Frontier Spirit

If there is a turning point in the story of the frontier as Martin Ridge tells it in his marvelously readable and viewable “Atlas of American Frontiers” (Rand McNally: $49.95; 192 pp.), it comes in chapter he calls “The Great American Desert.” That was the name originally attached to the region we now call the Great Plains, the semi-arid region lying between the 100th meridian (roughly, Dodge City, Kan.) and the Rocky Mountains. The first explorers thought this region, in the words of Major Stephen H. Long, who visited in 1820, “almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” It was John C. Fremont who corrected this view, properly noting that it was the Great Basin, lying between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, that was America’s desert and that the high plain was suitable both for agriculture and, above all, for grazing.

If the earlier view had prevailed, perhaps the culture of the Plains Indians might have survived longer than it did. That view did not prevail, of course, but one of the most distinguished interpreters of Western life and letters has built a personal and literary synthesis around the view that the West, by its forbidding aridity, has resisted full incorporation into the common culture of the United States.

In “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West” (Random House: $21; 227 pp.), Wallace Stegner puts his personal synthesis on display as never before. Writing at the top of his form in his mid-80s, Stegner, by being different and sometimes baffling, shows why the West itself is different and sometimes baffling. I began to read Stegner in 1978 when I moved to California from points east (Chicago and New York), and I found him, as I think most Eastern critics have, impressive and yet strangely unimpressive. I found his individual works of undeniably high quality, and yet somehow the whole seemed less than the sum of the parts. Stegner just didn’t add up. Mormon history, a life of Bernard de Voto, essays on the environment . . . there was too much nonfiction for the serious novelist’s own good, and too much fiction for the serious historian’s.

In this collection, I think I see what I have been missing.

A first clue: Commenting with great subtlety on Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” Stegner writes:

“So is this a story of hubris in the Bitterroots, of a young god destroyed by pride? If it is, why all that other stuff the story contains . . . so much exposition of the art of fishing, so many stories of fishing expeditions, so many homilies from the preacher father, so many hints about the relations of Norman Maclean with his wife’s family? An impressive story as it stands, would this be even more impressive if it were cleaned up, straightened up, and tucked in?

“I will tell you what I think. I only think it, I don’t know it; but once when I suggested it in Norman Maclean’s presence he didn’t deny it. Perhaps, like Robert Frost, he thinks a writer is entitled to anything a reader can find in him.”

Stegner’s secret, so to call it, is that he too is a writer determined not to deny his reader anything in him to which the reader might reasonably be entitled. Not to speak of normal and abnormal, his determination is far from automatic or necessary in a writer. Where does it come from?

A second clue: “(I)f I had been able to get to Paris I would probably have babbled with the Dadaists in the direction of total intellectual, artistic, and emotional disaffiliation. But there was one trouble. I had grown up a migrant, without history, tradition or extended family, in remote backwaters of the West. I never saw a water closet or a lawn until I was eleven years old; I never met a person with my surname, apart from my parents and brother, until I was past thirty; I never knew, and don’t know now, the first names of three of my grandparents. My family could tell me little, for neither had finished grade school, and their uprooting was the cause of mine. . . .

“And so, though I was susceptible to the dialectic of those who declared their independence of custom and tradition and the dead hand of the past, I had no tradition to declare myself independent of, and had never felt the dead hand of the past in my life. If the truth were told, and it now is, I was always hungry to feel that hand on my head, to belong to some socially or intellectually or historically or literary cohesive group, some tribe, some culture, some recognizable and persistent offshoot of Western civilization. If I revolted, and I had all the appropriate temptations, I had to revolt away from what I was, and that meant toward something--tradition, cultural memory, shared experience, order. Even my prose felt the pull of agreed-upon grammar and syntax. Eventually, inevitably, I was drawn to what I most needed.”

