Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Harvey, Mark

Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape. Edited by Curt Meine. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997. xxi 256 pp. Illustrations, notes, list of contributors, index. $24.95.

Curt Meine, author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) has assembled an excellent group of essays on the life and work of Wallace Stegner, whom Dan Flores affectionately refers to in one piece as the "Grand Old Man of western environmentalism" (p. 12o). Stegner, who died as a result of injuries from an automobile accident in 1993, produced a body of writing about the American West that fits squarely into the environmental paradigm of the region begun by John Wesley Powell and Walter Prescott Webb, in which aridity resides at the core of the region's history. Stegner's now-classic biography of Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, is, as Flores points out, a work that "not only opened a lot of eyes about western realities, it was a work of high art whose flowing, forward tilt narrative and clear-eyed logic possessed the irresistible pull of the Colorado River itself" (p.109).

Several essays examine Stegner's contributions to environmental thought. Tom Watkins, former editor of Living Wilderness and current occupant of the Stegner chair at Montana State University (who is at work on a biography of Stegner), recounts Stegner's youthful and self-admitted innocence about the West and those who threatened its public lands and rivers. He also shows how his thinking changed from studying Powell, being deeply influenced by Bernard DeVoto, and watching the Bureau of Reclamation hatch schemes like Echo Park Dam. Thomas Vale's essay considers Stegner's sense of place, forged by his awareness of how aridity, sparseness of settlement, mobility, and a culture of individualism characterized the American West. Vale creates maps and graphs of Stegner's mind to capture his understandings of the interactions of nature, culture, and history. Richard Knight, in "Field Report from the New American West," examines the recent waves of migrants to the rural West, where proliferating subdivisions have renewed the debate about the West's sustainability and revived Stegner's critical thinking about establishing a sense of place. Meine's own essay asserts that Stegner's tuo biographies of Powell and DeVoto are examples of "geobiography," manifesting his idea that "the writing of lives was as much a department of cultural geography and natural history as it was history per se" (p. 122). But the outstanding piece in the volume, in this reviewer's opinion, is Dan Flores's "Bioregionalist of the High and Dry: Stegner and Western Environmentalism." Flores reveals how Stegner's most enduring ideas and concerns-the limits imposed by aridity, acquiring a sense of place, and the need for wilderness in American culturebecame bedrock principles of environmentalism in the West.

Some of the essays focus on Stegner's fiction. Among these are Melody Graulich's "Ruminations on Stegner's Protective Impulse and the Art of Storytelling," John Daniel's "Wallace Stegner's Hunger for Wholeness," Jackson Benson's "Writing as the Expression of Belief," and James Hepworth's "Wallace Stegner's Practice of the Wild." While most of the essays in this volume perceive the positive effects of Stegner's work, at least one, by Elliott West, takes a critical perspective. West points out that for all of his sensitivity to western land and its many inhabitants, Stegner had a blind spot when it came to American Indians. As West puts it, "in all his large body of work, only once does he bring Indians into his narrative as flesh-and-blood humans with long pasts, evolving identities, and at least by implication, some kind of future" (p. 95). The lone exception is Wolf Willow, Stegner's blend of fiction and history based on his early life in Saskatchewan, where the Metis were an important presence. But generally he paid little attention to the rich and many pasts of Indian societies, a fact which explains his slant on wilderness. Typical of many writers of his generation, Stegner portrayed a virgin landscape unaffected by human use prior to white settlement.

Despite this critique, the prevailing tone of this collection is one of deep admiration for Stegner's work. This attitude emerges most explicitly in Terry Tempest Williams's essay at the book's end and in Charles Wilkinson's piece at the beginning. Wilkinson puts his finger on Stegner's legacy: "He wrote, I believe, more serious words, and certainly more valuable words, about the West than anyone ever has" (p. 4).

Reviewed by Mark Harvey. Mr. Haney is Associate Professor of History at North Dakota State University and the book review editor for Environmental History. He is the author ofA Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (University of New Mexico Press, 1994).