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In 1934 a graduate student from the University of Iowa was regularly hitchhiking the 50 miles to Rock Island, Illinois, to teach at Augustana College. At half-time, four courses a semester, he constituted the English department. It was hard work, but $900 a year was fair money in the Depression, so the young teacher was sorry to receive a letter from the board demanding to know if it were true that he was an agnostic and atheist, a disbeliever in the Augsburg Confession. Wallace Stegner wrote back to the Lutheran board "that he didn't see how he could be an agnostic and an atheist at the same time—which seemed to him philosophically difficult—and that as far as the Augsburg Confession was concerned, he couldn't remember ever having read it."
This is the kind of profile in courage that Jackson Benson sketches so approvingly in his biography of the late novelist Wallace Stegner. Not surprisingly, Benson's book has been scorned in the New York Times Book Review as an injudicious exercise in hero worship. But if Benson seems adulatory—and he is—most readers of Stegner will affirm there is much to admire, both in the man and in his work. Benson's biography, the first on his subject to appear, serves as an illuminating if somewhat awestruck retrospect on the long lifetime of professional, civic, and literary effort that has made Stegner (1909-93) a national treasure.
It was John Milton who said that a good poet must first of all be a good man. Benson in effect argues that few writers of the twentieth century have taken this dictum to heart, and that Stegner was one who did. Benson's emphasis on the moral seriousness of the writer and his work is terribly unfashionable, but in the long run it may have been these very moral qualities that have made Stegner so durable. In over half a century as an active writer, Stegner published twelve novels, ten volumes of essays and short stories, and six works of history and biography. Many, if not most, of these books are still in print.
Though Stegner was in no deliberate sense of the word a professing Christian, he was nevertheless dedicated to exploring Christian values of community, caring, and personal integrity. "What saves us at any level of human life," Stegner once wrote in an essay, "is union, mutual responsibility, what St. Paul calls charity." Almost every one of his novels attempts what Benson calls "forgiveness." Reading him, I am reminded of the Victorian earnestness of George Eliot, who, like Stegner, hoped we could be good without God.
Benson explains Stegner's devotion to constancy as the result of a pioneer childhood and the reaction to an unscrupulous father, both of which are chronicled in his first major novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). Born on his Norwegian grandfather's farm in Iowa, Stegner moved with his parents and older brother in quick succession to North Dakota, Washington, and Saskatchewan, where his father filed a homestead on the Montana line. The idea was to grow wheat to sell at a high price during World War I, but the weather didn't cooperate, and his father turned to bootlegging. Stegner's early years in Saskatchewan form the root of his most lyrical work, Wolf Willow (1962), a unique combination of history, fiction, and memoir. His father's bootlegging business took them to Great Falls, Montana, for a year or so, and finally to Salt Lake City. The family moved 20 times in nine years to stay one step ahead of the law. Big Rock Candy Mountain records the shame the brothers felt, the magnetic yet abusive personality of their father, and the longsuffering patience of their mother.
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