"Angle of Repose" by Wallace Stegner
Above: "Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. 632 pages.
I'm not saying I'm Oliver Ward. But I would be Oliver Ward if I could wave a magic wand to make it happen.
I completed reading this Pulitzer Prize (1972) winning novel today for the second time. I first read the book in the mid '70's.
Here is the Barnes and Noble overview:
An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past. Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story, he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.
My take
Lyman Ward, a retired, disabled history professor living in the San Francisco Bay Area, organizes his grandmother Susan's twenty-year correspondence with Augusta and tries to piece together Susan's and husband Oliver's life journey as he writes Susan's biography. There are lacunae in the correspondence where Lyman can only muse and speculate about missing information. Lyman moves to the ancestral property in Grass Valley, California to undertake his writing project.
And, so, the story begins. In her twenties, Susan Burling participates in 1880's elite New York City literary and arts society. Her best friend, a New York City socialite, is Augusta. Susan's relationship with Augusta is somewhat more than platonic and somewhat less than libertine. Since time immemorial nontraditional relationships have been typical in upper class echelons of most cultures. Susan has her own artistic and writing proclivities and enjoys being included in colloquies with the likes of contemporaries Whitman, Melville, and Poe in New York City coffee houses and salons.
At a Christmas party in Connecticut at the home of her sister Betsy, Susan meets Oliver Ward, a young, taciturn, mining engineer who seeks to make his future and fortune in Western mining and engineering projects. Susan and Oliver enjoyed conversing with one another at the party, but the relationship between them didn't take hold until a few years later, when her friend Augusta married Thomas Hudson, an important New York publisher, also part of Susan's literary group, and a marital prospect for Susan herself.
Following Augusta's and Thomas's marriage, Susan's social positioning becomes, at least to her, complicated. Susan begins correspondence with Oliver Ward. Oliver and Susan are married and soon thereafter head west to start Olver's career.
Oliver is clearly a talented engineer. When an Oliver Ward managed Idaho water project is on hold for lack of funding, Oliver is tapped by John Wesley Powell to aid in a national survey of western water. But Oliver never quite finds the holy grail of engineering accomplishment hoped for by Susan. Promising projects, like the Idaho project, suffer from funding delays. A job in Mexico doesn't pan out, though Susan loved the hacienda life and there pursued her writing and artist talents with elan. Leadville Colorado was hard living and violent encounters there threatening some of her husband's work force forced Oliver and Susan to seek other employment.
Oliver and Susan have three children. Susan assumes she and Oliver will be able to provide an eastern education for their children, but the money is not always there and plans sometimes have to be put on hold. A woman ahead of her time, Susan has money making capability herself through her illustrations of western scenes and essays on the west distributed via her eastern publishing connections. Susan becomes a well-known writer and illustrator as she dutifully, at least at first, dutifully follows Oliver to his various jobs in the West. Oliver, ever the quiet, proud, stoic feels emasculated by his wife helping with the family budget. Contradictorily, Oliver encourages Susan as an artist seeing the joy she derives from her talent.
Susan definitely loves and supports her husband, but Oliver's practical, focused technical mind will never grasp the high-minded talk in which Susan engaged in the New York salons. Oliver sits quietly in the background, as Susan, in her humble western home in Leadville, entertains eastern politicians, European mining investors, writers, and corporate chieftains, all besotted with her intelligence and social grace. Stoic Oliver does not feel threatened by any of Susan's high mindedness. He is proud of his wife and revels in her ease of engagement with high society. Oliver is smart enough to realize that Susan's strengths as an accomplished, social, literary figure are a help to his own career. Oliver is a rock solid, good individual secure in his own role in the world. This is not to say that Susan respects Oliver equally as a reciprocal. She can be wistful, if not doubtful, about the unsophisticated part of Oliver. Susan conveys the ambiguity about this part of her relationship with Oliver in her letters to Augusta.
Oliver has team of loyal workers who follow him. Frank is senior among them. Frank is desperately infatuated with Susan. Susan resists Frank's entreaties, but there is a growing estrangement between Susan and her husband. Oliver's lack of worldly sophistication gnaws. Oliver has started drinking as his failures pile up. The long-awaited jackpot arising from Oliver's project work remains ever elusive. All these factors leave Susan open to being nicer to Frank than perhaps she should be. There is no evidence in the Augusta correspondence that a Frank/Susan relationship was consummated, but, surely, as grandson Lyman speculates, Oliver knew something was amiss.
