Finding Lost Voices: More About Mary Hallock Foote with Sands Hall - Wallace Stegner’s profound debt to Mary Hallock Foote
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered
A few weeks ago, after writing “Finding Lost Voices: Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938) and the Theft of Wallace Stegner”, I had the chance to sit down with the writer Sands Hall, whose stunning Alta essay (“The Ways of Fiction Are Devious Indeed”) alerted me to Stegner’s theft of Foote’s work and life. And my intent today was to share that conversation. That is until Hall offered to write this piece where she outlines in detail the places in Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose where he stole from Mary Hallock Foote. I hope you enjoy this piece! I’ll be posting our interview for paid subscribers. What follows, is Hall’s essay. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
It’s been well established that Stegner, in writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, borrowed mightily from not only the life but the writing of Mary Hallock Foote (“borrow” is his word; a more appropriate term is steal). Below I attempt to unpack a few of the ways in which he did that.
It’s important to include in such a discussion the narrative device Stegner created for his novel. Historian Lyman Ward—suffering from a cheating wife and an unhappy divorce, as well as a terrible bone malady that’s led to the amputation of a leg and put him in a wheelchair—has taken himself to his grandparents’ home in Grass Valley, where he spent time as a child. It is in that haven that he begins to sort through the unpublished reminiscences of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, married to engineer Oliver Ward, as well as letters Susan wrote to her lifelong friend Augusta. As Lyman delves into this history, he moves between his own point of view, describing the difficulties and dramas of his life in Grass Valley, to that of an historian, offering essential context to the tale he’s unfolding—which allows him to slide easily and effectively into the point of view of his grandmother, using her texts to explain and support the eyes through which he’s looking. We come to understand that part of Lyman’s exploration of the lives and especially the marriage of his grandparents is in order to come to terms with his own.
But Stegner is not creating, as a fiction writer does, the story of Lyman’s grandparents. Rather, he relies on the lives of 19th century writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote (MHF) and her husband, engineer Arthur Foote—lives recorded in MHF’s writings. The letters he quotes so voluminously are ones MHF wrote to her lifelong friend, Helena Gilder. And while MHF’s reminiscences were indeed unpublished at the time Stegner found and used them in Angle of Repose (AOR), published in 1971, they were brought out by the Huntington Library Press as A Victorian Woman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (Rems) in 1972, the year Stegner won the Pulitzer.
One of the first examples of Stegner’s verbatim use of these Reminiscences is MHF’s description of the history of her friendship with Helena: And then Helena dawned on my nineteenth year like a rose-pink winter sunrise… Stegner-as-Ward names this friend Augusta: And then Augusta dawned on my nineteenth year… he begins, and for three long paragraphs copies word-for-word what MHF says about her beloved friend, ending with MHF’s beautifully rendered metaphor: Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past (Rems: 97-98/AOR: 33).
Such direct plagiarism is common throughout the novel—whenever the text is indented and in a different and smaller font, it’s largely plagiarized. I say largely as sometimes Stegner changes or adds details, deletes or elides or revises sections, moves information written on one date in MHF’s letters to a different date for Susan’s, at times he includes paragraphs in a letter that are taken from the Rems. It’s astounding to imagine how many hours he must have spent typing sentences he did not write into his manuscript. (It’s possible he was speaking into a tape recorder— as his narrator Lyman does — and paid someone to transcribe them.)
There are of course sections of the novel that do not rely on the Footes’ lives, when we find out what’s going on with Lyman in Grass Valley. Even then, Stegner relies on and builds connections between Lyman’s Sixties world and that of his late 19th century grandparents. In the historical sections, Stegner often acts as any fiction writer working with source material might: molding given situations into his own language. Nothing wrong with that, except that he incorporates descriptions, insights, even dialogue provided by MHF. Even more disturbing is that in the process of using so much about—and written by—Mary Hallock Foote, he torques the character of Susan Burling Ward: she comes across as small-minded, self-centered, and ungenerous, not the person one gets to know as one reads MHF’s own words.
