Among the enormous pleasures of rereading Angle of Repose is finding oneself submerged in Wallace Stegner’s descriptions of the West he loved and championed throughout his life: the crash of ocean near Santa Cruz, moonlight in an Idaho canyon, the plural peaks of the Continental Divide. His skill with detail and majesty, evoking emotion and wonder, is unmatched. One emerges from this absorption blinking, astonished to be in a living room and not on a beach, splashed with salt water, or in the frigid shadow of mountains. This is surely one reason the novel, more than half a century after its publication, continues to land on “best of” lists.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
Another reason may be the book’s portrait of a marriage—a tough marriage, of “unlike particles,” as Stegner’s narrator, Lyman Ward, puts it, who “clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose.” Ward’s grandmother, Susan, married to an engineer, knows the language of his profession, which fittingly surfaces as Ward sifts through her letters and unpublished reminiscences, probing the couple’s lives, and their marriage, as he seeks to understand his own. As we move back and forth between Ward’s travails and those of his grandparents, Stegner offers the reader opportunity for the kind of self-reflection and discovery that all satisfying novels provide.
And for many, Angle of Repose is a deeply satisfying novel. Yet Stegner inflicts his narrator with several curious maladies. Not just that his wife has cheated on him and that they’re unhappily divorced; Stegner also places Ward in a wheelchair: A debilitating bone disease has led to the amputation of a leg. Ward also can’t turn his neck; his “Gorgon” head is immovable; to change his line of sight, he must adjust his wheelchair.
An author authorizes; a reader gleans. That Stegner chose to remove a leg from his narrator and limited his ability to see feels pointed, as if the author is gesturing toward a psychological lack of mobility or a narrowness of vision these might reflect, or hinting at emotional scars that are in this way manifested. Yet nothing materializes as we read: It isn’t something Ward did that caused his wife’s infidelity. No dark secret is revealed.
But maybe it’s not about the narrator. Maybe it’s about the author. Because there does happen to be a dark secret at the heart of Angle of Repose: Much of the book is stolen.
The peripatetic arc of Ward’s grandparents’ lives is identical—except in one small but vital respect—to the lives of 19th-century Mary Hallock Foote, illustrator and writer, and her husband, engineer Arthur Foote. At the time that Stegner came across the then-unpublished reminiscences of MHF (as she is known) and her 50-year correspondence with a dear friend, he was, as he puts it, “without book.” MHF’s writings lay out the physical trajectory of life with her husband—New Almaden and Santa Cruz in California; Leadville, Colorado; Michoacán, Mexico; canyon and mesa in Idaho; Grass Valley, again in California—a trajectory Stegner follows for his fictional Susan and Oliver Ward (he uses those place-names as section titles). MHF’s writings are also where he found his title, a term she knew because she lived and worked with engineers. “Often I thought of one of their phrases, angle of repose,” she writes in her Reminiscences, published the year Stegner won his Pulitzer for the novel that relies on them so thoroughly, “which was too good to waste on rockpiles and heaps of sand.”
Stegner lifts scenes from MHF and enhances them. While this is within the purview of a novelist, more problematic is that he incorporates, verbatim, enormous chunks of her writing. In the historical sections of the novel, thanks to MHF’s texts, he convincingly conveys Susan’s heart and mind. Did Stegner put his narrator in a wheelchair, did he limit his perception, to indicate, consciously or not, that he’s using vehicle and vision provided by MHF to create his novel?
Most readers have no idea of this theft. Those who do often believe that MHF cheated on her husband, as Susan does on hers, and that Arthur Foote, like his fictional counterpart, Oliver, never spoke to his wife again. Not the case. This is the only time the novel’s historical sections deviate from MHF’s life.
Yet of course there is more to the novel than the lives of these “borrowed” (Stegner’s word) grandparents. As Ward slaloms out of his own life, into theirs, and back again, we perceive an increasing desire to forgive his wife’s infidelity—as Oliver cannot forgive Susan’s. And Stegner’s clever decision to make Ward a historian allows him to provide essential context, which lifts history out of the mundane and into the spectacular. And while he uses many scenes taken from MHF, he weaves them—phrases, descriptions, dialogue—into vivid, often unforgettable pieces of writing.
And perhaps in this way, the novel reflects and reveals California: Early inhabitants of our state stole lands from Indigenous peoples (and other thefts followed, it could be said, through the wages and living conditions inflicted on transient workers, immigrants, and refugees). As Stegner created his novel, he stole much from Mary Hallock Foote. The beauty of both is derived in part from ill-gotten gains.•