One day on the stalled Idaho water project, Oliver is in Boise on business. Frank, Susan and Susan's and Olivers's daughter, five-year-old Agnes, go on a walk near the canal of Oliver's water project. Agnes goes missing and is later found, by Frank, drowned downstream in the canal. Lyman reports, from a news clipping he had personally researched in building a timeline for the biography, that Frank took his life by gun shot the day after Agnes drowning. There was no mention of Frank's suicide in the Augusta correspondence. Lyman wonders how Frank and Susan could have lost track of Agnes... and so does the reader.
Days after the drowning of Agnes, Susan and daughter Betsy, watch from an upper window of their Idaho home, as Oliver, rips out, one by one, all of the roses of the beloved rose garden, where one of the roses had been especially cross pollinated to create a beautiful hybrid, red and yellow rose named after Agnes. This was the first time in Susan's and Oliver's marriage where Oliver behaved (drinking aside) as other than a supporting and loving husband. As he reviews his grandmother's letters, Lyman can only imagine Susan's devastation at the loss of her daughter along with her guilt (to what extent?) about being responsible for Agnes' death.
Oliver and Susan separated for two years after Agnes' drowning, but through the instrumentality of Susan's sister importuning Oliver, Oliver and Susan reunited, this time in Grass Valley, California, where Oliver had assumed a senior water position. Here, with a comfortable living standard, Susan and Oliver lived out the next forty years of their lives, never fully loving one another, but, living a life of mutually dependent necessity, without the deeper bond that characterized the first twenty years of their marriage. Lyman marvels at how almost all of his grandmother's biography is about the first twenty years of her marriage. About the next forty years at Grass Valley, there is nothing to write. Lyman grew up in Grass Valley and, as a boy, knew both Oliver and Susan. But, during that period, their existence is no longer detailed and magnified by Susan's correspondence with Augusta, which had ended at the time of Agnes' death.
Lyman was devoted to his grandparents, both Susan and Oliver. As decades later he sorts through his grandmother's correspondence with Augusta, both his real time experience living with his grandfather in Grass Valley and his appreciation for his grandfather's resolve to always do right for his family, notwithstanding the ambiguous feeling he senses from his high-minded wife, Lyman sees as a mark of character that sets Oliver apart from most men. Lyman understands how Agnes' death and Susan's, at best, negligence, broke his grandfather's resolve to carry forward his quest of the holy grail engineering project. Under the circumstances of the Agnes event, a quiet life of stasis (the angle of repose) for Oliver and Susan is the best that could be hoped for.
Stenger is a westerner. He went to high school in Salt Lake City. He ended his career as head of the English Department at Stanford University. In this novel he captured the spare-no-effort quality required to make good in the desolate, barren but full-of-promise American west of the late nineteenth century. My own forebears lived in the desolate, still untamed Great Basin during this period. Reading of Olliver and Susan ward enabled me to better understand the sacrifices and challenges made by my own ancestors as they forged a new life in the West. Insights like this are why good literature is important. Good writing inspires. Contrasting one's own life with past lives provide lessons to enable self-improvement, just for starters.
Another reason to enjoy the book: I have been to many of the places where the novel is set: Leadville, Colorado, Grass Valley, California, southwestern Idaho, and Mexico. Visualizing the novel through the lens of my own experience having spent time in these areas, brings Oliver's and Susan's story more vividly to live.
Lyman was writing a biography of his grandmother, Susan. That stands to reason. Susan's correspondence with her friend Augusta were the source material for the biography. But, for me, this book is great because it features Oliver Ward. For me, Oliver's doggedness in pursuit of his dream of engineering accomplishment, his undying loyalty to his family, his ability to attract good, loyal, talent for his engineering jobs, and even his forgiving acquience to worker and family faux pas along the way, set him apart as a literary avatar worthy of emulation. For me, Oliver, not Susan, sends the most important message of "Angle of Repose." This is why we have literature... to show us models and examples we can use to order our own lives. I'm not saying I'm Oliver. But I would be Oliver if I could wave a magic wand to make it happen.
Finally, I marvel at Stegner's ability to contrast the contrasting natures of Oliver and Susan, exploring with words and metaphors I could never put together myself, were I to attempt such characterization. This is a brilliantly written book... well worthy of its accolade at being America's best novel in 1972.