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Mary Hallock Foote, the model for the heroine of Angle of Repose,
tarpaper shack. It was a place with “searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree.” Yet, amazingly enough considering such a barren and hostile environment, he could still look back on a childhood not of suffering and boredom, but of “wild freedom, a closeness to earth and weather, a familiarity with both tame and wild animals.”
This rootlessness, his mother’s isolation, and the fact that he could not bring friends to his own home further reinforced his sense of the importance of family and community
Arthur De Wint Foote, the real-life counterpart of Oliver Ward in Angle of Repose.)
All the Little Live Things (1967).
his goal was to do for the West what Faulkner had done for Mississippi: discover “a usable continuity between the past and present.”
He was a liberal politically but a man of old-fashioned virtues—polite, courteous, kind—who applied a great deal of self-discipline to his life
Mary Hallock Foote—the genteel nineteenth-century local-color writer and illustrator whose life became the basis for Angle of Repose—in
this is a book about marriage, and just as certainly it reflects Stegner’s own values in that regard. We might note that he was happily married to the same woman for nearly sixty years.
realize that it isn’t backward I want to go, but downward. I want to touch once more the ground I have been maimed away from.
My wife turns out after a quarter of a century to be someone I never knew, my son starts all fresh from his own premises.
Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of—that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on.
am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.
don’t care about that, and I don’t care whether she was astonished, impressed, shocked, or amused. What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings —narrative, sidelighted, suffused with possibility.
was incorrigibly Hudson River school—brown light, ragged elms, romantic water. There they sat on the grass confronting nature. When they had eaten, they did what poets and philosophers did outdoors in the early years of the picturesque—strolled, picked early autumn leaves or late gentians.
Having no acceptable way of expressing their feelings directly, they probably vented them on nature. I can see a lot of tableaux while she is struck speechless by a view or a flaming swamp maple, and he stands there with his hat in his hand before the purity of her sensibility.
There they sat, burning under their serge and bombazine with emotions hotter than gentility could quite allow.
But mostly it is Main Street, Anywhere, a set used over and over in a hundred B movies, a stroboscopic image pulsing to reassure us by subliminal tricks that though we are nowhere, we are at home.
Her own work did not satisfy her, but the closer she came to her time the harder she worked, though she could hardly sit in a chair for ten consecutive minutes. She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque. She was some sort of cross between a hummingbird and an earth mover. The Scarlet Letter blocks went off in March.
It makes me restless, too, to see Oliver Ward going off to Deadwood, a raw Black Hills gulch lately stolen from the Sioux.
smell of orris root from Great-grandmother’s hair,
What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.
When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been before, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.
the mandolin shivered against it like a girl in white backed against a dark tree.
The way to develop and deserve self-respect, which was the thing most worth seeking in life, was to guide myself always by the noblest ideals that the race had evolved through the ages.
It makes me melancholy to see him so youthful and girded with determination, ready to mount and ride off into the future more than eighty years ago.
Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be.
She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it.
following Bancroft’s advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.
We pretend that by not speaking of them we have made them not exist. Yet it is not the marriage I dreamed of, not the marriage it was. It is a bruised and careful truce; we walk in bandages and try not to bump our wounds.
Thoreau?” As long as I had gone that far, I thought I might as well go the rest of the way. “How would I know what it means?” I said. “I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of–that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation–was stronger than he was, and maybe righter. It outvoted him. It swallowed him, in fact, and used the nourishment he provided to alter a few cells in its corporate body. It grew richer by him, but it was bigger than he was. Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by
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want the lawn as green as Ireland, however dry the summer. If I dared, I would even restore the rose garden. But I daren’t. That would be to question or resist my punishment. He meant that to be before my eyes from day to day as a reminder, and I accept that as only justice.
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
