Angle of Repose Read Free Page B

literary historian, view the world? As the novelist has said, “We all have to have in some degree what Keats called negative capability, the capacity to make ourselves at home in other skins.” Here was the tunnel vision that Stegner was looking for.
    Foerster did not provide a character—Stegner invented him, descended from Joe Allston—but a point of view, literally a position from which to view the world. In comparing Allston with Lyman Ward, Stegner notes that Allston and Ward are very different types. Allston is
    more emotional than Ward, less over-controlled. Lyman Ward is pretty uptight all the time. Joe Allston is likely to get drunk and disorderly and to wisecrack in the wrong places. He’s another kind of character, but he has some of the same functions as a literary device.
    Observer and commentator, Lyman Ward, immobile, travels through time and space via his mind’s eye, which of course is precisely what a novelist does. He is not immobilized by just his disease, which does allow him to move about in his wheelchair, but also by his attachment to place, his ancestral home, and by his obsession with his family’s history. Both literally and figuratively, he lives in the past. While one cannot agree with Lyman’s son, Rodman, that his father’s investigation of the past is a waste of time, his devotion does seem extreme—except when one realizes that his devotion is not just to the past for its own sake, but that he is also looking for guidance in his present situation. The subject of Angle of Repose is the life of Susan Burling Ward, but the essence of the novel is the evolving consciousness of Lyman Ward, her grandson.
    The novel can be roughly divided into two parts. The first third of the novel deals largely with Lyman Ward and his experiences and thoughts about his life. Lyman’s story and his character (a contemporary man who can understand and sympathize with a Victorian lady) frame the remaining two-thirds, which deals with his grandmother and whose state of mind is often conveyed to us by her letters to her eastern friend, Augusta. This Susan Burling Ward material, based on Mary Hallock Foote’s papers, would bring accusations of plagiarism, charges of misuse of source materials, and even angry denunciation by feminists who claimed that a male writer had deliberately set out to destroy the reputation of an accomplished female artist. Some of the charges grew out of misunderstanding and miscommunication; some, out of spite and, no doubt, jealousy.
    Stegner had gotten to know Janet Micoleau, one of Mary Hallock Foote’s three granddaughters, in Grass Valley through the husband of his secretary, Alf Heller. He visited the Micoleaus on several occasions while he was thinking about using the papers, and Janet encouraged him to do something with them, since her grandmother had been largely forgotten. She hoped that through Stegner’s work, interest in her grandmother’s life and work would be revived. When Stegner decided to go ahead with a novel based in part on the papers, Janet told him to use the papers in whatever way he wished. Stegner assumed that she, who had had custody of the papers, spoke for the family.
    There probably would not have been any trouble if the whole Foote family had been willing to become involved in dealing with the novelist and if Stegner and the Foote family had agreed on what they meant by “novel.” What the Footes meant was explained by Janet’s sister, Evelyn Foote Gardiner, when she stated in an interview: “I thought he would write something like Irving Stone’s biographical novels. That he would invent conversations and all of that, but that he would pretty much stick to the facts of their lives.” Although he changed and added in order to create a plot which gave the novel its central drama and which would bring together the past with the present, he did stick to the broad outline of their lives. However, Mrs. Gardiner and those who have taken up her cause