An early example that conveys both these efforts—Stegner’s extensive “borrowing,” the simultaneous negative shifting of Susan’s character—is the first time Mary/Susan and Arthur/Oliver talk to each other (they’ve met briefly once before). All have been invited to the house of Moses Beach for a New Year’s Day party. Both MHF and Stegner let their readers know that it was customary for ladies to gather at one particular house while the men visited house to house. By this time Mary/Susan’s drawing skills are in demand; she will wind up illustrating works by such writers as Hawthorne, Kipling, Longfellow, Alcott and others.
My own callers did not take up a very large part of my day. In the afternoon I slipped into the library and in the quiet there, with the noise of the carriages and company shut out, I grubbed away at a piece of work I had brought with me, a front-page drawing for Hearth and Home which had to be finished on time. The door behind me opened with a burst of noise and closed again. A young man stood there who apologized for his entrance and asked if he might stay. —Rems: (80-81)
“Her own callers were few and left early,” Stegner writes, before Susan makes her way to the library and begins to draw:
Sometime later the door opened, letting in a wave of party noise. Hoping that whoever it was would see her working and go away, Susan did not look up. The door closed with a careful click, whereupon she did look up, and saw Mr. Beecher’s cousin, Mr. What-was-his-name, Ward. He had such an earnest, enquiring face that she felt like throwing the drawing pad at it. —AOR (38)
Aside from MHF’s “the door behind me opened with a burst of noise and closed again” and Stegner’s “letting in a wave of party noise,” what I find interesting is with that “Mr. What-was-his-name,” Susan seems to dismiss their earlier meeting as unmemorable. Also curious—this is one of the first times in the novel that Stegner-as-Lyman occupies Susan’s point of view—is that Stegner establishes her in a petty, slightly mean way: not only does she want to throw her drawing pad at Oliver (already a bit odd), she wants to throw it because he has “such an earnest, inquiring face.”
In Angle of Repose, Susan’s seen Oliver earlier that afternoon, when Mrs. Beach summons her into the parlor (37), where Susan “got an earnest, frowning regard from an unseasonably sun-blackened boy too big for the gilt chair he was perched on…He looked outdoorish and uncomfortable and entrapped, and his hands were very large, brown, and fidgety.”
Whereas MHF writes (Rems 80): “I had noted, the evening before, when he was introduced to me, a restfulness of manner that seems to go with certain occupations or with the temperaments that seek them….”
Stegner offers “outdoorish and uncomfortable and entrapped”; MHF “a restfulness of manner.” From Susan and Oliver’s first conversation, Stegner seems intent on heightening the differences between them. On the one hand, we could say that he’s forging tension, vital to plot; nevertheless, Susan begins to come across as judgmental and even a bit shrewish—characteristics Stegner slowly amplifies as the novel unfolds.
In a similar vein, note below the subtle but important difference between MHF’s “he did not praise my work” and Stegner’s “she wanted him to praise the drawing.” Also how Stegner dramatizes the dialogue MHF narrates in her description, including taking MHF’s small joke that Arthur seemed to have “laid up more chills and fever than money” and giving that word play to Oliver.
He did not praise my work; he merely said how jolly it must be to have work that one liked and make it pay. I gathered that he had a job which paid but he hated it and was thinking hungrily of some other work that should have been his. His eyes had given out—permanently he was told by an oculist who made a mistake and cost the stunned patient his last two years at Yale (Sheffield) Scientific School. No years are wasted, necessarily, of course; he accepted the verdict and went south to raise oranges and laid up more chills and fever than money and came north and had his eyes looked at by a better man… all he needed was the right pair of glasses. His class had been graduated that June—and there he was, done out of those two years which would have put him in line with the other fellows. —Rems (80)
But why worry about Yale if he had his eyes? “Why not go ahead and be an engineer on one’s own?”
… she wanted him to praise the drawing. But he only said, “It must be wonderful to do what you like and get paid for it.”
“Why, don’t you?”
“I’m not doing anything. Not getting paid, either.”
“But you’ve been doing something. Somewhere in the sun.”
