Source of book: I own this.
Wallace Stegner is one of those authors that I was aware of and wanted to read for years. I finally got a copy of this book, his last collection of essays.
The title should be familiar to anyone who knows old time music. Back in the 1920s, Harry McClintock popularized a song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountains.” Around the interwebs, you often see claims that he wrote the song. This is false. While McClintock got a copyright for the song, it actually existed for decades before that, with various forms of lyrics - it was the typical folk song whose origins remain obscure. Also, the original McClintock version, before the recording, had far racier lyrics, as many folk songs do.
Stegner remembers his father singing the song to him, and it made enough of an impression that he used the song title as the title for one of his novels. To him, as he describes in the opening essay in this collection, it represents the mythos of the American West, the misguided idea that it is an endless source of wealth and riches, open to all. In reality, the West is fragile, resource-limited, and has generally enriched only a handful of those who came seeking those riches.
I have known for a long time that my father-in-law was a fan, and having read this book, I realize just how much of our conversations nearly 30 years ago, before I even started dating his daughter, contained ideas from Stegner. Like Stegner, he grew up in the west, particularly Utah, and shares a lot of what Stegner describes as the Western way of looking at life.
What was more surprising, though, was that my father-in-law could absorb so much of Stegner’s environmentalism and realism about the fragility of nature - and indeed share so many of Stegner’s views - and fail to see that the Republican Party is the party of exploitation, destruction, and science denialism. He really should be a liberal. It is one of the great mysteries of our time.
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs contains essays grouped by type and topic. The first is all personal stuff, about his childhood, about his life, about friends. The second is entitled “Habitat,” and is all about the living world. In this collection, there is a lot about water, which seems ever more relevant as climate change dries the west. But even before that, water has been overallocated by a lot. We are going to be forced by reality to change how we live in the west, as Stegner points out.
The final section contains essays about writers, from Steinbeck to Wendell Berry, and it's pretty fascinating as literary criticism.
I won’t talk about every essay in the collection, but I do have some highlights.
I very much loved his description of his childhood, his difficult father, his long-suffering mother. He writes with love and nuance yet realism about his parents’ limitations. The essay also illuminates a lot about how he came to be the person he was.
The next essay, “Letter, Much Too Late,” is a love letter to his mother, who died too early, at age 50. Stegner wrote it when he was 80. It is impossible to miss the ache that he feels not merely at the loss, but also at all that his mother lost over the years, much of it because she chose to devote herself to her husband, who himself was careless of her needs. It is a story all too common, although not as common as it was in that generation. (Stegner was born in 1909.)
I didn’t write down any quotes from any of the personal essays. I think they need to be read as complete works, and as a set.
I did, however, take a lot of notes about the conservation essays. First is this one, that is so incredibly true yet seems to be ignored by most of the right wing.
Stegner talks at length about the “myth of western individualism.” And it is a myth. The west has always been highly dependent on the federal government for its existence. It is federal infrastructure that has supported it, federal lands that have been exploited, federal funding that has sustained it. From dams and other irrigation infrastructure to the railroads to the interstate highway system to the extensive national parks, the west as we know it wouldn’t exist without trillions in federal funding.
Beyond that, however, western humans have never survived as individuals, but in cooperative groups. The Mormons are a great example of that kind of society, but everywhere across the west cooperation is necessary for existence. I was born in Los Angeles, which isn’t (as Stegner points out) part of the true west - it is the Left Coast or Del Norte depending on where you draw the line - but I currently live in the west, where water is scarce, and a lot of the white westerners still cling to the lone cowboy myth, even as they depend on government for the basis of their survival.
In a later essay, Stegner talks about this paradox.
Aridity, and aridity alone, makes the various Wests one. The distinctive western plans and animals, the hard clarity (before power plants and metropolitan traffic altered it) of the western air, the look and location of western towns, the empty spaces that separate them, the way farms and ranches are either densely concentrated where water is plentiful or widely scattered where it is scarce, the pervasive presence of the federal government as landowner and land manager, the even more noticeable federal presence as dam builder and water broker, the snarling states’ rights and antifederal feelings whose burden Bernard DeVoto once characterized in a sentence - “Get out and give us more money” - those are all consequences, and by no means all the consequences, of aridity.
Yep. Get out and give us money. That is the western right winger in a nutshell.
Stegner also talks about people like the Bundys, who took a federal building hostage because they didn’t like paying a paltry sum for grazing on federal land. This idea that everything would be better if the government went away is blind to all the ways they are dependent on the government.
