Under the Great Wide Sky : WHERE THE BLUEBIRD SINGS TO THE LEMONADE SPRINGS: Living and Writing in the West, <i> By Wallace Stegner (Random House: $21; 227 pp.)</i>

In another Times, in another place (considerably eastern), Sunday editors some years ago whomped together a bunch of us they chose to call “Writers of the Purple Sage.” Most of us were 40something then, and a few even lived somewhere around sagebrush, but the exception on both counts was pictured in distinguished gray-haired presiding manner beneath a California oak and presented to the readership in big hey-look-who-we’ve-discovered typeface as:

William Stegner.

West of the Hudson, that first name has always been pronounced “Wallace.” But at least they got it right, back there, that W. Stegner, Pulitzer Prize novelist, National Book Award novelist, and essayist and conservationist and historian and teacher and consummate citizen of the West, is our chairman of the board.

Early in his majestic sum of 29 books was “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Stegner’s breakthrough novel based on his own family and their version of the wanderings within that hobo anthem of Western hopefulness, and not quite half a century later here is another inspired stanza, “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs,” from that same restless lilt. In this collection of 16 essays, even the ones with the telltale sheen of deadline magazine work are pleasurable enough, all come right up to you with typical Stegnerian common sense, and three are the brilliant crystallization of his lifetime of thinking about the American West.

One kinship I have always felt with Wallace Stegner is the square-built Western kid sort, that although we both are descendants of a West of hell-raisers, we ruefully recognize ourselves as at most born to raise heck. Yet, chain us together to a keyboard and we’d fairly soon admit we have differences. Likely he thinks the plots of my novels are somewhat, shall we say, unbridled; possibly I think his main characters hew a bit too closely to his own persona. But maybe a little orneriness in our different directions--and those of Stegner’s Stanford students as diverse as Larry McMurtry, Tillie Olsen and Ken Kesey--is to be expected, too. As usual, he has spoken for many Western writers, and Westerners, who have had to pull up our socks and try to make something of ourselves: “There is something about exposure to that big country that not only tells an individual how small he is, but steadily tells him who he is. I have never understood identity problems.”

The backbone of this book is precisely about that big country and all of us in it, in his central trio of essays titled “Living Dry,” “Striking the Rock” and “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur.” They previously stood alone as a slim academic paperback called “The American West as Living Space,” findable only if you somehow already knew of its existence, so it is particularly gratifying to have this essence-of-Stegner in broader publication. Here’s the beginning:

“The West is a region of extraordinary variety within its abiding unity, and of an iron immutability beneath its surface of change. The most splendid part of the American habitat, it is also the most fragile. It has been misinterpreted and mistreated because, coming to it from earlier frontiers where conditions were not unlike those of northern Europe, Anglo-Americans found it different, daunting, exhilarating, dangerous, and unpredictable, and entered it carrying habits that were often inappropriate and expectations that were surely excessive. The dreams they brought to it were recognizable American dreams--a new chance, a little gray house in the West, adventure, danger, bonanza, total freedom from constraint and law and obligation, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the New Jerusalem. Those dreams had often paid off in parts of America settled earlier, and they paid off for some in the West. For the majority, no. The West has had a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams.”

Lots of lessons in that one paragraph, an impressive number of them about the art of writing. Parallel constructions, alliteration, deft change of sentence rhythm from that 40-worder which crescendos in “the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the New Jerusalem” down to the honest power of that four-word dream-breaker: “For the majority, no.” More vitally, though, he sweeps us at once into his exploration of the great theme of the West, the clash of its ecologies and its cultures.

Elsewhere in the book, Stegner says with a bit of a sigh that “the whole West, including much of California, is arid country, as I’ve been reiterating ad nauseam for fifty years.” Here in the essay “Living Dry,” he does a diamond-hard distillation of our settlement of this half-continent of mostly unreliable rain, to the conclusion: “And what do you do about aridity, if you are a nation accustomed to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led westward by pillars of fire and cloud? You may deny it for a while. Then you must either try to engineer it out of existence or adapt to it.” The engineering of water where there mostly isn’t any is just as trenchantly dealt with in the next essay, “Striking the Rock,” as are the signs he sees of adapting ourselves to the land’s circumstances--”the seedbeds for an emergent western culture”--in the finale of the three, “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur.”

It is a cause for wonder that Stegner, born in 1909 and thus a witness to every haywire development in the West since then, can remain full of hope. But then strong writers, the enduring hedgehog type, are said to know one big thing, and Stegner powerfully has always known his: “I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be dangerous to it.”

In the quibble department, I wish this publisher had retained Stegner’s useful bibliography that backed up his central trio of essays in their “Living Space” incarnation, or even better, had this splendidly cross-referential thinker furnish a suggested reading list covering this entire collection of topics. And to author and editor alike, I’ll say that I don’t see how it would hurt us Western boyos to lay off the use of “man” and “men” when we mean people in general, i.e. including women. (Especially since some of Stegner’s most affecting passages in this book are in his “Letter, Much Too Late” to his mother.)

Like his region, which he has christened for us the native home of hope, Wallace Stegner has exemplified extraordinary variety. If, after the novels “Crossing to Safety” and “Angle of Repose” and the inspired history/biography “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” and the marvelously unclassifiable “Wolf Willow,” anybody still needs to be introduced to the work of this eloquent writer, this book of essays is a good place to start. The essential Stegner is in them, patient as a mountain range, hopeful as a bluebird.