[In the following excerpted survey of Stegner's short fiction, Eisinger declares the author indecisive.]

With the publication in 1956 of The City of the Living, a volume of short stories, Wallace Stegner rounded off the first twenty years of his writing career. Yet up to now no one has made an effort to evaluate his work or to place him. I should like to make a beginning by suggesting that Stegner, the author of nine volumes of fiction, is perhaps more important to contemporary literary history than he is to literature. Not that he isn't, especially in the short story, a writer of intrinsic interest. But he may with profit be regarded as a representative writer, in this Time of Hesitation, whose rejections and allegiances are characteristic of his time. He has rejected Marx, Darwin, and Freud—that is, radical social thought and deterministic science. In fact, he has rejected all extreme positions, both moral and social, for he finds them corrupted by cynicism and tyranny. He urges the discovery of some middle way of viewing man and his social experience in which the possibilities for good and evil will be reconciled and the possibilities for variety will be recognized. He thinks that the human will and morality are operative in our world. He is preoccupied with the problem of identity; he wants his characters to find out who they are.

No single writer of course can be representative of so fragmented an age as ours. What Stegner has accepted is very different from the contemporary cult of violence or the despair of nihilism; nor can it be said by any means that writers generally have declared Freud dead. But Stegner's withdrawal from politics and political ideology is representative, as the history of American letters since the outbreak of the second World War bears out, and this withdrawal has significant implications. Disenchantment with politics has led some older writers, like John Dos Passos and Granville Hicks, to dismiss all formulable and closed political philosophies. Others have made the nature of society a matter of indifference, accepting it as given. Some younger men, like Herman Wouk, have positively cuddled up to American society in either an uncritical or a calculated acceptance of it. No matter what their course, none of these writers has wanted to be alienated from his society.

Clearly the relationship between society and man has changed: whereas man in the fiction of the thirties rebelled against society and sought to alter its structure, he now makes society the mise en scène against which he tries to discover himself. Warren's All the King's Men and Trilling's The Middle of the Journey are distinguished examples of this use of society. In these novels, social and political considerations appear to be foremost, but the principal subject in each is the protagonist's quest for the self. The search for identity, in which the individual becomes more important than the society in which he lives, may bear some relationship to the search for individual salvation which is a part of the current religious revival. It also explains, in part, the emphasis in recent fiction on childhood experience, where memory and sensitivity to the child's mind and emotions are the essential agents in the process of identification. Much modern fiction, then, tends to throw man back upon himself. From this strategy emerges a subjective interpretation of life experience concentrated upon the individual. Insofar as these generalizations describe modern American fiction, Stegner is a representative figure. And he is never more typical than when he affirms the goodness of life even though his characters know it is latent with horror.

It is perhaps too easy a formulation to say that Stegner has accepted a commitment to life. Yet it may be just as well to describe some of his early work in this broad, unsubtle way. His first novel, Remembering Laughter (1937), seems to me to be an attack upon the denial of life in dour Scotch Calvinism. Two sisters and a man, involved in an adulterous triangle, live out their lives yoked together by the demands of respectability. The chilled atmosphere of hatred and repressed emotion drives the man from the house and turns the two good and cheerful women into gloomy brooders. The reader might well anticipate from these conditions a tragic resolution such as we get in Ethan Frome, which in some respects seems to have been the model for this book. But Stegner does not move in obedience to the logic of the situation he has created. He seems impatient with his characters because they have forgotten laughter and have not adjusted to the irregularities of their lives. He permits the child of the adulterous union to run away from the problem, escaping, so to speak, into life. In this novel, Stegner's commitment to undefined life forces leads him, I think, to an evasion of moral and auctorial responsibility.

The Potter's House (1938) is a novelette in which Stegner manipulates a group of grotesque characters to make the point that we invite tragedy when the normal forces of nature are frustrated. Denied the proper expression of her motherhood, the potter's wife leaves him for a career of abandonment. Here Stegner permits nature to define life, and life becomes something we must accept. . . .

Stegner's short stories were first collected in The Women on the Wall (1950). Of the eighteen stories in that volume, nine concern children. Of these nine, six had been incorporated into The Big Rock Candy Mountain; two, about the Bruce of that novel, had not found a place there; and one had been put into Second Growth. For the most part these stories show a preoccupation with the father-son relationship that is well-nigh obsessive in Stegner. He seems under some compulsion to punish the father image and to define the child by repudiation of the father. Toward this end he sometimes uses the fashionable initiation theme by exposing the child to violence, death, or betrayal, always associated with the father. In this way he presses upon the child a recognition of the dark forces of life. Thus in "The Colt" the child has a traumatic experience in which he must face the disruption of loyalty and friendship, and in "In the Twilight" the boy engages in "the ritual act of kicking the sow's insides around" in the passage from nauseating weakness to exultant strength. Many of these stories are also exercises in the manipulation of illusion and reality, as in "Buglesong," where the boy, without passion, feeds live gophers to his caged weasel and watches it suck the blood from them, but seems really to live "in the enchanted forests of his mind," in tune to the music of poetry or the delights of the Sears catalogue.