Never mind that grazing fees and coal and oil lease fees and timber sale prices are so low that they amount to a fat subsidy to those who enjoy them. Never mind that half of the money that does come in from fees and leases is given back to the states in lieu of taxes. Never mind that the feds spend the other half, and more, rescuing and rehabilitating the lands whose proper management would bankrupt the states in which they lie. NEver mind the federal aid highways, and the federally financed dams, and the write-offs against flood control, and the irrigation water delivered at a few dollars an acre-foot. Take for granted federal assistance, but damn federal control. Your presence as absentee landlord offends us, Uncle. Get out, and give us more money.
And more later:
One of the things Westerners should ponder, but generally do not, is their relation to and attitude toward the federal presence. The bureaus administering all the empty space that gives Westerners much of their outdoor pleasure and many of their special privileges and a lot of their pride and self-image are frequently resented, resisted, or manipulated by those who benefit economically from them but would like to benefit more, and are generally taken for granted by the general public.
The federal presence should be recognized as what it at least partly is: a reaction against our former profligacy and wastefulness, an effort at adaptation and stewardship in the interest of the environment and the future.
And more about the grazers like the Bundys who use BLM land:
Do they exist to provide bargain-basement grass to favored stockmen whose grazing privileges have become all but hereditary, assumed and bought and sold along with the title to the home spread?
There are some other good observations about other things in these chapters as well.
If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
I too feel this way, shaped as I am by the places I have lived and the places I have loved. I also think that last line is amazing.
Culture isn’t some monolith, frozen in time and place. It is, rather, a pyramid that we all are continuously building. This is yet another thing that the right wing gets badly wrong. They speak of “western civilization” as if it were a museum. And of course, it is a euphemism for whiteness. But more than that, it is the worship of an imaginary culture that never really existed. Culture has been built and continues to be built by all of us, whether they like it or not. Hence why Albert Murray insists that there is no such thing as “white American culture,” because American culture contains white and black and Hispanic and every other kind of culture that Americans of every ethnicity have brought to it over time.
In another place, Stegner quotes C. S. Lewis. I admit I had not heard this quote before - I suspect it is not one of the ones white evangelicals like to use, for obvious reasons.
“What we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.”
Another interesting essay takes on the issues of violence and lawlessness in the west, and how they continue to haunt us through our national mythology. A few lines stood out.
Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be the West. In a folklore predominantly masculine and macho, even women take on the look.
And this gem:
All this may seem remote from the life of the average Westerner, who lives in a city and is more immediately concerned with taxes, his job, drugs, the World Series, or even disarmament, than with archetypal figures out of folklore. But it is not so remote as it seems. Habits persist. The hoodlums who come to San Francisco to beat up gays are vigilantes, enforcing their prejudices with violence, just as surely as were the miners who used to hunt down Indians and hang Chinese in the Mother Lode, or the ranchers who rode out to exterminate the nesters in Wyoming’s Johnson County War.
These days, add in the ICE thugs, and the various MAGA rioters. The vigilante has always been about “enforcing prejudices with violence” and that hasn’t changed.
Lawlessness isn’t exactly being against the law either. It is the idea that whatever the law enforcers do is right. As Stegner puts it when describing Western Novels:
Law is whatever he and his companions (and employers) believe (which means law is his and their self-interest.)
This too remains all too common in our society today.
Another essay in this section is a brief history of the conservation/environmentalist movement. He notes that there has been a gradual shift over time - in a positive direction.
Yes, there was an environmental movement before Earth Day, a long, slow revolution in values of which contemporary environmentalism is a consequence and a continuation. We are still in transition from the notion of man as master of the earth to the notion of man as a part of it.
This really is a necessary shift, and, in my view, a return to a healthier way of being in the world. We went wrong when we misinterpreted the blessing in Genesis to mean mastering nature rather than caring for it, and this misinterpretation hasn’t just meant the destruction of nature, but, as Lewis noted above, the exploitation of fellow humans as the means.
The chapters on writers were also quite fascinating. Stegner definitely takes on the Cowboy Myth, calling for a more honest way of writing. While I haven’t read Stegner’s fiction yet, it is clear that his goal in his writing was to find that honesty.
Real cowboys have more brutality and less chivalry in them than the literary kind. Some of them have been subverted by literary propaganda and believe their own myth. Others, I am sure, are trying to do what any writer is trying to do: render the texture and tensions of their own lives, their own occupation, their own place. Their trouble is that if they write with honesty about exploitation, insecurity, hard work, injuries, and cows, none of which make even a walk-on appearance in The Virginian and most of the horse opera it has spawned, they will find a smaller and less enthusiastic audience than if they had written about crooked sheriffs and six-guns.
