Angle of Repose Read Free Page A

antithesis of the in-your-face hatred and anarchy that surrounded him. He was a liberal politically but a man of old-fashioned virtues—polite, courteous, kind—who applied a great deal of self-discipline to his life and who usually repressed the kind of witty sarcasm or outspoken opinionatedness that his first-person narrators are likely to voice. Nevertheless, he obviously enjoyed speaking his mind through his characters—to balance the penalties of aging, there can be a perverse pleasure in being candid. When asked in an interview if the voice of this narrator was close to his own, he replied, “Yes, but don’t read him intact. He goes further than I would. Anybody is likely to make characters to some extent in his own image.”

I .
    Stegner first came across Mary Hallock Foote—the genteel nineteenth-century local-color writer and illustrator whose life became the basis for Angle of Repose —in 1946, when he came to Stanford. He was doing research for a chapter to be included in the Literary History of the United States called “Western Record and Romance.” He read several of her novels and story collections, as well as uncollected stories in their original magazine publication. He judged her “one of the best, actually; she was good and hadn’t been noticed.” He took notes on her work, put one of her stories in his anthology Selected American Prose: The Realistic Movement, 1841-1900, and included one of her short novels on his reading list for his American literature class. At the time, he was probably the only professor in the country to be teaching Foote’s work.
    A GI student in that class, George McMurray, enthusiastically reported to Stegner that he had come across Mary Hallock Foote’s illustrations and writings about New Almaden (in the Coast Range foothills near San Jose, California). He told Stegner that he had found out that Foote had a granddaughter living in Grass Valley, California (near the Empire Mine, where Foote’s husband had been the superintendent). McMurray said that he was going to go up there and see if he could get Foote’s papers for the Stanford library, with the idea of possibly using them as the basis for a doctoral dissertation on her life and work.
    The Foote family gave McMurray the papers with the understanding that he was going to publish from them and that he would supply typed transcriptions of the letters to the family. McMurray planned to do the dissertation under Stegner’s direction, but a decade went by with no progress, and he finally gave up. During the mid- 1960s, Stegner borrowed the transcriptions from the library and took them with him to his summer home in Vermont to read.
    Reading her quaintly 19th century letters, I thought her interesting but certainly not the subject of a novel. She lay around in my mind an unfertilized egg. . . . What hatched, after three years, was a novel about time, about cultural transplantation and change, about the relations of a man with his ancestors and descendants.
    He did not want to write a historical novel (as he commented on several occasions, western literature was too often “mired in the past”), but a contemporary one, and as he thought about the story in the Foote letters, it occurred to him that perhaps he could somehow link the two together so that the past was made part of the present. That, in turn, led him to look for the sort of narrator that had “tunnel vision,” frequently focused on the past and thinking about the present in terms of the past.
    The perfect model for what became his narrator, Lyman Ward, presented itself to him in the person of Norman Foerster, Stegner’s dissertation adviser at the University of Iowa, who had come to the Stanford campus to retire. Foerster, unfortunately, had been struck by a disease that had paralyzed his legs. With some sorrow about what had happened to his old friend, Stegner nevertheless put himself into Foerster’s place—how would he, a largely immobile