An ‘Unfashionable Square’ : WALLACE STEGNER: His Life and Work.<i> By Jackson J. Benson (Viking: 480 pp., $32.95)</i>

Wallace Stegner was, by his own admission, “a square,” a middle-class white male writing out of a straightforward realist tradition that had become, to use his word “unfashionable.” And in fact, although Stegner’s staggeringly varied career--as novelist, biographer, essayist, historian, environmentalist and founder of Stanford University’s superlative creative writing program--was, in the words of Malcolm Cowley, “unequaled in this century,” his reputation remains, in relative terms, modest.

As Jackson Benson points out in his earnest, well-intentioned but oddly unrevealing biography, “Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work,” this is due in part to neglect by an exclusionary Eastern literary establishment that early on pegged Stegner as “Western,” and therefore somehow unworthy of notice. It comes as a shock to learn that while Stegner’s “Angle of Repose” (1971) won the Pulitzer Prize and his “The Spectator Bird” (1976) garnered the National Book Award, neither book was ever reviewed by the New York Times.

Trying to account for his position in a quiet eddy outside the mainstream, Stegner often speculated that it was not just a geographic “otherness” that worked against him, but a psychological one, as well. In the mid-’60s, after three decades as a literary force to be reckoned with, he nevertheless complained that he could never feel “at home in a literary generation that appears to specialize in despair, hostility, hypersexuality, and disgust.” Stegner’s themes, always, were the old-fashioned verities of stoicism, endurance, sacrifice, compassion and forgiveness. This kind of rock-ribbed “goodness,” expressed in his work and his life, could not only seem unfashionable but could even, on occasion, drive people crazy.

Benson is penetrating and amusing about the startlingly antagonistic reaction of Ken Kesey, for example, one of a stellar cast of students--including Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Evan Connell, Tillie Olsen, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Thomas McGuane and Nancy Packer--to come out of Stegner’s writing classes. About an individual almost universally regarded as fair, democratic and modest, Kesey (the kind of self-consciously “naughty” student who would turn in essays with titles like “On Why I Am Not Writing My Last Term Paper’) had this to say:

“A man becomes accustomed to having 200 people gather every day at one o’clock giving him all of their attention--because he’s clever, good-looking, famous and has a beautiful voice. That can’t happen without affecting a man’s writing--the wrong way.”

Kesey, incidentally, also raved after Stegner’s death that “he was able to put together a power that ruled literature in California--and in some ways the rest of this nation--for awhile.” Presumably that didn’t include the New York Times.

In fact, as Benson demonstrates--sometimes inadvertently--what truly seemed to keep Stegner perpetually just out of step was a deep and abiding reticence. Although he is, in some sense, the most autobiographical of novelists--and even as a biographer, he chose subjects who were either close friends (Bernard DeVoto) or men in a similar grain (John Wesley Powell)--Stegner is almost always emotionally reserved, a point that Benson is forced to make again and again.

It would take a lot of digging and, perhaps more to the point, a certain sharpness for a biographer to penetrate that layer of reserve. Like many others, Benson--who had either the good fortune or the bad luck to spend several years working closely with both his subject and the man’s family before Stegner’s death--seems to have revered Stegner so much that he hasn’t the stomach to either probe or attack.

Stegner himself ran into a similar problem when he was writing a biography of his close friend DeVoto, “The Uneasy Chair.” And he knew it, too, commenting:

“It’s always more difficult to write about somebody you know well. For one thing, it presents you with the problems of how much to tell: things that are nobody’s damn business, and you don’t want to embarrass your friends or your friend’s wife or your friend’s family with something that has nothing to do with the main subject you’re writing about. In my case, it was Benny’s career. The way his head worked, and what he did with his head. He was kind of neurotic, and he did some silly things in his life, but it didn’t seem to me it was essential to dwell on the silly things. I wanted to write about the great things this flawed man produced out of his personal turmoil. So in a sense I suppose I can be called a whitewasher.”

