Wallace Stegner
Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner is a classic in American literature. It is the story of Lyman Ward, a wheel-chair bound retired history professor, writing the biography of his grandparents. Ward focuses specifically on his grandmother, Susan Ward, as he chronicles her life based on the articles she produced for prominent journals about her life in the West, her many illustrations, and the prodigious number of letters she wrote to her long-time friend.
The narrative unfolds through a two-pronged alternating time line. It opens in the late 1960s with Lyman’s routine and daily struggles with his disability. The time line then shifts to the 1870s through the 1890s as Lyman traces his grandmother’s early life, her immersion in culture and art, and her marriage to Oliver Ward, a mining engineer. Ward scoops her up to live in various locations in the West in pursuit of one job after another, one vision after another. With each recurring failure, financial setback, and personal tragedy, Susan becomes increasingly disenchanted. Her marriage frays and her relations with her husband are strained.
Stegner bases the character of Lyman’s grandmother on the real-life historical writer and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote. He cites copiously from her private letters, incorporates historical details of her life into the novel, and embellishes the rest. He portrays her as a refined Quaker who is more at home with the cultural and artistic milieu of New York than she is with living in a cabin in the untamed West. The novel moves slowly at times. Its strength lies in Stegner’s depiction of the challenges and hardships of life in the West during the late 19th Century.
The title, Angle of Repose, signifies the steepest angle of a dip at which loose materials maintain stability. It becomes a metaphor for the stability in Susan and Oliver’s marriage after decades of turmoil, disappointments, and tragedy. It also signifies Lyman’s understanding at the close of the novel that he needs to reach his own angle of repose by renouncing the resentment he feels toward his wife for her adultery.
The controversy surrounding the novel lies in Stegner’s verbatim incorporation of passages from Foote’s actual letters without seeking or obtaining permission to do so from her grandchildren. Furthermore, Stegner suggests the possibility that Susan had engaged in an adulterous relationship—one that her grandchildren vehemently deny and for which there is no evidence in any of her letters.
Stegner’s legacy, tarnished by his cavalier attitude towards his source materials, detracts from this otherwise commendable accomplishment.