SOURCE: "Literary Criticism and Short Fiction," in Wallace Stegner, Twayne Publishers, 1977, pp. 68-92.

The Short Fiction: Two Personae, One Theme

In the past four decades, Wallace Stegner has produced nearly fifty short stories. They have appeared in an impressive assortment of popular and scholarly publications. We find ten in Harper's, six in Mademoiselle, five in the Atlantic Monthly, and two or three each in Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Redbook, the Inter-mountain, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Happily for the Stegner reader, over half of these tales—in general, the better half—have been republished in more permanent form. The first collection, The Women on the Wall, gathers together the best Stegner stories published from 1938 to 1946; the second, The City of the Living, includes those which appeared between 1947 and 1956. Taken together, these two slim volumes constitute a microcosm of Stegner's development as an artist.

In the first place, both collections include a series of what we may call literary exercises—exploratory short stories, the best of which form the foundation for three of Stegner's major novels. "Two Rivers," and "The Colt," for example, describe critical incidents in the youth of Bruce Mason, chief protagonist of The Big Rock Candy Mountain', "Field Guide to the Western Birds" introduces Joe Allston, the cantankerous philosopher-hero of All the Little Live Things. But our microcosm metaphor also applies to these two collections on a second, more sophisticated level. The collected tales span the years 1938 through 1956—years which brought their creator from youth to middle age. During this critical period, we can observe Wallace Stegner's characteristic point of view changing from that of a young boy and then young man like Bruce Mason to that of a middle-aged and finally elderly man like Joe Allston. Simultaneously, we find our author's preferred mode of narration moving from the third to the first person. Despite this gradual change in perspective, however, the major themes of Stegner's short fiction remain relatively the same: initiation, maturity, identity, in short, growing up—reconciliation or resignation, as the case may be. Perhaps these are simply the themes of all literature. After all, men are born to live, grow old, and die. But if they are themes that admit of infinite variation, they also lend a comforting continuity to the canon of Stegner's short fiction.

Brucie

"The Chink"—written and published in 1940—is one of the few tales of Stegner's Saskatchewan boyhood omitted from The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Like most of Stegner's fiction, it finds its source in personal experience; the germ of the story reappears as autobiographical fact in Wolf Willow almost twenty-five years after its first publication in fictionalized form. Let us return for a moment to East End, the very zenith of Stegner country. We will remember young Wallace in his small boy's paradise; Mah Jim and Mah Li, the two pig-tailed Chinese who glittered like jewels in that drab setting; and East End's harsh code which classified foreigners with other weaklings and which victimized both without mercy. Wallace Stegner remembered these things too, and all find their way into "The Chink."

The narrator of "The Chink" is given no forename, but he is clearly the youthful Wallace Stegner—a boy from Saskatchewan grown up enough to contemplate the meaning of his own experience. Bruce recreates for us his abortive childhood friendship with Mah Li, the younger and the gentler of East End's two-man Chinese community. Mah Jim ran the inevitable Chinese restaurant and impressed himself upon a childish imagination as the eagle-eyed proprietor of the candy counter. But Mah Li, when he was not doing the town laundry, grew vegetables and caught fish. A frontier boy like Brucie could hardly fail to admire his quiet control over nature. Bumblebees blundered into Mah Li's brow; butterflies rested comfortably on his shoulders. And, best of all, he tamed Brucie's injured magpie and taught it to mimic the boy's pidgin-English nickname—the family laundry mark, "0-5! 0-5!"

Despite these impressive skills, Mah Li remained an outsider to life in East End, even for a runt like Brucie who was not quite an insider himself. "Sometimes I catch myself remembering him in the same way I remember the black colt my father gave me when I was nine," Bruce recalls with shame in the opening paragraph of "The Chink." "I loved Mah Li as I loved the colt, but neither was part of the life that seemed meaningful at the time." With his black queue, slanted eyes, and cream-colored complexion, Mah Li certainly looked like something more or less than human. Brucie knew that the two Chinese brothers were fair game for the cruel side of the local code of action. He had tweaked enough pigtails and snitched enough candy bars to be sure of that. But how was he to know they deserved to benefit from Whitemud's few positive values—friendship, courage, loyalty to one's mates? How indeed, except through sad experience.

Experience arrived with a vengeance one Halloween eve in October, 1918. In a town like East End, Halloween is a small boy's saturnalia. For one night of freedom, all rules are suspended, all roles reversed, and all adults—weak or strong—made the victims of pranks. Brucie and his cohorts decide to begin their mischief with a raid on Mah Jim's candy bars. But they are foiled in the attempt and retaliate with an even more elaborate assault. A welldisciplined boyish army, they stage a surprise attack on the brothers' privy, push it over, and are startled by a yelp from within. Mah Jim caught inside? As if to clinch the revenge, the biggest and boldest of the boys nails the privy door shut while his confused comrades stand by. Brucie begins to protest but loses his nerve and falls silent. As a marginal member of this army, an outsider not yet securely inside, he fears that protest will appear treason.

