Crossing to Safety Read Free

potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could
contribute.
    . . . We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. . . .
    I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.
    The personal in Stegner’s fiction becomes the universal. Impatience turns to patience. Reservations become possibilities of transformation. We find the musings of Larry Morgan turbulent in their truth-telling. That’s why we read, to understand what we have not dared to consider, to see ourselves in the characters portrayed.
    This is the sorcery of literature. This is the alchemy of Wallace Stegner’s pen.
    In reading
Crossing to Safety,
I begin reading my own relationships, wondering what accommodations I have made, need to make, and why, what risks of the heart are worth taking, and what I wish to create in the choreography of love. The circle of our friendships holds us in place with its possibilities.
    Consider this scene: Charity has just given birth to the Langs’ third child. Larry has just received word that his first novel will be published. Sally is about to give birth at any moment. A party ensues. Sid and Larry break open bottles of champagne.
    Whup!
His cork hits the ceiling.
Whup!
Mine follows. Cheers. People drain their glasses, and hold their empties toward us, and we pour. Then Sid is lifting his glass and calling for quiet. Finally he gets it. Sally, I see, is back on the couch. I move to get to her with the champagne bottle, but she raises her glass to show me that someone has already provided.
    “To the talent in our midst,” Sid says. “To the marriage of match and kindling, the divine oxidation.”
    Crossing to Safety
is a novel about gifts: the gifts of our talents; the gifts of our shortcomings, which allow us to grow; the gifts of a marriage; the gifts of our friendships; the gifts of what endures and what falls away; the gift of a good life and the gift of a good death.
    Wallace Stegner was a friend of mine, a true mentor. In the 1920s he played tennis with my grandfather Sanky Dixon in Salt Lake City, when he taught at the University of Utah. He knew my grandmother Lettie. He knew my lineage, respected one’s genealogy. He understood the Mormon culture that held me and he encouraged me to hold on to it, even as he helped me form the questions that would set me free on my own writing path. And he gave me a vocabulary with which I could begin to read
The American West as Living Space.
    But most important, Wally made me want to live a dignified life, a life that mattered to both the people and place where I belong. He honored both the power of the individual and the individual’s place inside community. Stegner reminds us that we have obligations to both. To have witnessed, in small part, the beauty of his own marriage of fifty-nine years to Mary Stuart Page is to believe that we can live by the strength of our own words.
    I miss him. I long to hear the steadiness of his voice, alongside his no-nonsense edginess, his wit, and his uncommon wisdom, which cut through hollow gestures and lies.
    But I know where to find him. He lives in the pages of his twenty-eight books. His spirit lives in the open spaces of his beloved American West, where he gave away so many of his words in the name of preservation, as he challenged us, his daughters and sons, to “create a society to match the scenery.”
    And Wally’s influence is very much alive in the hearts of all of us who knew and loved him. Each time I pick up my pen, I feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart.
    I recognize Wallace Stegner as a man who “crossed to