An Exit to Ringing Applause

It was whispered to me that the writer was in poor health, that at age 84 this could be his final public appearance. Since the writer in question was Wallace Stegner, one of the great voices of California and the West, it seemed worth a trip north to witness his public reading Thursday night to members of the San Francisco State Poetry Center.

Stegner did not look sick to me. His blue eyes appeared sharp and alert behind his glasses. There was color in his broad face. He walked with a limp, but also with a sense of purpose, to the front of the downtown church where an audience of about 200 was gathered. Propped on his elbows behind a tall walnut pulpit, Stegner offered a quick, self-effacing welcome. And then he began to read. He read in a voice that matched his prose--calm, steady, direct, dry.

He had selected a passage from “The Spectator Bird.” The passage dealt with a rough Atlantic crossing, full of heaving seas and other hardships and, finally, a death. Stegner carried the passage to a point where the narrator lay in his berth and pondered mortality, remembering a college experiment that had to do with the vision, and appetite, of chickens.

“Right now,” Stegner read, his voice softening, “while Ruth (the storyteller’s wife) sleeps and I do not, and this queasy ship carries us through the undiminished seas, I feel like a grain of corn, with the Great Chicken of the Universe standing over me taking aim. . . . She is not going to miss me when she pecks.”

We were left to do our own reading into the writer’s choice of material.

*

I cannot claim to be a Stegner buff, but I’ve read enough of him to appreciate why he won a Pulitzer and why, through both his own work and the Stanford writing program he founded, he has influenced so many other western writers. Stegner has lived in California half a century, setting much of his fiction in the West, but he is sensitive to any suggestion that he is a “regional writer,” a member of the purple sage school. His characters rarely ride or shoot; they simply try to live.

Still, western landscape and lessons seep through his prose, and Stegner was among the first to define this part of the land as something beyond geography. “America only more so,” is how he tagged California a long time ago--a line I’ve had thrown at me many, many times while on journalistic rounds in this state. And I came up here with the hope of conversing directly with the source of this California wisdom. After his reading was done, after he’d autographed dozens of books for the audience, Stegner turned to me in the now empty church and asked what I wanted to know.

Well, I wanted more than we would have time for, but for openers I asked his views on California’s collective malaise. Stegner is what he calls a “sticker.” He’s been elsewhere and would prefer to take his chances here. Still, he’s convinced we’ve reached a period of painful transition. The days of boom are done. It’s time to start finding ways to make less--less water, less land, less energy, less everything but people--go further.

“We have been practicing the economics of liquidation,” he said. “This is what has brought the fisheries, the timber industry, the cattlemen, to the end of the road. They exhausted their own resources, and that’s too bad.”

He said people misread the seeming ruggedness of California and the West: “It looks so wide open and so endless and so indestructible, and it actually is very fragile. Ultimately, you have to admit that the West is not indefinitely enlargeable. It’s got real limitations of numbers. I think we ought to control growth in some way, to learn to control it.”

For Stegner, the most obvious limit is water: “You know, it’s quite preposterous that 15 million people should live in that semidesert where you live, where there isn’t a source of water, a really decent source, for 200 miles. That produces a lot of aberrations.

“I think,” he said, smiling “a lot of people had better stay in Iowa, or Michigan. Or maybe try out South Dakota.”

It was time to go. I asked what he was writing these days. He said not much, that he was kept busy trying to reclaim his health. “I wouldn’t dare get into anything long,” he said, and with that we went our ways.

*

Let me close, not with our goodbys, but with a moment from earlier in the night. Stegner had finished the passage from “The Spectator Bird” and then read in full a short story, “The Traveler.” After the last line, he mumbled a quick thanks and moved abruptly toward the wings. His fast, hobbling gait gave him the appearance of an old cowboy who’d fallen from too many horses. He was followed out of the church by ringing applause, and it kept up long after the writer was gone. This seemed more than right.