In the summer of 1945, UC Berkeley English professor George R. Stewart spent a week working in the fire lookout tower at Sierra Buttes in the Tahoe National Forest. Four years earlier, he had published Storm, an experimental novel about a winter weather system named Maria that ravages the Sierras. A Book of the Month Club selection, Storm featured the tempest as protagonist, relegating its anonymous human characters to secondary roles in a vast ecological drama. It was this book that helped inspire the World Meteorological Organization to begin assigning female names to tropical storms.
Encouraged by his success but not wanting to write a derivative sequel, Stewart began to research forest fires. He worked alongside rangers with the United States Forest Service, at one point even disguising himself in a group of drunks to get picked up on a day crew. Having shared his manuscript with some of the rangers, he took pride in their assessment that he had nailed the technical details of firefighting.
The resulting novel, Fire, appeared in 1948. Set in the fictional Ponderosa National Forest, located somewhere between Lake Tahoe and Plumas County, the narrative follows the formidable Spitcat Fire, which spreads to several thousand acres over roughly 10 dry September days. A team of hundreds, led by an aging ranger named Bart, is marshaled and deployed to contain the deadly inferno.
Out of print for many years, Fire has now been reissued by NYRB Classics as part of a Stewart reclamation project. (The imprint has also rereleased Storm and the author’s popular 1945 study of American geographical nomenclature, Names on the Land.) It’s not hard to understand the renewed interest in his work. Stewart’s writing, after all, anticipates modern eco-fiction by privileging the nonhuman elements of climate and environment over the agency of human beings. “I’m a chronicler of the ecology,” Stewart claimed during his later years. Like an Albert Bierstadt painting, a typical Stewart novel captures the disparity between the forces of nature, especially in the American West, and the transient thrust of human civilization. In that sense, as historian Emma Rothschild writes in her introduction to the new edition, “[Fire] is a book for our times.”
Rothschild is absolutely right, for Stewart’s work sits comfortably alongside such contemporary efforts as Daniel Gumbiner’s Fire in the Canyon, John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, and Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. The novel’s Spitcat Fire eventually moves from treetop to treetop with a “slow majesty,” reducing the human fighters to “no more than a few ants, futilely scurrying.” Frequent shifts in perspective—from Bart the Ranger to Judith the Lookout to Arn the Dispatcher to Dave the meteorologist and even to the occasional deer or rabbit—emphasize the systemic qualities of wildfire, as well as the difficulty of understanding it from any single point of view.
Fire is not dissimilar to Storm, although it avoids the fallacy of treating a natural phenomenon as an organic character. Whereas the earlier novel was about withstanding the cyclone’s fury and repairing its damage, Fire offers the more compelling drama of a fight against a “monster of withering flame and choking smoke.” The key metaphors for Stewart are militaristic: collapsing fronts, flanking movements, advancing platoons. The rangers and foresters and volunteers who come together to quench the blaze embody what Stewart described in Storm as “matter-of-fact heroism.” Their decisions regard tactical maneuvers and resource allocations—axes and shovels, canteens and K rations.
In that sense, while Fire is an environmental thriller, it may also be read as a war novel. And why not? It was August 1945 when Stewart came down from his week in the lookout tower, only to learn that the United States had dropped a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima. “I think I was about the last man in the world to hear about the atomic bomb,” he later reflected. The specter of a devastating world war hangs over the novel. In recognition of this context, NYRB’s new paperback features a beautiful cover image from a 1922 painting of the Sacramento Valley by Chiura Obata, a Japanese American artist and UC Berkeley professor who was placed in an internment camp in 1942.
There is a Wes Anderson–like quality to Stewart’s writing that may appeal to many modern readers. (Imagine Moonrise Kingdom starring Robert Stack.) Scouts report to headquarters with urgent radio communications, while fire foremen and rangers—with names like Bart and Slugger—adjust their charts and organize new plans of attack. In places, this can come across as cheesy, and some of the dialogue has a “golly gee” flavor reminiscent of a Hardy Boys mystery or an episode of Lassie: “We’ve got to hit that fire with everything we can throw at it—and quick!”
Yet Stewart’s impressive attention to detail saves Fire from mere juvenile adventure. He was obsessed with topography and toponymy, and the terrain plays an outsize role in the novel. As part of his composition process, he asked his son to help construct a three-dimensional plaster relief map he could consult for accuracy. (It’s now held in UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.) And the obvious courage it takes to fight a wildfire keeps the action compelling. The characters in Fire are not terribly complex, but they display an admirable charm in their understated daring—as when a few volunteer loggers “looked at another, appraised their chances with liberal profanity, and then got to work with the nonchalant air of men who were risking their lives and rather enjoying it.”•