“Florida. I was trying to grow oranges.”
“And couldn’t?”
“The chills and fever flourished a little better.”
…
“What do you want to do?”
“I started out to be an engineer.”
“And at an advanced age gave it up?”
No smile. “I was at Yale, at the Sheffield Scientific School. My eyes went bad. I was supposed to be going blind….” He pulled from the inner pocket of his coat a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles and hooked them over his ears, aging himself almost a decade. “They made a mistake…all I needed were these.”
She found him boyishly engaging. Maybe she felt motherly. She said, “So now you can go back to Yale.”
“I’ve lost two years,” said young Oliver Ward. “All my class is graduated. I’m going out West and make myself into an engineer.” —AOR (39-40)
Why would Susan feel “motherly?” And why does Stegner-as-Ward, who’s been well settled into her point of view for this entire scene, suddenly step back to give us that coy “maybe”? And while MHF writes, “it’s rather mixing memories to sort what one said one’s self…” (80), it seems indicative of the character-building Stegner is doing that here, too, he has Oliver say he’s going to make himself into an engineer, rather than, as MHF recalls in the Rems, it’s something she suggested.
Mary/Susan eventually marries Arthur/Oliver and travels by train across the country to be with him in New Almaden, where he’s been hired as the mine’s Resident Engineer. It’s here that Stegner begins to quote extensively from Mary’s letters to Helena—I perused some of these letters in the Stanford Library Archives and penciled into the margins of my well-stickied copy of Angle of Repose are the dates of her letters versus the ones Stegner gives them—a curious nicety, given the degree to which he otherwise feels free to steal from them. He continues to take anecdotes and details from the Rems, rendering them for his readers. It is during this time that Helena/Augusta’s husband Richard/Thomas, editor of Century Magazine (and while I can’t see how one can rename Richard Gilder, the actual editor of the actual Century Magazine, so Stegner does), offers to lightly edit Mary/Susan’s letters and publish them as essays; thus begins her writing career. When Arthur/Oliver loses the New Almaden job, Mary/Susan and her son Sonny/Ollie stay in Santa Cruz while Arthur/Oliver tries to find work. Which he does, in Deadwood, South Dakota, while Mary/Susan and Sonny/Ollie stay with her family in Milton, upstate New York. When Arthur/Oliver lands a job in Leadville, Colorado, Mary/Susan leaves her son and takes the train to Denver.
In the Rems, MHF writes that Leadville “was booming at an altitude of ten thousand feet, close to the ridgepole of the continent (163).” While MHF’s use of metaphor is often exquisite, I point out this one especially as a ridgepole is essential to a tent: canvas swooping away from that horizontal support, as do mountains from the Continental Divide. It’s a figure of speech Mary knows because she and Arthur often camped. Furthermore, this life—camping, horseback riding, the western outdoors that inspired so much exquisite writing—would not have been available to her had she remained in her east coast life. Yet she missed that life deeply and continually; Helena and Richard represented much for which she often felt a sad longing. That tension ran through Mary’s life. It runs through Susan’s as well, and Stegner keeps it present in his narrative, although he presents Susan as much more continually miserable than I believe Mary was.
At the time I discovered the degree to which Stegner stole from the life and writing of Mary Hallock Foote, I had been asked to work on a theatre piece based on Angle of Repose. Perhaps that’s why, as I looked for a way to share my outrage regarding his actions, I moved in the direction of a play. I liked, also, that while there was no way Foote and Stegner could ever meet, in the magical “ether” of theatre, such a thing was possible. But above all, theatre offered an effective way to convey the degree to which Stegner relied not only on the Footes’ lives (which my play, Fair Use, also dramatizes), but on MHF’s words. As a character named MHF reads aloud the letters and memoirs she’s scribbling, a character named WS, typing his novel, simultaneously says those same words. Actors also portray Mary/Susan and Arthur/Oliver, as MHF and WS “share” the unfolding of their story. I include a bit of that playscript here to convey another way WS utilized MHF’s work. The dialogue in the first section, as well as all descriptions spoken by “MHF” are from the Rems (I particularly like that she writes that while Arthur was thinner and looked older, he “looked like a man one might go to Leadville with”) (169-171). Some of the dialogue and all of the language spoken by “WS” are from AOR (231-234).