At this point, Nemesis intervenes in the form of the 1918 flu epidemic, the plague that ravaged East End along with much of the rest of North America. Its arrival puts a dramatic damper on the Halloween festivities; it also provides Brucie with an easy way out of his dilemma. The Halloween guerilla squad immediately disbands and reforms as a rescue force. Armed with flu masks and eucalyptus oil, the boys disperse to spread the bad news through the streets of East End, and Brucie follows them blindly. Many hours later, conscience finally sends him to Mah Jim's rescue; but by the time he returns to the privy it is too late for any meaningful action—too late because his friend Mah Li is already dead. The privy had housed Mah Li instead of Mah Jim, and it is this gentle soul who dies like an animal in the midst of his own excrement. And too late because Brucie is already suffering the first symptoms of flu. By the time the boy recovers from his illness, the incident of the privy is a vague memory lost in the larger disaster. Mah Jim is preparing to accompany his brother's corpse back to China, and he interrupts his hasty preparations only to drop off an ironic memento. As the story ends, Brucie is left alone with a tame magpie and the mocking sound of its refrain—"0-5! 0-5!"

Mah Li's death is Brucie's first lesson in the "steady acceptance of consequences" that Stegner admires in Robert Frost and his New England farmers. "I kept thinking how I could have done something when the privy went over and I heard the yell from inside," an older and wiser Bruce remembers; "how I'd had the chance to tell Mr. Menefee and get Mah Li out, but hadn't taken it." Many chances to help and none of them taken. If Brucie had had the courage to stand up for a friend, the tragedy might have been averted. If Brucie had ever acknowledged Mah Li as his friend, his courage might not have been lacking. As a young boy, Brucie cannot articulate all these "if's"; but he is old enough to be aware of his own responsibility and guilt. In "The Chink," Wallace Stegner adds adult understanding to a child's truth of feeling and shows us Mah Li's death for what it was to Brucie—a first step in the painful process of growing up.

In "Saw Gang," published in 1945, we meet another sensitive boy; but this time he is an adolescent, a fifteen-yearold at the threshold of manhood, and actively seeking initiation into the world of adults. Ernie is a child of New England rather than Saskatchewan; thus, he is the inheritor of an infinitely more sophisticated set of values than the crude code of action which molds young Brucie. Moreover, "Saw Gang" is stylistically a very different story from "The Chink." Instead of depending upon a single dramatic incident like Mah Li's death, it proceeds by a gradual but steady process of revelation, a slow illumination of the outlines of Ernie's New England inheritance—virtues, vices, and ambiguities. The psychological development depicted in "Saw Gang" is understated. With strong preconceptions about the nature of work, responsibility, and fellowship, Ernie heads out for a day of labor on a New England work crew. When he returns, nothing remarkable has happened, and none of his notions has really changed. But the existing situation has been intensified—in Stegner's phrase for a Chekhov story—much as bright lights quicken the pace in a darkened theater. And that is enough.

Ernie's day on the saw gang begins early, well before dawn. He is the youngest of this team of rural New Englanders; and, as the work begins, he hangs back for a moment in order to see and copy what the others will do. What they do is set to work, without talking, without choosing a leader, without formally distributing the tasks to be done. And they continue to work, without stopping, without resting, without quarreling over either tasks or tools, until the sun is set. At eleven, a bracing lever hits Will Livesy on the chin; Will laughs, pats his chin in an exploratory way, and without further ado goes back to work. At twelve, there is a brief break for lunch; George Pembroke's wife lays out a spread of meatloaf, potatoes, vegetables, and biscuits, and the team falls to. At three-thirty, John LaPere refills the gas can on his chain saw. These are the only interruptions. Throughout the rest of the long day, Ernie keeps his mouth shut, his back bent, and follows the exhausting example of his fellows. However junior, he is a member of this team, and he offers his best.

Young as he is, Ernie is well aware of the reasons behind his companions' diligence. This is not Mormon country but rural New England, where the self-reliant farmer is the ideal type. A common and compulsive sense of obligation to George Pembroke gets the saw gang started. It also keeps the gang going long after more comfortable coworkers would have quit. "They would never have worked like this for any employer," a tired Ernie reflects; "they kept up the pace only because they all owed George help and would give nothing but their best day's work in exchange." But this is an overly simplistic analysis of the gang's motivation; and, in spite of his exhaustion, Ernie knows it. His teammates are men who admire competence for its own sake—a competence so self-confident that it does not even need to call attention to itself. And they practice competence for its own sake too.

When the saw gang breaks for lunch, the team stops to stare at the remains of a spruce grove—"whittled and chewed and mangled with a dull axe and finally broken off instead of being chopped off clean." Sheepishly, George explains, "That's the city boy I hired last summer." The men say nothing, whistle and snort, and move on. There is no need for talk, since all share the same instinctive response to this conspicuous example of city-bred bungling. Thus when Will Livesy pauses to let Ernie in on the joke, and does so with a silent shake of his head, it is an important concession. Throughout the long morning, Ernie has been barred from full status as a member of the saw gang. Despite his man-sized labors, the farmers continue to call him "kid" and keep him a distance behind them as they file through the woods. The mangled spruce stumps present an important augury for the future. Not now, but sometime in the days to come, they seem to say, Ernie will prove his competence, earn acceptance, and assume an appropriate rank within this rural society of peers.

