stegner’s Fiction 152 Chapters: Stegner’s Nonfiction 203 Chapter 4: Stegner’s Fiction - The Big Rock Candy 248 Mountain and Angle o f Repose Chapter 5: Further De-Mythologizing Pattems in Stegner’s Fiction 299 Chapters: From Stegner’s Contemporaries to Today’s 356 Westem Writers Afterword 404 Works Cited 406 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Foreword When I learned of Wallace Stegner’s untimely death in April of 1993,1 felt as if I’d lost both a friend and an opportunity. I had never met the man, but he was a grandfather of sorts, someone who knew a part of me that I was only just beginning to uncover: an imspoken part that takes quiet pride in the ancestors five generations back who trekked across the unforgiving plains and treacherous mountain passes to claim homesteads, and, perhaps above all, in the insistent stoicism and unfailing pioneer adaptability that at times runs through my veins as well. I was sitting in a newsroom in Oak Park, Illinois, when I heard the news. I don’t recall who told me - whether I heard it announced on the radio or a fellow reporter broke the news - but I do remember that I was oddly paralyzed for the rest of the day. My narrow reporter’s notebooks with their haphazard chicken scrawls lay quietly by my computer, waiting for the news stories I had yet to write, and somehow I could not bring myself to tackle the phone calls that needed to be made: to the local school board president to discuss implementation of a new gifted program, to the nearby Chicago Police Department to inquire about preventing street riots after an upcoming Bulls game. All I could do was stare out my second-story window onto the suburban street below with its bagel shop and convenience store and continual foot traffic to and from the El tracks two blocks Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to the north, and wonder about the future of the likes of Bruce Mason, Joe Allston, Lyman Ward, and Larry and Sally Morgan. I had always intended to meet Wallace Stegner one day. Not just at a crowded book signing, although such an encoimter might have served as an opening, but in the peaceful quiet of his Los Altos Hills, California, study, where the windows would open to a tranquil jumble of dripping ferns and chattering birds and we would each fold afghans across our laps as we discussed his years as a faculty member at Bread Loaf, the struggles of teaching such a stubbornly wayward student as Ken Kesey, and the dangers of being typed by an East Coast- led publishing industry as a “westem writer.” Jackson J. Benson had not yet published his biography of Stegner in the early 1990s and, aside from Forrest and Margaret Robinson’s slim 1977 volume on Stegner, little had been published about his life and works, and I imagine I fancied myself his one-day biographer, a devoted and attentive reader who would reveal to the literary world the majesty and grace of Stegner’s prose, of his skillful character development, of his lofty ambitions as a teacher and conservationist. But little did I know that Benson had long before set up a desk and computer in a comer of Stegner’s broad-windowed office, plugging away at a biography that grew into a nearly ten-year project, and that I, at age twenty-three, imdoubtedly would appear more mad than brilliant if I were to tap on the windows of the office of someone whose prose has taught me something of my place in humanity but who knew nothing of me and why I might Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be prowling aroiond his property. I was sorry, as much as anything, for poor Larry and Sally Morgan, who had returned to Battel Pond, Vermont, in Stegner’s 1987 novel Crossing to Safety to join the supportive family circle around Charity Lang in her last days, and who now surely would be further devastated by the death of their creator. Larry and Sally were mere characters in a novel, of course, mirrored after Wallace himself and his wife Mary, but I felt a certain kinship with them since it was they who first introduced me in 1987 to both the driving emotion and quiet grace of Stegner’s fiction. It was my mother who handed me Crossing to Safety shortly before I embarked on a five-month excursion to Madrid, Spain, to study the language and culture of a people whose history runs unimaginably deeper than the mere one- and-a-half centuries of my hardy westem American forebears. I remember crying quietly on the long flight fi-om Portland, Oregon, to Madrid, already homesick as I listened on my Walkman to a loud jangle of nearly indecipherable pop tunes, a homemade tape given to me by college dorm-mates amused by my preference for the quieter poetry of Bob Dylan, and I began to enter the world of the Morgans and the Langs as we stepped back over the years of a sometimes troublesome but always loyal thirty-four-year friendship.