MHF (writing)
The fame of Leadville silver eclipsed Deadwood's promises of gold. The new camp was booming at an altitude of ten thousand feet, close to the ridgepole of the continent.
Train whistle, chug of train slowing. During the following, passengers descend and scatter.
ARTHUR/OLIVER scans the crowd.
MARY/SUSAN sees and runs to him.
“All down the years of change and journeys, looking back, I see those long continental trains coming in at their last stations, the dust of state after state upon them….
MARY (holding him away, scanning his face)
Thee looks thinner than I have ever seen thee.
ARTHUR
High altitudes are not fattening.
MARY
The year since I have seen thee has changed thee.
ARTHUR
I am older.
MARY
Not older, precisely. Thee looks like a man one might go to Leadville with.
MHF
"Although the absurdity of going to Leadville at all struck me, Still, I had resolved never to lay a finger in the way of hindrance on my husband's 'legitimate work'. We traveled as far as we could on Denver’s narrow gauge, then started out at dawn with a buggy and two skinny horses from the end of the track."
MARY/SUSAN and ARTHUR/OLIVER sit, staring upward.
ARTHUR/OLIVER holds reins and whip.
ARTHUR/OLIVER: We’ve got a climb ahead of us. (To the horses): Walk on!
HE cracks the whip. THEY freeze while WS speaks, but throughout the following it’s clear by their that the buggy is in motion.
WS (typing)
Tableau: tiny figures at the foot of a long rising saddle, snow peaks north and south, another high range across the west. The road crawled upward toward the place where the saddle emptied into sky. The wind came across into her face with the taste of snow in it, and not all the glittering brightness could disguise the cold that lurked in the air.
MHF
We spent much of the day steadily climbing. Our horses had no load to speak of, yet before noon one of them was hanging back and showing signs of that lung fever which in these altitudes has but one end.
WS
"She looked at the horse, spraddle-legged, dull-eyed, with pumping ribs and flaring nostrils, and heard the breath rattle in his throat."
MARY/SUSAN
He's sick!
ARTHUR/OLIVER
They're not pulling much of a load. And we're still a mile from the pass.
MARY/SUSAN
I'll walk.
MARY/SUSAN start to leave the buggy.
ARTHUR/OLIVER stops her.
ARTHUR/OLIVER
We're at twelve thousand feet! The pass is thirteen or more. You'll be gasping like that horse in minutes.
MARY/SUSAN
Then lighten the load!
ARTHUR/OLIVER
If we leave the luggage it will disappear. (HE lashes the horses.) Get on, now. Get on.
MHF
From that on, the drive was spoiled by seeing the gasping creature kept up to his work.
(ARTHUR/OLIVER cracks the whip, cracks it again).
On the last and steepest part of the grade, a sharp turn with a precipice on one side narrowed the road rather suddenly.
ARTHUR/OLIVER (holds up a hand)
Listen!
MHF
Here we met the stage coming down, all six horses at full speed—
WS
Around the upper bend came a pair of trotting horses, then another pair, then another, then the rocking cradle of the stage.
MHF
They had the precipice on their right, we had the bank. I felt that moment I would just as soon die myself as see my husband force that dying horse up the wall of earth, but it had to be done. He stood out on the buggy step, throwing his weight on the upper wheels, and laid on the lash—
ARTHUR/OLIVER stands out, uses the whip; MARY/SUSAN grabs at his arm.
WS
The sick horse floundered. Oliver lashed, lashed, lashed it. She screamed and grabbed for his whip arm; he shook her off. There was a smoke of horse breath, a roar and rumble, a close, tense, voiceless rush—
MHF
The two men driving exchanged a queer smile—they understood each other…
WS
She saw the stage driver's queer, gritted smile…
ARTHUR/OLIVER
Get on, now! (HE snaps the whip.)