But will Ernie really earn acceptance? And if he does, will he remain satisfied with it? "Saw Gang" seems confident of an affirmative answer to these questions; for it is not only the story of Ernie's successful initiation into a society but a recreation and a celebration of that society—the simple world of the yeoman farmer. However, when working in a less nostalgic mood than that evoked in "Saw Gang," Wallace Stegner is more prepared to acknowledge the deficiencies of such an insular agrarian environment. For one thing, New England is exclusive and prejudiced in the patterns of its exclusiveness. In an earlier story called "Hostage," we meet young Andy Mount, who later reappears in Stegner's sole New England novel, Second Growth. Born and bred on a New Hampshire farm, Andy is nonetheless branded from birth as a member of the "no-good" Mount family. Because of this stigma, it is highly unlikely that labor, however herculean, will ever earn him a place on the saw gang. Andy learns this lesson as a youngster. .. . the end of Second Growth finds him leaving his hometown for a larger and more tolerant world.

Moreover, New England is dying, at least as a haven for the yeoman farmer. In a beautiful little story called "The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples," published in 1948, Stegner juxtaposes a sophisticated young city matron with the tiny wizened figure of a Vermont farm girl who is barely out of her teens but who is "too childish or too prematurely old" for love. The women talk, and Margaret learns the story of Sary's "disappointment"—a brief, abortive love affair with the farmer's boy down the road. At first, Margaret is inclined to pity the girl, to view her whole life as a "disappointment"—frustrated and barren. But this is to judge the girl in the city's terms when she is properly a part of the autumnal Vermont landscape, with its "wonderful resigned tranquillity" to its own decay. Like the twisted apples of the old village orchard—neglected, passed over, but still "sweet, golden, with a strange, wild tang"—Sary is as serene in the remembrance of her one "goin' out" as the city girl is in the memory of a lifetime of passionate experience. But Sary's is the serenity of death, not life. All of Stegner's New England stories are suffused with bittersweet tenderness for a dying culture. And his New England children—Ernie, Andy, Sary—all face a special dilemma in their growing up. They are heirs to a set of values which, if accepted, would prove limiting but, paradoxically, can be denied only at considerable cost.

In "The Blue-Winged Teal," published in 1950, Stegner observes a boy like Bruce Mason in the act of cutting himself free from such a past. Henry Lederer, the story's protagonist, is twenty years old and a college student. Like Wallace and Bruce before him, Henry interrupts his studies and returns home to nurse his beloved mother through her final illness. But unlike his real life and literary forebears, Henry finds himself paralyzed rather than liberated by his mother's death. Despite the fact that the best of his past dies with her, Henry lingers at home with the father he hates—temporarily unable to return to school, look for work, or make contact with the few hometown friends who share his college experience. The process of "The Blue-Winged Teal" takes Henry to the point where he overcomes his inertia and moves on to make a new life for himself. In "The Chink," young Brucie comes to terms with friends and friendship, insiders and outsiders alike. In "Saw Gang," Ernie comes to terms with his fellow laborers and the community work ethic made manifest in their activities. But in "The Blue-Winged Teal," Henry comes to terms with the complexities within his own family—the most painful confrontation of all and the most important along the long road to maturity.

John Lederer and his dead wife are the recognizable descendants of George and Hilda Stegner, Bo and Elsa Mason. Details differ, but the critical dichotomies are all there and all the same. John is the prototypical "poolroom-Johnny," handsome in a coarse, "bull-strong" way, the possessor of unexpected and equally useless talents, enchanted by the glamor and extravagance of gambling, but too cautious to take the necessary chances, too sentimental to close his eyes to the necessary human cost. In all, he is a man of many failures, large and small—jobs not taken, friendships not honored, loyalties felt but betrayed. His wife is his natural opposite, perhaps his complement; for she is one of those simple and almost saintly feminine souls that Stegner portrays so well. Both husband and son remember Mrs. Lederer in concrete images of a poignant plainness: lace collars and cuffs scented lightly with sachet and carelessly scattered in a bureau drawer; white china plates carefully hoarded and hand-painted with a single design; and the characteristic affection for the bluewinged teal, not a flashy bird but beautiful in its own way, with a band of bright blue feathers hidden modestly within each wing.

That is all we learn about Mrs. Lederer. But it is enough to allow us to view her, with her husband, in terms of already familiar polarizations—male versus female; father versus mother; vitality, violence, and rugged individualism versus self-sacrifice, compassion, and community. These are the poles that define Henry's experience, the poles that must be brought together in his own life. As the story opens, the boy shows himself to be naive—and, worse, self-destructive—when he seeks to formulate his parents' complex relationship in overly simplistic terms: "she had held the old man up for thirty years, kept him at a respectable job, kept him from slipping back into the poolroom-Johnny he had been when she married him. Within ten days of her death he had hunted up this old failure of a poolhall. . . . had sprung back into the old pattern, as if his wife had been a jailer and he was now released."