On my desk as I write is a work of extreme Gallic radicalism that I am, personally, unable to read without bursting into guffaws. This is “America” (Verso: $24.95) by the revered French sociologist Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard wishes to devastate. His direction, to use Stegner’s words, is indeed that of total intellectual, artistic and emotional disaffiliation. The central interpretive image he applies to this nation, whose soul he finds in the West far more than in the East, is that of the desert. He wishes, for the shock value of it, to show us that we are all living in a mental as well as a physical desert. What gives his work its unintentional hilarity is the writer’s unawareness of how very obvious all this is to the average American, whether or not he or she disposes of anything like Baudrillard’s rhetorical fluency.

Desert is central in Stegner’s thinking too, but desert isn’t the word he uses. He prefers aridity , precisely because that word lowers the intellectual, artistic and emotional stakes, tilts toward the pragmatic and mutes the mythic. Why not play the concept for all its worth, as Baudrillard does? Because Stegner is the son of a father who was twice literally ruined by aridity and because this harsh and broken farmer, if he didn’t technically abandon his two sons, at least brought it about that their mother had to place them in an orphanage for a time. Thus was Wallace Stegner disaffiliated. Further, merely philosophical disaffiliation for such a one is all but gratuitous.

The American divorce rate seems to rise with each degree of Western longitude until you reach Los Angeles, one of the great divorce capitals of the Western World. And when man deserts wife in this American desert, more often than not man deserts child too, as in Cyra McFadden’s “Rain or Shine.” In that funny, painful book, the author’s father, a rodeo announcer, rises during the night after his wife and child are asleep, quietly unhitches their house trailer from his car and drives off. Estranged wife and disaffiliated child wake to face the aridity alone.

Start out with a child trapped in a stifling European bourgeoisie, where everyone is measured and located in advance on the basis of family name, schools attended, accent, dress, religion and political party, and you may well end up in adulthood with an apoplectic Jean Baudrillard, screeching over scorched-earth landscapes and the prospect of scorched-earth human relationships. Start out with child on a bankrupt patch of literally scorched earth, the sun-scorched, parched earth of a ruined farm, outside a built-yesterday town where name, school, speech, religion and party are fading memories, and you may well end up in adulthood with a Wallace Stegner rescuing a bit of this, a scrap of that, piecing things together, saving as a saver and saving as a savior, cherishing as much tradition as he can, preserving it, and then passing it on in a helpful and pleasant arrangement, for no other reason than that you are his reader and a reader is entitled to everything a writer can give.

I once soke to a woman from a West Texas town called Bovina. “In my father’s generation,” she said, “it was impolite to ask anyone’s last name or use even one’s own last name at all freely. Last names were known, but they were faintly resented.” She associated this with two facts: first, that more than a few West Texans had escaped a past that a surname could bring back to unwelcome life; second, that a man “trading that way on his Daddy’s name” just couldn’t be much of a man. When I recall this fierce (and, by the way, fiercely learned) Texan, I hear in the American use of first names something other than the cloying friendliness that so many Europeans and Europeanized Americans hear. I hear, instead, a hostile silence about family advantage, a silence that grows from rampant, anarchic, merciless American individualism. The average Western American, if not the average American, bears the scars of a century of social atomization that Europe can barely imagine, a deconstruction that severs forename from surname just as it separates son from father and husband from wife.

The frontier spirit that, in its twilight, shaped Wallace Stegner was a rough spirit. Stegner first fled it, then seized it and turned into his art. The California of 1993, more than a century after the official closing of the frontier in 1890, may seem to suffer more from artificiality and, if you will, from a surfeit of smoothness than from any such roughness. But what a Czech visitor recently described to me as “your incredible California helpfulness” grows in us from a Stegnerian habit of saving what we can from the Western wreckage. The literary equivalent of “California helpfulness,” faintly off-putting as it is to Easterners, is what, 15 years ago, made Wallace Stegner seem strange to me. He was calmly putting things together when I believed, instinctively, that what strong writers did was tear things apart. The same quality in him, I recognize with a small jolt, is what now makes him seem familiar. In the interim, I have become a Californian, and a Westerner, myself.