He also talks about the difficulties of getting respect from the eastern establishment, which has tended to look down on western writers.
But indignation and local puffery are not the ways to achieve stature. You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
I loved that he specifically called out a number of Native American writers as being important western voices. You can find my list of Native authors here. I will note with approval that he names Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and N. Scott Momaday, whose writings I have enjoyed.
There is a line in the discussion of Steinbeck that I thought was interesting.
A critic, by contrast, is not a synthesizer but an analyzer. He picks apart, he lifts a few cells onto a slide and puts a coverglass over them, he runs tests of the chemical components of spittle and sperm and heartsblood. His is a useful function and, done well, may greatly clarify the reading of a story - may even give a reader the illusion of understanding both the product and the process. But it is more reliable on the product than the process.
I’m not a true critic - my blog is more of a reading diary than a critique of individual books. Although a few have been so bad that I have felt compelled to write a scathing review. This idea is interesting, though. Stegner is more of a writer than a critic, but it is interesting in what is essentially a work of literary criticism that he would be harsh on critics.
One author he discusses that I was not familiar with is Walter Clark. I am probably not the only one, as a quick online search brings up a law firm as the first hit for that name. I did vaguely remember that The Ox-Bow Incident was made into a film back in the day, but that is about it.
After reading this essay, though, his books do sound fascinating.
One line about that book struck me as profound.
That novel is a long way from being a simple reversal of the vigilante stereotype or an ironic questioning of vigilante justice. It is a testing of the whole blind ethic of an essentially false, imperfectly formed, excessively masculine society, and of the way in which individuals, out of personal inadequacy, out of mistaken loyalties and priorities, out of a fear of seeming womanish, or out of plain cowardice, let themselves be pushed into murder.
Something to think about when it comes to the MAGA bloodlust against immigrants and LGBTQ people. Particularly the expression of personal inadequacy in violence, and the ever-present fear of not being “manly” enough.
I read this book before Wendell Berry’s recent passing, so that chapter seems even more timely now. One point Stegner makes is that Berry wasn’t the typical - or better yet, stereotypical writer. He wasn’t self-destructive, didn’t die young, didn’t seem to have endless personal demons he was fighting. Rather, he was thoroughly functional, and lived a measured, intentional, and quiet life.
We have grown used to the image of the artist as a person more notable for his sensibility than his balance. We might go to that artist for the flash of insight, often achieved at terrible cost to himself, but not for sober wisdom. I don’t disparage these Dionysian writers; they have lighted dark corners for all of us, and will continue to do so. But I find your example comforting because it restores a lost balance - one doesn’t have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism.
The final chapter in the book is a humorous one, about a lecture Stegner saw, purporting to teach a formula for how to write a short story.
Like all such formulae, in every facet of life, it was hogwash. Very few things can be reduced to a rigid failsafe formula - and neither childrearing nor literature is one of those few.
My distaste for that lecturer stemmed partly from the fact that he was commercial, and I was above that, and partly from his carpenter’s-rule method, but most of all, I finally concluded, from the fact that he had nothing but method. He wrote from an unvarying blueprint. He pulled prepackaged frivolous surprises out of his sleeve to elicit a gee-whiz response. There was no fire in his belly, no passion or vision or doubt in his mind, no penetration or challenge in what he wrote. He illuminated nothing, opened no windows, left no worm of wonder working in his readers’ heads. He had nothing to say, and nothing to ask beyond the questions to which he had just precooked the answers.
That is the perfect analysis. Why even write if you have nothing to say? Writing is, after all, about communication. This also is the problem with AI, which also has nothing to say, just a method for saying it.
This is not to say that technique, practice, and diligence have no place in writing. They are as important in the case of words as in music, and nobody wants to read an incompetent writer any more than they want to hear a violinist who has never learned to play. But in neither case is technique the end of the matter: one must still make art.
I’ll end with a bit about John Cheever, which Stegner relates.
Once at a literary meeting I heard someone ask John Cheever why he wrote. He replied without hesitation, “To try to make sense of my life.” That is the best answer I can conceive of.
I would agree. And also confirm that I write to try to make sense of my life. Books are a means to that for me, but I also write a lot about myself and the things I care about.
Stegner never lacks something to say, or fails to show the fire in his belly. This book is a great example of that. The author shines through in the words, and communicates his passion and vision. That is what makes this book great, and well worth reading.
