Review: <i>The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California</i>, by Matthew D. Stewart

In The Most Beautiful Place on Earth Matthew Stewart describes Wallace Stegner as a “mid-century liberal realist and meliorist,” (140) whose writing staged a “revolt toward order and tradition” (8). Although Stewart never explicitly says so, his study of Stegner in California seems aimed at readers like me—people from the sixties counterculture whom Stegner largely despised and who returned the favor. In those Vietnam years, our avowed enemies were not conservatives, people whom we dismissed, but liberals like Stegner who seemed to control the country. After reading Stewart’s original, compelling, and thought-provoking book, I am ready to admit that Stegner deserves another look. I certainly underestimated his originality and importance.Stewart focuses largely on the novels Stegner wrote while he lived in Los Altos Hills, the San Francisco suburb where he spent most of his adult life. Los Altos Hills was more than a beautiful place from which Stegner wrote and the barely disguised site of some of his novels. It became the locus of his hopes—a site that could combine access to the wild with a community imbued with intellectual life and the arts—and his disappointments.In his books Stegner struggled with both his personal and the larger American estrangement from community, the natural world, and the past. He sought a way to repair a nation living in an “amputated present” (5). The books can be read as political interventions in the social and cultural battles between Stegner and the California counterculture, which he thought embodied “the amputated present.” Stegner first struggled with the counterculture in All the Little Live Things (1967), where the hippie character Jim Peck was modeled after people he knew “who didn’t have any notion of what went on but thought they did” (83).The books were political, but they were also much more. Stegner’s body of work, conventional on the surface, was anything but traditional in its blending of history, fiction, and memoir.Stewart, who is versed in western history as well as the literary criticism about Stegner, argues that Stegner used fiction as a way of thinking, particularly about the West: he meant his fiction “to serve, build, and protect Western places as places.” Stegner conceived of a place as more than a location; it was an aggregation that could only be built over time. He longed for a stability and community his own family and westerners as a whole had failed to achieve, which led him to idealize traditional rooted communities.Despite Stegner’s hopes, Los Altos Hills became an example of the western “formless non-communities” that he sought to escape and replace (85). It became a far less beautiful place after he and his neighbors occupied it. Stegner never succeeded in either his life or fiction in transforming space into place. Los Altos Hills stands as a paradoxical failure, symbol of western failure in a state that Stegner denied was part of the West. Although if California is not western, I, at least, am hard put to say what it is.Stewart devotes most of his attention to Stegner’s fiction, but he regards Wolf Willow (1955)—at once a fiction, a memoir, and a history—as Stegner’s paradigmatic book. It captured how he thought about the West and contained all his most “anguished questions” (55). It encapsulated Stegner’s West as the site of a primal conflict between “sticking” and moving.Strikingly and persuasively, Stewart claims that much of Stegner’s writing sprang from a Wenner-Genn Foundation for Anthropological Research grant in 1953 and a slightly later fellowship year he spent at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science (CASBS) at Stanford. Both fellowships involved a study of village democracy in Saskatchewan, New England, and Denmark. Stegner never completed the study, but he mined this material repeatedly in later writings.All the Little Live Things was the first of Stegner’s grumpy narratives featuring “cranky narrators,” but Angle of Repose, his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1971 novel, was the most successful and prominent among them (114). The book incorporated, sometimes without credit, the writings of the nineteenth-century writer and illustrator Mary Halleck Foote. Stegner’s fictional narrator is a historian with a failed marriage who recounts a story of the failure of his grandparents’ marriage. Both the narrator and his grandparents wrestle with the “tensions of selfhood” in the formless western non-communities that so appalled and fascinated Stegner (123). They struggled against their fate, which in Stegner’s eyes, at least, made them superior to the counterculture of the 1960s, which he identified with western rootlessness and ahistoricism.Stegner never sank to mere polemics. He was capable of wrestling with the other half of his dichotomy of stickers and rootlessness. In The Spectator Bird (1976) he tracks the dangers of stasis with the “inbred arrogance, the caste consciousness, pride of place, [and] incestuous exclusiveness” that follows (149). Still, hippies and rootlessness remained his favored target.Stewart tries to reconcile Stegner’s plea for preserving wild country, particularly in the West, as part of, in his most famous phrase, “the geography of hope” with his life in Los Altos Hills and his writing. “Did the ‘geography of hope,’” Stewart asks, include Los Altos Hills, California (170)? In 1988, at a lecture delivered at the University of Colorado, Stegner not only excluded Los Altos Hills but pretty much the entire West from the “geography of hope.” Westerners seemed incapable of building healthy communities that could encompass three generations, let alone preserve wild places.Stegner tempered his pessimism, though. He was generous toward and hopeful on account of the western writers who followed him—Ivan Doig, Bill Kittredge, Louis Erdrich, Scott Momaday, Rudolfo Anaya, and others. His sense of community and continuity became centered on the East, in New England small towns such as Greensboro, Vermont, the site of his last novel, Crossing to Safety. It is easier to idealize what you do not know well.Ultimately, Stegner’s strength may be less his skill as a novelist, or as a historian (which to the best of my knowledge he never claimed to be), but as what most critics never recognized him to be: a writer who moved across genres in pursuit of a single and persistent problem. He is certainly worthy of reevaluation beyond his identity as an environmentalist and a victim of eastern condescension toward western writers, intellectuals, and the West. He was far more complicated and interesting than that. Stewart contextualizes, interprets, and illuminates an important writer, environmental activist, and intellectual upon whom verdicts may have been delivered too soon.Stegner stuck in Los Altos Hills, for all the good that did him. When he died, he had his ashes scattered in Greensboro, Vermont, a place far from the West and the kind of New England town where many of the earliest westering Americans fled.

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