Stegner Shares His ‘Sense of Place’

When I began college, one of the men teaching freshman English was Wallace Stegner, a sturdy and open Westerner who even to a naive newcomer seemed a man set apart from the pinched pedagogical caution of my Eastern academic establishment. I was dismayed when I was assigned to another man’s section and I’ve regretted it since.

Stegner had that year published a novel, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” obviously autobiographical in origin, about a family moving around in a West where the spaces then as now were vacant and demanding.

Published novelists were figures of awe to me, even outranking film stars, and I watched Stegner striding among the immemorial elms in the Harvard Yard like a man wishing for wider skies. I didn’t meet him until, several decades later, he received The Times’ Robert Kirsch Award for a body of work written in or about the West.

Not surprisingly, Stegner did not much like Cambridge and says he would be hard put to summon up any significant memories of his six years there. He left in 1945 to return to the West, as head of the creative writing program at Stanford.

The revelation about his unhappiness as a temporary Easterner is in a new introductory essay, one of nine pieces about the West Stegner reads in “A Sense of Place,” a two-cassette recording from The Audio Press (Box 935, Louisville, Colo. 80027; (303) 665-3201).

The album is, not least, further evidence of the almost unbelievably wide and nourishing variety of cassettes you can now acquire to defeat the inefficiency of slow or paralyzed traffic.

It is also a reminder that the production costs of audio cassettes are modest enough that albums can be created as labors of a particular passion for a specialized audience rather than as candidates for the mass market. The Audio Press is, I take it, M. De Witt Daggett III, who celebrates the spoken West from his Colorado base.

In his uninflected but warm, quiet, deep-toned voice, Stegner remembers an itinerant Western boyhood. Born in Iowa in 1909, he has, he says, lived since in eight states and Canada, in 20 places. During the early years, there may have been anywhere from two to 10 dwellings in each of those places.

Friendships had to be left behind, with other things there wasn’t room to take, and he sometimes regrets the lack of the fixed and rooted past others have enjoyed. Yet he gives an eloquent evocation of Salt Lake City where, a Gentile in Mormon country, he paused longest and attended college.

At Stanford before he retired, Stegner inspired a long generation of young writers, while continuing to produce his own remarkable novels and nonfiction works. Notable among the latter is “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” his account of the opening of the West and in particular the daring explorations and the prophetic warnings of John Wesley Powell about overcultivating a dry land.

In one of the most moving of the essays, “How the West Was Lost,” Stegner carries forward Powell’s warnings about tampering with a fragile ecology, plowing and planting a land where aridity not moisture was the way of life. The consequences are everywhere, in the draining of the water table, the dust storms then and now, the chemical polluting of such water as there is. Stegner is an outspoken environmentalist, the poetic power of his prose born of an early found love of the austere beauty of the Western landscapes. His account of life amid the vastness of the Saskatchewan prairies captures the humbling majesty of the silent distances (full of sounds, if you listen as Stegner did). The emptiness is intimidating but also enviable, in a time when almost no vista seems beyond reach of the crimping ‘dozers.

The readings draw you to the books, “Wolf Willow,” “The Sound of Mountain Water” and “American Places,” from which six of the essays are taken. Those who love the West are likely to find even more reasons than they knew they had.

The same profound love of nature’s handiwork, and the same alarmed contempt for man’s, informs John Hersey’s “Blues,” his celebration of fishing for bluefish off Nantucket Island. The author of “Hiroshima” and “A Bell for Adano” has been seeking blues for 20 years. The book has become another imaginative and welcome audio eccentricity.

Published in 1987, the book is unabridged on four cassettes from Recorded Books, Inc. (Box 409, Charlotte Hall, Md. 10622; (800) 638-1304). Read by Norman Dietz in an appropriately cracky Eastern if not New England voice, Hersey’s text is in the form of a dialogue with a fictional inquirer about blues, a man he calls only The Stranger.

The format lets Hersey offer a treasury of ichthyological facts (how do the scientists know these things?), several mouthwatering recipes, poems in praise of blues and other fish, and his own poetic summoning of the magic of tides, light, weather and the respectful communion of man and sea.

Like Stegner, Hersey is appalled by man’s greedy, witless poisoning of a God-given bounty: the indiscriminate dumping of wastes, the overfishing that has endangered the striped bass and many other species, the oil spills and the overboating.

I’m not a fisherman, but Hersey’s book is engrossing and quite moving because, like Stegner’s, it is first and last about love.