WS
Oliver lashed the sick horse harshly, lashed its mate, leaped to the ground and kept on lashing. The buggy crawled upward. Susan sat white and trembling, hating his cruelty, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West.
MHF
The brutal West! That’s a bit melodramatic, Mr. WS. While I am glad I have forgotten what I said to my husband in that moment, that wasn’t cruelty. It was necessity. Arthur saved our lives.
It is in Leadville that for the first time Stegner authors a letter to Augusta, rather than using one written by MHF to Helena. “Do you remember, by chance, a family named Sargent on Staten Island?” Susan writes. “Their son, Frank, is Oliver’s assistant here…” (AOR 245). In introducing Frank Sargent, a composite of several men who worked with Arthur, Stegner sets in motion the infidelity that eventually explodes the Wards’ lives—but not, it’s important to note, the Footes’. Although that infidelity is 200+ pages away, it’s here that Stegner launches it, using MHF’s letters to Helena, in which Mary describes riding out each evening with one of Arthur’s assistants, to bolster the alternate storyline he’s building for Susan.
In their famous “Cabin on the Ditch” in Leadville, the Wards/Footes entertain people as diverse as writer Helen Hunt Jackson and the eminent geologist Clarence King (both Mary and Susan use King’s survey maps as wallpaper). Eventually, Arthur/Oliver is asked to journey to Michoacán, Mexico to scout mining techniques. Mary/Susan’s letters about and drawings of this remarkable journey are serialized in Century by Richard/Thomas (and generously used by Stegner). Eventually, when Arthur/Oliver is pulled to Idaho to investigate a very different kind of gold—bringing water to arid lands—Mary/Susan returns to Milton, where her second child, a daughter, is born. Mary’s is named Betty, Susan’s, Betsy.
While Mary/Susan is skeptical of Arthur/Oliver’s plan to divert the Snake River to irrigate the land around Boise—and concerned about what it would mean for her own life to accompany him to the far west—Arthur/Oliver returns from Idaho intent on convincing her of his plan. Below, as I move between what MHF writes in her Rems, and how Stegner dramatizes it in AOR, notice how even as he incorporates her images (Moses striking a rock) and metaphors (bringing up a baby/the success of his scheme), he again distorts the Mary we see in the Rems: Susan is more judgmental—worried that Oliver will “humiliate” her—and utterly lacks the confidence in Oliver that Mary has in Arthur.
I felt adrift as it were, cast off on a raft with my babies, swept past these wild shores uninhabited for us. My husband steering us with a surveyor’s rod or some such futile thing—and where were we going on this flood of uncertainties? I was in that frame of mind and body that if my dreamer had been Moses I should have tried to stay his hand lest the water when it followed his stroke might become torrent and overwhelm us…
He came back in February (1883), and in one evening’s talk upstairs by ourselves he convinced me that he was not mad. He was as quietly assured of the worth of what he was doing as I was of my own little scheme of a six months’ baby asleep in her crib beside us. No one could have convinced me that she was not worth a lifetime of pains and all the money we could scrape up to bring her to womanhood. He had that recklessness of time and cost, with absolute conviction as to the worth of the undertaking, which makes it possible to unfold a country or bring up a child from the cradle. —Rems (266)
Compared to Stegner
Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.
“I wrote you the minute I was sure we could pull it off,” he said.
He made her shake her head, he jarred out of her some hard laughter. “How can you say such a thing? How can you be sure you can pull it off, as you say?”
…
“Come here.” He led her to the foot of the basket. … and held her by the wrist, looking down at the sleeping baby.
“Do you think you can bring her up?” he said. “Can you make a woman of that baby?
“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t think so?”“You’re confident?”
“I hope so. I think so. Yes, why?”
“Will you believe me when I tell you I’m just as confident I can carry water to that desert?”
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his crosshairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”
—AOR (366-367)
There are many places where the woof and warp of the combined writings, the way Stegner folds MHF’s language into his, is very effective, and at times it can seem petty and picayune to point it out. And yet, in order to witness and understand the magnitude of the debt, it seems important to do just that.
