A Letter to George Saunders from the Northern Neck of Virginia

To: George Saunders

From: Gail Wilson Kenna

A student, one of those who took my course on your book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (of Chekhov short stories) is taking my latest course on Wallace Stegner.

She was one of those who wrote you a note after the “Swim” class met in an extra session to discuss your novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. You read the notes that students wrote to you about the Chekhov book, and then gave us helpful advice for reading Lincoln in the Bardo. I know enough about Wallace Stegner to say that he, like you, made time for students and readers until his death at age 84 in 1993.

In my current class, we are reading three Stegner novels with aging narrators: Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose, and Bruce Mason in Recapitulation. In the first class I discussed how Stegner’s fictional realism can be traced to his life and his historical interests, and that he was often at odds in the 1960s with those who distained his realism. One student, during a break, asked if I thought Stegner would appreciate the wildly experimental Lincoln in the Bardo.

I believe this first novel of yours would have amazed Stegner, and that by book’s end, it would have deeply moved him, as it did me.  At some point in your years of teaching, you might have used the 1982 Stegner essay, “Fiction: A Lens on Life.” At the beginning he asserts, “It is fiction as truth that I am concerned with...fiction that reflects experience instead of escaping it, that stimulates instead of deadening.” He goes on to say the writer tries with every piece of fiction to “create a world.” Which is what you did in Lincoln in the Bardo.

The essay concludes with words that Stegner might have written to you, George.  “The work of art is not a gem… but truly a lens. We look through it for the purified and honestly offered spirit of the artist. The ghosts of meaning that flit past the windows of his fictional house wear his face. And the reward of a lifetime of reading is a rich acquaintance with those gentle or powerful or rebellious or acceptant, those greatly mixed and humanly various but always greatly human ghosts.” 

What Stegner accomplished between 70 (Joe Allston’s age) and 1993 when he died, included two brilliant novels, Recapitulation and Crossing to Safety, plus non-fiction. Lucky you (and us) that you are only 66, and keeping alive the genre of the short story, and inspiring so many of us to write.

 Next week I’ll have some thoughts on why Stegner deserved the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird.

Dear Wallace Stegner…greetings on Cinco de Mayo

In 1989 at nearly 80, you wrote a letter to your deceased

mother, Hilda, who died at age fifty. Today I recall your death at 84, thirty-one years ago in Sante Fe. I also note it is 52 years since you won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose. Articles are still written about this novel. In the June 1, 2022, New Yorker, Roxanna Robinson discusses Angle of Repose & the “act that mars” your literary legacy. Once again, the claim is made for a house of fiction built on purloined pillars. Forgive my borrowed phrase from Henry James, a writer you honored. And who is to say this phrase is original with Henry?

In front of me are two large biographies, totaling 839 pages. The 1996 “authorized” one took a decade for Jackson J. Benson to write. He devotes fewer than twenty pages to the Angle of Repose controversy. Yet Philip L. Fradkin’s 2008 biography has a detailed chapter of 45 pages, “Angle of Unrest.” I find this biography beautifully structured and a pleasure to read… because Fradkin physically visits all the landscapes of your life.

What did I learn in the chapter, “Angle of Unrest?” That a mélange of communication mishaps occurred.  First, you thought about a project involving the real-life Mary Hallock Foote from as early as 1945. Much later and on multiple occasions, you met with Foote’s granddaughter, Janet. She was the one (of three) with whom you communicated through the years.  The family in Grass Valley had un-transcribed “Reminiscences” & letters; and they worried Grandmother Foote, the late 19th century illustrator and writer, would be forgotten in history.

By 1995 the Stegner-Janet Micoleau correspondence was in the U of Utah library and accessible to scholars. But the communication mix-ups, as you know, happened after the novel’s publication in 1971. A few of these are sisters not in accord with each other, Janet not taking the time to read the draft you offered before publication, neither she nor sister Marion reading the novel cover to cover when it came out. And by then aggravation was felt because Grass Valley folk began to comment on Mary Foote in unpleasant ways. Yet you had warned Janet to think of the character as Susan Burling Ward, not her grandmother.  Then at some point Blake Green, a journalist in search of a story, contacted an aggrieved Marion, not Janet. Green sensationalizes what you claimed would have been a dull story otherwise. In 1978, Professor Walsh at U of Idaho (publish or perish world of universities) gets in touch with sister Marion. Professor Walsh thinks you also stole your narrator Lyman from Mary Foote. Walsh does not contact you but conducts “a nasty piece of character assassination.”  If asked, you could have explained that Lyman’s prototype was your old mentor with one leg and a frozen spine. Okay, I have limited space, and the mélange could continue.  I just wish you knew something I just read.  The 2002 hardcover about the life of Mary H. Foote sold fewer than one-thousand copies. Between 1997 and 2007, Angle of Repose sold over half a million. Your novels and other books remain in print. You acknowledged your borrowing and once again mixed history and fiction. I am a wiser person for having known you, Wallace Stegner.

Next week:  Your memorable Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird

A Sad Day and Bad Memory

I try to write about whatever I promise at the end of my weekly blog. Today, however, I will switch to something that Wallace Stegner, who lived by a strict moral code, might understand. Which is my need to comment on Thursday April 25th when four Supreme Court male justices focused on hypotheticals & not the January 6th insurrection. And why, I ask, was Clarence Thomas even there?  How egregious in a flagrant and shocking way.

On Friday, April 26th, several media commentators mentioned Lady Justice related to the Thursday Supreme Court hearing on presidential immunity. These comments made me think of Venezuela’s Lady J. The first and only time I saw her was when I left Caracas in August 1995, after four years of helping incarcerated North Americans. One was a medical doctor, found not guilty in Superior Court. Yet five Venezuelan Supreme Court justices passed his case back and forth, year after year. Eight years of incarceration before this medical doctor was released and could again be a pediatrician. A special nod to then Senator Joseph Biden for having his office act on this injustice and exert pressure on the U.S. Embassy about this prisoner.

The life-size Lady Justice I saw in August 1995 was painted by a Chilean prisoner.  His large drawing replaced Abe Lincoln’s words in the lawyer’s room in Reten La Planta in Caracas. Translated from the Spanish, Abe’s English words stated… do not be a lawyer unless you can be an honorable one. In a ‘pay and you go’ legal system, these were ironic words. So why not push the mockery beyond honest Abe? Why not depict on the wall of the lawyer’s room, Lady Justice as she was in Venezuela? Peeking from her blindfold and loading the scales of justice with gold for herself.                                                                       

In 2020 I re-issued Beyond the Wall. The brilliant artist, A. Cort Sinnes of Napa Valley, took my description of Lady J and created this new cover for the second edition. Twenty years earlier, living in Bogota, Colombia, I wrote the first edition of Beyond the Wall under a grant from the Puffin Foundation in New Jersey. In the new 2020 foreword, I ended with these words. 

“A reader might ask: What does this book have to do with me?”

I answer with a quote from poet Theodore Roethke:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. 

Yet is this true in our country in a time of increasing darkness for our Democracy?

And Lady Justice?  How at the present time should she be depicted in the USA? 

Through a glass darkly, with her back turned away from the United States of America?

I am reissuing this book because I believe Venezuela’s corrupt legal system has something to teach us. I write these words on July 4th, 2020, four months before our national election.

Now it is 2024 and just over six months before we vote again.

Next week, Wallace Stegner’s imbroglio with the Pulitzer-prize-winning Angle of Repose…