LANDSCAPES AND LEGACIES — Sharon Butala on native prairie grassland at Old Man on His Back bison preserve stands by a stone that commemorates her husband Peter. (Schmitz photo)

SCREENINGS, READINGS & MEANINGS

By Gerald Schmitz

Wallace Stegner: landscapes and legacies beyond repose

Wallace Stegner and the American West
By Philip Fradkin
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008

This is the first of a two-part series.

I can’t escape the perception that Eastend did a lot more for me than I ever did for it. All I ever did for it was remember it, fondly, probably inaccurately, and forever.
— Wallace Stegner to Sharon Butala, June 1987

Back to my native Saskatchewan again this August after ancestral visits in Iowa with my American Jesuit uncle, my mind turned to places and people that I will never see again but that are lodged forever in my imagination. That’s why this column follows up an unfinished series which I started in an Aug. 26 column last year on Clint Eastwood (more on him coming soon). I’m dedicating it to the memory of my Eastend rancher friend Peter Butala who died in August 2007, loving husband of Saskatchewan author extraordinaire Sharon Butala and prairie conservation visionary to the end.

Eastend, which takes its name from east of the Cypress Hills, was the closest rural hamlet to Wallace “Wally” Stegner from ages five to 11 when he grew up on the Canadian side of the then “borderless” frontier with Montana. His restless father George, of German ancestry, had been drawn there by the wheat boom. Born in Iowa, like my own father but two years later in 1909, Stegner would return to help establish the famous Iowa writers’ workshop. He would spend most of his life, though, in California, where my dad spent the Depression years before taking over the Schmitz homestead farm near Englefeld after the Second World War.

Eastend, immortalized in Stegner’s 1962 non-fiction work Wolf Willow: A History, A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, represented perhaps the most formative period in his mental geography. The introduction is by his only son Page. Stegner managed only one return visit, disguised as Mr. Page, in June 1953, a year after I was born.

Eastend was also a way station to greater things. As he wrote: “The boundaries of the world that I was dragged out into from Eastend in 1920 had widened beyond belief.” Yet he would remain “western” to the core even after achieving national and international acclaim. As the inside flap to Fradkin’s excellent book on his life and work declares: “Wallace Stegner was the premier chronicler of the twentieth-century western American experience,” a witness to “nearly a century of change in the land that he loved and fought so hard to preserve.”

Stegner’s best known and most controversial novel is Angle of Repose, winner by unanimous vote of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Perhaps his finest non-fiction book is Beyond the Hundreth Meridian — i.e., west of this degree of longitude that happens to run through Dodge City, Kansas and Brandon, Man. — published 17 years before Angle of Repose.

Stegner’s dodgy dad George went into the illegal booze trade during Prohibition and his family suffered the consequences of an itinerant existence. With no stability at home or in school, Wally from an early age sought refuge in the life of books. In early adulthood he would spend years in Iowa and Utah, another prominent influence in his writing, now home to the Sundance Film Festival initiated by actor Robert Redford. Fradkin describes Stegner as being “bereft” after his much-loved mother Hilda died in an apartment in Salt Lake City in November 1933, adding: “His father had conveniently disappeared, and for that and much more, Wally never forgave him.”

The young Stegner had several serious romantic entanglements that ended in disappointment. But then, while working on his doctorate and teaching at a small Lutheran college, Augustana in Rock Island, Illinois, he met Mary Stuart Page, a graduate student who had a job in the university library. They would be unwavering soulmates for the next six decades. The wedding took place Sept. 1, 1934 in Mary’s parent’s home in Dubuque, Iowa. That was my first stop in Iowa a few weeks ago when I visited the site of my great great grandparents John and Catherine Klein’s house to the northwest of the town.

Stegner would move on to teaching posts at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin, where he would begin his first major novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain about his “orphaned and symbolic family.” It was not published until 1943. By then he had travelled to pre-war Europe with Mary, turned down several unsolicited war-related jobs in Washington, D.C., and was teaching at Harvard University. Writing was his driving passion and he became associated with New England’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He and Mary were also enchanted with Vermont and bought a property there.

Stegner’s name was coming to national attention. He even took on a controversial cross-country assignment with Look magazine. But he was looking for more, and that meant moving west at the end of the war, to California’s Stanford University. He and Mary took up residence in the then pristine hills near Palo Alto south of San Francisco. He would teach in Stanford’s English department from 1945 until 1971, become a full professor at age 36, and remain a literary legend long after his retirement from the university.

Stegner had a profound influence on students who would go on to renown of their own. To mention only five: Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, made into a 1971 movie classic), James Houston (Continental Drift), Ken Kesey (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which became a 1975 screen classic), the acclaimed environmentalist authors Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) and Wendell Berry (A Place on the Earth). Stegner was, as Fradkin puts it, a “reluctant conservationist” who not only exploded western myths while recording its great adventures, but, as a preserver of the past, railed against its rapid exploitation and, to his mind, destruction.

Shortly before his death in 1993, a former student recalled to him being haunted by a remark his teacher had made in class 43 years earlier — “the sickness of our times is not a political sickness but a soul sickness.”

But Stegner didn’t just write and talk, he acted. A non-conforming liberal Democrat, he allowed himself to be lured to Washington in the heady early, and only, years of JFK’s presidency. This was largely through his relationship with pioneering western environmentalist and Kennedy administration Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall. Indeed, Wally had already joined the Sierra Club, written about “crimes against the land,” and would be a major contributor to Udall’s manifesto The Quiet Crisis and the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act.

Shortly before his death, Stegner penned a short life summary as a guide to documentary filmmaker Stephen Fisher. In reference to the west, especially southern Utah (near Monument Valley, the site of many classic movie westerns, notably those of John Ford), and under the heading “What I learned” were the following points that resonate as much today:

— Respect for the land and its history;

— Contrition for my part in despoiling it;

— Some sense of responsibility, as a citizen at last of the whole country, for trying to repair and preserve;

— Suspicion and dislike for those who in continuing and inexcusable ignorance, or in disregard for land ethics and human ethics, go on raping the West (and also the world at large) in cycles of boom and bust, growing desertification, bad sociology, bad human living.

The documentary aired posthumously on television in 1996, narrated by Utah’s most famous resident, Robert Redford.

Next week, part two.

Schmitz is a member of the Sundance festival’s patron circle and an ambassador member of the Canadian Film Institute.