As subsequent developments indicate, Henry must learn to understand and accept his father if he hopes to avoid repetition of the old man's mistakes. For, despite their mutual suspicion and resentment, the two men are much alike; they are locked into similar cycles of guilt, shame, and anger. Henry tries to deny his patrimony, calls his father a callous brute, his mother a martyred misfit, and views his parents' marriage as a thirty-year mistake. Such patent oversimplifications, such evasions of the full complexity of the truth, immobilize their possessor. They maroon Henry in his hometown, accustom him to mindless vegetation. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner, folk wisdom tells us. Wallace Stegner, an old-fashioned moralist, disagrees and amends the maxim: Tout comprendre c'est tout comprendre. That is all. Understanding will never teach Henry to love his father. Old wounds do not heal without leaving a scar. But understanding will liberate the boy from the paralysis born of self-hatred, release him from the chain of childish resentment which binds him to his father, and supply him with the strength to move out on his own.

Understanding bursts upon Henry with the speed and impact of an epiphany—"as if orderly things were breaking and flying apart in his mind." Such nearly mystical moments of growth and illumination—ones in which a protagonist, bright and perceptive but blind in one critical area, suddenly learns to see—provide a particularly satisfying framework for stories of initiation and the discovery of identity. Stegner makes use of these moments throughout his short fiction. "The Chink" and its fellow tales of Saskatchewan boyhood all culminate in a single dramatic revelation. Stories with a contemporary setting revolve around the epiphany experience as well. In the 1946 "Balance His, Swing Yours," for example, a middle-aged Midwesterner momentarily acknowledges his kinship with an ugly, overbearing Englishman, both fellow outcasts at an elegant seaside resort. Similarly, in 1948's "The View from the Balcony," a young warbride pierces through the quiet, civilized facade of a graduate school party and recoils in horrified recognition from the divisiveness, cruelty, and disorder she finds revealed behind it.

Henry Lederer's moment of insight is an equally painful, but more productive, experience. It begins with the boy's return from a successful November duck hunt. As he enters the shabby poolhall, loaded down with a string of fine birds, the regulars receive him as a mighty huntsman. Several days later, he finds himself the reluctant provisioner for an old-fashioned duck feed—a sordidly sentimental victory feast spread for the benefit of his father's poolroom cronies. The rich smell of roasting duck mingles with the foul breath of cigar smoke, cue-chalk dust, and chemical disinfectant. Max Schmeckebier, the ringleader of the inevitable back-room card game, mans the stove, while John Lederer forks out huge platefuls of steaming duck. The orgy of eating and drinking begins, accompanied by crude jokes, satisfied belches, and mawkish reminiscences. Henry views the spectacle with quiet dismay. But when his father interrupts the feast to salute two graceful teal wings tacked on the back-bar mirror—an incongruous tribute to his mother's memory—the boy's dismay becomes silent fury: "Gabble, gabble, gabble, he said to himself. If you can't think of anything else to gabble about, gabble about your dead wife. Drag her through the poolroom too." Henry wants to see his father's gesture as an act of desecration; but a hasty mirrored glimpse of pouched eyes and trembling lips, as the old man beats an awkward retreat from the poolroom, takes the boy abruptly aback. The bright blue teal wings hold real meaning for John Lederer. They have moved him to tears.

Viewing his father for the first time with the detached eyes of a stranger, Henry sees anguish, guilt, and the consciousness of failure inscribed on his aging face. Suddenly, the old man's veneer of geniality and good spirits is pitifully easy to penetrate. His sporting life is an evasion; his whores and crap games, cheap tickets to oblivion; and the sordid mechanics of the pool hall, one of "the careful games that deadened you into sleep." John Lederer deserves his son's sympathy more than his hatred; and, in the end, oddly enough, he receives his just deserts. When Henry understands his past and accepts it, in full comprehension of its continuity with the present, he is free to depart, and does so. But his departure is no victory. As Stegner describes it, in a moving final image, Henry bids his father farewell "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." Tolerance, sympathy, the ability to see through another's eyes: little Brucie has come a long way from East End.

Joe

In 1946, four years before the appearance of "The Blue-Winged Teal," Wallace Stegner published a very good short story called "The Women on the Wall." It failed to excite much critical interest at the time; and it did not attract one of the prestigious prizes that were fast becoming standard fare for Stegner. But it has remained throughout the years one of its author's favorites—and with good reason, for it was a prophetic piece, prophetic of Stegner's future course as a writer of short fiction. By 1946, Wallace had arrived at Stanford, critical success, and the not very advanced age of thirty-seven. Although he would continue to write in the "Brucie" mode for several more years, the saga of the sensitive adolescent must already have begun to lose interest for him. Boyhood memories were fast fading; both of his parents were dead; the peculiar problems of the intellectual outlander had been long surmounted. And, despite occasional exceptions, the best of the "Brucie" stories were also in his past, back with the sense of unfulfilled aspiration that dominates The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Recognition of this sort must have been in Stegner's mind as he sat down to write "The Women on the Wall," for, as a short story, it is a real departure from his previous work. It is an attempt to create a contemporary setting and deal with contemporary problems—a sure-footed step away from the familiar terrain of Whitemud, Greensboro, Salt Lake, and Iowa Cities.

The story deals with the changing perceptions of an elderly colonial who has been ejected from a comfortable post on the Galapagos by the turbulence of World War II and has resettled on a quiet stretch of California coastline. Mr. Palmer spends his mornings in an airy study overlooking the ocean, ostensibly engaged in reordering his memories. But, in fact, he is often content just to gaze from his windows, survey the rolling Pacific, and immerse himself in the activities of a bevy of military wives who occupy a nearby row of beachfront apartments. There are six major figures in this group, and Mr. Palmer soon learns to recognize them all: placid Mrs. Kendall and her quiet little son; vivacious Mrs. Corson and her quick-footed daughter; boyish Margy Fisher in the inevitable bathing suit and bare feet; and slow-moving Hope Vaughn, six months pregnant.

