Stegner: Conversations On History And Literature

2. The Early Works

2. The Early Works Etulain: You have mentioned several times in interviews and in your autobiographical writings that your parents had a limited education, but were they interested in books; did you have easy access to public libraries in your early years? Stegner: My mother was interested in books and used to buy books, but she bought books from the places where she could buy books, which was generally from the T. Eaton or Sears Roebuck catalogue. There was no library in East End, Saskatchewan, and nobody really had any books. I suppose we had as many as anybody in town. People used to borrow them from us, God help them now. But she did buy books, and I can remember my brother and me, on our muskrat-pelt money, buying books for ourselves for Christmas. I remember buying Owen Wister's Red Men and White. Here's the beginning of the western myth. We had no notion what it was about, but it looked pretty interesting in the catalogue: Red Men and White. I remember another one, On the Trail of Tipoo-Tib, something about ivory hunters and slavers in Africa. We bought those with our own money. My mother bought most of the books in our house, mostly novels of the popular kind, the Graustark novels and things like that. There was no library there at all. There was a library in Great Falls which I began to use a little, but it wasn't until I got to Salt Lake that I began to be a real addict. I would go down to the library two or three times a week and bring away three or four books each time, without any direction whatever. A lot of them turned out to be things like G. A. Henty, historical novels for boys, and a fellow named [21] 22 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALLACE STEGNER Tomlinson, who used to write historical novels about American history, the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky, Indian fights, and so on. More western myth. I remember Tomlinson and Henty; I don't remember much else from that period. But I remember just devouring books, one a day, sometimes more. We were always moving, and once in a while we would rent a house in which there was a residual library of some kind. I can remember when I was about, I guess, a junior in high school, setting myself the job one summer of reading through the Harvard Classics on the theory that that was good for my mind. I didn't understand one damn word of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and the rest! I remember reading almost all of Conrad, though, in some rented house. Somebody there had been a Conrad fan. That didn't hurt me any. I can remember reading in another house a certain amount of exploration, Captain Cook's reports of his explorations in Australia, the discovery of New South Wales, things like that. Again the selection was absolutely random and accidental. I don't suppose anybody began to direct my reading until I got into college. Then it was a direction primarily by temporary fad, the fad of the times. It began with James Branch Cabell and Hemingway and went on to Joyce and the rest of them. I was simply following people whose judgment in books was better than mine, more original than mine, and ahead of mine. If I found them interesting I would go read them. You mention, I think it's in Big Rock Candy Mountain, Bo Mason's buying a very expensive set of Shakespeare, isn't it? That's a detail out of our actual life. Yeah. We had that set of Shakespeare , but 1 don't know when he bought it. He got hooked by some traveling salesman. It always impressed me because it was bound in red calf. It looked very gorgeous. I don't recall reading any of that Shakespeare; God knows, I couldn't have. It was too remote from my dialect and anything that I understood. I don't think I ever read any Shakespeare until high school. You mention Ridpath's histories. Ridpath's histories I did read because they had pictures in them, the rape of the Sabine women, and the Gracchi with their swords outthrust. I did read in those histories on rainy days, days when I didn't really want to go out-partly, I suppose, because my hands were always cold and white and...