Angle of Repose Read Free

country. He continued, however, to have more success with the short story (winning several O. Henry Memorial Short Story Awards) and with his nonfiction (including the Powell biography—a Pulitzer finalist) than with the novel. He was discouraged, and thought that he might give up writing novels altogether.
    A breakthrough did not come until late in his career, when he wrote All the Little Live Things (1967). It was with this novel that he at last found his voice by inventing Joe Allston, the narrator, who is witty, sometimes wise, and often cantankerous. Allston in All the Little Live Things would become the pattern for the narrators in Stegner’s last novels and the forerunner in several ways of Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose. Allston was in part a product of Stegner’s own reaction—now that he himself had grown older—to the late 1960s and its radicalism, and to the blossoming of the “now” generation with its antihistoricism, intolerance, and hypocrisies. Sometimes this voice is light, even flippant, but always there is an undertone of skepticism.
    With Allston, for the first time the novelist experimented with the first-person singular, which up to this point he had avoided. It seemed to him that “you couldn’t deal with really strong emotions in the first person because it’s simply an awkwardness for an individual to talk about his own emotions.” But once he began to work with it, he found he could do things that he could hardly do by any other means:
    First-person narrative encourages you to syncopate time, to bridge from a past to a present. It also allows you to drop back and forth, almost at will, freely. When Joe Allston or Lyman Ward is working with the past, his head is working in the present.
    And time, this merging of the past with the present, is not only an essential aspect of structure in these late novels; it is in itself a central theme and of particular importance in Angle of Repose. During this period, with the onset of the Allston type of narrator, Stegner made a conscious effort to, in his words, “interpenetrate the past and present.” In several essays he has stated that his goal was to do for the West what Faulkner had done for Mississippi: discover “a usable continuity between the past and present.” And he has added, “That’s what western novels too frequently don’t do.”
    With Allston in All the Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird, and the narrators descended from him, Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose and Larry Morgan in Crossing to Safety, Stegner used a first-person narrator to achieve a voice close to his own, yet fictional. It would convey a sense of truth and conviction which came not, as in his one previous major success, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, out of the telling of his own story, but rather out of the force of his personality and belief. These narrators fit Stegner not only because he was getting older and matched them in age and perspective, but because his character stood in strong opposition to the excesses of his times, to the nihilistic, self-indulgent, and self-centered attitudes we see expressed so often by the younger generation in Angle of Repose. He has said that one of the themes of Angle of Repose is this generation gap,
    especially the anithistorical pose of the young, at least the young of the 1960s. They didn’t give a damn what happened up to two minutes ago and would have been totally unable to understand a Victorian lady. I could conceive students of mine confronting Mary Hallock Foote and thinking, “My God, fantastic, inhuman,” because they themselves were so imprisoned in the present that they had no notion of how various humanity and human customs can be.
    Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn’t understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war. By nature Stegner was the