Mr. Palmer enjoys watching all the group's comings and goings, but he is especially delighted with the daily ritual of the morning mail. From his window, the women look like figures in an ancient Greek frieze as they gather each day on the low stone wall facing the letter boxes and wait, pricked out by the clear California sunshine, for the regular arrival and departure of the old gray mail car. The letters control their fates in a very direct way, bringing messages of life and death from soldier husbands. For the women, this waiting is a significant activity: indeed, their wartime mission appears to be a passive but important one—preserving ancient patterns of nurturance and continuity in the midst of a disorderly world. Old Mr. Palmer idealizes the women as modern Penelopes, admires their patience and fidelity, and resolves to leave them undisturbed in their waiting. He decides that they will not benefit from the intrusion of his pity. Penelope, he recalls with satisfaction, was as competent for her waiting as Ulysses was for his wars and his wiles.

Had Mr. Palmer kept to his scholar's eyrie, his insights might have culminated in this classical parallel; the story might have ended with women, children, sea, and sun caught in a kind of symbolic stasis. But, being human, the old gentleman breaks his resolve, leaves his perch, and edges closer and closer to the women on the wall and to the real lives hidden behind their waiting. The first hint of discord comes with the death of Captain Fisher; for, as far as Mr. Palmer can see, there is no group support for his bereaved wife, no communal keening for the lost hero. Overnight, the thin, barefoot widow simply vanishes from her accustomed place on the wall. A second hint comes with the appearance and disappearance of a half-grown cocker pup. A pet for Tommy Kendall, the pup spends two lonely days tied to the end of a rose trellis, barking and whining and begging for his freedom. Finally, Mrs. Corson puts an end to the general misery with a quick call to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Relieved at the dog's departure, Mr. Palmer steps out of his study long enough to commiserate with Mrs. Corson. Soon, and not entirely to his displeasure, he finds himself corralled into accompanying her and her daughter on a shopping excursion.

Having arrived downtown, Mr. Palmer readily agrees to treat young Anne to a pony ride while her mother runs errands. Time passes, one pony ride stretches to two, three, four, and five, and the old gentleman gradually grows perturbed. At last, Mrs. Corson returns and drives the trio back home to the beach, but she brings increased cause for agitation along with her. Her eyes are dilated, her manner frenetic, her sharp tongue quick as a cat's. Leaving Mr. Palmer no opportunity to protest, she bursts into an animated and vicious recitation of her group's carefully guarded secrets. Tommy Kendall is adopted, his mother an overprotective prude; Hope Vaughn is pregnant with a stranger's child. On top of it all, Mrs. Corson has a secret of her own; she is addicted to pep pills and pot, which she procures at the local fortune-teller's.

Desperately, unsuccessfully, Mr. Palmer tries to contain Mrs. Corson's tidal wave of words. Neighbors are staring, children eavesdropping, and Mrs. Kendall has dissolved in tears. At last, a literal deus ex machina, the mail car arrives on its daily round. As if by magic, the recriminations cease. Mrs. Corson, Mrs. Kendall, and Mrs. Vaughn assume their regular places by the low stone wall and wait patiently in the Attic sunlight for the ritual of distribution, reading, and relief to unfold. The story ends abruptly, much as it begins, with a colorful pageant spread out before Mr. Palmer, and speculation as to its meaning revolving in his mind. Viewed at close range, as individuals, the waiting women lose their simplified, symbolic stasis and are revealed to him as fellow mortals; frustrated, violent, they are at war with one another and with their common fate. The peaceful resignation he has imagined in them is no more than grudging submission to the empty monotony of their lives.

As an elderly colonial, well-educated and well-traveled, retired from work, without family or an active role in life, Mr. Palmer is a very different character from Bruce Mason. Indeed, he seems to represent a dramatic departure from the "personal heresy" promulgated in The Writer in America—the firm foundation in deeply felt personal experience that Stegner has hitherto seen as the necessary prerequisite for building believable fiction. How to explain the story's success in light of these contradictions? Fortunately for the student, Stegner resolves them for us in "A Problem in Fiction," a detailed recreation of the gestative process which gave birth to "The Women on the Wall" [Pacific Spectator, Autumn 1949].

According to its author, the story did originate in personal experience, but it was personal experience of a relatively abstract kind—an internal confrontation with the validity of symbol making. Like old Mr. Palmer, Wallace Stegner spent a series of stolen mornings spying on the daily ritual of a group of military wives. And, like his elderly alter-ego, he first viewed the women symbolically, as the essence of fecund quiescence and cyclical growth; later, with the addition of a classical parallel, he perceived them as the contemporary equivalents of faithful Penelope. As an artist, Stegner's next task was to set his characters in motion, to devise a meaningful plot for the women to act out. But, when he tried to do so, he failed; and his failure helped him recognize the falsity of his original conception. His symbols and parallels were pure imposition. They told him more about himself than they did about the women, who were doubtless as confused and angry as anybody else underneath the placid surface of their daily routine. In short, if Stegner had a story, it was a story about himself and his own growth in sympathy and understanding. Better yet, it was a story about a man very much like himself, but not himself, whom he could observe with the detachment and irony appropriate to fiction.

