A Mysterious Wallace Stegner Occurrence

In summer 2011 at the Iowa City bookstore on the ‘remaindered’ table, I found Philip L. Fradkin’s Wallace Stegner and the American West. I had an authorized Stegner bio, but I decided to buy this one for Wayne Johnson, who had been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. In the 2010 Iowa summer writing festival, I had taken Wayne’s Novel Solutions. After that class and a two-semester phone & mail course with Wayne, I wrote the first draft of a novel.

Now in 2011, as had occurred the summer before, students met their instructors at a welcome dinner and then had a short meeting. The following afternoon classes began. My course was with a writer named Sands Hall. That first afternoon she held up a new novel and said she had read it over the weekend. Then she exuded praise for the 2011 State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.  I’d read about this novel and knew that Patchett received a food magazine assignment and spent two weeks in Brazil. This gave her the authority to base a novel there. Oh, spare me, I thought, being someone who detests Bel Canto.

Why?  Because I lived in Lima, Peru, and knew a Peruvian artist who was held in the Japanese Ambassador’s residence when the terrorist group, MRTA, took it over. Besides this, a photo-journalist I had met and worked with, documented Peru’s terrorist organizations for decades. That Ann Patchett romanticized a violent and real event in Bel Canto appalled my friends.

That first day in class, Sands had no sooner finished her exuberant praise of Patchett when she asked who would ever want to spend time with Wallace Stegner’s dreadful & depressing All the Little Live Things. Besides Fradkin’s hardcover bio on Stegner, I had bought a paperback in the Iowa City bookstore: All the Little Live Things! The novel was in my Land’s End canvas briefcase beside my desk in the classroom. Even more coincidental than what occurred in class was what happened in my hotel room. I began flipping through the Fradkin biography. In the chapter, Angle of Unrest, I saw the name Sands Hall at the bottom of page 266. On the page across from her name was a short scene from Fair Use, a play in which Hall argues with her father, writer Oakley Hall. He is cast as Historian and his daughter as Playwright, and they disagree vehemently about Stegner’s Pulitzer winning novel, Angle of Repose. After this serendipitous moment, I realized why Ms. Hall had fished Stegner from a literary pond and shown antipathy toward him after her exuberance for Patchett. 

Wayne Johnson

I also knew it was going to be a long week and it was.  That is except for seeing Wayne, giving him the Fradkin bio, and finding one more copy on the Iowa City bookstore’s remaindered table for myself. 

Next week:  The Angle of Repose Controversy

Glances at Wallace Stegner

This week on April 13th marks the 31st year since Wallace Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had gone there to accept an award that mandated the winner’s presence. His fate was to have an automobile accident at night, followed by complications in the hospital, and his later death. His wife Mary was uninjured and lived into her late 90s. Yet from Stegner’s 68th year until his 84th, his accomplishments as a writer and human being were extraordinary.

This May I will be teaching a course on memory and aging in three of Stegner’s novels. The three characters who will be discussed are Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose, and Bruce Mason in Recapitulation. The third character’s story was told in Stegner’s early and successful novel, Big Rock Candy Mountain. In this big book, Stegner used his imaginative eye and mind to give form to the story of his childhood and youth.  In Recapitulation, Bruce Mason, a retired ambassador, revisits Salt Lake City and relives in memory those years from decades earlier.

A few years before Stegner’s death, he was working with Robert Redford on a documentary of his life. It can be found on the internet at Wallace Stegner: A Writer’s Life on YouTube. This Sunday morning, I spent a pleasurable hour re-watching the film; and yesterday I reread three Stegner interviews in Stealing Glances by James R. Hepworth.  What a pleasure to hear Stegner’s voice in my head, and then this morning to hear him speak throughout the hour-long documentary. When I read fine fiction, I read slowly, silently vocalizing, which speed reading does not allow. Try this as you read the following words from Stegner, spoken in a seminar at Dartmouth College.

“Largeness is a lifelong matter. Sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock…If you are a grower and a writer as well, your writing should get better and larger and wiser.”

This is true of Wallace Stegner and so beautifully shown in his last novel, Crossing to Safety.

Next week:  Stegner continued…

Fraud as the Eighth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno

This week I would like to revisit an earlier blog about the first book of The Divine Comedy, which Dante Alighieri completed early in the 14th century. By the time of his death in September of 1321, he had completed the third part, Paradiso, published posthumously.

Are you wondering how this is relevant in 2024? I can only hope you watched an amazing PBS two-part presentation (two hours each night) of Dante’s Divine Comedy. If you missed it this past week, search PBS Passport. It is an enactment I want to see and to read again. (Do put on the captions!)

The following words were ones I wrote in 2023 to the delight of some and the outrage of others.

Have we not heard ‘fraud’ lately, this word with its origin in Middle English? Hasn’t the word resonated outward from New York City? The legal F word as it were. But only D words for the deplorable, despicable, disreputable, disgraceful man on trial for fraud. A demon with a Sharpie, not the sword of Dante’s demon who perpetually circles Scandal and Schism in the ninth ring of the 8th circle. After the 8th, the 9th circle leads to the Pit (or Well) of Hell. What a place it is, with its four rings, all named under the title, Treachery, about traitors to homeland, political party, guests, and benefactors.

Please understand that I’ve skipped the first seven circles of Hell. But I will name them. Limbo, The Lustful, The Gluttonous, The Avaricious & Prodigal, the Wrathful & Sullen, and The Violent. The latter ring includes murderers & tyrants, and those against neighbors, themselves (suicides) and possessions (squanderers).

It is the 8th circle titled Fraud that interests me. Yet the name given to it, which takes in all its rings, is Malebolge. Word 11 does not recognize this word, though the OED does. This word describes the 8th circle of hell as consisting of ten rock-bound concentric, circular trenches. As used in the past, malebolge meant a hellish place or condition. Maybe we ought to bring the word back as an apt description for Congress. Take a few minutes and study the list of those in the 8th circle of Hell. We recognize all of them, don’t we? Maybe not Simonists from Dante’s time, and the selling of ecclesiastical privileges. But think of the Big D selling presidential pardons. Look at each of the ten rings and get a visual image to match them. I see fraudulent counselors down there in Georgia admitting their guilt. I await Rudy sweating more dark dye. Falsifiers of Metals, Persons, Coins, and Words makes me think of Sam the Bit Coin Man! Please share with me some of your thoughts after seeing this diagram of the Inferno.( I enjoy messages from readers.)

Oh, Dante Alighieri, I won’t forget being in Ravenna in the early 1980s and standing in the crypt that contains your remains. Forget bones. You left us The Divine Comedy, and I mean to read it all this time, beginning with the Inferno by Allen Mandelbaum, whose translation is called, “The English Dante of choice.”  

Until next week and thoughts on Marilynn Robinson’s latest book.