What Would Wallace Stegner Say About Donald’s Felonies?

Today I take leave of a writer I love. I am on the porch of the cottage where I read, write, and study. Before me is a verdant garden, tall trees in every direction, and a riot of chattering birds. I sit here in a wood rocker from Poso Park, a century-old cabin on the boundary of Sequoia National Forest. Nearby is another rocker from Poso, both older than my 81 years. I mention this cabin in California because of Wallace Stegner’s last book, a non-fiction work from 1992, and one worth reading about living and writing in the West.

Stegner loved wilderness and national parks and fought the good fight on their behalf.  He died 23 years before Donald Trump’s first reign and his gutting of the EPA, as if the agency were a rotting fish. Given Wallace’s moral code, he would not have been able to stomach anything about the rich boy who inherited Big Rock Candy Mountain. This was the mythical place that Stegner’s father George sought throughout life. And the wreckage from his father’s false dream was strewn everywhere he went, while dragging a fine wife and two sons with him. Stegner describes his father as “a boomer from the age of fourteen…always on the lookout for the big chance, the ground floor, the inside track… And if you believe the world owes you a bonanza, then restrictions and laws are only an irritation and a challenge.” How familiar this sounds.

Wallace Stegner, the famous writer and environmental activist, never reconciled with his father in life or death. Which is to say the violent did not bear it away. His father shot his mistress and then himself on June 15, 1939. News of the murder-suicide “splashed across the front and inside pages of Salt Lake’s three daily newspapers for two days.” (Fradkin bio, p.94) Stegner wrote that his father “did more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime.” George’s story is one for tawdry rag-sheets like The National Inquirer. But the past week did bring this welcome headline to newspapers throughout the world and in our country. 

Ironically, George Stegner did not die with a felony, since there could be no trial. But his grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery alongside son Cecil and wife Hilda is unmarked.  In Recapitulation, a brilliant novel about memory and time, Ambassador Bruce Mason does order a gravestone for Bo Mason. Yet in real life, he never took this action, unable to forgive his father for what he had done to both family and to those whose lives he crossed in a relentless search for the ‘deal’ and the summit of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In early July I return to Literature I Love with Colm Toibin (Column Toe Bean ) as the Irish say!