Hence, Mr. Palmer, a rather conservative old gentleman, scholarly in his interests, analytical in his approach to life, but earnest, even sentimental, a lover of animals and children, and an irrepressible knight-errant in the face of feminine distress. With his creation in 1946, Stegner had happened upon the voice, the persona, that was to serve him best in his middle years. Details differ, but the general features of Mr. Palmer's personality recur constantly in the major male characters of Stegner's subsequent short fiction, permitting him to explore the perennial problems of familial and communal identity long after their permanent resolution in his own life, and providing him with the perfect solution for a persistent technical problem as well.

As we have noted, an imperfect control of the varieties of point of view is the greatest weakness in Stegner's early fiction. In his early tales, no doubt because of their deeply felt autobiographical basis, he tends to allow the perspectives of protagonist and author to merge. At key moments, for example, Bruce Mason and his creator are almost indistinguishable. Of course, this identification of author and protagonist has its advantages. "The Chink," "Saw Gang," and "The Blue-Winged Teal" are all strengthened by the unusual degree of enlightened self-scrutiny that their heroes bring to bear on the business of growing up. But identification of this kind deprives Stegner of some of the most potent weapons in the literary arsenal, most notably irony; it also seems to result in occasional overwriting. Subtly suggestive stories like "The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples" and "The Blue-Winged Teal" are marred by the insertion of superfluous soliloquies and by unnecessarily explicit psychological summaries. According to Robert Frost, the writer deserves credit for whatever the reader gets. Whatever the explanation—perhaps he is too personally involved in his material, perhaps he is as yet unsure of his powers of dramatization—the early Stegner too frequently cuts himself off from the full range of risks and advantages suggested by Frost's critical precept.

In "The Women on the Wall," we are spectators to the emergence of a perfect vehicle for Stegner's mature speculations about the business of growing up. As a small "d" democrat, Stegner is a firm believer in old-fashioned institutions such as work, marriage, and the family. Nonetheless, he is also fully aware of the fragility and intermittent failure of these institutions, as well as the impossibility of doing more than merely suggesting their value to anybody else. Such things, he believes, the young must learn for themselves.

Not altogether unlike his maker, Mr. Palmer is a convincing spokesman for the classical Protestant virtues; on the other hand, he is naive, idiosyncratic, and somewhat outof-date. Despite his growth in understanding, the old man never manages to provide any real support for the women on the wall. His insights, authentic but completely internalized, are of value to no one but himself. We know that Stegner sympathizes with elements of Palmer's point of view; but, at the same time, we are made aware of its impotence. Such subtle distinctions would be impossible without the measure of authorial detachment increasingly evident in Stegner's later work.

One of Mr. Palmer's more notable descendants appears in "The Traveler," a story published in 1951. A middle-aged drug salesman happens upon the reincarnation of his childhood self—an imaginative young orphan, isolated on his grandparents' back country farm, and hungry for the stimulation and excitement of the outside world. The traveler is exhilarated by this unexpected return to his past, and moves on refreshed and strengthened in his sense of himself. But despite this, and despite the fact that he is a peddler of "miracle" drugs, he finds himself unable to minister to the boy's needs, unable to reassure him that he will find a more rewarding world. For that "most chronic and incurable of ills, identity," each man must act as his own physician. Similarly, in "Impasse," published two years later, a father learns to live with insights he cannot and would not share, even if he could. His difficult only daughter is not a pretty girl. Hitherto, her rebelliousness has seemed like ingratitude; now, it is revealed to him as the pathetic product of youthful illusion. Once free of her parents' effusive care, Margaret hopes to excite the attention and romantic admiration so far denied her because of physical disadvantages. Just as she is doomed to discover her self-deception, so her father must stand helplessly by as the dreary drama unfolds itself.

Like Mr. Palmer, Margaret's father and the medical salesman experience impotence, but they do so without arousing in their readers the strong feelings of pity and apprehension inspired by "The Women on the Wall." As characters, they are relatively thin and underdeveloped; they cannot sustain Mr. Palmer's burden of imprisoned insight. Indeed, "The Traveler" and "Impasse" attract our attention chiefly as literary way stations; they are tales which employ the elderly observer figure introduced in "The Women on the Wall," experimenting with him, keeping him alive through the late 1940s and early 1950s while Stegner brings the saga of Bruce Mason to a conclusion. At the end of the journey are "Field Guide to the Western Birds," a splendid novella published in 1956, and Joe Allston, the cantankerous ex-literary agent who narrates the story. Allston is not Wallace Stegner; rather, he is Mr. Palmer perfected. He is a Westerner, but a recent and somewhat reluctant arrival on the West Coast. His best years have been spent in New York, and he brings an arrogant outsider's eye to bear on the easy platitudes of Western life. On the other hand, he has had ample opportunity to observe the foibles of the Eastern literary establishment. Intelligent, opinionated to the point of prejudice, but at the same time acutely aware of his own limitations, Joe is constantly assessing the facts and fictions in his own attitudes and experience. He combines within himself strong personal prepossessions and fierce self-scrutiny. As such, he is an ideal guide to "the middle ground."

