Were Stegner around this week to blow out the 100 candles on his birthday cake, it’s likely he would still be mad at the East Coast Media Conspiracy, and by that he meant this newspaper.
“It was The New York Times that broke his heart,” said Nancy Packer, a retired professor of English at Stanford, who knew Stegner well in the time he nurtured writers from Ken Kesey to Larry McMurtry here on the Farm, as the university is known.
Stegner won the National Book Award for“The Spectator Bird,” which The Times never reviewed. He also won a Pulitzer for his best-loved novel, “Angle of Repose,” which the paper only noticed after the award, and then with a sniff.
Even in anointing him the dean of Western writers, The Times couldn’t get his name right, calling him “William” Stegner. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.
Living and writing in the West, Stegner wrote, left him with the feeling that “I gradually receded over the horizon and disappeared.”
The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite -– those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.
Norman Maclean, the Montana native whose gin-clear prose makes “A River Runs Through It” an American treasure, certainly carried some of the Stegnarian chip on his Western shoulder.
After the success of his first book, Maclean was approached in 1981 by an editor at Knopf publishing, which had rejected the novel but was eager to take on his next project. Maclean wrote back in compacted fury.
“If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I were the sole surviving author,” Maclean wrote, “that would mark the end of the world of books.”
Stegner felt similarly dissed, but he’s aged well — everywhere, perhaps, but Manhattan and Stanford, the cradle of the creative writing program he started.
I asked Tobias Wolff, the author of “This Boy’s Life,” and a former Stegner fellow who teaches at Stanford, if there was a class here devoted to his canon. After all, he wrote 35 books — novels, histories, short stories — and is the subject of two lengthy biographies, including Philip Fradkin’s recent tome, published by Knopf.
Wolff shook his head. “Generally, students don’t read him here,” he said. “I wish they would.”
Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.
He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.
How many writers of fiction can make that claim?
All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.
His prose was never Hallmark, and he was often blunt.
“The West is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it,” he said in an interview. “The West as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The West is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”
This product of the hardscrabble, boom-and-bust, wandering man frontier — his dad made a living playing poker and selling bootleg liquor one year — has given us two of the most famous lines about the West. Both are grounded in optimism.
He called the West “the geography of hope,” despite many misgivings, and he dreamed of a day when Westerners would fashion “a society to match the scenery.”
Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.
And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.
On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”
He knew — the where and the who.