This is not to imply that Stegner’s life story harbors any deep dark secrets still waiting to be unearthed. But there are occasional moments in this otherwise impressive book when Benson’s critical faculties are not, perhaps, as acute as they might be. He defends Stegner, for example, against charges of anti-female bias, claiming, “I can think of no other recent male writer who has shown as much sympathy for the condition of women or who has so often taken the woman’s point of view in his fiction.” In discussions of Stegner’s individual works, however, Benson is--consciously or not--considerably more damning.

Writing about Stegner’s first novel, “Remembering Laughter,” he describes the central character, Margaret, as “inflexible and fanatical in her properness and Puritanism” while hastening to assure us that this is “one of the very few times in his fiction where a female character is viewed with less admiration than the male.”

He then quotes Stegner addressing his long-dead mother about her portrayal in “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”: “The character who represents you . . . is a sort of passive victim. I am afraid I let your selfish and violent husband, my father, steal the scene from you and push you into the background in the novel as he did in life.”

Benson paints the protagonist of “Angle of Repose” as “a heroine with a foot of clay,” a condescending snob whose “real mistake was that she never appreciated [her husband] enough until it was too late.” And Charity Lang of “Crossing to Safety,” one of Stegner’s more remarkable creations, Benson describes variously and accurately as “a castrator,” a serpent in Eden, “insist(ing) on total control.”

It doesn’t take a card-carrying feminist to figure out that Stegner, while obviously fascinated, intrigued, and attracted by women, also had feelings about them that were, at the very least, ambivalent. And it seems the duty of the conscientious biographer to delve into such feelings, particularly when--as here--they appear so inextricably tied to an author’s work.

Wielding a sharp scalpel would not, admittedly, be an easy task. For what shines forth from this biography, as it does from Stegner’s work, is the man’s essential decency, that old-fashioned, hard-working goodness. An Eagle Scout as a youth (though he later scrupulously confessed to cheating to win two of his many merit badges), he strove for and often attained the Scoutly virtues throughout his long life: He was faithful (his marriage of more than half a century is a model of affection, humor, and effort), industrious (not a naturally graceful stylist, he worked hard at his prose; the later novels, with their clean, beautiful imagery, show the results) and loyal (he was an energetic, impassioned mentor to many young writers).

He was, as Kesey quite correctly observed, a strikingly handsome man; he was unfailingly courteous, even courtly, and it would be hard to find a writer more devoted to his craft.

Even a critic as tough as the Native American poet and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn could be disarmed. In an essay (and eponymous book) starkly titled “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” she criticizes his work but can’t help remarking on his eloquence, his lack of self-consciousness and his “power.”

It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that she takes him to task particularly for remarking that “Western history sort of stopped at 1890,” missing the point that people went on living in the West well after that time, struggling to match their lives to the myth of a frontier that never existed. This was Stegner’s major theme: the gap between reality and a myth he saw as destructive, pernicious, a lie. Cook-Lynn’s righteous anger could find far more appropriate targets, among them Kesey, who, as Benson points out, often embraced the Western myth of rugged individualism without a trace of Stegner’s saving irony.

One wishes, however, that Stegner’s personal myths were not so tightly circumscribed, that he’d been able, somehow, to unburden himself of a bit more of his personal mystery. There were times, apparently, when he wished it so, himself: In the middle of reading a biography of John Steinbeck, he wrote to a friend, “How do people get that personal? How do they express so freely what they feel? He makes my inverted Puritan hide crawl at times, maybe with envy, maybe with pity.”

Benson, in this first full-scale Stegner biography, makes a valiant attempt at getting under that hide, and does have some marked successes: His analyses of Stegner’s short stories, often lost in the attention lately paid to the novels, are superb, and he is very strong in his consideration of Stegner’s long and precedent-setting avocation as an environmental activist.

This is a decent, high-minded biography of a decent high-minded man. One only wishes for a little less reticence, for the bravery of a deeper plunge into the mystery of the man and the artist.