"Field Guide" describes Joe's experience at a chic Northern California cocktail party cum musicale. His hosts, the Casements, are fantastically, almost preternaturally wealthy folk who are also friendly, self-effacing, with that endearing innocence occasionally characteristic of the very rich. Sue Casement is the party's presiding genius. Like most of Stegner's Western women, pioneer or contemporary, she is a humble worshipper at the shrine of culture, an irrepressible protectress of neglected artists. Her musical extravaganza is a good-natured plot to promote the career of her latest protege, Arnold Kaminski, pianist from Poland, an unrecognized refugee genius. Kaminski plays well and impresses his elegant, handpicked audience. His arrogance is egregious but acceptable, part of the price people like the Casements expect to pay for participation in the great world of art. But after the departure of most of the guests, Kaminski gets drunk and oversteps even the generous rules of artistic license. Deliberately, gratuitously, inexplicably, he insults his ingenuous hostess and nips his own burgeoning career in the bud.

Joe Allston, always the last guest to leave, surveys the developing crisis with wonder. He has spent his time at the cocktail party identifying and observing the entire spectrum of "western birds": fashionable San Francisco aesthetes, beagle-breeders from the Hillsborough horsey set, and miscellaneous, mesmerized hangers-on. In its own way, Joe's undertaking is as arrogant and unproductive as Kaminski's; for, in spite of his confidence, he fails to classify the guests or to predict their behavior. He returns home to his imperfect hillside a much chastened man, perturbed and unsettled by his somewhat voyeuristic research into the complexities of human intercourse. In his own irreverent dialect, he is a bird watcher brought down to the level of the birds.

Even this brief summary should be sufficient to suggest the technical excellence of "Field Guide." To begin with, let us admire Stegner's superb resolution of the problem of point of view. This is the first story since "The Chink" to be written in the first person, and the advantages Stegner realizes in his use of the device are decisive for his future work. "Field Guide" may be viewed as the structural model for All the Little Live Things and Angle of Repose, two of Stegner's most successful novels. Joe Allston provides the reader with a plausible, consistent, and informative perspective from which to observe the Casement extravaganza. Certainly not omniscient, limited and often erroneous in its insights, invariably controversial, but always interesting for its own sake, his line of vision is occasionally outrageously funny and never dull. At the same time, Allston provides Stegner with what must have seemed like the irresistible opportunity to satirize gently a familiar type, the literary agent—not a writer, but a writer's wet nurse. Allston's mode of discourse is a curious mixture of the acute and the inappropriate. Stegner organizes his narrator's thoughts and words in a manner that approaches stream of consciousness, juxtaposing colloquialism and classicism, telling detail and injudicious generalization, just as they occur in the most private recesses of Allston's mind. The process culminates in a daring mock-Vergilian description of Kaminski's performance of a Bach chaconne: "As when in the San Francisco Cow Palace, loudspeakers announce the draft horse competition, and sixteen great Percherons trot with high action and ponderous foot into the arena, brass-harnessed, plume-bridled, swelling with power, drawing the rumbling brewery wagon lightly, Regal Pale. . . . " An outrageous comparison for one of the master works of classical music? Of course, but one entirely consistent with the compulsive irreverence characteristic of Joe Allston. . . .

Joe's distinctively analytical approach to life reduces the chaos of the Casement cocktail party to a readily assimilable order. He isolates the important guests, describes them in detail, and records the significant moments in their conversation. Naturally, this process falsifies as it simplifies; if Sue Casement or Arnold Kaminski were our narrators, they would doubtless make entirely different selections. But the "truth" lost in terms of the entire party experience is neatly counterbalanced by the "truth" gained in terms of Joe Allston's personality. This is a compromise to be sure, but a pretty good one. If we learn very little about the genus of California party-goers, we learn a great deal about a more interesting species, the retired literary agent.

"Field Guide" is also remarkable for its convincing evocation of place and for its skillful use of natural, especially animal imagery. True, we have paused over Stegner's impressive descriptive powers before; but, with the exception of the New England stories, his descriptions have rarely ventured beyond the boundaries of the Stegner country. At their best, they have been renderings of virgin Western landscape, the less populous the better, such as the majestic river canyons that blocked exploration beyond the hundredth meridian. More cluttered with humans, a California cocktail party demands a response more complex in its mingling of sentiments. Yet Stegner, through Joe, succeeds in portraying the party in sharp yet subtly telling colors. His recreation of the "Casement Club"—"chaste and hypnotically comfortable and faintly oppressive with money, like an ad for one of the places where you will find Newsweek," and his lovingly Lucullan catalog of the party refreshments—"trenchers as big as cafeteria trays," "a state fair exhibit of salads," and "a marvelous molded crab with pimento eyes afloat in a tidepool of mayonnaise," fairly catch the tone.