In this next excerpt from the Rems, MHF describes the investors willing to back Arthur’s scheme, and the brochure that has helped do the convincing. In the excerpt from AOR, you’ll notice that with that sentence, “I have a copy of it here,” Lyman Ward enters the narrative. I find it amusing that while MHF states that the source of the quote used for the brochure is Psalms, Stegner-as-Ward determines where it comes from “with great difficulty.” Observe, too, how Stegner takes MHF’s wry perspective, “The engineer’s wife read it somewhat as a work of fiction, all history in the making being fiction to the majority in its day,” and uses it as a sulky and dismissive comment from Susan: “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in the family.”
I no longer quarreled with his imagination, though I held my breath; the wonder was that he should so soon have found other men with imagination. Not shysters, but men in big business of their own with names that commanded respect. I asked to be told about General C.H. Tompkins, the president of his new company, called the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company…General Tompkins had built up the American Diamond Drill Company and was its president… It was all incredible; and these good names connected with us added to the pilot’s responsibility; still, it looked less lonely on that raft!
…
The new irrigation company’s first report came out in great form, printed by De Vinne, with an Egyptian hieroglyph on the title page signifying Agriculture in the desert: fellaheen in loincloths carrying “pots” slung from a pole across their shoulders and emptying them on the land; underneath, from Psalms: “I have removed his shoulder for the burden; his hands were delivered from the pots.” When Clarence King saw this report—he probably went no deeper than the cover—he said, “That quotation ought to build the canal.” The engineer’s wife read it somewhat as a work of fiction, all history in the making being fiction to the majority in its day. —Rems (267-9)
Compared to Stegner’s passage in Angle of Repose:
He led her to the foot of the bed and made her sit down; he drew from the pocket of his coat, hanging on the bedpost, a brochure in a green cover. I have a copy of it here. “The Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company,” it says. Inside, on the title page, fellaheen in loincloths are carrying water in pots slung on a pole, and underneath the woodcut is a quotation which with great difficulty I have determined comes from Psalms: “I have removed his shoulder from the burden; his hands were delivered from the pots.”
“I showed that to Clarence King,” Oliver said. “Did I tell you I met him on the train, coming East? He says the quotation alone assures us success.”
She was appalled; he was a child. “Mr. King is a great joker.”
“Maybe, but he wasn’t joking about this. Neither am I. Go ahead, read.”
Shakily, she laughed. “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in the family.”
“Fiction is it?” He flipped the page. “See who the president of this company is? General Tompkins, who is also president of American Diamond Drill. He’s not used to backing fictions.” —AOR: 367
Mary/Susan and Arthur/Oliver spend a decade in Idaho, where the ebbs and flows of support for Arthur/Oliver’s mighty vision are heartbreaking, and where they build a home in a cañon outside Boise. Meanwhile, in Angle of Repose, Frank Sargent shows back up; Stegner increases the sexual tension between him and Susan, even as Mary/Susan is pregnant.
There are so many places where Stegner uses MHF’s words and details and letters that it would take a huge volume to annotate them all, and the sheer number makes it difficult to select examples, but here is one more: the birth of Mary/Susan’s third child, named Agnes (this is the one family name Stegner did not change). In the Rems, they’ve sent an inept nurse home and Arthur has raced to fetch the doctor but brought back Mary’s sister Bessie (Stegner did not provide Susan with a sister in that lonely life in Idaho).
The baby came at sunset, and out of the window of my room, they told me, a double rainbow could be seen spanning the hills where the river enters the Cañon. A sight so beautiful that he, who did not know that he had another daughter about two minutes old, came to the door and begged them not to let me miss this welcome to our Cañon baby. I laughed to think of it afterward—how Bessie held the door against him and said sternly, “She is not thinking of rainbows!” —Rems (300)
In Angle of Repose, there is no sister, but there is a stern doctor. Oliver and Ollie are together, and we are in the point of view of Ollie, a rare circumstance in the novel, but the reason for it seems revealed by the end of this excerpt, in which Stegner significantly alters the beauty of MHF’s memory:
Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one atop the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.
