How well do you know your grandparents?

As part of my mission to understand America better, I half promised myself a while ago that I would try to read a few Pulitzer Prize winning novels. So far I have managed ‘American Pastoral’ by Philip Roth and ‘The Shipping News’ by AnnieProulx from the Nineties, ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker from the Eighties and ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee from the Sixties. Looking down the list from the Seventies I selected ‘Angle of Repose’ by Wallace Stegner.

‘Angle of Repose’ is a long, rich and troubling book. Stegner, whose life filled almost all of the Twentieth Century, chose to write a fiction of sorts about the Nineteenth Century. There was controversy when it was published because he borrowed rather too heavily from actual correspondence of Mary Hallock Foote. He had asked permission to use the letters but the family were displeased with how much he borrowed. However, it still won the Pulitzer Prize so must have been warmly received by the great and good of American Letters.

There is much to glean about the history of the United States from his thin fictionalisation of the experience of the pioneers in The West. It is obvious that the Disneyfication of The West is far from the truth, but it is easy to be short-sighted and picture it as all John Wayne and Champion The Wonder Horse. If Stegner’s interpretation is anything to go by, The West was a very different place.

It is instructive to read how civilised much of the settlement was. Certainly, there were times of great violence and struggle, and amazing disregard for First Nation peoples, but it seems that for the most part the pioneers carried with them the gentility of the East. Carrying almost nothing with them, save their bravery and ingenuity, they built a new society.

It is also an education to discover how readily some people moved across the great continent, even in the 1870s and 1880s. The impression I had from acquaintances was that most people, on leaving the great cities of New York, Boston or Chicago, never returned. It is clear that in this fiction at least, moving West was not final and return was frequent and possible.

I am fascinated by Stegner’s ability to build complicated, realistic characters. There is such a depth to the protagonist, Susan Burling Ward, that parts of this novel read like biography rather than fiction. Stegner was a master of his craft.

The main thrust of the book is an exploration of the relationship between grandparents and a grandson. The timeline sways from the 1880s to 1970. In 1970, grandson Lyman Ward is attempting to write about his grandparents and their struggle to establish themselves in the new States. How well do you know your grandparents? Lyman, as commentator, decides that he is best placed to describe the lives of his. It makes for a moving portrait.

The Americans of the 1880s were so resourceful. By comparing them with people of the 1970s Stegner is highlighting just how much has been lost. I suppose the comparison is even more acute now, in the digital age. How many of us can say honestly that we know how to catch, kill and cook our own dinner? It is not a problem unique to America, but perhaps the contrast is at its most stark when light falls on the exploits of the early European pioneers.

Stegner had a lot to say about how human beings coped in taxing situations, and he said it with eloquence.