Cheek by jowl with such graphic culinary detail we find a host of ambiguous metaphors drawn from the animal kingdom. Impulsive Joe is seen as a feisty little terrier; his gently assertive wife Ruth as a part, ironical raccoon. In addition, Joe pursues his original "bird watching" conceit as relentlessly as any of his classical allusions. Kaminski appears as a homeless cuckoo chick, while his unlucky hosts, the Casements, play the role of a pair of reluctantly adoptive robins. And "Field Guide" opens and closes with the image of a towhee locked in prolonged combat with his reflection in a plate glass window. This odd menagerie of creatures suggests an attitude toward our animal inheritance that is neither encomiastic nor abusive, but simply accepting. Nature, even human nature, is essentially self-absorbed and indifferent to moral distinctions; both present a tabula rasa to the complex network of artificial constraints that we call civilization. In short, "Field Guide" debunks the romantic myth of nature's infinite bounty as surely as historical and biographical works such as Beyond the Hundredth Meridian do, and it does so in the more pliant fictional form that we have called Stegner's "middle ground."

Idealization of nature's bounty is one tenet of the romantic faith; virtual idolatry of nature's human mimic, the creative artist, is another. A born iconoclast, Joe Allston delights in the deflation of both myths; but in "Field Guide" it is the latter that absorbs his attention, excites his wrath, and provides the fulcrum that sets this doubly ironic drama into motion. The minute Joe enters the Casement Club he recognizes Kaminski for a "Glandular Genius"—familiarly known as the "G. G." This is a type Joe has come to know and despise during his long years as a literary agent. A "G. G." is an artist who thinks himself cut from a finer cloth than ordinary mortals, who believes that his special abilities render him less rather than more responsible for fulfilling the obligations incurred in everyday life. Kaminski is selfish, oversensitive, affected, and self-pitying, eager for emotional self-indulgence of every kind. In Joe's eyes, he displays all the stigmata of the Glandular Genius and displays them with a sense of pride.

Allston, on the other hand, sees himself as a "defender, self-appointed, of the good American middle class small-town and suburban way of life." All the Little Live Things tells us that Joe is a transplanted Midwesterner, but his heritage is clearly implied in "Field Guide," for he is burdened with all the built-in ambivalences that gave birth to DeVoto's The Literary Fallacy. Joe reveres literature but rejects the contemporary literary life-style; he admires Byron but condemns Byronic posturing. Unlike Kaminski, he associates cultural achievement with self-control, with the co-operative spirit, and with a healthy respect for traditional institutions. In short, his values are those which Hilda Stegner, who knew what life was like without them, saw as the foundation of civilization.

As we know, these values are also Wallace Stegner's ; indeed, the Stegner biography .. . is testimony to the fact that the creative life can be as orderly as it is inventive. But, as we have taken pains to point out, "Field Guide" is fiction rather than autobiography; and Joe Allston, while a sympathetic character, is one his creator can view with detachment. The Casement cocktail party would scarcely serve as an interesting subject for a story if it left Joe's prepossessions exactly as it found them. Intensification is sufficient justification for a very short piece such as "Saw Gang," but we look for growth and development in a novella of nearly seventy pages, and we get it. "Field Guide" is successful because it makes use of a double, reverberant pattern of psychological reversal. It confirms Joe's insights, but it also undercuts them. In doing so, it suggests the limitations of human understanding, the imperfectness of the growing up process which we have been tracing throughout Stegner's short fiction.

Allston is right to despise the Glandular Genius but wrong to see Kaminski as a clear-cut representative of that pernicious class. Like most people, Kaminski is complex enough to defy categorization. He is too talented to need to play the "G. G.," yet too self-destructive to play the role right. He is both criminal and accuser, victim and victimizer. Whatever his deficiencies, he deserves Allston's compassion much more than his contempt. As soon as Allston becomes aware of this, the texture of his discourse abruptly changes. Hitherto, "Field Guide" has been rigorously naturalistic; now the natural gives way to the surreal. The closing moments of the Casement party read like the final frames of a Marx brothers comedy. Kaminski makes indecent remarks to a homely little music teacher. He dodges his hostess' enraged husband, throws chairs, and falls flat on his face into a darkened swimming pool. In the end, he has to be fished out of three feet of water as unceremoniously as a drowned rat.

Joe Allston finds himself less and less able to identify the villain of this melodrama. As he drives home in the encroaching Peninsula fog—the perfect physical reflection for his inner feelings of moral uncertainty—he asks himself the ultimate, unanswerable questions. What kind of person is this Kaminski? Where does he fit in? Even if he is the human anomaly he appears to be, does not society have a place for him, a use for his peculiar talents? Or will the time-honored institutions that sustain other people always work against him, betray him, exclude him, confirm the fact that he does not belong? Despite Joe's eccentricities, he is a thoughtful man, and his experiences in "Field Guide" work to refine a maturity that is already remarkable. Like Andy Mount, Henry Lederer, and Bruce Mason, Joe has come to terms with his own friends and family. His life has been one steady affirmation of traditional values—hard work, marital fidelity, a well-earned and honorable retirement. But like Mr. Palmer, Joe has also come to terms with the dark side of the traditional life style. Age-old patterns provide continuity, security, order, control; but they cannot provide all things for all people. Motherhood does not help the women on the wall any more than mothering helps Arnold Kaminski. In sum, maturity means resignation as well as reconciliation. As Joe Allston puts it at the end of "Field Guide," "I don't know whether I'm tired, or sad, or confused. Or maybe just irritated that they don't give you enough time in a single life to figure anything out."