“By George, your mother ought to see that. It’s an omen, no less.”
They ran past the cooktent…Ollie’s father knocked…
“Sue? Sue if you’re able, look outside. There’s an absolute sign, the most perfect double rainbow you ever saw.”
The door opened, the doctor stood in it, wide, shirt sleeved, his hands held fingers-upward in the air. Every lamp in the house seemed to have been lighted behind him; his shadow fell clear to the front door. Ollie’s horrified eyes made out that the stiffly upheld hands were enameled with blood.
“Your wife isn’t interested in rainbows,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a daughter three minutes old.” —AOR (418)
Forty-five pages from the end of his 569-page novel, Stegner-as-Lyman writes, “Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me…I have to make it up” (AOR 524).
And make it up he does: While Susan is behind a bush with Frank somewhere, doing whatever it is they’re doing, she neglects her three-year-old daughter, Agnes, who drowns. As a result, Frank kills himself, and Oliver, having put it all together, tears up his precious rose garden and never speaks to his wife again. At last, Stegner creates his own story, but at what a cost to those who know that he based his novel on the lives of the Footes? And those who don’t know that’s the case, think Stegner’s come up with those remarkable lives, and written those amazing passages.
During their time in Idaho, MHF recalls sitting with her husband and his assistants “in the restful silence of the Juniors’ room” and writes, “…often I thought of one of their phrases, ‘the angle of repose,’ which was too good to waste on rockpiles and heaps of sand. Each one of us in the Cañon was slipping and crawling and grinding along seeking what to us was that angle, but we were not one of us ready for repose” (Rems 306). Mary Hallock Foote points out the life metaphor in that phrase, which of course was so useful to Stegner. Although, his narrator seems to have a very different sense from MHF of what might be meant by “repose”; when asked, Lyman defines it as “horizontal, permanently.”
Mary’s daughter Agnes died at 18 of acute appendicitis. Mary’s grief was such that she did not write or publish again for over a decade. The Footes were living in Grass Valley by then, where Arthur was Superintendent of the North Star Mine. The Wards, Oliver supervising the Zodiac Mine, lived there as well—not speaking to one another. Many decades later, Arthur’s dream was brought to fruition: it would take the U.S. Government to fund his mighty vision. Stegner does not mention this.
In an Author’s Note at the front of the novel, Stegner thanks, mysteriously, “JM and her sister” (Mary and Arthur’s granddaughters) “for the loan of their ancestors.” That is the sum total of the acknowledgment he offers Mary Hallock Foote.
SANDS HALL is the author of the award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint). She is also the author of a novel, Catching Heaven (Ballantine), and a book on writing, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, Iowa Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books; her recent essay in Alta Journal about the “is-it-plagiarism” scandal surrounding Wallace Stegner has won numerous awards. Sands is also a singer/songwriter and theatre artist; in addition to an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she holds a BA in Acting and an MFA in Theatre Arts. She brings her extensive theatre experience to her teaching. Professor Emeritus, Franklin & Marshall College, she lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California. www.sandshall.com
Upcoming Readings
I hope to see you all at some of my upcoming events!
February
February 21, 2:00 PM EST, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s talk on the Craft of Biography at New York University, New York, NY
February 22, 5:00 PM, An Evening with Iris Jamahl Dunkle at North Bay Letter Press, Sebastopol, CA
February 23, 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM - WORKSHOP Empowering Your Voice Through Multimedia Erasure at North Bay Letter Press, Sebastopol, CA
February 26, 6:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT
February 27, 3:30-5 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, LNCO 2110, Salt Lake City, UT
March
March 5, 4:30 - 6:00 PM- Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Gavin Jones at The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA
March 6 - UC Boulder/Center for the West, online lecture. Details are coming soon!
March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas
March 14 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Books and Books in Key West, FL
March 21 - 2:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the New York Public Library, New York City
March 30, 4:00-5:30 PM, Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the Occidental Center for the Arts, Occidental, CA
May
May 17 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA
 | A guest post by
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Such an unbelievable story!