In fact, the staple of Stegner's technique throughout the volume is the illusion-reality dichotomy, employed so that the moment of truth occurs when illusion is stripped away or destroyed. The technique is often dependent on Stegner's treatment of blurred vision, which is the distorted or dishonest way his character conceives experience. Reality is truth, the truth that shatters pretense, escapism, naïveté, the calm surfaces of life. In "The Women on the Wall," Mr. Palmer, in a sense retired from life, sees the women who wait for mail from their warrior husbands as figures in a Grecian frieze. Everything contributes to the illusion of peace and life suspended: the static, sunny wall, the deep-blue, pacific ocean, the gentle California climate, the isolated suburban point where they all live. But when Palmer learns about the women, the frieze cracks. The thin girl's husband is killed. The plain woman is a frustrated puritan, spoiling the child who is a surrogate for her passion. The husband of the pregnant girl has been dead for three years. The husband of the wiry woman won't come home on leave and she is taking dope and going to pieces. The hatred boiling in the women erupts in a savage fight among them. Mr. Palmer cannot retreat, much as he would like to, from the tensions, the cruelties, and the sins of reality. In "Beyond the Glass Mountain" the strongseeming, successful Mark is immature and sentimental beside the pitiful-seeming, cuckolded Mel, strong in his disillusionment because he has accepted his lot in life and learned to live with pain. "The View from the Balcony" shows that while all the young married graduate students live cozily with their beautiful view, the terror of the night and the forest is always with them; it is a condition of life.

But man fronts up to it. Despair is not Stegner's response but the operative will and the light of truth. Men must learn the worst as it is a part of the truth and then accommodate themselves to it. In stories like "The Volcano" and "The Sweetness of Twisted Apples" human beings face natural and man-made calamities by showing an amazing capacity for endurance. They do not surrender their dignity. They are wedded to life.

Stegner puts the same theme in another way in his skillful story "The City of the Living," which gives the title to his last collection, published in 1956. In Luxor across the Nile from the City of the Dead a father sits with his typhoid-stricken son. The man's life is antiseptic and insulated. His god is science, his priest the white-robed scientist, his communion wafer the wonder drugs, his providence his insurance policies. Among all the preservatives and guarantees of life, he lives what is not-life. Egypt is deadly, with its disease and stench, its unnumbered dead and enervating poverty. Yet with all its heritage of decay, Egypt seems a promise of life everlasting, surviving on its ritual or finding a core of viable tradition, even asserting the dignity of its impoverished people. For its people are attached to their land and their culture while the father is unattached and the life within is barren. The technique of paradox involved in the manipulation of illusion and reality, the irony whereby the painful aspects of life are ultimately the final and good ones, the palpable sensory experience of place, and the complicated coordination of warring symbols—all this is characteristic of Stegner at the top of his bent.

"The Blue-Winged Teal" is also a characteristic story. Here is the familiar pattern in which the son hates the father and exercises the hatred by coming to an understanding of the father. The father is not much good. He runs a pool hall. With his wife only six weeks dead he has latched on to another woman. But the son discovers in him the depths of loneliness and horror which make the life beneath the surface. The boy's initial contempt is an immature interpretation of experience; at the end, initiated into the dissemblings and frustrations of life, he says goodby to his father "like a cry, and with the feeling he might have had on letting go the hand of a friend too weak and too exhausted to cling any longer to their inadequate shared driftwood in a wide cold sea."

The other stories in this volume are not as firmly controlled or as thematically satisfying as the two I have just discussed. These two show no new development in Stegner, but an intensification of what he has been saying all along. Here is the commitment to life of Remembering Laughter, but now shaded by the sombre recognition that the affirmation must draw its strength from the tangled depths of human experience from whence it wells up. Here too is the search for understanding and identity, but now conducted with a more mature tolerance than in the earlier work.

The pattern of rejection-acceptance, however, combined with the search for identity, sometimes brings Stegner to an ill-defined middle way. It is his penalty for seeing the mixture of good and evil everywhere and for rejecting partisanship or loyalties. "Field Guide to the Western Birds," of almost novelette length, reveals the possibilities for confusion and indecision hidden in the middle way. Stegner here poses the world of money against the world of art. If the philistines are obtuse they are full of good intentions, while the artist has a promising talent but he is full of insecurity and self-hatred. The narrator of the story is a retired literary agent. he too has lived in two worlds: the world of literature and of business. Recognizing the vices and virtues of each order of experience, he finds himself caught in an undefined middle. He assumes a posture of uncertainty. The pianist, posing as a Polish refugee, is really a Jew from South Boston. He doesn't know who he is. The narrator, with his value system tugging him this way and that, does not know who he is either. When there are no firm loyalties by which one can define himself, can find his identity, man ends in confusion.

The unanswered questions at the heart of Stegner's work are: who is man and what can he affirm when he lives at dead center? It is toward this dead center that American society has been moving—the spot where the other-directed citizens practice "togetherness" and huddle in mutual anonymity. In their hands the polarities of American life are disappearing. Stegner, in refusing to make choices, speaks in the idiom of his indecisive time. Standing in the midst of his society, he has not so much seen it as experienced from it. He has tried to record the life of man and society from within the given framework. But consistent vision and true perspective, I believe, come to the artist who is outside. In A Portrait of the Artist, one of his friends says to Dedalus, "You're a terrible man, Stevie—. . . always alone." Joyce knew what Stegner has not yet learned: that the artist must be utterly independent. He must be alone.