Stegner: Conversations On History And Literature

6. On the Mormons

6. On the Mormons Etulain: I suppose your first contact with the Latter-day Saints was during your high school years in Salt Lake City. What were your first impressions? Stegner: I'm not sure I remember any first impressions that were in any sense religious. The first impression I had of the Mormon Church was of what the Mormons called Mutual, which you know about. Every Tuesday night, down in the ward amusement hall, youth activities go on, classes of one kind or other, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all those other organizations that Mormons are very good at. I fell into that with great eagerness. The first thing of that kind that I had had at all was in Great Falls, where, though I was too young to be a Boy Scout, I was a Cub Scout, I guess, or something, and I liked uniforms, I liked uniformity, I liked belonging to things, and so when I got to Salt Lake I instantly was a Boy Scout. I've forgotten what ward, but ... I liked it. That gave me a kind of hole to crawl in, and I liked it very much. It was good for me, but with no sense at all of any religious temptation. As a matter of fact, about the time when I began to have the usual adolescent religious questionings, I had already shifted from whatever Mormon ward I started in and gone over to an Episcopalian Boy Scout troop. There were two Episcopalian Boy Scout troops in Salt Lake which were, at least among our crowd, held to be the best outfits in town. I belonged to one, and we often went on camping trips with the other one for a week or two at a time up in the Uinta Mountains. We joined forces in a nonMormon , even in some cases anti-Mormon, coalition. But certainly my first [101] 102 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALLACE STEGNER initiation into anything like that was through the local wardhouse where the neighbor kids around me went, and I just naturally went along. You mention in The Gathering of Zion [1964J that you "have a warm admiration" for "the everyday virtues of the Mormons." What characteristics did you have in mind when you made that statement? I suppose what I had in mind is precisely what people have in mind when they speak of the New England virtues. The old-fashioned virtues, the virtues that have to do with hospitality, with family life, with the sort of welcome that strays have in a big family. In Utah, then, you could fall in with a family which had nine kids. You probably still can there more than anywhere else. They were big families, and they were warm and open families. They had a lot of what I'd always missed; though our family was tight, it was not that kind of warm and open family. It was closed, closed against the world instead of open to it. These people were so confident of their family life that they just threw open the doors in every direction. It wasn't a desperation move, in other words, but part of living their religion. The family is so important in Mormon religion that without it the religion would hardly exist. And all of that meant a kind of welcome which I had never seen, which I tried to express in some way in Recapitulation. Though the Mulder family I created in Recapitulation was a Jack Mormon family, it was still part of the same sociology. The virtues are essentially virtues of hospitality and familial warmth, and also, quite commonly, a degree of community responsibility that, on a frontier, I hadn't seen much of. No, that was a society which, for better or for worse, was a developed society rather than a developing one. It had come developed. They traveled on the road like villages already developed, organized humanity instead of disorganized. You also mention that you find Mormon women incredible. I suppose you mean the endurance, hard work, and patience on the overland trails, or did you have something . .. I had been reading a lot of Mormon women's journals of the handcart companies and the early wagon trains, and also some of the journals of women who were part of the whole Nauvoo complex, and whose husbands sometime during that period took another wife, or two, or three-women who put up with that, who put up with the constant...