The American West as Living Space by Wallace E. Stegner (review)

180 Western American Literature All this is not new, but it is humane. And it is universal in its impulse because it is aware of other regions and their intimacy: “For me, the authentic map of the universe is composed of these microcosms—domes and domes of specific human light, crossing all abstract political, geographic, economic, and racial boundaries.” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University The American West as Living Space. By Wallace E. Stegner. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. 89 pages, $10.00/$18.00 text edition.) Longtime readers of Stegner will have the feeling that they’ve encountered parts of this book before, and they’ll be right. This series of three transcribed lectures is a quintessence of his struggle with the West-as-it-is, a careful con­ densation of large themes into measured space. Two beauties coexist in this slim volume: it gracefully documents a lifetime of study and thought on the American West, and it was distilled by Stegner in his own voice. In the preface, he says, “I decided that I would rather risk superficiality and try to leave an impression of the region in all its manifestations, to try a holistic portrait, a look at the gestalt, the whole shebang. . . .” What results is a deeply engaged set of descriptions that is also engaging, even as it kicks the props from under large portions of western myth. It rings true, and will make both native Westerners and pilgrim/aficionados squirm, though for different reasons. “Living Dry” defines the territory and the terms. Stegner follows Powell in letting the landscape and its aridity be the starting point. From there, he ranges through history, popular illusion, governmental fallacy, anthropology and other pertinent regions, ending, like a lizard’s tail, with a point. And what do you do about aridity, ifyou are a nation inured to plenty and impatient of restrictions and led westward by pillars of fire and cloud? You may deny it for a while. Then you must either adapt to it or try to engineer it out of existence, (p. 27) “Striking the Rock” deals with the consequences of the latter choice. He aims at stupidity and greed, both western and federal, and finds no shortage of targets. In this diverting lecture, Stegner skins politicians, BuRec, the Forest Service, the BLM and subsidized agriculture with tight-lipped charm, com­ bining well-chosen specifics with rigorous logic. In doing so, he provides analyses of the feudal/fascist tendencies of the western establishment and the inevitability, given faulty premises, of boom-and-bust economics. His conclu­ sion finds little solace in open spaces: Reviews 181 . . . the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it . . . neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope. (p. 60) The concluding lecture, “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur” is a study of culture and personality as they appear against the landscape, in a re-examination of ideas familiar from Letters from, an American Farmer. Stegner’s character sketch is more incisive than affectionate, a critique of the inability of a society to adapt to its own land. On that note, he looks at the literature of the West, starting with a cool evaluation of Owen Wister’s Virginian as a paid thug, and proceeding to the modern day with a series of raptorial swoops. His literary values—which include integrity—are expressed in a well-turned jeremiad that ought to be required reading for anyone intend­ ing to write about the West. Summing up this book isat least as difficult as Stegner’sattempt to sum up the region to which he has given a lifetime of study and devoted the major part of his art. The West is a difficult region to grasp, whether physically or spiritu­ ally. By either measure, Stegner’s work is a monument and this book—a vast treatment in a limited space—is essential reading. C. L. RAWLINS Boulder, Wyoming Entrepreneurs of the Old West. ByDavid Dary. (New York: Knopf, 1986. 416 pages, $22.95.) The Legacy of...