Stegner: Conversations On History And Literature

After Ten Years

After Ten Years: Another Conversation with Wallace Stegner Etulain: What do you think have been the most notable changes in the American West during the last decade? Have the continuities been more significant than the changes? Stegner: Actually change may have been part of the continuity. The old boom-and-bust routine still goes on. I suppose Dallas, Denver, and a lot of places are less prosperous now than they were ten years ago--was it ten years ago that we talked? Yes. Those ten years have gone by pretty fast. Billings has not become as big as Denver, as it was talking about becoming ten years ago. Denver itself is in a slump. Texas is in a slump. It seems to be almost like a continuous, repetitive act of God that the western resources should be mined in that fashion, that populations should rush in and have to rush out again, or trickle out again. I don't suppose they have trickled out of the Southwest, where sunshine is a relatively renewable commodity, but water is not, and I suspect sooner or later there is going to be a problem there. They're getting overpopulated for what they can support. No, I would guess that changes in the West are just another blip on that long curve. A big boom, prosperity, and population growth followed by a This conversation took place in Wallace Stegner's home in California on 27 December 1989. [ix] x CONVERSATIONS WITH WALLACE STEGNER bust, which in different places was of different proportions, but which was a bust or a decline. Some places, like Montana, don't seem to have the same kind of boom because they haven't got that much sunshine for one thing. The weather is rougher. I think Montana is relatively safe from the kinds of things that the Southwest is not so safe from just because it takes an awful lot to live there and there isn't a lot to make a living by. It's a helluva good life but a poor living. That's one of the reasons why Montana seems to me to get more and more characteristically western-it survives in the old fashion. There's more literary acknowledgment, I think, of the West. Several people from the Southwest have come on pretty well since we talked. Leslie Silko, and people like that have made it pretty solidly. The bunch around Missoula, I suppose, is the latest and in some ways the most noticeable crowd because they're all pretty good. Rather insular, but they've made their impact, which is what a regional literary movement tries to do. Stay itself but get itself noted. I think that's a hopeful sign that in a town as small as Missoula there should be three or four writers of considerable importance. Not important to the New York Times Book Review, maybe, but important in the whole scheme of things. That's been going on there for quite a long time; that isn't a change either. It's just a kind of growth. A good many years ago, what's his name ... ? Richard Hugo or Leslie Fiedler? Before them. He wrote a book about the metis, and the Louis Riel rebellion .... Joseph Kinsey Howard. He had a literary circle going in the 1940s. And H. G. Merriam published the Frontier up in Missoula before that. There was a kind of persistent, small literary germ growing there. It has not changed in its general emphasis, but it's got better and bigger as time has gone on. And the people who were there, though some of them died and some of them left, left their influence behind. Even Fiedler's influence, I think, was an enriching one in the way he stirred up the waters. He made an awful lot of people mad. I don't know that he learned much from his experience there, but people learned something from him just by seeing that particular eastern type. I'm interested that the people who predict the future argue that California will stop growing, and yet it continues to expand. California is, as we've said before, not fully part of the West. It's west of the West, as somebody in California recently said. And it has the water and the climate and the soil to support a population like Japan, if it has to. I wouldn't want to live here when it was going...