Themes of Past and Present in Angle of Repose

THEMES OF PAST AND PRESENT IN ANGLE OF REPOSE Bruce A. Ronda Skidmore College " Tm not writing a book of Western history,' " the narrator of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose tells his skeptical son, " 'I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess.' . . . What really interests me is how two such unlike particles [his grandparents, the novel's protagonists ] clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any."1 These lines from Stegner's 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel contain three of the major issues that make it an important contribution to literature generated by the Western experience. Despite the disclaimer of the narrator, Lyman Ward, the novel is a part of Western history, or rather, of its reinterpretation. The role of women, the persistence of Eastern and Victorian cultural values, the place of investment , speculation, and industry—these are issues treated with increasing seriousness by historians of the West, and all are central to the novel. The marriage of the gifted New York artist, writer, and intellectual Susan Burling and the silent Western engineer Oliver Ward and the maintenance of their relationship suggest the strength of the Victorian configuration of the values of fidelity, duty, and self-sacrifice. Angle of Repose provides insights into the ways in which dominant Victorian values lay at the core of much of the nineteenth-century Western experience and reveals how fiercely settlers clung to the conventions of manner, dress, and role, despite profound changes in environment . Finally, the "unlike particles" rolling from the past into the present of the narrator, a crippled historian who is Oliver and Susan's grandson, point to a concern with the relation of past and present. For Lyman Ward, the past, especially the Victorian past, is rich in authentic values, stable, predictable, while the present is shallow, violent, arbitrary , crippled. The invention and elaboration of such a past, the sense of loss and regret at its passing, the anxiety of living under the shade of such grandparental giants, the possibilities of recovering meaning from the past—all these comprise a third major theme the novel explores. Stegner drew his nineteenth-century couple and their story from the life of Mary Anna Hallock, a successful New York illustrator who 218Notes married the young mining engineer Arthur Foote in 1876. Stegner duplicated the Footes' sojourns at New Almadén, California, Leadville , Colorado, and the Idaho territory in his account of the Wards. Mary Foote tried to overcome her sense of personal loneliness and cultural isolation through a prolific correspondence with Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner's, and his wife, Helena de Kaye Gilder, whom Stegner named Thomas and Augusta Hudson. Articles, short stories, illustrations, novels, and subsequent fame as an authentic voice of the West followed from this correspondence.8 Stegner has built this account into a narrative framework of a novel within a novel. The outer story deals with the grandson, Lyman Ward, who is obsessed with his grandparents' marriage and is seeking to account for its survival. Using letters, newspaper files, and journals, Lyman dictates his version of the past into a tape recorder, which is then transcribed by young Shelly Rasmussen. Shelly's naive openness and uninhibited sexuality form a central contrast with the reticence and privacy of Lyman's grandparents. Meanwhile, Lyman's son, Rodman , is attempting to persuade his father to forgo this exhausting project , confront the seriousness of his bone disease, and be admitted to a nursing home. Struggling for a sense of personal self-worth, convinced of the shallowness of the present, and driven to recover or invent the meaning of the past from the crippled present, Lyman presses on in his account of the Wards. While Lyman's account ranges beyond the "evidence" he amasses, reconstructing major sections of dialogue and indeed imagining entire scenes, Stegner's novel as a whole is part of the recovery of a fuller Western history whose variety has not until recently been appreciated or documented. A Western novel with a woman as the...