For the first time, this summer, I’m reading a novel by the American author Wallace Stegner. I’ve wanted to a long time. I didn’t grow up or go through school knowing of him. But one of my former colleagues and friends in the history department, the late Dan Greene, was a big fan of Stegner’s in large part because they both loved the American west. Dan’s and my interests in history overlapped in certain places and we both used novels by Willa Cather in our intro-level history classes, so I knew we were on the same page so to speak in that regard. If he liked Stegner, I should know about him.
Crossing to Safety is the name of the novel I’m reading, and it was given to me by another friend who thinks highly of Stegner and suspected I would like it too. By the way, giving books to friends is a wonderful thing to do.
Anyway, this novel is about a writer who’s trying to make it in academia starting in the 1930s, and the geographic sweep of the novel takes in Madison Wisconsin, Cambridge Massachusetts, rural Vermont, Florence Italy, and Albuquerque, New Mexico where the main character is from.
One of the comments the narrator makes about himself struck me as very illuminative about art and culture and history. “Anyone who reads, even one from the remote southwest, at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been hungry reader, all my life.” Clearly, right then it’s Stegner himself talking to you.
There’s a lot there, from the notion that reading is the key to an infinitely broader experience in life; to acknowledging of a kind of cultural legacy that’s equally open to anyone who wants to experience it.
Artists of every age—and I include writers of course—by becoming artists, join into the flow of that legacy, that immense tradition, as attenuated as Stegner says it may be, as it flows from eminent places like 15th century Florence to random locales like 20th century Albuquerque. Or 21st century Waco, Texas.
Every artist creates in the shadow of every other. This can be perceived by some as stifling—there’s a telling scene in Ed Harris’s movie Pollock in which a drunken Pollock curses out the very idea of Picasso. But it can also be a legacy that’s energizing and enlightening. Even if you wind up reacting against it, you’re still diving into it and being shaped by it. And wherever, whenever, and whoever you are, you can tap right into it as much as can a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
