Wallce Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Stegner's last novel is suitably garrisoned to hold its ultimate position, armed with subject matter ranging from family, to career, to love, to friendship, to art, to death--in precis, with the memorable stuff of human life. And then there is that even deeper matter, the one that evades explicit mention, and would almost escape notice entirely (as it so often does) were it not for the title and its prefatory source, a stanza from Stegner's good friend Robert Frost:
I could give all to Time except--except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with, I have kept.
And what are these "things forbidden"? Stegner, I believe, could have laid out an easy answer for us, drawn from natural gifts, gifts conditioned by years of pain-love-experience. That is the common precedent, and one not forsaken by many great men. Tell 'em, old man, tell 'em. You've earned your pulpit, and they need to know.
Instead, Stegner is calculatedly reticent. Instead, he gives us Sid. Sid, who holds in his unfulfilled vial of desires that small, perpetually rooting-sprouting-growing-dying-rooting seed, that definitive element of human (in)sanity, that ineffable sentiment or soul, the one that haunts the last lines of Gatsby. Stegner gives us Sid, and with him all of our insignificance and hope, our long walks in the woods, our quashed poetry.
Only a writer with Stegner's appreciation for nature could have found it natural not to shout the things in his head, but rather to whisper them, so as not to disturb the continuity of eternal human dawn.
To have vision, and the ability to express it in atomic booms, and to instead render truth softly, with the grace and tickle of a Fall breeze; to own a powerful fist, yet never to hit readers over the head, no matter how insipid they may be as a class; to be so close to death, your own and your loved ones'; to still hold "the things forbidden" close to your vest, despite all the cards having fallen; to place yourself and your writing not above, where it quite arguably belongs, but instead in the continuum; to be There, to see it all, to keep not silent but subtle--
Chapeaux, Mr. Stegner. I hope that your molecules find their ways into the fabric of writers for centuries to come.
I could give all to Time except--except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with, I have kept.
And what are these "things forbidden"? Stegner, I believe, could have laid out an easy answer for us, drawn from natural gifts, gifts conditioned by years of pain-love-experience. That is the common precedent, and one not forsaken by many great men. Tell 'em, old man, tell 'em. You've earned your pulpit, and they need to know.
Instead, Stegner is calculatedly reticent. Instead, he gives us Sid. Sid, who holds in his unfulfilled vial of desires that small, perpetually rooting-sprouting-growing-dying-rooting seed, that definitive element of human (in)sanity, that ineffable sentiment or soul, the one that haunts the last lines of Gatsby. Stegner gives us Sid, and with him all of our insignificance and hope, our long walks in the woods, our quashed poetry.
Only a writer with Stegner's appreciation for nature could have found it natural not to shout the things in his head, but rather to whisper them, so as not to disturb the continuity of eternal human dawn.
To have vision, and the ability to express it in atomic booms, and to instead render truth softly, with the grace and tickle of a Fall breeze; to own a powerful fist, yet never to hit readers over the head, no matter how insipid they may be as a class; to be so close to death, your own and your loved ones'; to still hold "the things forbidden" close to your vest, despite all the cards having fallen; to place yourself and your writing not above, where it quite arguably belongs, but instead in the continuum; to be There, to see it all, to keep not silent but subtle--
Chapeaux, Mr. Stegner. I hope that your molecules find their ways into the fabric of writers for centuries to come.
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