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5. Angle of Repose Etulain: What was the genesis of Angle of Repose? How did you come to write the novel? Stegner: the genesis is clearly the Mary Hallock Foote papers. I was without book, and about that time a graduate student of mine, George McMurray, decided that he definitely was not going to make a dissertation out of the reminiscences and the letters, which he had hoped to do, perhaps with an anthology of some of her stories. He hoped to restore her, because he really admired her stuff. But he turned out not to be able to do it because he just got too old and discouraged. He would have had to learn German and a lot of other things in order to get a Ph.D., and he was a re-treaded GI student, already sixty-three years old. When these things fell back upon me, I looked into them thinking there might be a book there. I read the letters, which didn't happen instantaneously. There are enormous numbers of them, a stack that high of typed letters; it's about a year's work to read through the blooming things. I took them to Vermont one summer and read around wondering whether there might be a biography in them or whether they might be a novel. Eventually I decided that if it was anything it was a novel, but it was a year or two before I finally determined that there was really a book there. It grew during the time of reading, perhaps because that story reinforced my own notion of what a story is. It was like the Big Rock Candy Mountain without my realizing it. It was the boomer husband and the nesting wife, although with variations in it and on a much higher social level. Anyway, it appealed to me finally as a story, and I determined that it was a [83] 84 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALLACE STEGNER novel. Up to that point it had come entirely out of the papers. Then I began to realize that I didn't want to write just another nineteenth-century triangle in cowpuncher's or in prospector's boots. I really didn't want to write a historical novel; I wanted to write a contemporary novel, but it occurred to me that maybe past and present could be linked together in the way that I had obviously been working toward for a long time. So I fiddled around for a good long while, and I finally wrote the opening chapter more or less as it is, utilizing a narrator with a broken marriage and a broken body. The physical misfortunes I borrowed from the plight of myoid professor, Norman Foerster. The marital problem I took from the experience of a friend of mine, whose wife-with whom he was madly, crazily in love, and by whom he had six or seven children-left him suddenly , simply ran off with some doctor, who almost immediately got himself killed in an automobile accident up at Lake Tahoe. So she was left, having abandoned her husband and having lost her lover. She tried to come back to him-she tried to crawl back to him-and he wouldn't have her; he kicked her out-implacable. Which is the origin of the Lyman Ward story, essentially. I added the crippling and the other business partly because it was there before me in Foerster and partly because it seemed to accentuate the tearing apart of people who have been very close for a long time. And that's where that came from. I don't think my friend ever did have anything to do with his wife again, and I don't know what ever happened to her; she just vanished. But it did seem to me in the circumstances that I had imagined -using Grass Valley as the place for this-taking him back during this time of crisis and healing-that in that place sooner or later they were going to come for him. If he had children, they were going to come and try to take care of him, or put him away, file him away. He was in a box, as it seemed to me, speaking from a box rather hollowly, desperately reconstructing the life of his grandmother and desperately avoiding his own. It seemed to me that the present and the past could be brought together in that way. If I could do it...

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